2497: The Further Adventures of Class Zero

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After some further time with Final Fantasy Type-0, I’m now 100% on board with what it has to offer. It’s a slow burn, to be sure — its rather drab early hours don’t really sell it all that well, but by the time it’s flinging Alexander, Bahamut Zero and Gilgamesh (including the correct music) around with gay abandon it’s hard not to enjoy the ride.

I’m planning a Final Fantasy month over at MoeGamer at some point in the near future, so I’ll write more about this then, but I did want to comment a little on the game’s tone, because it’s markedly different from the mainline Final Fantasy series, and makes this abundantly clear from the outset.

Mainline Final Fantasy games are benchmark JRPGs for many people; they’re regarded as the quintessential example of “young hero gathers a band of companions and saves the world”, despite a number of installments deviating from this stereotypical formula. One thing you can say with a reasonable amount of confidence, however, is that, on balance, they’re optimistic affairs, all about bonds of friendship and love overcoming great evil and that sort of thing. This isn’t to say that the series doesn’t have its dark moments — in fact, several installments’ darkest moments make up some of the most iconic and influential moments in all of gaming history — but on the whole, it’s a series designed to make you feel like part of a heroic epic with all the optimism that involves.

Type-0, meanwhile, occupies the complete other end of the spectrum. I talked a little yesterday about how it de-emphasises the role of the individual in favour of a large cast of characters, and the further you play, the more this becomes apparent. Part of Type-0‘s background lore is the fact that when someone dies, anyone who knew them forgets who they were, even if they were very close. This is one of many reflections the game makes on the horrors of war; a very literal interpretation of Stalin’s supposed (and possibly misattributed) quote “when one dies, it is a tragedy; when a million die, it is a statistic”.

Type-0 lays it on fairly thick with its depictions of the brutality and the senselessness of war. It doesn’t do so in a particularly preachy manner, however; the game’s setup is such that it’s fair to spend some time pondering whether anyone — including the side you’re on — are the “good guys” in the conflict depicted. Instead, we simply see various horrors unfolding, both through the eyes of Class Zero on the ground, and through the distant detachment of the narrator during the documentary-style cutscenes that punctuate the main beats of the narrative as a whole.

One particularly chilling moment comes in the aftermath of a mission late in the game, which culminates with your side in the conflict summoning Alexander as an ultimate weapon of mass destruction; in order to do so, many of your allies give up their lives as they channel their magic and life force into the summoning. The devastation that Alexander wreaks is immense, presented to you in simple, cold statistics — white text on a black screen — after the battle is over. While in the heat of the moment, Alexander’s summoning is pure Final Fantasy fanservice, the realisation that the spectacular light show you just witnessed cost the lives of many people on both sides of the conflict makes you wonder whether or not it was worth it.

I’m nearing the end of the game now, I think; just two more chapters to go. I’ll be interested to see how it ends — particularly if it concludes on as bleak a note as its opening sequence, featuring a seriously wounded soldier trying his best to reach his destination with his also wounded chocobo, then finally dying, forgotten, on the streets as the conflict continues to rage around him. I’m also interested to do a second playthrough once I’ve beaten it once; not only are you at a more suitable level to tackle the optional “Expert Trials” on a second playthrough, there are also additional missions called “Code Crimson” which add additional details and context to the story.

Considering Type-0 is a spinoff game in the Final Fantasy series rather than a mainline installment — and considering it originated as a Japan-only, handheld-only title — it’s impressive quite how much lore has been packed into this game, all of it reviewable through an in-game encyclopaedia. You don’t need to know most of it to appreciate the story, mind you; it’s simply there as “additional reading” if you find it interesting. While I wasn’t sure about Type-0 when I first started playing it, the longer I spend with it, the more fascinating I find this war-torn world that seems to be on a collision course with absolute disaster, so I very much welcome this additional content, particularly as some of it comes in the form of cutscenes that explain what happens to a number of minor characters along the way.

I’ll have definitely beaten it at least once by the time Final Fantasy XV rolls around; whether I’ll have made it through any more of that remains to be seen, but now I’m familiar with how it all works and got to know the characters, I’m certainly up for a bit of New Game Plus.

2496: Type Zero

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In anticipation of the imminent Final Fantasy XV — a game which I am getting increasingly desperate to play the closer its release date creeps — I decided to boot up a game I’ve had on my shelf for a while, but haven’t really done anything with: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD for PlayStation 4.

I had pretty much no idea what I was in for when I fired it up for the first time. I just knew, prior to its release, that it was a well-regarded game for PSP that had previously been confined to Japan, and that people had been clamouring for a localisation for quite some time. In fact, so desperate were English speakers for an English version of the game that there was already a decent quality fan translation of the PSP version available, though in order to play that you’d need to 1) know how to “do” PSP homebrew and 2) be willing to “do” PSP homebrew.

In other words, Final Fantasy Type-0 was a mystery to me when I first started it. After about 15 or so hours with it so far, I think I’ve kind of got my head around what it’s all about and where it sits in relation to other Final Fantasy spinoff games — and the mainline series, for that matter.

Type-0 (formerly Final Fantasy Agito XIII) is part of the overly ambitious Fabula Nova Crystallis series which also includes the Final Fantasy XIII games and the upcoming Final Fantasy XV (formerly Final Fantasy Versus XIII), though since the series was first conceived each of the projects kind of diverged off in its own direction — hence the name changes, abandoning the direct links to XIII — so that now they only have the loosest of thematic and stylistic connections with one another.

That said, Type-0‘s mythology is quite closely related to that of Final Fantasy XIII despite unfolding in a different world, with particular regard to the existence of “l’Cie”, individuals who have submitted themselves to the will of a superior entity (in FFXIII’s case, powerful godlike beings called fal’Cie; in Type-0, the “peristylium” crystals that form the centrepieces of the game world Orience’s various city-states) and an obligation to fulfil some grand purpose called a Focus in exchange for kinda-sorta immortality and badass magical powers. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, you don’t play l’Cie in Type-0; they’re part of the backdrop of the ongoing story.

Type-0’s narrative focuses on the dominion of Rubrum and its elite training facility Akademeia. Across thirteen classes, Akademeia trains young people to become Agito, the best of the best when it comes to martial and magical prowess. Among the classes, the cream of the crop is found in Class Zero, a unit of youngsters with particularly exceptional powers that has, until the events at the start of the game, been kept somewhat secret from the rest of Akademeia.

Class Zero is brought out of hiding and into immediate active service as Agito Cadets when the Militesi Empire invades Rubrum’s capital and Akademeia itself. Against rather improbable odds — including a l’Cie — they manage to push back the imperial incursion and retake Akademeia, giving Rubrum the opportunity to pick itself up and start planning a counter-offensive. From here, Class Zero plays a leading role in helping Rubrum to expand its territory, push the Militesi Empire back and prevent them from deploying any more of their weapons of mass destruction, such as the Ultima Bomb which devastated one of the other city-states of Orience.

If this all sounds highly political and like the setup for a strategy game such as Final Fantasy Tactics… well, you’d be wrong, technically, but there is something to that comparison, which we’ll get onto in a moment.

In actual fact, Type-0 is an action RPG in which you control a single member of Class Zero at once — accompanied by up to two of their classmates, depending on the situation — as they attempt to complete missions for Rubrum and, in between mission days, wander the dominion generally helping out and making life miserable for the Militesi Empire. Unlike mainline Final Fantasy games (with the possible exception of XII) where the emphasis tends to be on the core cast’s personal stories, Type-0’s plot is less about individuals and more about the ongoing conflict between Rubrum and Militesi.

Each member of Class Zero is unique in their capabilities. Each one wields a different weapon, which all handle very differently from one another, and each one has a unique skill tree, though there is some overlap in common abilities between numerous class members. Some are better at dealing or taking physical damage, some are ranged attackers, others have particularly strong magical capabilities. Ultimately, the best approach to playing the game is to try and keep the entire squad levelled up pretty evenly, which means you’re going to need to get comfortable with playing at least a few of the characters, and perhaps bring the ones you don’t like so much in the AI-controlled slots so they still get some experience.

The reason I mention Final Fantasy Tactics earlier is that the way you set up your characters in Type-0 bears more than a passing resemblance, albeit without the deep and complex Job system that Tactics has. In Tactics, each character had the ability to equip two different “Job commands” at the same time, allowing them to mix abilities and spells from two classes at the same time. In Type-0, your character has two main ability slots, up to one of which can contain a spell — though some characters can unlock an ability to equip two spells — and the other of which can contain one of their unique abilities. There’s also a third ability slot dedicated to defensive magic and abilities, allowing characters to equip curative spells, protective spells or physical abilities such as blocking damage.

In order to succeed in Type-0’s missions, you ideally need a mix of different capabilities, since you’ll run into enemies that are strong or weak against particular types of attacks, and sometimes you’ll encounter enemies that are out of melee reach — on balconies, for example — necessitating ranged attacks. In other words, it’s not simply a case of equipping all of your cadets with equipment and abilities that boosts their physical attack power as high as possible; you need to understand which ones are intended as mages, outfit them accordingly and them complement them with physical melee and ranged attackers to cover every eventuality.

The combat system itself takes a little getting used to. You control a single character at a time, and the face buttons on the PlayStation controller are mapped to normal attack with your weapon (Square), abilities and spells (Triangle and X) and defensive abilities (Circle). You can “lock on” to enemies and keep them in sight by holding the right shoulder button, and dodge with Circle while moving.

Notably, attacking doesn’t require button-mashing; characters instead continuously attack while you hold down Square. Some characters have different moves available if you push forward or backward on the analog stick while holding square; Sice, for example, has a gap-closing leaping slash forwards when you push forward, an attack behind her when you push backwards and a standard melee combo if you just hold the button without a direction.

The different weapons are all very… well, different, and in order to succeed with a character you need to familiarise yourself with not just the abilities you can equip, but the amount of time the character’s various animations take to complete. This is because Type-0’s combat is heavy on timed hits; while locked on to an enemy, they will occasionally show a weakness, usually right after an attack or if they’re knocked off balance. During this time, depending on the enemy’s remaining HP, your lock on reticle will turn either yellow (Breaksight) or red (Killsight), and if you land a successful hit with either a physical attack or magic while either of these is active, you’ll do enormous damage, even killing the enemy immediately in the case of Killsight.

Just hitting the attack button as soon as you see the markers isn’t generally enough, however; most characters have a bit of a wind-up to their attacks, meaning if you start an attack when the marker appears, you’ll probably miss the window by the time it actually impacts the enemy. Instead, you need to watch the enemy animations to anticipate when Breaksight or Killsight are going to appear, and over time you’ll come to recognise how different enemy types behave in order to take maximum advantage of this feature. Pudding-type enemies, for example, rear back before they swipe at a foe; when you see them do this, dodging to the side to avoid the strike then immediately launching a forward+Square attack with most characters is a good way to hit their Killsight window perfectly every time.

Type-0 is very much a mechanics-focused game rather than a story-centric game, which puts it somewhat at odds with the mainline Final Fantasy series, but firmly in keeping with many of the spin-off titles such as the aforementioned Final Fantasy Tactics. That’s not to say the story is bad — I’m not that far in so far, but it’s been a suitably dramatic “wartime epic” so far, with many of its important moments presented in an appealing “documentary” style — but rather it’s a game in which its individual characters are of significantly lesser importance than the big picture.

It’s an acquired taste, in other words. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it all that much when I first started playing, and indeed I know a few people who bounced off it quite quickly. However, give it some time and get to know how the combat works, and it becomes quite rewarding and satisfying. There’s plenty of side content to do besides the main missions, and it’s one of the most replayable Final Fantasy games I’ve ever seen, with a second playthrough not only seeing your Cadets at a suitable level to tackle tougher challenges, but also rewarding you with additional story material at various points.

Give it a chance if you haven’t already. It’s not the best game to ever bear the Final Fantasy name, but it’s a solid, interesting game in its own right that demonstrates, once again, that Square Enix isn’t at all afraid to experiment and do all manner of strange, wonderful things beneath the Final Fantasy banner.

2396: The Many Final Fantasies You Haven’t Played

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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.

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

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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.

2223: Exploring Record Keeper a Little Further

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On the assurances of others who have played it a lot further that it does get a lot more interesting and challenging later, I’ve been idly trying a bit more of Final Fantasy Record Keeper. And I’m starting to “get it”, I think.

One of the issues I have with mobile games of this type is that they often throw too much content at you at once, much of which is well out of your league and is just a waste of the limited “stamina” resource to participate in. Record Keeper does suffer from this to an extent, but it is at least pretty up-front about the fact that you should probably play what it calls the “core dungeons” first in order to upgrade your stamina bar, then challenge either the Elite versions of the core dungeons or the daily event dungeons.

Record Keeper takes a slightly interesting approach to powering up your “account”; rather than having experience points and a level, in order to increase your maximum amount of stamina — and, consequently, the amount of dungeons you can challenge in a session without spending the “Mythril” currency to recharge — you simply need to repeatedly collect five “Stamina Shards”, which are crystals awarded to you when you finish a dungeon. Normally you get one the first time you finish a dungeon and another the first time you “master” the dungeon by completing various rather straightforward objectives along the way; this usually means that the first time you run a dungeon, you’re pretty much guaranteed two Stamina Shards, which means you can upgrade your stamina bar and keep playing fairly easily, especially as your stamina completely replenishes when you upgrade the bar.

So clearly the “best” way to approach the early game in Record Keeper is to grind your way through the core dungeons to get your stamina as high as it can possibly go, then once you have a decent stock of that — and, in theory, some good characters and equipment by then, too — you can challenge the game’s more, well, challenging content. Makes sense, for sure.

Trouble is, the core dungeons… well, they’re quite boring, or rather they’re painfully easy. When you can get through each one almost entirely by using the “Auto-Battle” function, perhaps unleashing a special Soul Break ability from a character you’ve borrowed from another player on the boss to one-shot it in most circumstances, that’s not particularly compelling gameplay, though I suppose it does allow you to play the game almost as an “idle game” a la those endless “clicker” games that infest Steam.

This isn’t all that unusual for mobile games, though. Mobile games, despite their reputation for being disposable, throwaway experiences, are often designed with the long tail in mind. That means being as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. That means catering to all ability levels, including “dribbling idiot”. That means if the early game of your mobile game isn’t easy as fuck, the “dribbling idiot” end of the spectrum — which, I theorise, is the end of the spectrum most likely to spend money on the game in order to ease their progression — will lose interest and drop off quickly. More hardcore gamers, meanwhile, are used to piss-easy early games in RPGs and MMOs, and are usually willing to put up with this for the promise of challenging content and amazing rewards in the endgame. I can’t speak for Record Keeper’s “endgame” at present, but there’s certainly scope for the collecting aspect to become rather compelling.

So that’s where I am quite now. It’s proving to be quite a nice diversion for while I’m, say, queueing for a dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV, and a suitable toilet game in that I can set them off battling on auto-mode while I’m having a shit, then reap the rewards afterwards. Unlike Brave Frontier, the mobile game that previously grabbed me, Record Keeper’s dungeons and battles seem to be kept reasonably short and snappy, at least in the early game; eventually, I tired of Brave Frontier because it became too time-consuming for something I originally only started playing to “fill gaps” in time, but if Record Keeper remains pacy I can see it being a nice thing to have on my phone for quiet moments.

We’ll see if it maintains my interest. I’m intrigued to start looking at the Elite Dungeons and the daily events, but I’m going to continue grinding my way through some more core dungeons first of all; while the depth of gameplay in these early battles is nothing special, it is nice to revisit monsters and locales from classic Final Fantasy games from a new angle, and getting loot and XP is always fun, isn’t it?

On the offchance you want to “follow” me in the game, my Friend ID is rfEj.

2222: I Can’t Decide if Final Fantasy Record Keeper is Good or Not

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I’ve been having a sporadic go at Final Fantasy Record Keeper on mobile recently. I sort of like it, but I also sort of think it’s rubbish. It’s hard to say which opinion carries the greater weight at the moment.

For the unfamiliar, Record Keeper is a Final Fantasy fanservice game in that it allows you, as an original (and rather dull) character created specifically for the game, to venture into the worlds of most of the mainline Final Fantasy games from I-XIV and engage in some of the iconic battles from the series. Major plot beats are presented as “dungeons” in which you have to complete several different stages concluding with a boss fight against a boss from that point in the original game, complete with its original attack patterns.

As you progress through the game, you unlock various characters from Final Fantasy history, and you’re encouraged to swap them around and experiment with different party combinations, as a character running a dungeon from their “own” game gets significant bonuses. You can then get equipment — again, sourced from all the various games — and give them to characters to power them up and make them stronger, as well as crafting “ability orbs” that allow them to cast spells and skills that deal more damage or have special effects.

There’s actually quite a lot to it, but the fact that it’s a free-to-play mobile game means that it’s riddled with irritating features. Firstly and perhaps most significantly is the fact that it’s entirely dependent on being online, with painfully sluggish menus and lengthy load times, even when the game has cached its data. Worse, if your network connection flakes out while you’re playing, the whole game freezes until connectivity is restored, even if you’re in the middle of battle.

Then there’s the social features, which actually weren’t in the game when it originally launched. As is usually the case in mobile games of this type, you have the opportunity to “borrow” another player’s showcase character when you run a dungeon, and make use of their special ability a limited number of times during the dungeon. A nice idea, for sure, but completely unbalanced; most other players are well above my current level and consequently inflict one-hit kills on bosses, making strategic play unnecessary. It would perhaps be better if you were matched with players who were of a similar level or amount of progress through the game to you.

Free-to-play also means gacha, and in this case that comes in the form of the “relics”, the equipment you give to your characters. Rather than purchasing these from a shop, you “draw” them, either one crap one for free per day or a chance at better ones if you spend money or use the rarer “Mythril” currency you acquire through playing. Relics can be levelled up and upgraded in rarity independently of characters, so the main metagame comes from collecting and fusing these items together to form a powerful (overpowered?) party to challenge the content in the game.

There’s a lot to dislike about Final Fantasy Record Keeper, but a lot to like, too; the developers are clearly very much in love with Final Fantasy as a whole, incorporating authentic graphics, sound, music and animations into the game. The fact that the boss fights make use of authentic attack patterns — even from less “conventional” Final Fantasies such as XIV — is a really nice touch for longstanding fans of the series, and the Relic and Ability systems provide plenty of scope for customising and upgrading characters.

It’s a nice idea, in other words; I’m just not sure that a free-to-play mobile game was quite the optimal way to do this. Still, it’s significantly better than many other mobile games I’ve fiddled with in the past, so I’ll give it a chance for a bit longer and see if it holds my interest.

2156: Five Favourite Final Bosses

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I beat Splatoon’s single player mode this evening, and was thoroughly impressed with the final boss battle — a thoroughly old-school and long fight that demanded you put into practice pretty much every skill the rest of the game had subtly taught you up until that point.

That got me thinking, then: what are some of my favourite final boss battles? I am, as I’ve previously mentioned on these very pages sometime in the dim and distant past, a real fan of a good finale to a game, since I’m one of those apparently rare breeds of gamer that actually likes to beat games. I love well-done final boss fights that go the whole hog, with impressive graphical effects, a stirring and unique soundtrack and a feeling of excitement and satisfaction unlike anything else in the rest of the game.

So here are five of my favourites. Not necessarily my absolute favourites, but five that spring immediately to mind, and in no particular order.

Final Fantasy VIII: Ultimecia

The easy choice would be Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth, of course, and to be sure the battles against Bizarro Sephiroth and Safer Sephiroth are indeed spectacular, particularly with the stirring tones of One Winged Angel accompanying the latter.

But I actually really appreciated Final Fantasy VIII’s final conflict, because it unfolded in a number of interesting and dramatic phases, each one raising the stakes significantly until the final final boss, which, by this point, you absolutely wanted to throw everything you had at.

The battle begins with the party attacking a regular-sized Ultimecia accompanied by the “sorceress battle” music that has marked major battles throughout the rest of the game. This is then followed by Ultimecia summoning Griever, an embodiment of the protagonist’s image of the “ultimate Guardian Force”. New music comes in here. After this, Ultimecia “junctions” herself to Griever, creating a monstrous entity, and fighting the party to the sounds of the famous battle theme Maybe I’m a Lion. And finally, the obligatory “fighting the true form of the final boss in something that looks like space” phase is accompanied by The Extreme, a high-intensity, pumping piece of music that gives this final phase of the battle a real sense of urgency.

Like most Final Fantasy games, Ultimecia was a bit of a pushover if you’d spent the time preparing properly, since final bosses are never the most powerful things in a Final Fantasy game; optional, so-called “superbosses” are, since their extreme difficulty would likely prevent more casual fans of the game from clearing the story. Make no mistake, though, she didn’t go down particularly easy — particularly compared to Sephiroth in VII — and the necessity of throwing your most powerful spells and Limit Breaks at her meant that the fight was consistently interesting and thrilling to watch.

Space Channel 5 Part 2: Purge

It’s kind of strange to think of a rhythm action game having a final boss, but Space Channel 5 was far from being a typical rhythm action game; the emphasis was very much on the “action” side of things, as between the two installments, it told an enjoyable — if utterly camp — story filled with dancing, singing and guitar battles.

The final battle in Part 2 felt surprisingly climactic and movie-like. It was also a textbook example of a “spirit bomb” battle, in which the protagonist looks like they’ve been completely defeated — indeed, some theories suggest that Ulala is outright killed by Purge’s initial assault — but is then given new-found strength and abilities by the power of friendship/love/belief/whatever. In the case of Space Channel 5, this is reflected in both the visuals — you see throngs of people dancing behind Ulala as the battle progresses — and the audio, which features a crowd of people shouting the directions as opposed to just Ulala as in the rest of the game.

This battle also does something I particularly love with its soundtrack: it provides a new twist on the game’s main theme, bringing a wonderful sense of closure to the whole experience.

Super Mario World: Bowser

I mention this one not because it’s a particularly amazing fight — compared to some other battles I could mention, it’s fairly unremarkable — but because, to the best of my recollection, Super Mario World was the first game I ever played to completion and saw the end credits of. Consequently, it was also the first time I had ever encountered a final boss battle, and I very much enjoyed how it was a slightly different setup to the rest of the game, that made you realise Shit Was Getting Real.

The usual status bar at the top of the screen was no longer there, it was a single-screen stage rather than a scrolling level, and it was accompanied by unique music and graphical effects — in this case a rather rudimentary but effective thunder and lightning effect.

This being the era long before GameFAQs use was widespread, I had to work out how to defeat Bowser myself. It took a good few attempts to determine what to do, and a good few more to actually correctly put it into execution. But my goodness when I finally achieved it for the first time it felt absolutely amazing. I probably cheered. Like, out loud. I forget. But, needless to say, it was a very exciting moment indeed.

Ace Combat 4: Megalith

I came to the Ace Combat series relatively recently and still haven’t played them all to completion, but I was thoroughly impressed with Ace Combat 4 from start to finish. It took air combat, something that could have easily been extremely dry and clinical — the old MicroProse sims of yore sprang to mind — and turned it into something cinematic and dramatic, with wonderful setpieces and incredible music.

The crowning glory of the game, though, was the final mission, which was set up and executed absolutely perfectly. The prior missions had set you up to expect something horrendous to fight against, and it’s finally revealed as “Megalith”, a superweapon that will, not to put too fine a point on it, wreck everyone’s shit if allowed to do its thing.

You know that things are getting real when the pre-mission briefing screen, which usually had some rather arcadey music accompanying it, was instead accompanied by near silence, with only a heartbeat-like throb in the background. And then once the mission begins, you hear this:

Incredible stuff. Particularly as, in appropriate action movie style, you wreck Megalith’s shit by flying inside it and dropping bombs in its most sensitive areas.

Splatoon: DJ Octavio

Finally, the reason I’m writing this at all: Splatoon’s final boss.

The battle against DJ Octavio is a textbook example of an old-school boss battle, particularly those favoured by Nintendo. It’s a lengthy affair that is far more than simple tank-and-spank: you need to make use of all your skills to beat it, and it’s not easy. It’s also quite unforgiving, giving you only three lives to play with (though you can replenish these by reaching checkpoints in the fight, which is one thing we didn’t used to get in the old days) and lots of opportunities to fall off into oblivion or be splattered by his many and varied attacks.

The cool thing about DJ Octavio is that it’s designed in the same way as the rest of Splatoon’s single-player mode: it’s made to encourage you to use various skills and techniques that will serve you well in competitive multiplayer, which is, after all, the meat of Splatoon. Multiplayer battles are chaotic, and the fight against DJ Octavio introduces you to this fact gradually over the course of the battle, beginning by simply throwing missiles and punches at you — the one constant throughout the fight is that you have to “reflect” his punch attacks back at him by shooting them before they strike you or the ground — and gradually, over time, stepping things up with more treacherous ground to fight on, additional enemies, powerful superweapons and more things happening at the same time.

By the end of the fight, you’re essentially handling the same mechanics, but at a much higher speed and with more distractions. Deal with that and you’re almost certainly ready for the unpredictability of human opponents.

For bonus points, the DJ Octavio fight also includes a lightweight spirit bomb in its final phases: the music changes from the dubstep-techno-type stuff Octavio has been playing at you throughout the fight to a song sung by Splatoon mascots Callie and Marie, who have been helping you out in not-very-good disguises throughout all of the single player mode. It’s a great way to close out the fight, with a real feeling that you’re being encouraged to do your best against seemingly impossible odds — and consequently finally getting everything right and clearing the game feels just as satisfying as that first time I beat Super Mario World all those years ago.

So good job, Nintendo; while many people may not think of you immediately when contemplating spectacular finales to games, it’s clear you know your shit when it comes to badass bosses.

Now to get destroyed in multiplayer, I guess…

1824: First Fantasy

I finished Final Fantasy I last night, bringing the first chapter in my Final Fantasy marathon to a close. And you know what? I really, really enjoyed it.

This may have something to do with the fact that I was playing the PSP version, also known as Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition, which has been substantially tweaked and rebalanced from both the original NES release and the subsequent enhanced PSone Final Fantasy Origins version, which I played last time I beat this first installment.

While there’s an argument that it’s worth experiencing the game in its original, purest, grind-heavy and rather difficult form — complete with its Vancian Magic system, just one of many influences the game drew from Dungeons & Dragons — the PSP version proved to be a lot more enjoyable generally. The pacing was better, there was a lot less running around in circles grinding — the original required you to do this to even beat the first boss, which appeared before the game’s title screen — and the more traditional Magic Points system made some of the more lengthy encounters and dungeons later in the game somewhat more feasible.

Those late-game dungeons — four of which were added in the Game Boy Advance Dawn of Souls release of the game and the last of which was added in the Anniversary Edition release — proved to be really great, if a little bizarre. Collectively dubbed the Soul of Chaos, the first four extra dungeons live up to their name by tasking you with exploring 5, 10, 20 and 40 floors that feature set layouts but randomised floor orders and available treasures. There’s not really a coherent theme to the dungeon floors as such — although the less interesting floors tend to be of an appropriate element to the dungeon’s name: fiery caverns in Hellfire Chasm, for example — but the chaotic, unpredictable nature of them is what makes them interesting. On one floor you might be exploring a cave; the next you might be paddling a canoe around a flooded village; on the next, you might be attempting to navigate a maze of bookshelves while scholars mumble about their research and get in your way.

The final new dungeon, known as the Labyrinth of Time, was the most interesting by far, however. The Labyrinth of Time creates a new dungeon each time by picking ten different “puzzle floors” out of a selection of 30, then challenging you to beat these puzzles against the clock and with one or more of your abilities sealed off. The more abilities you seal off — and the more useful they are — the more time you have available to complete a floor. Run out of time and a dark miasma descends, damaging you every second and increasing the number of monsters you encounter.

The puzzles vary from simple observation puzzles, in which you have to answer questions about something you’ve just seen, to challenging physical tasks such as marching in line with a group of NPC soldiers. Like the Soul of Chaos dungeons, they have little to do with the overall Final Fantasy story — what little story it has anyway — but they’re immensely enjoyable and challenging to complete. And then at the end of it all you have Chronodia, one of the toughest bosses in the game, to fight for ultimate bragging rights… oh, and the best sword in the game, too.

The first time I played Final Fantasy I, with the Origins release, I did so in order to understand the series’ roots, and sort of had a good time, but found it a bit of a chore after a while. The PSP version, meanwhile, I found genuinely enjoyable, even from a modern perspective, and was inspired to go on and complete the game’s most challenging content. I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to anyone looking for a fun portable RPG experience — and those of you without a PSP can even play it on your phone.

Onwards to Final Fantasy II, then, which I remember enjoying quite a lot the first time I tried it (again, with Origins) but which is widely regarded to be one of the worst installments in the whole series thanks to its bafflingly bizarre mechanics. For Fynn! Wild Rose!

1805: Christmas is Over

Well, it’s the evening of Sunday December 28, and I’m counting down the hours until I have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning and trudge all the way to work. (Okay, I drive most of it, but there’s still an honest-to-goodness half-hour trudge at the other end, which I’m really not relishing in the current cold weather.)

The Christmas break has been nice, and the fact I’d spent the previous few months at work, away from home (as opposed to working from home as I was previously) has made me appreciate it somewhat more. I’ve enjoyed the time off, I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to just relax without the pressure to “do” anything, and I’ve enjoyed having the time to indulge in some favourite games, TV shows and anime without time commitments.

I finished the Hanzou story in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus today — that’s one of the four stories in the game. I enjoyed it a lot; gameplay-wise, it’s a significant improvement on the first game thanks to its jump to 3D, and its narrative is interesting. Throughout the course of the story, we learn some new things about the main cast as well as get introduced to the newcomers in this particular installment: the girls of the Gessen shinobi school, and the new members of the Hebijou school that Homura and her gang hailed from in the original game before being exiled following the events at Burst’s finale.

My initial reaction to the Hanzou story was that I was slightly disappointed there weren’t more of the visual novel sequences giving background on the girls and how they were feeling about various things — but on balance, I think there was a good amount. The game didn’t try to do too much: it introduced one major plot/background point per character through several of these sequences peppered throughout the course of the entire narrative arc, and the rest of the story was delivered through snappy but enjoyable talking-heads sequences that were just about characters talking to one another, not narration. It worked well, and it teased just enough information about the Gessen girls to make me want to find out more about them: fortunately, I can now do just that by playing through their story, followed by Hebijou and finally Homura and her friends in the Crimson Squad.

I also, as we saw yesterday, made a start on Final Fantasy. I’ll be writing more about that as I make more progress through it, though with my intended creative writing project in January this will likely be over on the Squadron of Shame forums rather than here.

I’ve also watched some anime for the first time in what feels like months; I’ve been continuing with the farming-themed series Silver Spoon, which was recommended to me by some anime-loving friends, and I’ve been reminded what a good show it is. It has an enjoyably understated plot about a teen boy feeling somewhat out of his depth in an agricultural academy, and some appealing, entertaining characters who occasionally reference recognisable anime tropes without being defined by them. There’s one character in particular who looks like he would be more at home in a series like Dragon Ball Z, for example, so seeing him mucking out cows and working with chickens is rather entertaining, to say the least!

Anyway. Early-ish night for me tonight due to the aforementioned Danger of Work bell tolling, so I’ll sign off there and simply say I hope you all had as restful and pleasant a Christmas as I had, and are looking forward to a good new year.

1804: First Fantasy

PSN finally came back up after some “hacker”-induced downtime over the Christmas period, so I took the opportunity to start filling my brand new 64GB memory card with Final Fantasy games — specifically, I-IX and Tactics, though there will also be a copy of the X/X-2 remasters added to that shortly, particularly if they end up in the PSN store’s sale.

I made a start on Final Fantasy today. I’ve played this a couple of times over the years, though never the original NES version. Rather, my past forays into it have been on the Final Fantasy Origins version on PlayStation 1, an upgraded port with 16-bit-style visuals and a significantly enhanced soundtrack over the bleepy, blurpy NES chiptunes of the original. (It was also bundled with a similarly upgraded port of Final Fantasy II, which was also the first time that game had ever made it outside of Japan.)

This time around, however, I’m playing the PSP version on my Vita. I wasn’t expecting anything particularly different from the Origins version, but already something feels a little different. The pacing feels better when it comes to levelling; it seems to take a lot less time to gain a level, leading to significantly less running around in circles fighting armies of wolves just to beef yourself up enough to enter the first dungeon. The magic system’s adoption of a more traditional magic points system rather than the NES original’s D&D-style “you can only cast this level of spells this many times” mechanic also makes White and Black Mages seem somewhat less useless, which is nice.

The original Final Fantasy is an odd beast, really. It’s unmistakeably a Japanese role-playing game in look and feel, but it’s clearly heavily inspired by Western fantasy, even going so far as to directly reference numerous Dungeons and Dragons elements such as monsters, races and the like. It’s abundantly clear that Final Fantasy is Dungeons and Dragons through a Japanese lens, in other words, and it works rather well. It’s actually relatively rare for Japanese role-playing games to play the fantasy tropes completely straight these days, as they often tend to incorporate elements of sci-fi along the way, making for a curiously distinctive mix of influences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the evolution of the Final Fantasy series over the years, which has all but abandoned its roots with the most recent installments — with the exception of XIV, which is deliberately very true to said roots, directly referencing past games at numerous junctures throughout.

The limitations of video game storytelling in the era when it was originally released are still apparent in the PSP rerelease, but the gameplay additions at least make it significantly more playable to a modern audience. I’ll be interested to see what tweaks — if any — have been made to the somewhat idiosyncratic Final Fantasy II for its PSP incarnation, but I have quite a journey ahead of me before I can start that particular adventure.

For now, it’s time to let Garland try and knock me all down… I have a suspicion he will be unsuccessful in his efforts, and the lovely Princess Sarah will be returned to her rightful place in Cornelia Castle before long.