#oneaday Day 523: A deluge

There is a veritable deluge of good games that have come out recently, and this statement applies pretty much regardless of the specific types of game you are into. From my own personal perspective, I've been having a great time with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Absolum, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Lumines Arise from recent releases, and a copy of Full Metal Schoolgirl arrived today, begging me to "just give it a quick try" this evening. Then alongside that, from varying degrees of "the past", I have Death end re;Quest: Code Z and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the go. And I'm playing Space Rogue and The Granstream Saga for video series.

Honestly, it's easy to get overwhelmed at times like this and get struck down with the dreaded analysis paralysis. But I've been trying hard to fight through that any time I feel it of late — and that, in part, is how I've ended up with quite this many games "on the go" at the same time.

You see, the way I figure it is that if you have just one "big game" on the go at a time, sometimes you're just not in the mood to play that one game, and thus it pays to have other things you can turn to. It's easy to start feeling "worried" that you won't get around to finishing any of the things you've started, though, but realistically, with the way today's games are designed, you can devote an evening to one thing, play something else another evening, play something else another evening, and so on.

It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get through something — and to some people, whether or not you get through it at all, though I don't fall into that category, as I do like to finish what I start. The important thing is just that you feel like you're spending your time in a way that is enjoyable and beneficial to you. So if you're in the mood to fest on a single game for multiple days straight, do that. If you're not in the mood for that one "big game" one evening, don't spend hours agonising over whether or not you're "allowed" to play something else — just go play something else. And, heaven forbid, if you're not in the mood to play anything at all of an evening? Stick the telly on and watch a few episodes of a favourite show. Yes, it can even be something you've watched myriad times previously if you really want.

Part of the "I must stick to one thing" mentality that I have been doing my best to shake off is down to my time working in the games press, when it was important to get reviews done in time for embargoes so you could have competitive coverage. And I even self-inflicted this somewhat with MoeGamer, too, in the name of being able to give single games or series more in-depth coverage. But none of that needs to happen. It's nice to be able to write stuff for MoeGamer or script videos, but it's not an absolute requirement of everything I play.

Honestly, I think part of the reason I worry over such things is because I want to feel like I have made a contribution to the world of video games through writing about stuff — particularly stuff that doesn't get a lot of love or attention from mainstream outlets. And I do still feel like I want to do that — but also I have to remember that I am also making a contribution to this world through my day job, and my work in that regard is probably getting seen by a lot more people than articles on my own personal websites. Probably, anyway.

All this is a long way to say that I think I'm going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl this evening, and I'm not going to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 512: Can't stop grinding

I have a problem, and its name is Final Fantasy Tactics. Specifically, it is Final Fantasy Tactics' progression system. It's not that it's bad. Oh, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My problem is that I'm having too damn much fun beefing up my little guys. I have spent several entire play sessions doing nothing but fighting random battles and levelling up my guys, because the next thing that I think it would be cool to unlock is always just over the horizon, yet within reach. And so I keep going, and going, and going… and now my main team is pushing level 40 and is about 75% of the way through Chapter 3.

Part of the reason this has happened is due to the situation I described the other day, where the Golgollada Gallows fight proved to be something of a roadblock until I spent a bit of time grinding my way to be able to survive it convincingly. While I was engaging in that process, I found myself thinking "hey, this is actually kind of fun in and of itself", and so I have found myself drifting back towards just playing for level and job progression rather than advancing the story.

Oh, I'm not going so far as some particularly extreme examples of the genre, such as in Chris Person's excellent piece on Aftermath describing how he spends five hours at the start of every Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough absolutely breaking the game's progression system on the very first map, before the story even gets underway properly. No. That does sound like it might be fun to try sometime, but I'm not going that far for only my second full playthrough of this game in my life.

I'm just levelling everyone probably 10 levels higher than they need to be for the point in the story I'm at, and unlocking some of the seriously powerful jobs. Dragoon's fully upgraded Jump ability being able to hit almost any square on the map from any other point, after a small delay? Working on it. Ninja's frankly obscenely overpowered Dual Wield ability? Got it. Arithmetician's ability to nuke the entire map instantly and without using magic points? Definitely working on it.

As Chris says in his Aftermath piece, doing this is "funny and the game doesn't stop you". Nope; because the random encounters scale to your characters' levels, you'll always be presented with appropriately levelled opponents and be able to score some decent experience from them. As such, you can quite feasibly level all the way to 99 if you feel that way inclined — and in doing so, you'd likely unlock most, if not all, of the available jobs with some canny switching at appropriate moments.

I have set myself a milestone, though. When my "main five" hit level 40, I'm going to move on with the story.

Probably.

I mean, I want to make sure I can handle that Wiegraf fight, right? Maybe just a few more levels…

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#oneaday Day 509: A new age of "talkies"

Back when the CD-ROM era first started, and game developers suddenly had a lot more storage capacity to play with, a revolution unfolded. Games became "talkie", with formerly text-based dialogue now being supported (or sometimes, in those less enlightened times, replaced) with voice acting of variable quality. This was, for the most part, seen as a significant step forwards in terms of games being able to tell interesting and convincing stories, though some genres benefited from it more than others, with probably the biggest beneficiary being point-and-click adventures.

These games already had pretensions of movie-style storytelling. Indeed, back when Ron Gilbert of LucasArts coined the term "cutscene" with Maniac Mansion, he defined them as "short, animated sequences — like scenes from a movie — which can provide clues and information about the characters" (emphasis mine). As such, it was only natural that as interactive entertainment and movies moved ever-closer together, we would start to hear game dialogue as much as read it.

That wasn't universally the case, mind; not every game that featured dialogue was fully voiced. In many cases this was because the storage capacity of a CD wouldn't have been sufficient to include the entire script for longer games such as RPGs, particularly on console, where they had been becoming more and more dialogue-heavy. In those cases, the extra storage space instead went to other purposes such as pre-rendered video sequences or even live action video.

The advent of DVD didn't lead to longer games suddenly becoming "talkie", either; while there was often a lot more speech in these games, they still often weren't fully voiced. Final Fantasy X is a good example — major story scenes in that game are fully voiced, but incidental interactions and random NPC conversations remain text-based. And this situation has continued right up until this day — even with the huge storage capacity of modern flash memory-based cartridges and Blu-Ray discs, there are still a fair number of RPGs that have unvoiced dialogue — although that number is dwindling a bit. Many Japanese games, even from relatively low-budget studios like Compile Heart, even have dual audio today.

We're in a position now where it's possible for another minor revolution in "talkie" terms, and one of the best examples I've seen is the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remake. This is one of those games where, as outlined above, there was far too much in the way of script for them ever to be able to make it fully voiced back in the PlayStation days. Not only that, but video game voice acting in the late '90s was generally… Not Good. There was the odd exception, yes, but going back and listening to some of those early "talkie" games sometimes makes you just want to turn the speech off and go back to fully text-based dialogue. King's Quest V says hello. (King's Quest VI, meanwhile, is excellent.)

Today, though, we have a wide and diverse variety of voice actors with plenty of video game experience, and pretty much all of them can be heard in Final Fantasy Tactics. And the result is simply smashing. By combining the revised (and considerably better) retranslation for the PlayStation Portable "War of the Lions" version of Final Fantasy Tactics with a cast of voice actors who can actually act, we have one of the most gloriously theatrical games I think I've ever played. It really is a thing of wonder, and it adds so much to the game.

It makes me want to see more games from the PS1 era tackled like this. I would love to see some remasters of games from that period where the basic gameplay isn't touched all that much aside from a few interface and balance tweaks, but a fully voiced script delivered by people who know what they're doing is added. There's a bunch of games that would really benefit from this treatment — though it remains to be seen if companies like Square Enix will feel inclined to do this any more.

By all accounts, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles appears to have been doing well both critically and commercially, though, so hopefully this is taken as a sign of something people would like to see (and hear) more often.

In the meantime, I'm off to go enjoy it a bit more.

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#oneaday Day 506: Tactical Sunday

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I absolutely love and respect greatly, but I have to be in the right mood to play it. Today I was very much in the mood to play it, so play it I did. I got to a point that proved to be a sticking point for me when I first played it on PlayStation — Golgollada Gallows, also known as Golgorand Execution Site in the original — and, indeed, it proved to be a bit of a sticking point for me this time around, also.

However! This time around, I was armed with the knowledge of how I beat it last time around, which was to spend several hours doing random battles to level up my core units to such a point that they could survive the challenge of Golgollada Gallows — notorious as one of the toughest fights in the relatively early game — and progress without too much trouble.

Y'see, the difficulty I had with this first time around is that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of positions itself as a game where you move from story beat to story beat without any interruptions. Because it's not a conventional RPG in which you directly control the protagonist as he wanders around towns and dungeons, it's easy to see the random engagements you can run into on the node-based world map as annoying inconveniences preventing you from seeing the next bit of story.

But they are there for a reason — and, indeed, The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game makes it even easier for you to take advantage of them by making them not random at all. Sure, sometimes as you move from node to node you'll get the distinctive "swoosh" that indicates a battle is incoming, but unlike the PlayStation original, you can choose not to engage if you don't want to. This prevents you from encountering a minor softlock if, for example, you're trying to get to a town to stock up on healing items or refresh your units' equipment.

However, it also goes the other way. If you pass through a non-story node and you don't have an encounter there, you can choose to "search for enemies" and manually trigger a battle. This means if you actually want to spend some time levelling your units or earning them some new abilities — which the game doesn't tell you to do, but which is very much a good idea — you can do that much more easily than in the PlayStation version. If you want to, you can just stand on one battlefield, do a fight, then immediately trigger another one — no running back and forth between nodes in the hope of getting the "swoosh", because you can trigger it at will, and you can ignore it if it's inconvenient.

While I'm not normally a fan of being able to turn off encounters in a regular RPG — it feels very much like cheating, plus it does you out of some progression that you probably need — in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where battles take 5-10 minutes or more rather than a few seconds, this was an important and very welcome tweak to the formula.

Anyway, upshot of all this is that I beat Golgollada Gallows on my second attempt rather than taking the many, many, many attempts I did back in the day. I was still relatively new to console RPGs when I first picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, after all, and it hadn't occurred to me to grind because I wasn't super-familiar with the concept. Once I spent that time levelling my units properly, though, everything fell into place, and the rest of the game was much more straightforward. As, indeed, I suspect it will be this time around, too.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a wonderful remake of an already wonderful game. I have greatly enjoyed my time playing today, and, having got over that notorious difficulty spike, I suspect the remainder of the game (except maybe "that" Wiegraf fight) will be even more enjoyable.

So your lesson for the day, then, if you're new to Final Fantasy Tactics, is don't be afraid to grind. Embrace it. Love it. You will come to appreciate it when all your units are suddenly orders of magnitude more effective with just four or five additional levels under their belts!

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#oneaday Day 485: Forgetful

Missed yesterday. I have no excuse, I just forgot. You can blame Final Fantasy Tactics or God. I did make some videos and write about Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, though. You can read that here.

Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm really impressed with the new The Ivalice Chronicles version. I wasn't initially sold on the new look of the "remastered" mode, but seeing it in action makes it make a lot more sense than still screenshots might suggest. There's a nice almost "fabric"-like texture to everything, which makes the game sort of look like it's unfolding on a tapestry, which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the narrative it's telling.

The biggest upgrade by far is the full voice acting. I remember back in the PlayStation 1 era thinking that it was a bit sad, if understandable, that big games like RPGs didn't have full voice acting. The reality is that the voice data for a game as big as Final Fantasy Tactics probably wouldn't fit on a CD! We have no such constraints today, however, so a fully voiced Final Fantasy Tactics is a thing of wonder, and there's an incredible voice cast doing their thing with the excellent War of the Lions script from the PSP version — definitely an upgrade from the borderline nonsensical PS1 original.

The game is still just as hard as it ever was, though. It will absolutely kick your ass if you don't take a bit of time to buff up your characters — and you still need to use a solid strategy during the missions themselves, even if you've levelled up a bit and got good equipment. The computer-controlled "Guest" characters are still as dimwitted as ever, unfortunately, which can lead to some annoying situations, but you can just look at it as these characters being true to their personalities. I can't say I was sorry any time Argath got knocked out.

One of the little things I like the most is the fact that all your "cannon fodder" party members — i.e. the ones who aren't directly relevant to the story — have their own voices, too. And rather than having just one male voice and one female voice, there are actually several, so your individual, "unimportant" characters each have their own personality, which helps you become attached to them. And, given that Final Fantasy Tactics has permadeath (albeit a somewhat forgiving take on it, where you have a few turns to resurrect them before they're gone forever) that's an important part of the experience.

I'm not far into the game as yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I suspect I will get a lot more out of it now than when I played it back in the day. It's a truly great game, and I'm thrilled that it's got a new release — and a release in Europe, which it never had back in the day!

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#oneaday Day 570: Nintendon't

So apparently Nintendo are under pressure from their investors to say sod the 3DS and start developing for smartphones. I can't help but think that this is a really good idea. The 3DS was a bold experiment for the company, but it's not going particularly well for them right now — hence the massive price cut. Said price cut still isn't enough for me to want to purchase one, however, which I think is part of the problem. Nintendo doesn't seem to know who the 3DS is for. Is it for the casual market, a la Wii? Is it for core gamers? Is it for people who played their DSes religiously?

The answer to all of those questions is a shrug of the shoulders and a non-committal "Idunno".

The trouble is, of course, iOS and to a lesser extent Android. Why should people purchase a dedicated game system featuring an initially impressive but ultimately useless gimmick when they can have equivalent gaming experiences (albeit without the 3D) on their phones? The only real advantage I see of the 3DS (and, by extension, the Vita) over the smartphone platforms is the addition of physical controls — a relatively big deal, sure, but a lot of developers are getting wise to the best ways to work controls around a touchscreen now.

iOS and Android have a bigger ace up their sleeve than physical controls, though: pricing. This occurred to me today when considering the disgruntlement people expressed over Final Fantasy Tactics releasing at £10.99/$15.99 on iOS. Final Fantasy Tactics is about 14 years old, and was a full price title on its original release. It was then a full price title on its more recent PSP release before dropping down to around the $10 mark on PSN. The iOS port is more expensive than the PSP version, sure, but it has been revamped for the touchscreen — and rather well, I might add.

Still think it's expensive? Let's take a look at the one game people consider to be an "essential purchase" for the 3DS: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. A game of an equivalent age to Final Fantasy Tactics. Given a slight makeover with some new textures, 3D graphics and an interface revamp, sure — along with the addition of the Master Quest variant that I'm pretty sure no-one ever plays — but still, in essence, the same Ocarina of Time we were playing on the N64. The price? $40.

Now hold on a minute. Suddenly Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all. If Nintendo are going to charge that much more for the privilege of having the game on physical media rather than a digital download, then I say bring on the digital future. If Nintendo are so stubborn as to remain dedicated to their own proprietary hardware, then they need to think about how they can be competitive. Because at the moment, they're not — and the sales figures are showing that. Perhaps the 3DS will show a sharp upswing in popularity when the price drop comes into effect tomorrow, but said price drop still isn't going to solve the system's most critical problem — a lack of good games, and those games that are good released at a price way higher than you'd find similar experiences on the App Store — even the most expensive ones like Final Fantasy Tactics.

It'd be sad to see Nintendo crushed after they dominated the handheld market for so many years. But I have a feeling it's going to happen — and the sooner they accept it, the better. I for one would certainly be very happy to see a Virtual Console app appear on the App Store, and I'd be delighted to play titles like Super Mario Bros., Castlevania and numerous others on the go. But I'm not buying a 3DS for the privilege — if Nintendo can't accept the common knowledge that people of 2011 want fewer devices in their pocket, not more, then frankly they deserve everything they get.

#oneaday Day 568: iOS Gaming Not Proper Gaming? To That I Say "Balls!"

There's a degree of at least partly-justifiable snobbery surrounding iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPod touch — an assumption that they're not "proper" game platforms because they don't have the words "Nintendo", "Sony" or "Microsoft" emblazoned anywhere upon them, and that software for them is much cheaper than for aforementioned devices with "Nintendo", "Sony" or "Microsoft" emblazoned upon them.

This is a flawed assumption. However, as I say, it is at least partly understandable given the meteoric popularity of titles such as the ubiquitous Angry Birds and all manner of other casual-friendly games. In many ways, iOS devices are the Wii of the handheld world, featuring a lot of casual games, a lot of shovelware and a surprising number of diamonds in the rough which it's entirely possible that self-professed "hardcore" gamers will gloss over on the grounds that they're "just mobile phone games".

That in itself isn't a negative thing, though; if you're waiting for a bus/train/poo to fall out/tardy date/kettle to boil then these quick-fire, quick-play games are ideal. You can load up Bejeweled Blitz, play a game and post your score to Facebook in the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee. You can play a level of Angry Birds in the time it takes your toast to be toasted. If you're as bad at Flight Control as I am you'll have caused a hideous air traffic accident by the time you've finished a poo.

But here's the key thing: iOS gaming isn't just about this kind of game, but that's where the flawed perception of it comes from. Take Square's recently-released Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, for example. This has attracted widespread bewilderment and criticism for its "unreasonable" £10.99 price point — but this is a game for which I paid £50 for an import version upon its original release 14 years ago (Christ, that makes me feel old — that game's nearly half as old as I am), and whose PSP version released at £35. Okay, sure, you can grab it for less than a tenner from PSN now, but for a couple of extra quid you can get a version with new touchscreen controls — touchscreen controls that work extremely well with the game, I might add (yes, I caved and bought it — I love me some FFT) along with a ridiculous number of hours of gameplay. Final Fantasy Tactics is not a short game — so consider its £10.99 price point in terms of "price per hour" and you'll find it a bit more reasonable.

At the other end of the pricing spectrum is the excellent (if poorly-translated) Zenonia series of action-JRPGs, the latest entry of which is completely free with a few optional microtransaction items available for those happy to pay some money or watch some ads. Zenonia is an excellent 16-bit style RPG that is simple to play yet deep and very addictive. And again, it's not a small game. The touchscreen controls are a bit fiddly — any game that attempts to incorporate a traditional control scheme usually is — but once you get used to them and customize them to your liking there's a lengthy RPG that will keep you occupied for many commutes there. The kind of lengthy RPG that you'd pay at least £20 for on DS. For free. And despite featuring microtransactions and premium items, the game never hassles you to spend money on it — it's just an option that's there if you want it, but I haven't paid a penny and it still feels like a proper game.

The list goes on: Kairosoft's series of management/sim games have provided a resurgence in popularity of a genre which has laid fairly stagnant for some time. Virtual renditions of well-established boardgames allow multiplayer action at times convenient to both players — even if that's not at the same time. And some of the finest roguelikes in existence (100 Rogues, Sword of Fargoal) are to be found on the platform.

iOS is here to stay as a gaming platform, and the sooner people wake up and stop seeing it as some sort of bastard offspring to the "mainstream" gaming industry, the better. Sure, there's a ton of amateurish shovelware out there — but that doesn't by any means diminish the significance of the some the games which are available for the platform — a platform which is growing more and more likely to give both Nintendo and Sony in particular cause for concern as the months roll by.