I finished Final Fantasy XV's main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game's "secret" dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.

As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.

The Pitioss Ruins are only accessible after you've finished the game, since you can't get the flying car Regalia Type-F until this point, and you need to be able to fly to reach the area of the map where the dungeon is.

You may have noticed the area on the map earlier in the game — it's near the Rock of Ravatogh, marked as what looks like a yellow slash mark on the map. It looks like it should be an icon you can click on, but it's just part of the map. In actual fact, this yellow stroke is a small dirt airstrip on which you can land the Regalia Type-F (carefully!) before proceeding on foot towards the Pitioss Ruins, which stand proudly atop a nearby hill, looking like a deceptively small stone structure.

Like Costlemark Tower, the Pitioss Ruins only open at night, though in this case it's through a button activating rather than the actual entrance opening up. Noctis must enter alone by hopping through a narrow gap in a metal fence, pushing the button and descending via an ancient elevator into the complex.

The Pitioss Ruins are a pure puzzle dungeon — there are no enemies inside, meaning your only task is to explore it thoroughly and loot it of all the many treasures it has to offer. (And there are many treasures inside, including the Black Hood accessory, which allows Noctis to auto-dodge enemy attacks — immensely useful.) This does not, by any means, mean that it is a walk in the park, however; on the contrary, it took me just shy of four hours to clear it today, since it's filled with challenging, interesting and unforgiving environmental puzzles.

The dungeon is split into several areas. You begin gently with a small area in which your task is simply to get a door open. In order to do this, you need to navigate around moving walls, hit switches to move rolling boulders out of the way and eventually smash an enormous statue to clear the way to the door.

This is subsequently followed by a puzzle that demands careful observation of the environment, including the small details, in order to succeed. Flipping a switch activates a room that rotates around its axis, with openings at regular intervals. You have to get into one of these openings, then stand behind a small "wall" (which becomes a floor when the opening is perpendicular to the ground) and carefully fall down a small hole, avoiding spikes.

Beyond this, there's a section with a number of platforming challenges, some of which simply require careful jumping onto stationary platforms, and others of which see you standing precariously atop spinning spiky things.

After this there is one of the highlights of the dungeon for me. Opening a door, you discover a huge Demon Wall-esque structure rolling backwards and forwards across an enormous dark room. The front of the structure is covered with spikes, so you have to think and observe carefully to get around it. What then follows is a lengthy sequence where you climb all over and through the structure and the surrounding room in order to get out of a door at the other end of it. It's a beautifully designed sequence that makes a huge amount out of a geographically small area.

Next up is another highlight: a section of dungeon where everything is skewed at roughly a 45-degree angle. Not only does this play havoc with your perception of perspective, it also presents the unusual traversal challenge of effectively allowing you to stand on not one flat "floor", but instead two separate faces of the blocks that make up the area. Navigating this section is a perception challenge: can you correctly recognise which areas are safe to jump to, or which you can climb up?

Delightfully, dropping down into the next area heralds a complete change in perspective: the game temporarily becomes a side-on 2D platformer with static screens, Prince of Persia-style. This sequence is short but sweet, with some tricky jumps and a couple of mean tricks at the end.

This is then followed by a sequence that uses a similar idea to the skewed section earlier, but in which the angle at which the level is rotated changes at various intervals. Using a huge statue at the far end of the room to orient yourself, you need to ensure you recognise which way is "up" and carefully pick your way to the statue itself, at which point you jump on its tits and it falls over, conveniently allowing you access to the next area.

Following another climb over confusing angled floors — this time rather narrow and precarious — you find yourself back at the start of the dungeon from a different perspective, at which point you need to find a way to open the doors to the treasure and make your escape.

I absolutely loved this dungeon. I loved it so much that I didn't even mind when I forgot to save after my first clear (the game didn't auto-save, either!) and promptly crashed the Regalia Type-F on takeoff, causing an immediate Game Over and losing four hours of progress. My second clear was much smoother since I knew what I was doing, but it still took quite a while.

The dungeon design itself is really good. It's well paced, gradually increasing in difficulty and complexity as you proceed. There are frequent means of unlocking "shortcuts" to various sections of the dungeon, so you don't have to clear it all in one go — you can't save inside, but you can step outside, save and return to where you were using the shortcuts without too much difficulty.

Perhaps the best thing about it is something that the team have clearly learned from masochistic platformers such as Super Meat Boy: instant respawns. Since you'll be "dying" a lot in the Pitioss Ruins — it's filled with bottomless pits and instant death spike traps — it would be a real chore to have to endure Final Fantasy XV's hefty load times every time you fucked up. Thankfully, then, you won't get a Game Over inside the Pitioss Ruins — "dying" will simply set you back to the nearest checkpoint, which may be the start of an area, or just before a particularly tricky jumping challenge later in the dungeon. Getting put back to these checkpoints is sufficient punishment to discourage messing up, but not so frustrating you want to leave the dungeon behind and never speak its name again.

All in all, the Pitioss Ruins proved to be a spectacular piece of level design, with some Nier-level mechanical mindfuckery along the way thanks to the skewed sections and the 2D platformer part. I really enjoyed clearing the dungeon, and I have no doubt that the Black Hood will prove to be very useful in the rest of the postgame content.

The post 2518: The Pitioss Ruins appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

When I've not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I've been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I'm determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I'm starting to "get it".

Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I'm not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there's a certain amount of "assumed knowledge"; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like "TM" stand for, which is something I don't recall X and Y doing.

Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn't really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I'm a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn't been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y's default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)

Moon's online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo "no direct online interaction!" way, but it's charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it's possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.

As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.

I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from "get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there" from the previous games. The new "trials" concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I'm interested to see how this develops further in the game — I'm still on the first island at present.

I'm not yet quite sure if I'm "doing it right" with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I'm sure there are no mistakes I might make that can't be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I'm genuinely enjoying Moon, and I'm keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.

The post 2516: Alola! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Still plugging away at Final Fantasy XV, and still having a lot of fun. I'm now up to Chapter 8, as I eventually ran into a roadblock in Chapter 3 where part of the map where several sidequests concluded was locked off and thus I had to progress further to be able to continue. Along the way I enjoyed some spectacular story sequences, but now I'm back on the sidequest train for the moment.

I've been very much enjoying the whole experience of Final Fantasy XV so far. While the sheer amount of sidequests and other distractions around the game world absolutely kill the pacing of the main story if you don't have the self-discipline to focus on that first and do all the other shit later, all that side content is enjoyable to do. As I noted in my first impressions a few days ago, the whole game feels like an inversion of the usual Final Fantasy formula, in which a wide variety of things are open to you from almost the very outset of the game, and you're simply able to immediately go and do whatever appeals to you the most.

Like Xenoblade Chronicles X, an open-world RPG that had a rather similar structure, I've been enjoying how much all the side content makes the world feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in place. Through numerous sidequests — and the conversations your party members have during these quests — you learn quite a bit about the world that you might not discover if you just focused on the main story. The town of Lestallum, for example, is one with a pretty strong gender divide that has come about naturally over time; the women (who are "built", according to Gladio, who one can infer from his enthusiasm is all about the thicc girls) work the industrial jobs such as maintaining the power plant in the city, while the men run the market stalls, restaurants and shops. You might not notice this immediately if you just pay it the flying visit you do in the main scenario quests, but Holly's series of sidequests explores this side of things a bit further.

I've enjoyed the dungeons, too. I think I've cleared them all now — with the exception of the high-level deeper levels that open up once you've completed the main story — and they've been pleasingly different from one another. Particular highlights included the Crestholme Channels, a labyrinth of sewers beneath the outskirts of the Crown City, and Costlemark Tower, a complex dungeon with a shifting layout that you have to carefully navigate your way through in order to reach the boss at the end.

(As a side note, Costlemark Tower presently has a bug in it where sometimes if you've done things in the "wrong" order, beating the boss will not trigger the final cutscene and award you with the weapon you're supposed to get for clearing the dungeon. If this happens, exit and re-enter the dungeon, work your way back to the boss room and trigger a somewhat glitchy cutscene. You then have to fight the boss again, though the bug means that you can't target it unless you're able to trigger a Summon spell. You can, however, fling magic at it; Blizzard spells are particularly effective, so stock up on those before going in for an easy victory.)

I think I'm just about coming to the limit of sidequests that are left to do before I'll be obliged to continue on with the main story. At about 57 hours deep in the game so far, I've already very much had my money's worth, but I'm keen to see how the story continues and concludes — and also very excited to explore what sounds like a considerable amount of post-game content.

The post 2515: Life in Eos appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am still on Chapter Three of Final Fantasy XV, appropriately dubbed "The Open World" — the point at which the majority of the main map opens up to you and you're let loose to go and piss around doing whatever you want before progressing the main story.

The fact this moment occurs so early in Final Fantasy XV is a curious inversion of the usual formula for Japanese RPGs in the Final Fantasy mould. The typical format is that the game spends anywhere between 10 and 30 hours sending you on a linear quest that takes in most of the major locations around the world, conveniently introducing you to all these places and gradually providing you with increasingly unrestrictive means of transportation between them. At some point in the game — usually not long before the final confrontation and the end of it all — you are effectively given the "keys" to the world and complete freedom to explore, usually in conjunction with some particularly convenient means of getting around such as an airship.

Not so in Final Fantasy XV. Here you're given the open world almost from the very beginning of the game, and there are a hell of a lot of things to do in it. I have been finding the myriad sidequests and hunts enormously entertaining and compelling, so much so that I haven't advanced the story beyond the party's arrival in the major town of Lestallum, and yet somehow I'm 30 hours deep in the game and past level 40 on all my characters.

There's an argument that this kind of structure kills pacing somewhat, and it's often a bugbear of mine with open world games. But I sort of feel like it makes sense this way around: that "open world" bit at the end of older Final Fantasy games often felt a little peculiar, as the narrative was demanding that you fend off some sort of imminent disaster, and yet there you were breeding chocobos, investigating crashed planes underwater or collecting frogs to get through a forest. The narrative demanded urgency, in other words, but the gameplay discouraged it.

In Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, after the dramatic opening of the game, Noctis and his companions are simply out in the world, attempting to operate incognito while developing their own skills. While the Empire's invasion of Noctis' home city of Insomnia is something that needs Sorting Out at some point, the Noctis at the beginning of the game is not ready to face up to that responsibility, nor is he skilled enough or familiar enough with his unique powers to be able to simply charge in and take on a whole empire. It makes sense, then, for him to travel around the world, coming to understand it with his friends, developing relationships with people who could prove useful to know in the future, and improving his own skills in the process. The Empire will still be in Insomnia tomorrow, after all, and retaking a capital city is not the sort of thing you want to rush.

Practically speaking, it doesn't really need all that much justification, as exploring Final Fantasy XV's world is simply fun. Today I particularly enjoyed encountering the Rock of Ravatogh, a dungeon at the far Western side of the map that is actually a landmark you can see from the far Eastern side. Yes, it's that old open-world favourite "if you can see that mountain, you can go to it" — or in this case, "if you can see that mountain with weird pointy glowy bits sticking out of it and smoke billowing out of the top, you can go to it".

The Rock of Ravatogh, despite being an outdoor location, is treated as a dungeon rather than just a hill that you have to find your way up. This makes it a much more enjoyable, spectacular experience to climb, as it's been designed and paced to feel like a real trek up a mountain, rather than simply walking in a straight line up a sloping grass texture. There are sections where you need to avoid slipping, there are sections where you need to climb cliff faces, there are sections where you need to pick your way along perilous paths with sheer drops to one side of you. And there are some amazing views of the game world along the way, plus a great reward for making it to the very top.

The Rock of Ravatogh is only the second dungeon I've encountered in Final Fantasy XV, but it's very different to the first, which was a series of dark, underground tunnels with scary noises behind closed doors. This gives me hope that other dungeons in the game will be similarly varied and interesting to explore; I'm looking forward to encountering them for the first time.

The post 2509: Still on Chapter Three appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

(Should have been posted last night, but I forgot to hit Publish!)

A little over ten hours into Final Fantasy XV so far and I'm well and truly on board.

Pro-tip: if you're finding the opening a bit slow, make an effort to not get sidetracked by sidequests and instead push the main story on at least until you're able to get into the Duscae region. From here, the game opens up a whole lot more and you'll have had a taste of various different experiences you can expect to see a lot more of throughout the rest of its duration.

One thing I was very pleasantly surprised about was the discovery that Final Fantasy XV has proper dungeons. This isn't particularly unusual for a Final Fantasy game, but it is relatively unusual for an open-world RPG, to varying degrees. Games like The Witcher 3 have kinda-sorta dungeons dotted around the place, but these often tend to feel like "oh look, another cave" rather than an exciting place to explore and loot. Games like The Elder Scrolls series have hundreds of the bloody things everywhere, but are often designed in a somewhat copy-paste manner, meaning that few of them feel "special". And games like the Xenoblade series pretty much do away with dungeons altogether; Xenoblade Chronicles X did have some underground areas, but again, like The Witcher 3, they felt more like part of the scenery than a discrete experience in their own right.

Relatively early in Final Fantasy XV's main story, you're taken to your first dungeon, and it works in traditional Final Fantasy manner: it's self-contained, it has its own music, it has secrets and branching routes to explore, and it has its own lineup of monster encounters. It felt like a significant gameplay moment to step into this place, and it was exciting and rewarding to explore. There were some surprising and interesting scripted encounters within, and the whole thing felt authentically… well, Final Fantasy.

And I think that's part of the reason I've never really found open-world RPGs to do dungeons in a satisfactory manner for my tastes: you often end up doing exactly the same thing in them that you do out in the open world, whereas Final Fantasy XV's dungeons look set to have unique mechanics, puzzles and methods of exploration. I'm looking forward to discovering more of them.

I think that sums up Final Fantasy XV's approach quite well, actually. It knows when to use scripted sequences effectively — dramatic confrontations, boss fights, dungeons — and when to use the more freeform, unpredictable and emergent gameplay more typically found in open world games. Purely emergent games (I'm picturing the Elder Scrolls series in particular when I use this description) often end up feeling a bit sterile and characterless because nothing has had any real soul put into it — it's all driven by mechanics. Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, will surprise you with unscripted encounters out in the wilds (its equivalent of the random battles of yore), but also knows when would be a particularly effective time to have a monster burst through a wall or a villain to make their first appearance to make a speech and attempt to defeat you with Their Infallible New Weapon.

I like Noctis and his friends a lot; their constant banter, while occasionally repetitive, adds a lot more personality to wandering the fields than Skyrim's mute protagonist, and by restricting the party to those four core members (and occasional guests) the conversations can flow naturally rather than having to work by triggering responses to one another as in something like Xenoblade. Already I'm feeling that core theme of "brotherhood" coming through very nicely indeed. The supporting characters are great, too, running the gamut from all-business badass (Cor) to the flamboyantly colourful and gorgeous (Cindy).

I'm having a blast, in other words. I'm looking forward to my next day off, when I'll be able to really get stuck in.

The post 2507: Into Duscae appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's good. Real good.

I haven't progressed that far in the story as yet as it's simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I'm very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I'm penned in to a relatively "small" area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.

Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it's clear that it's going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I'm very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.

And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I've spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I've hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I've witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis' home city of Insomnia.

And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I'd previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they're all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you're inside or outside.

The whole concept of it being "a fantasy based on reality" has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I'm looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.

For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.

The post 2506: Fifteen appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Regular readers will know that I don't often get hyped up about big-budget releases, but ever since I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time back in my schooldays, the mainline Final Fantasy series has been something that I cannot — will not — miss out on. And the signs are good for XV to be an incredible installment.

Here's a new trailer if you're not sure what the fuss is about:

There are so many things I like about this trailer, and what it promises from the full game.

Broadly speaking, I really like the "fantasy based on reality" idea that appears to have been the main impetus behind its design. Final Fantasy XV's game world, Eos, is based on the modern age in a believable manner — right down to your party sometimes spending downtime with their heads stuck in their respective smartphones rather than talking to one another — but incorporates classic Final Fantasy material in amongst all that. I'm a big fan of this idea; I love the concept of "supernatural crazy things happen in a world that is like ours", so I'm very much on board with Final Fantasy XV's overall setting.

One of the things I'm most interested in is the small playable cast, which consists of just four members plus occasional guests. This is one of the smallest playable casts in Final Fantasy history, though the last time the party was this small (FFI and FFIII; you could perhaps make the argument for FFV too) the technology wasn't really there to do anything interesting with characterisation. (EDIT: descarte25 quite rightly pointed out in the comments that we've also seen small casts in X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns.) Now, though, we have incredibly realistic character models doing believable things in a plausible fantasy world. And the small cast size means that everyone is going to get some exploration; no-one is going to feel like a "bonus party member" who is little more than a walking collection of stats and abilities.

It's an interesting bunch of characters, too. Noct, while looking like one of the most emo teenagers in the entire history of the series — which is saying something in a series that features Squall Leonhart — has already shown himself across a couple of demos and an anime series to be a likeable, interesting and anything but morose protagonist with plenty of depth to his character. The fact that it is his story rather than an unlikely group of heroes who just happen to stumble into their destiny to save the world puts an interesting twist on the series' prior formula. Noct starts the game as someone unique and special, though perhaps doesn't quite know what to do with his status, and thus relies on his friends to help him through his journey.

One of the key themes of the game as a whole is intended to be the bonds of brotherhood between the four characters in the main cast. They grew up together, fight together and live together on the road as Noct continues his journey; although the circumstances of each of them meeting, as depicted in the Brotherhood anime, were anything but natural — not least because Noct is a prince — it's clear that their mutual relationships are going to develop and deepen over the course of the adventure. The best RPGs convey a clear sense of party members being true companions, closer than family, and if Final Fantasy XV pulls it off correctly, it's going to be a memorable ensemble cast for sure.

Outside of the story, there are a bunch of gameplay systems I'm looking forward to, too. The Ascension system looks like an intriguingly deep means of developing the four characters' abilities, for one, and the magic system, where you mix elemental energy with other items to produce all manner of different effects, looks particularly fascinating. Magic is also interesting in that it has an impact on the environment around you, too; fling a Fire spell and the surroundings will burn and become scorched; fling a Blizzard spell and everything will become coated in frost. This is not something that is normally acknowledged in role-playing games, so I'm interested to see how it fits in here.

There look to be a wide variety of sidequests along the way, too, including Final Fantasy XII-style hunts. I'll be interested to see how deep these sidequests are; technically the Behemoth hunt in the Episode Duscae demo was a sidequest, and that had a ton of things to do along the way, including investigating the area, tracking the beast to its lair and devising a spectacular strategy to deal with it — including abilities for each character that were unique to that fight rather than simple hack and slash. While I'm not counting on all sidequests being that interesting, the designers have claimed that they've made an attempt for there not to be "filler" content ("bring me 50 pelts from the monsters on the plains!") and so hopefully this stuff will be worth doing. It remains to be seen how well they achieve this.

That's probably enough enthusing for now, because you can bet there'll be plenty more to come next week once the game's actually in my PS4. Here's an hour-long video of some of the music from the game.

The post 2499: One Week to Go appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Been soloing a bunch of Palace of the Dead in Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days, so I thought I'd assemble some tips for those who are looking to challenge it.

General tips

• Take your time on the early floors. You want to equal or exceed the boss' level when you reach it, so clear each floor thoroughly rather than rushing through. You can safely avoid enemies once you hit level 60.
• Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Most floors have patrolling monsters; keep an eye out for these and engage them in the corridors between rooms before pulling the monsters in the rooms themselves.
• When fighting on the normal floors, DPS as hard as you can. Summoners, use Garuda-Egi. Tanks, use your DPS stance. The quicker things die, the easier a time you'll have. In most cases you'll probably want to concentrate on one enemy at a time — pull from a distance whenever possible.
• When fighting bosses, the priority is on doing mechanics rather than DPSing as hard as possible. Summoners, get Titan-Egi to tank for you. Tanks, use your tank stance.
• Drink potions whenever you can if you're not at full health. The last thing you want is to die to a landmine or exploding chest.
• Save Pomanders of Serenity for floors where Auto-Heal is disabled. Most of the other floor effects aren't really anything to worry about, but Auto-Heal not working can really fuck you up.
• Don't use Pomanders of Safety and Pomanders of Sight on the same floor because they're redundant. Safety removes all traps on the floor, and Sight allows you to see traps and thus avoid them. There's no need to use both.
• Pomanders of Alteration are a gamble best used before you hit 60. If they spawn Mandragora-type enemies on the next floor, that's free EXP. If they spawn Mimics, however, you're in for a miserable time.
• When using one of the transformation Pomanders, remember that you're not invincible. The Manticore may be able to kill everything in a single hit (assuming Knockback isn't disabled by a floor effect) but its HP and defense are the same as yours in your regular form.
• Transformations are immune to Toad traps, and Pacification/Silence doesn't affect the transformation's ability. Landmines are still very dangerous, however, particularly as you can't drink a potion to heal yourself while transformed.
• Save Pomanders of Resolution for the floor 100 boss. You'll need all three during the fight.

Enemies to watch out for

• Hornets, found in the 1-10 block, have Final Sting, which will do a shitload of damage if you let it go off. You can actually run away from it and avoid the damage if you get far enough away, but it's best to try and kill the hornet before this happens.
• Slimes, found in the 11-20 block, cast Rapture if you take too long killing them. This will almost certainly kill you, so kill them as quickly as you can.
• Gaze attacks — marked by a very obvious glowing purple eye over the enemy model while they're casting it — can be avoided completely by simply turning your back to the enemy. It's particularly important to do this when dealing with Palace Cobras (petrification), Palace Deepeyes (powerful paralysis) and Palace Pots (Mysterious Light, which causes heavy damage and Blind).
• Morbols will show up in the 11-20 block towards the end, complete with Bad Breath attack. Run towards them for the easiest path to avoid the large cone AoE.
• Wraiths have a huge AoE attack that causes Terror. If you can stun it, do so. Otherwise, run for dear life as soon as you see the marker appear.
• Palace Skatenes will cause Sleep on you shortly after they cast Chirp. This isn't a huge issue, however, since you'll wake up immediately upon taking a hit.

Boss tips

Floor 10: Palace Deathgaze

Pretty easy, and if you've fought basic Deathgaze-type enemies in the game you'll know what to expect. It has a heavy attack called Whipcrack that will do a chunk of damage, so pop a potion after it does this. Stormwind (a large cone AoE) and Bombination (circular AoE) can both be avoided. Aerial Blast covers the whole arena and causes Windburn (damage over time for a few seconds). It will cycle through these abilities until one or the other of you are dead.

Floor 20: Spurge

The Easy Way: Level to 35 or 36, pop a Pomander of Strength and a Pomander of Lust and then just go ham on Spurge and you'll probably kill it before it summons its first set of Hornets if your gear is up to snuff.

The Proper Way: There are two main phases to this fight, and they simply cycle around and around. In the first, Spurge will twat you for a chunk of damage with Bloody Caress, then fling two circle AoE attacks at you — one around itself and one aimed at you. During this time, keep your HP topped up and wail on Spurge as much as you can. The second phase starts when Spurge moves to the side of the arena. At this point, two Hornets will spawn, and Spurge will stay in place, occasionally shooting a large linear AoE attack called Rotten Stench. Avoid Rotten Stench while knocking the Hornets down as quickly as possible — otherwise they will use Final Sting on you — before returning to the punishment on Spurge.

Floor 30: Definitely-Not-Hydra

Pretty easy. When it hits you with Ball of Fire or Ball of Ice, immediately move to avoid the effect of the circular area the attack causes — damage over time for Ball of Fire and slowed movement for Ball of Ice. Keep hitting it while this is going on, and try not to bait any Balls of Fire or Ice into the very middle of the arena. When Definitely-Not-Hydra moves to the centre of the arena and starts casting Fear Itself, stand inside its hitbox to avoid the attack completely. Then repeat the process.

Floor 40: Ixtab

Ixtab will spew void crap over the ground every so often — move out of this to avoid damage. He will then summon two Bhoots which you should kill as quickly as possible to avoid being caught in their attacks. He also has an arena-wide attack that causes Terror, often causing you to stumble into the Bhoots' area of effect if they're still up. Aside from this, not a lot else to say.

Floor 50: Edda Blackbosom

Pay close attention to what Edda is doing. If she uses Cold Feet, turn away to avoid its Terror effect. If she uses In Health, you'll either need to get well away from her or stand right on top of her — react quickly to the AoE marker, but you have plenty of time to get from one extreme to the other if the cast goes off. If you get hit by In Health, one of the letters on the floor will light up. The more of these lit up when she casts Black Honeymoon, the more damage you'll take. Aside from this, she's pretty straightforward. Watch out for In Sickness, which causes Disease and slowed movement; cleanse this off yourself if you can.

Floor 60: The Black Rider

A few things to watch out for here. Firstly, keep out of the large purple circles he drops on the ground at all cost — they cause Bleed, which deals heavy damage while you're in them. Secondly, watch out for the aether sprites he summons around the outside of the arena and don't get caught in their blasts, as these deal extreme damage. Their appearance will often coincide with his charge attack, a linear AoE marker that follows you around. While this is casting, make sure your back is to a "safe spot" away from the aether sprites to avoid being knocked into their blast radius.

Floor 70: Big Snake Thing

I can't remember Big Snake Thing's name, but it's a big snake thing. The most important thing to do in this fight is move Big Snake Thing out of the watery patches it drops on the ground when it casts Douse. While it is in these areas, it gains Haste, which makes it nigh-impossible to avoid Electrogenesis when it casts. Aside from this, Big Snake Thing should cause you no real difficulty.

Floor 80: Definitely-Not-King-Behemoth

This is a daunting fight, but fairly straightforward if you know how to handle all the mechanics. Firstly, when DNKB casts Charybdis, move well away from the AoE marker because it will drop a tornado. Said tornadoes inflict a heavy damage over time debuff if you get sucked into one, and periodically they will suck in everything around them — there'll be a very brief AoE marker to show the effective range of this when it happens, so to be safe don't be anywhere near the tornadoes. Next, when DNKB walks away from you, follow him, because he's about to use Trounce, a massive conal AoE attack that is much easier to avoid if you're right next to him. Thirdly, at around 10% HP remaining, he will begin channelling Ecliptic Meteor, and unlike the other times in the game where this happens, there's nothing to hide behind. Try and kill him before it hits, but don't worry too much if it does — it hits for about 80% of your HP, so if you're topped up before it happens, you'll be safe and free to finish him off after the attack.

Floor 90: The Godmother

This is a bit like the final boss of Pharos Sirius (Hard). Attack The Godmother until a red bomb spawns, at which point you should stun its Blast ability if you can and kill it as quickly as possible while avoiding the AoE markers from the untargetable smaller bombs that spawn around it. When it's down, return to wailing on The Godmother. When a blue-grey bomb spawns, hit it with an instant ability while facing The Godmother to knock it towards her. You want the blue-grey bomb's Hydrothermal Combustion ability to hit The Godmother and interrupt her ultimate attack. From here, simply repeat these two processes until The Godmother is down.

Floor 100: Nybeth Obdilord

Try to make sure you have three Pomanders of Resolution by the time you reach floor 100 — block 91-100 seems to throw them at you, but save them up from earlier blocks to be safe if necessary. Nybeth himself isn't too much of a threat if you take care to avoid his AoEs, particularly the large cone-shaped Doom attack. The important mechanic in this fight is the adds that he spawns at roughly 90%, 70% and 30% of his HP remaining. As soon as they appear, pop a Pomander of Resolution and use Kuribu's attack to firstly kill the enemies, and then use the ability again on their corpses to remove them permanently from the fight. Click off the transformation before you turn your attention back to Nybeth. Repeat two more times and you're home free.

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I'm going to do a more detailed write-up on this over on MoeGamer when I've read and thoroughly digested everything in this massive tome, but I thought I'd give some initial thoughts here.

Encylopaedia Eorzea is here! Yes, for a long time the Final Fantasy XIV team had been suggesting that a lore book might be on the cards, and at FanFest last week, it was finally revealed. It was put up for sale at the start of this week and seemed to develop a waiting list very quickly; fortunately, I managed to get in early and snag a copy.

£34.99 gets you a formidable hard-backed book over 300 pages in length, printed on gorgeous thick, parchmenty paper and presented in full colour. The book is heavy enough that it would probably do some damage if you smacked someone with it — and you all laughed at Arcanist, Summoner and Scholar's auto-attack!

The tome as a whole is split into eight different "books", each dealing with a different aspect of Eorzean lore.

The first, and shortest, concerns "the basics" of the planet Hydaelyn and what makes Her tick, including geography, the relationship between Hydaelyn's light and Zodiark's darkness, the Twelve gods in the Eorzean pantheon, and the basics of "aetherology" — the underlying (fictional) science of how the elements interact with one another to create life, magic and other effects.

The second, and one of the longest, concerns Hydaelyn's history, reflecting on the world's cycle of Astral and Umbral eras, with the latter's arrival being heralded by a Calamity of some description — each elementally themed in the case of the first six, and the seventh (used as the initial story catalyst for A Realm Reborn) covering all elements in the sheer magnitude of its disaster. This book is particularly interesting because it gives some background reading on the mysterious ancient civilisations of the Amdapori, the Mhachi and the Allagans, all of whom are explored to a certain degree in the game itself. It also provides a good primer of the storyline for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, which is no longer playable, but which is concluded through A Realm Reborn's cycle of raid dungeons, The Binding Coil of Bahamut, The Second Coil of Bahamut and The Final Coil of Bahamut.

The third book provides a primer on the different people of Eorzea and where they came from. It only explores the playable races of Hyur, Elezen, Lalafell, Miqo'te, Roegadyn and Au Ra — those hoping for some information about the Padjali or a hint as to whether or not we'll ever see Viera in the game will have to keep theorycrafting.

The fourth book is the longest and concerns the geography of Eorzea, including all the zones from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as well as short look at Ala Mhigo (subject of the upcoming expansion Stormblood) and the Garlean Empire (recurring villains).

The fifth book concerns Hydaelyn's "servants", and explores the various characters that you come into contact with throughout the game, right from the main "protagonists" the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to the recently introduced Warriors of Darkness. This section also includes information about groups involved in sidequests in the game, too, such as Hildibrand's Agents of Inquiry, the organisation NOAH who spearheaded the investigation into the Crystal Tower and a section entirely devoted to more minor NPCs such as those who served as the face of the Relic quests, and poor old Edda, who has had a rough ol' time of it both during life and in death.

The sixth book looks at Hydaelyn's "disciplines" — in other words, the playable classes in the game. Interestingly, the book makes no mention of the base classes on which the more familiar "Jobs" are based; the focus is entirely on the higher-level incarnations of the Jobs.

The seventh book concerns Hydaelyn's "burdens" — the various beast tribes of the realm, and the Primals associated with each of them. This section also looks a little at as-yet underexplored groups such as the gigants, as well as the eikons of the Warring Triad, which we're halfway through the story for in the game at the time of writing.

The eighth and final book is a bestiary of monsters from around the realm, divided into the various "-kin" categories. It also incluides a look at voidsent, elementals and chimeras.

There is a lot of information in this book, and it's presented in a clear, enjoyable to read manner. The thing I've found most beneficial about it is that it provides a good summary of the various storylines that have unfolded during the game since its launch; this is several years ago now, so it's not surprising that some details may have slipped many players' memories! The lore book acts as a good reference guide for those who may have forgotten some of the finer details.

Above all, though, Encyclopaedia Eorzea is clear evidence that the team behind Final Fantasy XIV have built more than just a game. They've truly built a world for people to inhabit, which has its own history leading up to today, as well as many more stories yet to tell. And if you flip through it's pages, you'll understand just why so many people still like to call Eorzea home.

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I first played Level-5's Dark Cloud midway through the PlayStation 2's lifecycle. I recall enjoying it enough to finish it, but finding it lacking in a few areas compared to some other role-playing games that were around at the time. Most of the criticisms I had of Dark Cloud were addressed by its sequel (known as Dark Chronicle here in Europe for some reason) but, regardless, I still have fond memories of the original.

Looking for something to fill the gap between now and Final Fantasy XV at the end of next month, I remembered that I'd bought several PS4 revamps of Level-5 games when they were part of a sale ages ago, but never booted them up. (Specifically, I got Dark Cloud, Dark Chronicle and Rogue Galaxy, the latter of which I've never played at all.) Since I played the demo of Dragon Quest Builders earlier in the week and heard it compared favourably to Dark Cloud and its sequel, I decided to fire up Dark Cloud and take another look, a good (probably) ten years or more after I played the original.

Interestingly, having played it for a couple of hours this evening, I'm finding myself liking it a lot more than when I played it the first time around. I'm not sure if it's a matter of my tastes changing (which, although I know they have a bit, haven't drifted that far away from what I enjoyed 10+ years ago) or if Dark Cloud has just aged very gracefully, but either way, I like it a lot.

For those who weren't around for Dark Cloud first time around for one reason or another, here's the gist. You play a teenage boy who looks a bit like a non-elfin Link in a poncho, who is a silent protagonist for the course of the adventure. In the opening moments of the game, your village is destroyed by a Dark Genie which, moments before, we saw had been unleashed on the world by an obviously evil gentleman in an M.Bison uniform and sporting a spectacular moustache. Somehow, you manage to survive through a windmill falling on top of you as you rescue your childhood friend and obvious love interest Paige from certain death.

Awakening to find your village nothing more than a bare patch of land, you start hearing voices. Specifically, the Fairy King decides you are his chosen one, and blesses you with the magical gem Atlamillia, which apparently will enable you to rebuild the world. Conveniently, the Fairy King explains, he managed to seal away all the people and buildings of the world in magical spheres called Atla to prevent them from certain annihilation at the hands of the Dark Genie, but unfortunately this wasn't enough to stop them from being scattered all over the place, with most of them rather inconveniently rolling in to local dungeons.

What then unfolds is a rather unusual adventure that alternates between action-RPG dungeon crawling in randomly generated maps, and a top-down building arrangement game called the Georama. The latter is sometimes described as a "sim", but it's not anything like as deep as something like ActRaiser or Dragon Quest Builders — all you have to do is find the component parts of each building, plop them down on the map, talk to the residents to figure out the right part of the map to put their building in (and which direction to face, in some cases) and then your job is done. In other words, there's no actual "management" required beyond making sure everything is in the right place, making it more of a puzzle than a simulation.

The Georama does give the dungeon crawling a unique twist, however — as well as finding treasures that your own character can use, you're also finding people and places, and in turn these can unlock new facilities for you to make use of when you return to the surface. Once you rebuild the Odd Gaffer's Buggy, for example, he'll start selling you items. Rebuild Paige's house and her father will teach you to fish. Even seemingly incidental houses will reward you with special events and items when you complete and place them correctly.

The Georama gameplay gives Dark Cloud an interesting sense of personality. Because you're quite literally rebuilding these people's lives from nothing, you get to know them quite well; far from being the random, anonymous NPCs you get wandering around towns in more conventional role-playing games, Dark Cloud's characters all have names and personalities. Some of them get along with one another; some of them don't (in which case you'll need to make sure their houses are far apart!).

Meanwhile, the dungeon crawling, although action-based, has plenty of aspects to get your teeth into. Your main concern, at least early in the game, is the game of "press your luck" you play with your supplies, because not only do you have to make sure your HP don't run out, you also have to keep yourself watered and ensure that your weapon doesn't break. This latter aspect is of particularly key importance, because weapons can be customised and level up through use, meaning if you break one it can potentially be absolutely heartbreaking.

The weapon growth and customisation system takes the place of a traditional experience and levels system. Instead, each weapon has its own level, with most capping at 5. Once they've capped, however, you can turn them into a gem that can be attached to another weapon in order to transfer some of the capped weapon's statistics and attributes. When the new weapon is upgraded, it absorbs the gem and becomes far more powerful than it would have been through just upgrading alone. Ultimately it becomes possible to construct some formidable weapons, making it all the more important that you don't inadvertently snap the blade on a passing rock monster.

Dark Cloud is charming and enjoyable, and there are still relatively few games quite like it; even Dragon Quest Builders itself is a distinct experience, focusing more on the town-building and crafting side of things than dungeon crawling. I think I made a good choice in revisiting it, and I'm looking forward to playing some more soon.

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Spent a bit more time with the non-story aspects of FFXIV's 3.4 patch Soul Surrender today, so here's a few thoughts with that in mind.

First up, I finished my first Wondrous Tails journal, albeit rather poorly, so I have a good handle of what that's all about now.

Wondrous Tails is a new weekly quest where you acquire a journal from the adorable young Miqo'te Khloe Aliapoh. Khloe wants to hear all about your adventures, so you agree to help her out by filling in her journal with tales of some of your exploits. You are then presented with 16 different challenges for the week, nine of which you need to clear to complete the journal.

On the opposite page to the challenges you are to face is a 4×4 grid of blank spaces for stickers. You acquire these stickers by completing the challenges — one per challenge, though you don't get to choose which sticker you get. Fill a line in the journal and there's a reward separate from the one for completing 9 challenges. Fill two lines and there's another reward. Fill three and there's another still. These rewards are significant, at higher tiers consisting of Allagan Tomestones of Scripture, the current "top end" endgame currency, and even item level 250 armour which, while not the best in the game at the moment, is certainly pretty good.

They are not, however, easy to accomplish, as I've discovered this week. It's not completely random chance as to whether or not you fill some lines — by helping new players complete duties for the first time, you earn "Second Chance" points, which can be used in one of two ways: firstly, to mark a completed challenge as incomplete while marking an incomplete one as complete. This effectively allows you to do something again while removing the need to do something you don't want to do. You can choose the complete challenge to make incomplete, but not the incomplete challenge to make complete. Alternatively, you can spend two Second Chance points to shuffle the entire board of seals (including the ones you've already placed) in the hope that you will get a more advantageous arrangement. In order to make three lines with nine seals, you need their placement to be absolutely perfect — a horizontal, a vertical and a diagonal. As such, it's a bit of a gamble that you can't necessarily rely on.

I gambled and failed, ending up with no lines at all by the time I had nine seals — you can only use the shuffle option when you have between three and seven seals, so you can't just shuffle a completed board around. Still, I at least got the reward for completing the journal for the week, which is meaningful in itself, and there's always next week to try again.

Next up, I jumped in to the randomly generated Palace of the Dead in an attempt to finish my Aetherpool weapon and get something to take the place of my outdated i210 Anima weapon until I can finish the upgrade process. New to Palace of the Dead in this patch is the addition of the Accursed Hoard, a series of hidden treasures that can only be located by using Pomanders of Intuition, which last until you unearth a piece of the Accursed Hoard. Your party banks the pieces of the Hoard until you complete the tier of the Palace that you're on, and like everything else, if you party wipes you lose them.

Assuming you successfully completed a tier, each piece of the Hoard the party acquired will reward you with a sealed sack which must be taken to a new NPC in Quarrymill to appraise. There then follows a gacha-style appraisal sequence, during which you can anticipate how good the item you're about to get is via the animation that plays (or not!) during the appraisal sequence. There are some decent items available through this system — in my first batch of three sacks, I got a paissa minion, the expensive Thavnairian Bustier top and a firework. In the seven other sacks I acquired throughout the evening, I got more fireworks. It seems fireworks are the default "normal" draw, at least from the common bronze sacks, but there seems to be an above-zero chance of getting rare items from this, too, making Palace of the Dead a worthwhile activity for reasons other than acquiring the weapon.

There's obviously a lot of RNG in both of these systems that I've described, and some people don't like that, preferring a predictable goal that you can take aim for and always see your progress towards. Final Fantasy XIV has always been heavily RNG-driven, however, and so these two systems, while having the potential for enormous frustration, are firmly in keeping with what we've come to expect from the game to date!

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Final Fantasy XIV patch day has come and gone, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts. I'm going to mostly talk about the Main Scenario quests in this post, so I'll put in a Read More link for those browsing the front page who don't want to accidentally see spoilers.

MAIN STORY SPOILERS AHEAD!

In numerous ways, I think Soul Surrender is the best content patch Final Fantasy XIV has had to date. Not only does it add numerous new gameplay systems — Wondrous Tails and Adventurer Squadrons mix up the action a bit, even if the latter is fairly bare-bones at the moment — but it has, I think, one of the best sets of Main Scenario quests the game has seen for a long time.

Soul Surrender unfolds after the events of Heavensward and its first three content patches came to an end, which is to say that the Dragonsong War is over, and the former Holy See of Ishgard has undergone a revolution and become a republic, with longtime Warrior of Light buddy Ser Aymeric in charge of keeping order. All has seemed peaceful for a while now that the Ishgardians and the dragons have successfully laid down their arms and starting the long healing process from their centuries-long conflict.

Right on cue, then, unrest stirs elsewhere in Eorzea, as rumours once again surface of the Warrior of Darkness and his companions. Their motivations aren't immediately apparent, but the end result of the chaos that they sow is that the realm's various beast tribes have been thrown into despair, leading them to once again, out of desperation, attempt to summon their Primal gods.

The Warrior of Light initially thwarts their scheme in the Ixali homeland of Xelphatol, just as the Ixal head honcho is in the process of finalising the process of re-summoning windy madam Garuda for the fifth(?) time since Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0. The battle at the end of Xelphatol is pretty spectacular and chaotic, with the boss actually using Summon Garuda as a move several times throughout the fight, forcing you to deal with some of Garuda's distinctive mechanics and area of effect attacks while simultaneously pummeling another boss altogether.

Following this, rumours abound that something similarly suspicious is going on with the kobolds near O'Ghomoro in Upper La Noscea on the isle of Vylbrand. The Warrior of Light and the Scions go to investigate only to discover a Maelstrom camp mildly inflicted with chaos by the apparent presence of a kobold intruder. The Warrior of Light eventually chases this interloper down, and it turns out to be a child kobold that recognises his elders are preparing to summon Titan once again, and that this is a very bad idea indeed, particularly as numerous adult kobolds — including his parents — have been taken away, never to be seen again. The Warrior of Light and the Scions conjecture that these missing kobolds may have been killed and their remains used for ritualistic purposes in summoning Titan, but resolve to investigate rather than jumping to any conclusions.

The Warrior of Light arrives, with the young kobold in tow, at The Navel, deep within O'Ghomoro. The ritual for summoning Titan is reaching its final stages, but has not yet been completed, but things are thrown into chaos when the young kobold spies the bodies of his parents lying motionless next to the head of his tribe and his henchmen, apparently having been used as the latest sacrifices to appease the Lord of Crags. The young kobold, completely grief-stricken and filled with absolute despair at the loss of his only family, screams out in pain, and the sound of his anguish awakens Titan once more.

In gameplay terms, this then provided an opportunity for the game to reuse the Titan Hard Mode level 50 fight, but a severe emotional gutpunch is delivered during the battle when you see that Titan's lines — usually of the "Bow down, overdweller!" variety — have all been changed to the young kobold's various screams of anguish, with Titan's ultimate ability coinciding with the kobold screeching "WAKE UP!!!", at a complete loss as to how he can possibly handle the devastation his life has just suffered.

The young kobold is left in the care of the Maelstrom soldiers, who promise to take care of him rather than put him to the sword, as is usually the approach taken to those "lost" to the Primals' influence. At the last moment, the young kobold regains his voice, still full of pain and grief, but starting to show that his tribe's god doesn't quite have a hold of him just yet.

In the meantime, the Warrior of Light and the Scions are called away to Little Ala Mhigo in South Thanalan, where they hear rumours of further unrest — specifically, a suspiciously large shipment of crystals which makes the group think that another Primal summoning is imminent. Indeed, when they encounter a mysterious figure known as "The Griffin", who appears to have become a prominent individual among the Ala Mhigan refugees, and who promises that his countrymen have a "great power" hidden within them, it seems all but certain that something is amiss.

However, the Warrior of Light and the Scions uncover the truth in short order: the shipment of crystals was not for the Ala Mhigans to attempt to summon a Primal in an ill-advised attempt to retake their homeland from the Garlean Empire. Instead, it was used as a trade with the local Amal'jaa, who apparently wanted to use it to summon their Primal Ifrit once again.

Upon arriving at the Bowl of Embers, hoping to stop the summoning ritual, The Warrior of Light and her companions discover that the Amal'jaa have, in fact, been decimated ahead of their arrival, and waiting for them in the Bowl of Embers is not the fiery Primal Ifrit, but the Warrior of Darkness and his party of companions.

A grand battle ensues, with both sides competing to channel their aether into one of their number who can best handle it, and eventually strike the other down. The Warrior of Darkness and his companions fight for their very lives, for they believe they are fighting to save their world — a parallel world to Hydaelyn, and one which runs the risk of being consumed not by Darkness, but by a surfeit of Light. They seek to redress the balance between the worlds, all of which are shards of what was once a greater reality, and they even gave up their corporeal lives and very souls in order to be able to travel between the worlds by means of crystals, much as the Ascians do.

Utterly defeated by the Warrior of Light, however, both sides of the conflict are drawn into the mysterious space between worlds where Hydaelyn has previously addressed the Warrior of Light alone through the Echo. Minfilia, revealed a while back to have transcended her mortal existence and become the Voice of the Mother, speaking for Hydaelyn herself, agrees to journey back to the Warrior of Darkness' ruined world and take into herself the excess of light in an attempt to stave off the cataclysm that threatens to turn it into the antithesis of the Void, itself another of these parallel worlds that was previously consumed by Darkness.

We're left with a number of questions. Chief among them is the matter of what The Griffin is really up to. It transpires that The Griffin the Warrior of Light and her companions met was merely a figurehead; the real Griffin is much more hesitant to show his face, but clearly has plans to retake Ala Mhigo, perhaps with the assistance of the Ascians, who never do anything for free.

And then in the final scene we see Nero tol Scaeva, last seen after our adventures in the Crystal Tower and the World of Darkness, stumbling across some ominous-looking Allagan ruins. He claims to have finally found something. But what? The smart money is on Omega Weapon, which could well spell disaster for all of Eorzea and beyond if true. We'll have to wait and see what happens next in the final content patch for Heavensward in three months' time, at which point we should have some information about what we can expect from the new expansion.

Exciting times for the Realm, indeed. And this is just the main story! I'm pretty certain that for me, this has been one of the best "episodes" of the game to date, and I can't wait to see how it continues.

I haven't even touched the grand finale of Alexander, yet, and I still have plenty of other adventures to catch up on, too. There'll be plenty of time for those tomorrow, though… for now, probably time for bed for this particular Warrior of Light!

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I finished up Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force this evening, including getting the Platinum trophy, and I've come away thoroughly satisfied with what is possibly Compile Heart's best game to date, although it's a close-run thing between this and MegaDimension Neptunia V-II.

I was particularly impressed by how much the two new narrative paths diverged from the original Fairy Fencer F's storyline — while they involve many of the same dungeons, locales and characters, the important stuff about the story is very different indeed, right from the characters' personalities in some cases all the way to their motivations and eventual goals.

I found the fact that the game wasn't afraid to be a bit dark to be very much in its favour. Its colourful Tsunako character designs would suggest an adventure similar in tone to the Neptunia series, but in actual fact Fairy Fencer F is lighter on the comedy, heavier on the drama and even tragedy at times. That's not to say there isn't any comedy at all — what comedy there is tends to be well-timed in order to lighten the mood after some particularly heavy exposition — but it's not the main point of it all.

This seems to be a direction that Compile Heart is moving in with its recent releases, and one that it seems to feel comfortable with. The Neptunia series has been expressing greater confidence with storytelling as it has proceeded, too — while the first game felt a bit like a string of amusing events loosely tied together with the semblance of an overarching plot, mk2/Re;Birth2 took a much darker tone with some truly odious villains (and one of the series' most notoriously unpleasant optional endings) and Victory/Re;Birth3 had a much stronger sense that it had been composed as a complete story rather than a series of episodes. As for MegaDimension Neptunia V-II, that had its darker elements — particularly towards the end — and consequently, narratively speaking, was the most "structurally sound" of the series.

I didn't play the original Fairy Fencer F when it came out, but I've now experienced that game's story thanks to Advent Dark Force's Goddess arc. It's clear that Compile Heart wants to experiment with more ambitious narratives, but thought, quite rightly so, that Neptunia probably wasn't the best place to do it (although that said, mk2's Conquest ending is effective precisely because it is so tonally dissonant with what you've been conditioned to expect from the rest of the series). Fairy Fencer F jumps in headfirst with a likeable cast of rogues, many of whom are a bit morally ambiguous, and which Advent Dark Force does a good job in exploring over the course of its three distinct narrative paths.

Perhaps most striking about Advent Dark Force is that it isn't afraid to let main characters die — something that would be unthinkable in a Neptunia game, regardless of how dark the overall plot got — and it demonstrates this early on. In most of the narrative paths, which take place after a "time loop" at the end of the common route, then diverge in three very different directions, protagonist Fang seeks to atone for the deaths he directly or indirectly caused in the common route, with varying degrees of success. Each path features a different combination of characters from the complete playable cast, with some of these characters dying or even being on the "other side" in different routes.

Of particular note is the character Sherman, who — mild spoiler, sorry — is the villain in the original Fairy Fencer F story, but in the Vile God arc he spends a significant amount of time being the protagonist in Fang's absence. In the Evil Goddess arc, meanwhile, he has a more complex role that I'll leave for you to discover.

One of the other great things about the additional routes in Advent Dark Force is that it gives some of the "filler" characters from the original something to do. Fairy-loving scientist Harley, for example, doesn't have a whole lot to do in the original game's narrative, but in the Evil Goddess arc in particular she plays a leading role. Likewise, in both the Vile God and Evil Goddess arcs we see a lot more of the taciturn child assassin Ethel, including how she became the person she was and how it came to be that she could only communicate through the word "kill" with varying intonation.

After having finished all three routes, I'm left with the feeling that I have when I finish a good visual novel: I have a good, solid understanding of all the characters, the situations in which they found themselves and the world which they inhabited. And, if the post-credits sequence in the Evil Goddess arc — clearly intended to be the "true" path — is anything to go by, then I have little doubt that we're going to see more of these characters in the future. I certainly wouldn't complain about more Fairy Fencer F games if it gives Compile Heart a chance to spread their wings and explore more ambitious narrative themes — particularly if the game itself is as good as Advent Dark Force ended up being.

I'll say one more time for now: if you're still ignoring (or worse, deriding) Compile Heart games and call yourself a fan of JRPGs, you're missing out on some great experiences. Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is a good entry point to start exploring their work for yourself if you feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of Neptunia out there already; if you enjoy good, traditional JRPG stories, solid combat, wonderfully loathsome villains (one of them even does the ol' "ohohohohohoho!" beloved of '90s anime) and a colourful, immensely memorable cast of characters you can't go wrong with this one.

The post 2437: Ultimate Fencer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

With it being Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary it's only fitting that I take a look back at the reason I've been playing it since its closed beta — and why, even though on several occasions I've felt like I might be "done" with the game, I keep on coming back, time after time.

These memories are presented in no particular order, but it makes the most sense to start with this one.

Knowing FFXIV was going to be something special

I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV's closed beta after a casual discussion with a Twitter friend about Final Fantasy XI and how much I liked it despite never really getting all that far with it. Eventually I found myself with an invite to the testing period of the game, and I was immediately smitten with it. Everything about it felt Final Fantasy. The look, the feel, the music, the controls, the battles, the monsters — and yet, it had enough of its own unique identity to make it feel like far more than just series fanservice.

Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV adopts a somewhat "dark fantasy" tone throughout, clearly heavily inspired by works such as Game of Thrones and The Witcher in places. Sure, there are still moogles and chocobos, but there are also complicated political machinations, betrayal, murder and, technically, just prior to the start of 2.0's story, apocalyptic catastrophes.

I was immediately drawn into the world in a way that World of Warcraft never quite managed to enrapture me. NPC dialogue, although localised with more than a few liberties taken from the original Japanese, much to the chagrin of people who play with Japanese voiceovers, was beautifully written with an almost Shakespearean tone in places, blending old- and middle-English words and phrases with modern spellings to make it actually comprehensible.

The fact that Final Fantasy XIV placed any emphasis on its main story at all — let alone to the degree that it has ended up doing so — was a unique feeling for me. Even its predecessor Final Fantasy XI's main story had felt like a side activity you did when you had done enough level grinding to be able to take on the next mission; here, the main story was tightly tied in with your character's progression: you advanced through the levels and became more powerful both in terms of mechanics and narrative, until you eventually reached level 50 and took on your most terrifying challenges yet.

During the closed beta, I only played up to about level 20 or so, but that was enough to know that I wanted to keep playing — and to know that I wouldn't mind when the servers were wiped post-beta to prepare for the start of live service.

Making some great friends

My friend who had urged me to try out FFXIV was all set to assemble a Free Company — FFXIV's take on guilds — as soon as the facility became available, and many members of that free company, centred around the Giant Bomb video games website, became great friends. I even took a trip to PAX East to hang out with a bunch of them and had an absolute blast. And while I recently left said Free Company in favour of a smaller group who are more local to where my wife and I are, FFXIV's various ways of keeping in touch — as well as extra-game means of communication like Discord — mean that I'll never be far away from this band of loveable rogues.

Castrum and Prae keeping me up until 5am

When I reached level 50, I was proud. The only other MMO I'd ever reached the level cap in prior to that day was World of Warcraft, and I'd stopped playing shortly afterwards, as my lack of friends playing had made that game a rather lonely experience at high level — this was the days before its current Dungeon Finder system, itself inspired by FFXIV's Duty Finder.

I'd heard the final two story dungeons, intended to be done pretty much as soon as you hit 50, were quite an experience, and so I asked the Free Company very nicely to accompany me on my first run through them. This was — and still is — the best way to run these dungeons, since they're both full of cutscenes, and running with a completely preformed party means no risk of other people running ahead and starting boss fights while you're still watching dramatic scenes.

The experience of running Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium left such an impact on me that I immediately wrote about it on USgamer. It remains one of my fondest gaming memories to date, and it makes me a bit sad that people coming to it now will more than likely be partied up with a group of people who outgear it to such a degree that every boss fight is a complete steamrollering. Pro-tip, then — if you're just hitting 50 for the first time and you have 7 friends handy, queue up for Castrium then Prae and check the "minimum item level" option in Duty Finder in order to experience these two dungeons at their original difficulty level from shortly after launch.

Entering the Coil

I happened to be up and about one night when some Free Company-mates were heading into the endgame raid dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point, the raid had been "unlocked" because better gear than it offered was already available, and so it was there for people to run just for the experience of the unique story it offered, as well as unlocking subsequent chapters.

Coil was a whole other level of the game for me. The encounters were much more complex, they demanded much more coordination and awareness of what was going on, and the unique story, music and enemies you fought in there made it feel like a truly "special" experience.

Forming LoCoBomb and tackling Coil proper

Loose Cannons, or LoCo, were Giant Bomb's neighbours in the Limsa Lominsa housing district of Mist, and they're now my new Free Company. LoCo is a tiny little group compared to the hundreds of members of Giant Bomb (many of whom are inactive players, but still) but we struck up a mutual friendship with one another, even going so far as to put together a rather casual, slapdash static for tackling The Binding Coil of Bahamut, a little later than much of the rest of the player base, but tackling it nonetheless.

Raiding together was a great way for us to get to know one another better, and we had a lot of fun times working out way through the first four Turns until we hit our first real barrier: Turn 5.

Toppling Twintania

Turn 5 of Coil was originally the hardest fight in the entire game, facing a party of 8 players off against the rather angry dragon Twintania. Accompanied by the fantastic piece of music Thunderer, this was a genuinely terrifying confrontation in which you really felt like you were battling against insurmountable odds.

Twintania was our first real encounter with having to properly coordinate raid tactics thanks to now-notorious mechanics such as Divebombs and Twisters. Taking her down for the first time was an incredible feeling, only to be matched by the time we finally bested the final boss of the Second Coil of Bahamut.

Nailing Nael

Turn 9 of Coil — or Turn 4 of Second Coil, if you prefer — quickly took over from Turn 5 as being the hardest fight in the game, mostly due to how unforgiving it was. The fight featured a wide variety of tasty instant death mechanics and even a few sections where careless play could wipe the rest of the raid without too much difficulty.

After a long slog through Second Coil — Turn 6 gave us a lot of grief, though the subsequent two went a little smoother — LoCoBomb persevered and were eventually victorious, however, and we still weren't sick of the two incredible boss themes Tempest and Rise of the White Raven.

This encounter remains, to date, my favourite boss fight of all time in any game ever. Ten character levels, over a hundred item levels and one expansion later and it's still not particularly easy to clear.

Phoenix from the Flames

A lot of people will note that Turn 12 — Turn 3 of Final Coil — is as memorable an encounter as the grand finale Turn 13, and I'd certainly agree with that. Resolving a large number of questions surrounding what really happened at the end of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, Turn 12 sees the party facing off against the iconic Phoenix, accompanied by this magnificent arrangement of the game's main theme Answers. I still get shivers every time I hear it. And the recent The Rising event in the game now brought it out at the perfect moment to genuinely give me goosebumps all over my body.

The Final Witness

The final battle in Final Coil is appropriately spectacular. It wasn't horrendously difficult by the time we got to it — each subsequent patch had increased the amount of bonus HP and damage you'd be blessed with when you went in, theoretically allowing more and more people of lesser skill and/or gear to enjoy all of Coil's story — but it was still an immensely worthy absolutely, positively, definitely final boss. And it made incredible use of Answers.

An in-game marriage and a real-life proposal

(if the embed doesn't work, go here to embarrass me)

January 3, 2015: Amarysse Jerhynsson married W'khebica Qimi (now Wuckle Bunny, because no-one can spell authentic Mi'qote names properly). During this process, the player behind Amarysse Jerhynsson — yours truly — made a rather lengthy virtual speech that culminated in him proposing to the player behind W'khebica Qimi, who was sitting in her study upstairs from him at the time.

We married in June 2015. And who says computer games are antisocial?

Heavensward and beyond

The first full expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was an exciting moment, as it would take us to brand new areas, see us tackling brand new dungeons and battling fierce new foes. It was everything most people hoped for, with an excellent story — to some, better even than A Realm Reborn's at times meandering narrative — and one hell of a final boss fight.

While the long lull between Heavensward's release and the first major content patch finally arrived with us was, I feel, largely responsible for the fact that my former Free Company are no longer quite as obviously "active" (at least in public channels) as they used to be, Heavensward has, on the whole, been a great evolution of A Realm Reborn's base, even introducing a number of brand new types of content to the mix, with my favourite being the new randomly generated Deep Dungeon.

Heavensward's raid scene hasn't appealed that much — I'm not really a fan of steampunk in general, and the narrative set up around Alexander was feeble and unmemorable compared to the majesty of Coil — but there's still been plenty of stuff to do, and as we saw with the Live Letter yesterday, there will continue to be more and more stuff to do as we start the buildup to the second full expansion, set to be revealed for the first time in October.

It's not many games you can play almost continually for three years and still look upon fondly, but I guess anything you spend that much time in the company of eventually becomes something you really, truly can't ever let go of.

It's hard to get this across to people who haven't been on the journey I've been on, and it probably won't be quite the same for someone who starts right now, but I stand by my nomination of Final Fantasy XIV as my Game of the Year for 2013 over on USgamer, and given the number of hours I've played, it's probably my GotY for 2014, 2015 and 2016 too.

The post 2412: Looking Back on Three Years, Off and (Mostly) On, in Eorzea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Upon realising that the Spike Chunsoft enhanced remake of One Way Heroics was, in fact, coming out in just three weeks' time, I decided to revisit the original game, which has long been one of my favourite takes on the roguelike genre thanks to it being quite unlike pretty much any other game I've ever played.

For the unfamiliar, One Way Heroics places you in a randomly generated world map that continuously scrolls, like those old Super Mario World levels that everyone hated. This being a turn-based roguelike, however, One Way Heroics only scrolls when you take an action, be this moving, attacking or fiddling around with something in your inventory.

The aim of the game is ostensibly to defeat the Demon Lord and save the remaining part of the world from being consumed by the mysterious darkness that is just out of shot on the left side of the screen. More often than not, you will fail in your task, either by yourself being caught in said mysterious darkness by miscalculating how many turns it would take you to cross the mountain range you found yourself stuck in the middle of, by dying embarrassingly to a nearby feral dog who gave you a nasty nip right in your most sensitive areas, or by forgetting you had a bag full of highly flammable (and explosive) items and then going toe-to-toe with a fire-breathing imp.

It's not an insurmountable challenge, though. In fact, defeating the Demon Lord is more a matter of persistence than anything else; she (yes, spoiler, she's a she) appears at regular intervals throughout your journey, sticks around for a few in-game hours during which you can either attempt to do some damage or run away from her, then she disappears again for a bit. Damage you deal persists from encounter to encounter, though she does have the chance to heal a few HP and erect a few magical barriers in between your various clashes. As such, so long as you can keep yourself alive, you can eventually wear her down bit by bit rather than having to defeat her all in one go.

Except, if you look a bit deeper into the game, defeating the Demon Lord isn't the only way to finish the game. In fact, it's arguably the easiest way to clear the game, since the other endings mostly require all manner of convoluted requirements and lucky rolls on the ol' random number generator. That said, the game's "Dimensional Vault" system does at least allow you to carry useful items over from playthrough to playthrough, so you can effectively prepare for the more complex conclusions a bit at a time, much like preparing to fight the Demon Lord, only over the course of several playthroughs instead of just one.

The other ways to beat the game vary from defeating the Darkness itself (which requires a Holy weapon, a very rare find indeed) to reaching the End of the World at the 2000km mark. The subsequently released One Way Heroics Plus expansion also added a number of other ways to clear the game, including finding your way into a whole other dimension to discover who or what is really behind this whole creeping darkness thing, and then either surviving until the end of that dimension or defeating said ne'er do well once and for all.

On top of all that, there are character-specific endings, too. During each playthrough, you have a chance of encountering a number of different non-player characters who, assuming you meet the prerequisite requirements to recruit them (usually some combination of cash and charisma levels) can join your party. As they fight alongside you and you meet various conditions (different for each character), they gain affection for you, and after having had three separate conversations with them, revealing their backstory and the truth about themselves — including, in many cases, why there appears to be a version of them in each and every dimension out there, more than aware of what you're up to — clearing the game gives you their unique ending on top of whichever particular finale you went for.

These little stories that are attached to the party members are one of the most interesting things about One Way Heroics, because they elevate it above being a simple mechanics-based roguelike and give it a touch of narrative. Not enough to be obtrusive — the emphasis is still very much on preparing your character to clear the game in whichever way you deem most appropriate — but enough to give you a real feel for who these people are and what their place in the entire mystery of One Way Heroics is.

One particularly interesting thing about them is that you can go a very long time without encountering any of them at all, and thus assume that One Way Heroics is entirely mechanics-based. Another is that their storylines are all pretty dark in tone right up until the end, which is all the more effective due to the fairly breezy tone the rest of the game has going on. I defy anyone not to shed a tear at Queen Frieda's ending in particular, though I shan't spoil it here.

Replaying One Way Heroics over the last few days has reminded me quite how much I like this quirky little game, and I'm extremely excited to see how the new version pans out in comparison. From the looks of things, it takes the basic mechanics of the original and gives it a fresh coat of paint along with a new setting and storyline, plus a number of guest characters from other games including Danganronpa and Shiren the Wanderer.

All being well, I'm probably going to devote next month on MoeGamer to this game, its expansion and its new version, which will be out partway through the month. It's an underappreciated gem, for sure, and one which everyone the slightest bit interested in the more unusual side of RPGs owes it to themselves to check out.

The post 2405: Revisiting One Way Heroics appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XV was originally due to come out at the end of next month. Today, director Tabata officially confirmed the rumours that have been swirling around the Internet for the last couple of days: the game has been delayed until November 29.

Tabata announced the delay in a video on the game's official YouTube channel.

His reasoning behind the delay was that, although the team had finally completed the "master version" of the game, meaning a version that was feature-complete and that they would be happy releasing to consumers on disc, they had already started work on some additional content and adjustments that would normally be distributed as a "day one patch" to be applied automatically when a Final Fantasy XV player had their console connected to the Internet.

The trouble with day one patches, though, is that they're not part of that master game experience. They're not on the disc; they're reliant on an Internet connection. And while the "not everyone has an Internet connection" argument is rapidly losing steam as broadband becomes more and more affordable and ubiquitous, there's still a fundamental problem with them from an archiving perspective. In other words, if someone interested in the history of gaming were to become interested in checking out Final Fantasy XV some twenty or thirty years down the line, it's doubtful the PS4's PSN servers would still be up and running to allow them to download the patch, and as such they'd be left with an inferior — although, in this case, still complete — version to explore.

In some cases, day one patches contain essential bug fixes that actually get the game working, meaning the game is unplayable straight from the disc. And in others, they fundamentally shake up the structure of the game — the day one patch for No Man's Sky is a good example of this latter instance. There are very few cases where they are desirable, although sometimes developers are left with no choice — if a game is rushed out of the door to meet a deadline, for example, or if in last-minute testing after the game has been duplicated several million times, a major problem is found.

With Final Fantasy XV being such a big project, though, it seems that Tabata and his team have been given the flexibility to hold the game's release back until it meets with their high standards, however, and Tabata himself notes that he is uncomfortable with releasing a disc-based version of a game that isn't the very best version it can possibly be. He's not ruling out future patches and DLC — and the existence of a "Season Pass" for the game confirms that there are going to be a number of substantial add-ons for Final Fantasy XV — but he wants that initial day one experience to be as smooth as possible for all players around the world, regardless of whether or not they have an Internet connection or are able to download the day one patch.

This, ladies and gents, is how you make a video game. It's what we used to expect from previous, non Internet-connected consoles, and it's something that we have lost sight of in the modern age, where attention-deficient mobile game-playing audiences bray and whine if games don't receive "updates" every two weeks, even where none are necessary. While it's disappointing that this no longer means I'll be playing Final Fantasy XV next month, I respect Tabata and his team enormously for wanting to make their game the very best it can be before it gets into the players' grubby little hands.

I guess that means I have time to play through Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force before Final Fantasy XV after all, then…

The post 2400: Final Fantasy XV Delayed for All the Right Reasons appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2386: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: Doing F2p Mobile Games Right appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Doubtless I'll be writing about this in more detail at some point in the near future over on MoeGamer, but while it's still new and fresh I thought I'd give some initial impressions on Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force, Compile Heart's latest PS4 release.

FFF:ADF, as I will refer to it hereafter, is a Neptunia Re;Birth-style reimagining of the PlayStation 3 game Fairy Fencer F. It includes the whole story of the original game, updated and expanded with all-new mechanics, plus a whole bunch of brand new content as well, making for what looks to be an absolutely sprawling mammoth of a JRPG that I'm very much looking forward to sinking my teeth into.

For the uninitiated, FFF:ADF casts you in the role of Fang, a lazy asshole who we're introduced to as he's been locked in prison for stealing bread. Three days earlier, it transpires, Fang pulled a legendary sword known as a Fury out of the ground, and thus found his fate inextricably intertwined with the adorably cute but rather headstrong fairy Eryn. Fang, wanting nothing more than a good meal and a warm bed, finds himself rather hastily recruited into a quest to find all 100 other Furies scattered around the world and use the power of the Fairies within to wake up the Goddess and prevent some sort of horrible catastrophe from occurring.

FFF:ADF follows Compile Heart's usual RPG formula fairly closely. Town scenes are menu-based and allow you to visit a number of different locations to purchase and sell items or just chat with NPCs. As you progress through the game, more facilities become available in town.

When you leave town, you'll likely be entering one of the game's dungeons, which are filled with enemies you can see wandering around the map, and perhaps an event and/or a boss fight to complete.

Striking an enemy with your weapon while you're in the field — a challenge made significantly easier than in the Neptunia series by the simple addition of a visual and auditory cue when you're in range to connect a hit — allows you to get the jump on an enemy; mistiming it or letting an enemy run into your back, conversely, lets them ambush you.

Combat initially appears similar to the Neptunia series but there's a few twists on the basic formula. For starters, characters only begin with a basic attack rather than a multi-hit combo. Multi-hit combos can be unlocked later — and they include fighting game-style techniques such as launching and juggling enemies — but initially the bulk of your damage will probably come from your special skills, which are further subdivided into weapon skills and magic spells.

The thing that's looking most interesting about FFF:ADF at this early stage is its progression system. Whereas Neptunia's character progression was completely linear — though once you unlocked abilities you could customise your characters to a minor degree, and Megadimension Neptunia made more of this by making different weapons capable of different combos — in FFF:ADF you earn WP ("Weapon Points") through combat, which can then be spent on unlocking abilities, buffing stats and activating passive skills. In practice, there's probably a "right" order to unlock things in — and if previous Compile Heart RPGs are anything to go by, you'll probably unlock everything by the time you're through — but it's nice to at least feel like you have some options.

Other cool features include a battle system that allows up to six party members at a time, which will hopefully make for some interesting encounters later in the game — I only have two characters at present! Neptunia's Challenge system is back, too, providing you with useful stat boosts in exchange for completing various tasks.

It's early days yet, but FFF:ADF looks like Compile Heart's most polished title to date; there's none of the weird screen tearing from Omega Quintet and, so far, none of the frame drops of Megadimension Neptunia, and the 2D art (courtesy of Neptunia artist Tsunako) is as gorgeous as ever.

I'm looking forward to seeing what this game has to offer; everything I've heard from people who have already played it makes me feel like it's going to be a really solid JRPG, and I'm excited to see what other gameplay features I'll be fiddling around with as I progress further.

The post 2383: Fencing with Fairies appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Just in time to cover it extensively this month over on MoeGamer, I'm finally up to date on the Ys series, as I finished Memories of Celceta tonight.

I'm glad I finally took the time to play through it all, as it really is a remarkable series that has evolved considerably since its humble beginnings. I'll save the history lesson for MoeGamer, though, and talk a bit about Memories of Celceta specifically.

Memories of Celceta builds on what Ys Seven started, and does it very well. While Ys Seven felt a little bit clunky at times — at least partly due to the fact that it was running on the crusty old PSP hardware — Celceta feels much more fluid and refined. It's not perfect — the poor old Vita struggles to keep the framerate up when there's lots happening on screen, but it never really becomes a problem. No, I'm talking more about the gameplay; combat is fluid and satisfying, and the skills each character has all feel a lot more distinct than the rather feeble ones you had for the majority of Seven. Different characters have clear purposes, both in and out of combat, and each one is enjoyable to fight as.

The thing I liked the most about it, I think, was the emphasis on exploration. The central concept of the game is that protagonist Adol is exploring the uncharted forest of Celceta, a job well suited to an adventurer such as he. Indeed, your progress in the game roughly corresponds to your progress uncovering the surprisingly sprawling map, and by the end of the game you'll be at, or at least close to, 100% of the forest being mapped out.

And it's an interesting forest, too, with plenty of distinct areas rather than remaining uniformly green and leafy throughout. There are plains-like clearings, towering mountains, crystalline lakes and damp, soggy marshland. Later in the game there's the Ashen Forest, which is a beautiful, almost otherworldly area bathed in a curious sparkling, purple mist.

I found myself missing the "jump" button from Oath in Felghana and its ilk less in Celceta than I did in Ys Seven. This is because the maps were overall better designed and more interesting to explore. Ys Seven's dungeons in particular weren't bad as such, but it's clear that technological limitations, at times, held Falcom's designers back a bit from making some really interesting levels.

I particularly liked the various "artifacts" you acquire throughout Celceta, many of which provide you with new traversal abilities in true Metroidvania tradition. The Hydra Scales, for example, allow you to swim underwater and reach otherwise inaccessible chests and areas, while the Gale Boots allow you to run incredibly fast, even straight up certain walls. The controls for some of these non-standard means of traversal are occasionally a bit wobbly — steering the Gale Boots is near-impossible, so you better line up before you unleash them, for example, and combat underwater is a terrible experience proving that Falcom, unfortunately, didn't learn anything from Ys Origin's excellent underwater section — but they never get in the way of gameplay, because they're usually required only to bypass a particular obstacle, at which point you can just get back to doing what Adol does best — hacking and slashing through hordes of enemies.

I won't spoil anything, but the finale was fantastic, too. The Ys games have all had excellent finales so far, and Celceta certainly didn't disappoint with a particularly strong final confrontation and the unusual move of having a few things extra to do after the "final" boss. It was dramatic, exciting — and, perhaps most importantly, extremely relevant to the overall Ys lore, which, again, is something that Falcom excels at. By now, the lore of the world of Ys is extremely well-realised, with each new game bringing us new information about a region or country; effectively, we learn about these lands alongside Adol as he continues his quest to see every part of the world "without shortcuts".

I'm a total convert to Ys, then, and you better believe I'll be all over Ys VIII when it inevitably comes West. In the meantime, have a rest, Adol Christin, you've definitely earned it.

The post 2361: Up to Date on Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

(yes, I found a way to put a beard on my model in ComiPo! Woo!)

I've been playing a bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt lately. I've been meaning to give it a go for ages, but it's never quite dropped in price enough for me to want to jump on board; thankfully, the combination of the Steam Summer Sale and Andie generously buying me a copy as an anniversary present means that I can now explore this game to my heart's content.

Playing Witcher 3 alongside Ys: Memories of Celceta is an interesting experience, because it's a study in contrasts between Western and Eastern game design philosophy. Both of them have a surprising number of elements in common: they're both action RPGs, they both involve exploring a large overworld, fighting monsters and completing quests, they both feature a muscle-bound man with white hair tied back in a ponytail (though he's not the protagonist in Celceta, instead acting as a Dogi-substitute and cipher for the ever-mute Adol) and they're both very good. But they're both very different.

Celceta is fast-paced and action-packed. Its combat is very arcadey, with lots of flashy special effects, overblown sound effects, rockin' music and celebratory messages flashing up on the screen as you do things like use the right attack type to take advantage of enemy weaknesses. In contrast, Witcher 3 feels almost sedate in its pacing, even in combat, which, thanks to its excellent animations and fluid movement, has an almost dance-like feeling about it as opposed to the frenetic leaping around of Celceta.

The upshot of this is that Witcher 3 is a surprisingly relaxing game to play. This might sound strange, given that the setting for the Witcher series is one of the darkest, bleakest takes on Western fantasy out there, but I've absolutely found it to be the case. While in Celceta you can't relax for a moment when you're out in the overworld because everything is trying to kill you, in Witcher 3 there's plenty of opportunity to explore, wander off the path into the bushes and just start walking in a direction to see what's there. Worthwhile things are marked on the map so you're not wandering completely aimlessly — unless you want to — but for the most part the game's rather sedate pacing has the pleasant feeling of a walk in the countryside or the woods rather than constantly fighting for your life, even though the countrysides and woods of Witcher 3's world are far more dangerous than what your average rambler might have to contend with.

Both games have their place, then, and I'm enjoying them both a great deal. I feel like on the whole, I tend to enjoy the more frenetic, chaotic, joyful pace and tone of the Japanese approach to RPGs more — they cheer me up with their sheer energy — but there's most definitely something very appealing and oddly relaxing about the more sedate pacing and carefully crafted periods of solitude in games like The Witcher 3.

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I beat Ys Seven tonight. That leaves just one more Ys game to play through before I've beaten every one of the currently available games in the series, making me eminently ready for Ys VIII, whenever that makes its way West, because it almost certainly (hopefully) will.

Ys Seven is an interesting change after the three games built on the Ys VI engine — Ys VI, Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin. I kind of miss some of the defining aspects of those three games — most notably the platforming elements, which are completely absent from Seven — but Seven very much does its own thing and takes ownership of it, creating an experience that is satisfying in its own right, even if it's a slightly jarring change of pace initially.

The first thing to note about Ys Seven is that it's at least twice the length of previous Ys games. This still puts it at well under the average length of a typical JRPG these days — it took me 24 hours to beat on Normal — but makes it feel significantly longer than the previous titles. This isn't a bad thing, though; along with the greater length comes greater scope: Ys Seven's narrative feels more ambitious and, for want of a better word, epic than its predecessors; while past Ys games felt very much like you were taking care of business in a small, localised area, Ys Seven does a good job of making you feel like the fate of a whole country is at stake. There's a sprawling overworld to explore, and several villages, each with their own unique aesthetic.

This rather more sprawling scale comes at a slight cost: while past Ys games' small geographical area meant that pretty much every character in the game had a name and a story to tell, Ys Seven's NPCs, for the most part, feel quite a bit more generic. This is partly due to the fact that none of them have names, instead being called things like "Obliging Maid" and suchlike — with the curious exception of questgivers, who all have very Western names like "Kevin Lassiter" — but I suppose it does help keep the focus on the main cast, which, in keeping with the rest of the experience, is significantly bigger than previous Ys games.

Even your party is bigger. Adol is no longer alone, bringing up to two companions in tow this time, and there's a reason for this: enemies now have various resistances, meaning you need a balanced party that can cover all types of damage, otherwise you simply won't be able to kill some enemies. For most of the game, there's little reason to switch out from the default party of Adol, longtime companion (but first time playable) Dogi and whoever fills the third slot at that point in the party, but upon reaching the final boss the reason for the total squad size being seven members becomes clear. Be sure to keep everyone's equipment up to date — thankfully, inactive characters gain experience at the same rate as the front line, so there's no need to go out of your way to grind too much.

One aspect of the game that feels very different comes when you're fighting a boss. Whereas in past Ys games boss fights were almost puzzles and dexterity challenges, where you'd have to dodge incoming attacks and take advantage of openings, Ys Seven's bosses are often damage sponges that, at least on Normal difficulty, feel like they can be beaten more through brute force than anything. On the harder difficulty levels I can see them being stiffer challenges, because you're more limited in the healing items you can carry, but certainly on Normal, I could get through most bosses without too much difficulty by just making sure I had enough potions on hand. It wasn't until the final boss, which has significantly more complex mechanics than any of the other fights in the game, that I found myself having to be a bit more careful with what I was doing.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing; Ys Seven's boss fights are enjoyably hard work and feel like you're struggling against a powerful opponent. Like a lot of other things in the game, though, coming straight off Oath in Felghana, Origin and Ark of Napishtim, it's a bit of an adjustment for sure.

Above all, though, Ys Seven keeps the heart of Ys firmly intact. It's wonderfully sincere about everything, but isn't afraid to show a sense of humour now and again. That said, it's overall considerably darker than any of the previous installments, particularly around the middle of the story, giving it a distinctive feel. It's not overly grimdark or anything — it's still a bright, colourful, earnest quest featuring a silent protagonist who quite literally lives for adventure — but it was a little surprising to see things like a shirtless Adol getting tortured in a jail cell after a particularly dramatic revelation partway through.

I enjoyed it a lot, in other words. Now I just have Memories of Celceta to go and I'm up to date. And then I will have to physically restrain myself from going back to the beginning and doing a Nightmare run, I feel…

The post 2348: I Beat Ys Seven appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Ys: The Oath in Felghana tonight, after a bit less swearing at the initially unassailable-seeming final boss than I anticipated.

That was an absolutely brilliant game. Well-paced, enjoyable to play, challenging but never insurmountable and certainly didn't outstay its welcome; my game clock read just over 12 hours at the end, although GOG Galaxy claims I actually played it for 24 hours, which can probably be accounted for with a number of boss fights that took a significant number of attempts to clear.

Make no mistake, Oath was a difficult game, but it never felt overly punishing. Indeed, any time that I found myself staring at a Game Over screen, I always knew that it was my fault. Specifically, it was usually the result of overconfidence: charging headlong into a group of powerful enemies, hoping to obliterate them all quickly and gain a ton of XP, but instead getting torn to shreds. Or, in the case of boss fights, it was a matter of learning the attack patterns and then being able to execute suitable countermeasures.

The boss fights were a particular highlight, because they featured an absolute ton of variety and mechanics to pay attention to. The first couple of bosses were very much about dodging and timing, while others were about inventive use of your skills to avoid damage. What I particularly liked were the several encounters that initially seemed absolutely impossible to complete, but which after a bit of practice and careful observation proved to be somewhat less of a problem than I initially believed they would be.

Oath is old-school in its sensibilities in that failure is part of the experience. When you first encounter a boss, you pretty much need to fail in order to understand what it's doing and how it affects you. I've said this before, but in many ways it reminds me of fighting fast-paced versions of Final Fantasy XIV bosses: all mechanics can be countered and dealt with in some way, whether that's through dodging, skill use or various ways of protecting yourself. There are always clear visual and auditory cues as to what's about to happen, allowing you to prepare yourself appropriately, and in situations where you're expected to perform more complex actions such as switching between skills in the heat of battle, the encounters are designed in such a way that you always have time to perform the actions you need to rather than suffering under a relentless assault. Indeed, it's certainly possible to defeat the final boss without taking any damage because there's an Achievement for doing so, and I imagine most of the others can also be handled in such a manner.

I also enjoyed the plot a great deal. While I missed the presence of Feena and Reah from Ys I, II and Origin, the new characters were well-defined and interesting. The villains in particular had some interesting plot arcs, and the game threw up several unexpected curveballs towards its conclusion.

Character highlights for me included series recurring character Dogi, who despite being big enough to crush walls comes across as one of the nicest people in the world, and this game's vaguely implied romantic interest Elena, who was both adorably cute and a genuinely likeable character. I felt a bit bad leaving her behind at the end of the game, but I'm getting the impression protagonist Adol is a bit of a player; I'm anticipating a variety of other cute girls over the course of the games in the series that I'm yet to play.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again; I'm sorry that I haven't checked out this series sooner. I'm having an absolute blast with it, and I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming Ys VIII, which I'll be very surprised if we don't see come West courtesy of Xseed Games in the near future. Given how much I've enjoyed the series so far, I feel fairly confident saying that I'll probably be there day one when it finally comes out.

The post 2339: Adol Wins Again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I started Ys: The Oath in Felghana today after finishing the main story of Ys Origin. (I do intend to go back and replay Origin on the harder difficulties as well as grind through its extra modes and unlockables, but that will be a gradual process!) So far I've played about two hours or so into the main story, beaten four bosses and yelled more curse words at a game than I can remember doing for a very long time.

Oath in Felghana is hard. Really hard. Like, really really hard. I did not know this going in, so feeling quite confident off the back of clearing Ys Origin (which was challenging, but not mega-hard) I thought I'd start Oath on Hard rather than Normal.

I started to think that I had maybe made the wrong decision when the first boss took me a good ten attempts. When the second one took me probably twenty or thirty tries — including having to stop after a few attempts because I was getting pretty wound up by the whole thing — I seriously considered restarting on Normal or Easy, but my pride prevented me from doing so.

Then I beat that boss, and I remembered what I had discovered during my first runthrough of Ys Origin. Ys games, so far as I can tell, are not games intended to be breezed through without any resistance whatsoever. They're short, yes, but whenever their diminutive length is quoted, it isn't taking into account all the times you'll have to retry the difficult bits. Because you'll have to retry the difficult bits a lot. In other words, Ys Origin and Oath in Felghana may well be "10 hours long", but that figure assumes that you'll beat all the bosses first time and won't make any stupid mistakes while exploring lava-covered ruins. And I can assure you that you won't beat all the bosses first time, and you most certainly will make stupid mistakes while exploring lava-covered ruins.

This difficulty makes it all the more satisfying, though. There's a feeling of genuine "release" when you finally overcome a difficult challenge, and much like Ys Origin, I've found that while the bosses in particular are difficult, you'll almost certainly find yourself getting a little bit further each and every time you try, rather than stagnating with absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do. Oath, like Origin, is so well designed that it manages to "train" you how to beat its bosses without giving you any explicit instructions. The animation and sound cues, the attack patterns, the overall "rhythm" of the encounters — all of them are carefully tuned to make each encounter surprisingly intuitive, and while many of them aren't especially complicated in terms of mechanics, you'll need to practice in order to perform what the game is asking of you flawlessly. And you will need to be as close to flawless as possible, because Oath in particular is very unforgiving.

It's funny. The Souls series kicking my ass and forcing me to learn encounters is one of the things that ended up putting me off it, but I'm really enjoying it in the Ys series. This leads me to believe that it's perhaps not this actual style of game that puts me off, but the aesthetic; Ys is colourful, cheerful and energetic, while Souls is dark, dreary and depressing. While there's a time and place for dark, dreary and depressing, I tend to prefer that sort of thing in my survival horrors and adventure games; when I'm RPGing, I want to be heroic in a colourful fantasy land filled with pretty girls. And Oath in Felghana is certainly delivering on all fronts so far.

The post 2336: From the Shores of Felghana appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm on the 25th floor of the Tower of Bogomil, Dungeon Travelers 2's very definitely, totally, positively final dungeon, honest. There are just five floors to go until I reach the top and the final final boss, though I suspect I will probably have to go and fight at least one of the "Gods" that lurk at the bottom of the other postgame dungeons before it will let me in to get my teeth kicked in by the boss. Oh, there's also a five-floor annex to the tower, because of course there is. Each floor of this is pretty small, from what I understand, though; they're mostly about additional boss fights.

I checked the clock when I made my last save tonight: 208 hours. This is officially the longest I've ever spent on a completely single-player game. Final Fantasy XIV has it beat in terms of total playtime, of course, but being an evolving MMO, that's a somewhat different situation. Previous holders of the personal playtime records for me included Persona 3 (somewhere around 90 hours), Persona 4 (likewise), several of the Hyperdimension Neptunia games (100+ hours each, albeit split across several playthroughs) and Xenoblade Chronicles X (well over 100 hours and I hadn't even finished half of it — must go back sometime).

What's kind of impressive about that playtime for Dungeon Travelers 2 is that it's a single playthrough. I haven't started again, I haven't done a New Game Plus — this is the same save file I started months ago. And only now, after 208 hours, am I even vaguely near finished.

What's also impressive about the playtime for Dungeon Travelers 2 is that the vast majority of it occurred after the main ending to the story. The "Otherworld Chapter", as the postgame is called, unfolds largely without an ongoing narrative — it simply unlocks a series of challenging dungeons in sequence and tasks you with navigating your way through some increasingly perilous and head-scratchingly confusing locales with a mind to eventually opening up the aforementioned Tower of Bogomil and making your way to the top. Why? Just because. (Well, technically you think the final boss of the story, who managed to escape after you defeated her, might be lurking up there.)

This motivation for dungeon-crawling is one of the purest there is: the simple joy of exploration and discovery. And this is one thing that Dungeon Travelers 2 is absolutely exceptional at that. It may obviously be working within some tight budget constraints — there are a lot of palette-swapped enemies throughout the game, and each dungeon is based on a single tileset, which in the case of the Tower of Bogomil you see a whole lot — but the absolutely exemplary level design makes up for these limitations and then some.

What I found interesting is that Dungeon Travelers 2 keeps a lot of its tricks up its sleeve until the postgame. One of the latter story dungeons features some switch puzzles that involve opening either red or blue gates at once, never both, but the postgame also adds floors with conveyor belts, floors that are interconnected by ladders and pitfalls, floors that are full of teleporters on every step, one-way walls, secret passages and doors that demand you have a specific party makeup or class present in order to proceed.

Essentially, the main story of the game is getting you prepared for this pure exploration, combat and character-building experience in the postgame. You get a taste of what to expect in the future in the story; you get thrown in at the deep end once you're past the "final" boss. And it's hugely enjoyable, as my playtime will attest.

Five floors to go, then. I'm hoping I get it finished by the beginning of next month, because there's a ton I'd like to write about this game over on MoeGamer, so watch over there for some in-depth thoughts.

The post 2317: 25 Floors Up appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A controversial statement, perhaps — and I make no apologies for a third post about Ys in a row — but one that I feel confident in making, even having only finished the first game and made it about halfway (I estimate?) through the second. (Aside: given how much I've enjoyed the first two games so far, you can count on a month of Ys over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.)

Ys speaks to me in a way that Zelda never has. This isn't to say that I don't like Zelda, mind you — I count A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask among some of my favourite games of all time — but there's something just… kind of magical about Ys that I've been delighted to discover over the past few days, and a little disappointed in myself that I never took the plunge and explored this series earlier.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think the thing that sticks out to me most of all is how Ys provides a much more coherent and continuous feeling in its narrative than Zelda does. The fact that Zelda games up until Link's Awakening still referred to the various dungeons as "levels" made it pretty clear that despite the sprawling overworld in each instance, these were basically games designed on the same linear principles as more traditional action/arcade adventures. This very much gives Zelda games a feeling that persists today: a sharp demarcation between the overworld and the dungeons. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it particularly unusual; many RPGs make this distinction, and massively multiplayer games in particular have an even more stark divide between the two types of content, with dungeons tending to be cooperative multiplayer affairs, while overworld action tends to be (for the most part) solo or social in nature.

But with Ys, there's no such demarcation. The world is continuous and coherent, and consequently far more believable. You're not pausing your exploration to get through the mysteriously puzzle-filled castle that happens to stand between you and your objective; you're continuing your journey, exploring the world, fulfilling the promises you made to the people who believe in you. It's a continuous, flowing process and narrative, rather than one that is heavily punctuated. Exploration flows into conversation flows into combat flows into more exploration; the only real punctuation comes in the form of the boss fights, which don't necessarily come at as predictable points as in Zelda games.

This coherent feeling is particularly apparent in Ys II, which expands on the excellent worldbuilding of its predecessor. Characters move around as the story progresses, and they make reference to the places you find yourself travelling to. Sometimes you run across them on your travels as they get up to things independently of you; sometimes you'll return from an adventure to find them acknowledging your deeds when you speak to them. Contrast with Zelda's worlds, which tend to be rather static in nature; populated with weird and quirky characters in many cases, sure, but there's not a lot of feeling of things going on while you're not there, with the exception of Majora's Mask, of course, where this sort of thing was the whole game's central design tenet.

My friend Chris also points out that Ys makes him feel powerful, and he's absolutely right. This is a big contrast between Ys and Zelda, and it's partly due to the nature of the protagonist character. While both games sport a visually distinctive but mute self-insert character for the player to inhabit and play as they see fit, Zelda's hero is a child, while Ys' hero is a young adult. There's always been an element of childish clumsiness to Zelda's combat; even once the series moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time and started having more complex combat mechanics than a single attack button that always did the same thing, Link always felt… not incapable or incompetent as such, but like he perhaps wasn't quite as comfortable holding a sword and shield as he perhaps should be. Which is understandable in several of the games, where he has the whole "Hero" thing kind of thrust upon him suddenly.

In the case of Ys, meanwhile, there's a strong feeling that, when played well, you are overwhelming your enemy with superior skill and power. This is depicted differently in both Ys I and Ys II, despite both being based on the same fundamental "bump" system, which allows for button-free attacking and a style of gameplay where you never really have to stop moving.

In Ys I, the feeling of overwhelming power is brought about by the rather brief levelling curve: with a level cap of just 10, each one of those 10 levels is a significant jump in power for protagonist Adol. If you keep pace with where you're "supposed" to be as you proceed through the story, you'll take down most enemies in a single hit. It's not until the very latter stages of the game, when you've been level 10 for a while, that you'll come across enemies that need multiple hits to fell, and even then, no more than one or two extra hits.

In Ys II, meanwhile, the combat is rejigged so that individual hits do less damage, but you can inflict them incredibly quickly, particularly while attacking diagonally. You also push enemies backwards while attacking them, giving the combat a feel somewhat akin to the sport of fencing, where dominating your opponent and forcing them to move how you want them to move is key. In Ys II, careful, tactical movement of enemies — not shoving them into a large group of their friends, for example, nor pushing them into a corner behind a rock that makes it difficult for you to keep up the assault — is absolutely key, and getting it right is an immensely satisfying feeling completely unlike any other action RPG I've played.

Then you have things like the items. In Zelda, the items you unlock as you proceed through the game are predictable and are used based on clear, recognisable visual cues that stay the same throughout the game. In Ys, meanwhile, you might use each item only once or twice throughout the game in circumstances where it makes narrative sense to do so, not because it would make a good puzzle or dexterity challenge. This gives the game much more of a traditional "adventure game" feel to it, and I like that very much about it. In Ys II, there are also a number of items you can use in unconventional ways, too, and the game rewards experimentation with, for example, giving healing items as gifts to NPCs, or using the "Alter" magic to turn yourself into a Roo and talk to monsters. While very few of these things are necessary to complete the game, they, like so much else in these games, provide a lovely sense of a world that has been well thought out and beautifully crafted, particularly in these revamped Chronicles+ versions that I'm playing on PC.

This is all my opinion, of course, and doubtless there are some die-hard Zelda fans out there who would feel the complete opposite to me — and doubtless some other people out there who would gleefully point out that Ys and Zelda aren't really directly comparable at all — but so far, I don't feel it's premature to say that I'm already in love with this series, and intend to devour as much of it as I can in short order. Count on further enthusing as and when that happens.

The post 2312: After 1.5 Games, I Already Like Ys More Than Any Zelda I've Played appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's something of a novelty these games to start and beat a game over the course of a couple of days — particularly an RPG — but with Dungeon Travelers 2 being considerable in both length and difficulty, I felt that a palate cleanser of some sort was in order before I tackled the remaining 15+ floors of that game's final dungeon. I considered picking up the new Doom, but I couldn't quite bring myself to spend that much on it, so instead, as I noted yesterday, I turned to the Ys series.

This evening, I beat Ys I. Here are some things I thought about it.

Things I liked

• That music! The PC version I was playing has three mixes of the soundtrack available: the original FM version, a remastered MIDI version from a later incarnation and a full-on rock the fuck out version from Falcom's in-house band. I must confess I didn't try the two earlier versions, as Falcom's band is pretty damn amazing. Wailing guitars and pounding drumbeats complemented the action perfectly, and brought a pleasantly nostalgic feeling over me, making me think of both Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which had plenty of widdly-diddly guitars) and my brother (who was always very good at widdly-diddly guitars when I was growing up).
• Levelling up is meaningful. There are ten experience levels in Ys I. Each one is a significant jump in power. From level 1 to level 2 is the difference between taking 4 or 5 hits to kill an enemy and being able to splatter it in a single hit. Your power continues to increase hugely as the game progresses.
• You have an HP bar that gets bigger. I don't know why I like this, I just do. I liked it in Metal Gear Solid, I liked it in Kingdom Hearts and I like it here. It's a satisfying visual representation of your growth in power.
• Your HP bar shows how much damage the last hit you took chipped off. This is really nice. Similar to how fighting game health gauges work, your HP bar in Ys highlights the amount of damage the last hit gave you in a brighter shade of red so you can estimate roughly how many more individual hits you can take before needing to worry about healing.
• Tactical health regeneration. Healing items are few and far between in Ys I, so it's fortunate that you regenerate health by standing still… though only when you're in a place where you can see the sky. Later in the game, you acquire a healing ring that allows you to regenerate in dungeons, too, but for the majority of the time, finding an open-air "clearing" in a dungeon makes a nice checkpoint.
• Cute girls. My goodness. I want to cuddle Feena forever.
• The sense of place and character. I mentioned this yesterday, but Ys I's world feels remarkably coherent, even with its relatively tiny size compared to some other RPGs. By the end of the game, you recognise every character, and the character notebook feature in the game suggests that the writers thought long and hard about each and every NPC in the game, regardless of their importance (or lack thereof) to the plot.
• The interesting structure. Ys I is broadly split into two parts: the first half sees you charging around the overworld completing various quests, and this will probably bring you up to the level cap of 10. Once you've done everything out in the world, you then enter the 25-floor final dungeon Darm Tower, where you'll need to use everything you've learned (and a few other things besides) to make it to the top and kick the last boss' face in.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game. I've lost count of the number of RPGs I've played where the final boss is an underwhelming battle thanks to the ability to overlevel yourself for it by doing all manner of side activities beforehand. In narrative terms, the final boss should really be your most significant challenge, so it's always a little disappointing when you can mash it in a couple of turns. Not so in Ys I; this asshole puts up a fight.

Things I liked a little less

• The bosses are a bit primitive. This is perhaps understandable, given the game's heritage — despite this being a modern remake, the original Ys I came out in 1987 and the bosses in particular make this abundantly clear, with very simple attack patterns that have no "intelligence" whatsoever — simply either randomised or predictable path-based movement.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game… but for all the wrong reasons. The final boss is all kinds of bullshit. He bounces around the screen, frequently going out of reach. When you hit him, the floor falls away underneath where he was, and this can either kill you instantly or trap you in a corner if you're not careful. He shoots fireballs that split into so many bullets it's literally impossible to dodge them all. Fighting him is more a matter of being able to inflict enough damage on him before he kills you than any real skill at recognising and dealing with his patterns.
• Inconsistent item behaviour is a little unfair. You can't use items or change your equipment in boss battles. This means you can't use that healing potion you've been saving, or the magic mirror to freeze your opponent in place. Worse, the various rings you acquire throughout the game — which vary in effect from doubling your damage dealt to halving your damage taken via allowing you to slowly regenerate when standing still — have no effect whatsoever in boss battles, either.
• There are a number of instances where the game kind of forgets to tell you what to do next. This happens for the first time right at the very beginning of the game, where no-one tells you that in order to trigger an important event you first have to speak to each and every NPC in the starting town. There are a number of other such incidents later in the game, too, but again, this is perhaps a remnant of the game's 1987 heritage, when games were a lot less hand-holdy.

Ultimately, none of the things I liked a bit less about Ys I distracted me from playing it through from start to finish and really enjoying the experience. I'm not sure whether I'll go back and play it on the notorious Nightmare difficulty — I'm not sure I can face some of those bosses again! — but it's a definite possibility. For the immediate "now", though, I think I'm going to move straight on to Ys II to see how Adol's adventure continues.

Yep. I'm 100% on board with this series, and I look forward to exploring the rest of it.

The post 2311: I Finished My First Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been meaning to check out the Ys series for quite some time — my Steam library informs me that I have owned a number of the PC versions for several years, and I also have a number of the PSP versions loaded on my Vita, too. For some reason, though, I've never got around to it.

I decided that it was time to change all that, so I booted up Ys I to start at the beginning. And, well, I kind of wish I'd done this sooner.

Ys is a series I've been dimly aware of for many years. I remember some seriously random things from my childhood, and one of the things that is still stored in my memory for some inexplicable reason was seeing a review of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys in the SNES magazine my brother's girlfriend at the time was working on, Control. Something struck me as very interesting about this side-scrolling hack and slash adventure, and I often found myself wondering what it would be like to play. For one reason or another, though, I never did check it out, but the Ys series had always been at the back of my mind ever since.

Ys I is a rather different affair from Ys III, which took a distinctly Zelda II-esque approach of attempting to reinvent the series as a side-scrolling platform action RPG rather than the more traditional top-down perspective of other installments. But Ys I isn't like any other RPG I've played, either. It's not like Zelda because of its use of the rather peculiar (but fun and satisfying) "bump" combat, wherein you attack enemies just by walking into them, and whether or not they do damage to you depends on the angle you hit them at. It's not like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because it's not a turn-based RPG, nor is it a globetrotting adventure. Instead, it's something that very much has its own identity.

Ys I — and, indeed, most of the subsequent Ys games — casts you in the role of one Adol Christin, a redheaded adventurer lad who washes up on the shores of the land of Esteria against all odds after surviving a strange phenomenon surrounding the island called the Stormwall. After a brief convalescence — and specifically against the recommendations of his doctor and nurse — he heads out into the world to explore and figure out what is going on, and before long, oh, wouldn't you know it, he's some sort of Chosen One at the centre of all sorts of mystical happenings that appear to converge on Darm Tower, a hulking, sinister structure on Esteria that seems to be the source of everyone's troubles and woes.

Where Ys shines is in its small scale. In this sense, it's rather similar to the only other Falcom game I've played to date, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Trails in the Sky featured a fairly hefty journey for its main cast, but its real appeal was in how much character and personality it gave each and every party member, shopkeeper, NPC on the streets and distinct region of the world. Ys I is the same, only in more concentrated form; the island is a very small place that you quickly learn to find your way around, even with the game's total lack of any sort of map function, and it's not long before you feel like you've got to know pretty much all of the 88 characters who are scattered around the game world, some of whom have something interesting to say, others of whom are simply background colour.

What's fascinating about Ys is that even the incidental, "useless" NPCs are full of personality and have clearly been written with a greater context in mind. They each have their own little stories to tell, and over the course of Adol's adventure, the things they say change subtly, giving you a good feeling of the sort of person they are and what they think about everything that's been going on. And the game sometimes surprises you by making what appeared to be an incidental character rather more important than they first appeared.

Couple all this with some really lovely pixel art in the field, some gorgeous visual novel-style illustrations when speaking with the more important characters, and an absolutely rockin' soundtrack, and, well, you have a game that is really rather good: unconventional, memorable, interesting and, most of all, fun.

If Ys I, the oldest and most primitive title in the series, is this appealing to me, I can only imagine how enjoyable the most well-regarded entries like Oath in Felghana and its ilk are. I'm looking forward to investigating the rest of the series in detail, and anticipate that I may well become a bit of a Falcom fanboy by the time I'm done with them.

The post 2310: My First Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I must admit, when I first started playing Dungeon Travelers 2 I was concerned that its dungeons were a bit on the small side compared to the dungeon crawler I had previously played, Demon Gaze. As the game progressed, however, it became apparent that I didn't have anything to worry about.

And then I heard about the post-game content. And then I got into the post-game content.

Demon Gaze had a certain amount of post-game content — most notably a fairly straightforward dungeon where you re-fought all the bosses from earlier in the game, then a horrendously difficult true final boss right at the end. It took me quite a while to plough through it, mind you, though this was partly due to the fact I was also chasing the Platinum trophy, which necessitated a certain amount of grinding on the random number generator in the hope of getting some of the best item drops in the game.

Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame is on a whole other level, though. It's practically a whole other game's worth of content; you finish the main story of the game around about the level 50 mark or so, and the postgame will take you to 99 (and beyond, if you level reset in the hope of "crowning" your characters through permanent stat bonuses) across a number of different dungeons.

What I find most fascinating about Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame is how much effort has been put into it. I find myself wondering how many people will beat the final boss of the main story, watch the credits roll and then put the game down. It would be perfectly valid to do so, after all, since the game is technically "complete" then, even if you haven't even seen half of what it has to offer. There aren't even any specific trophies for the postgame — the only trophies you're likely to see pop in the postgame is the enormous grind that is "kill 20,000 enemies" (you won't even have killed 10,000 by the end of the main story, but you most certainly will have at least 20,000 under your belt by the end of the postgame) and the Platinum. In other words, the only reward you're going to get from seeing the game through to its true end is the satisfaction of having beaten it.

But boy, is that going to feel good when it happens. The postgame dungeons are significantly more challenging than their main story counterparts, and in some cases make use of mechanics that haven't been seen anywhere else in the game. There are dungeons where you have to contend with the relationship between several different floors, dungeons where you have to flip switches to open coloured doors in the right order, dungeons where you have to bring certain classes in order to pass through certain doors (bet you wish you'd leveled Tsurara now, huh) and dungeons that are just a single floor, but absolutely enormous.

Each of the dungeons has two or three bosses to fight as you progress through them, and a level 99 God boss at the very end who will most likely destroy you if you charge in there when you first reach them. Instead, what you're supposed to do is explore each dungeon until you reach a trigger point (normally just before the door to the God battle) which opens up the next one. In a couple of cases, you have to increase your Quest Rank to a certain level before the next dungeon will open up, too, so hopefully you've been paying attention to the Quests as you go through the game!

I'm currently on the second-to-last dungeon, Gear Castle. This is a five-floor futuristic tower with a lot of puzzles. The first floor featured switches that opened blue or red doors (and closed the others), while the second was largely based around conveyor belts that you could switch the direction of with levers around the level. The third, which I'm currently on, features a mix of these two aspects, and I'm yet to see what the fourth and fifth floors offer.

Once I'm through Gear Castle I'm on the home straight: all that stands between me and final victory — aside from that 20,000 kills trophy, which I have no idea how close I am to — is the 30-floor Tower of Bogomil and whatever lies at the very top. I understand that reaching the 26th floor of Bogomil is a significant moment, as it's at this stage your party should be levelled enough to take on the Gods, so I'm looking forward to that with a certain amount of trepidation.

All in all, the clock is going to be well over 200 hours by the time I'm finished with this beast, and I have absolutely loved it throughout. It's seriously one of the best dungeon crawlers — if not RPGs, generally — that I've ever played, and more people need to play and love it.

Assuming I make it to the end by then, I'm planning a month of coverage on MoeGamer next month. There's certainly a hell of a lot to write about.

The post 2299: The Sprawling Endgame of Dungeon Travelers 2 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

JAST USA recently released Aselia the Eternal on Steam. The game's been around for a good few years now — its original Japanese version for even longer — but its release on Steam will doubtless allow a whole new audience to (hopefully) enjoy it. I will now attempt to explain why it is worth giving it a go.

Aselia the Eternal is a combination of a visual novel and a strategy game. The overall balance is very much in favour of the story side of things — it's a good six hours of reading before you get to the game's first strategy battle sequence — but when you do get to the strategic aspect, it's a game that puts up a good fight.

The narrative concerns the player-protagonist Yuuto, who finds himself drawn into another world populated by people who speak a completely different language to him. Unable to find his way home, he gradually learns to communicate with these people — the ones with whom he's staying known as "Spirits" — and finds himself recruited into the army as an "Etranger", a wielder of a powerful, sentient sword that regularly threatens to eat his soul.

Gradually, as Yuuto becomes more and more involved in the lives of the Spirits, he starts to worry less and less about trying to find his way back home and more about helping to resolve the conflict that threatens to tear this fantasy world apart. As such, the narrative becomes very much a high fantasy sort of affair — war on a grand scale, magic and mayhem around every corner, transcendence of humanity not at all out of the question — and builds to a thoroughly exciting conclusion that I won't spoil here.

The story is compelling, interesting, well-written and well-translated, but it's the gameplay part that is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, since it's one of the most original takes on strategic RPG-style combat I've seen. Virtually eliminating all luck from the equation, combat in Aselia the Eternal is actually about putting units together in small squads to perform most effectively according to what type of unit they are — and by doing this correctly you can effectively guarantee that you'll win a conflict before you reach it. The tricky part is in finding those suitable combinations in the first place.

The basic rules of engagement have each of your squads made up of three ranks — a frontline fighter, a mid-range tank and a support fighter bringing up the rear. Each of the different types of Spirits perform best in a particular slot: Blue Spirits (such as the eponymous heroine) do their best work as speedy damage dealers in the front row; Green Spirits tend to have the highest defense and HP, so sit in the middle; Red Spirits often have support abilities that can damage an entire enemy squad or provide suitable benefits to your own, so sit at the back. You're not limited to this arrangement — and indeed, with Yuuto in the mix, who is none of those things, you'll have at least one squad with an unconventional lineup — but there are clearly optimal ways to do things, making each of the battles in the game as much of a puzzle as a strategic RPG experience.

Aselia the Eternal comes together so nicely because everything it does is in service to its narrative and worldbuilding. Despite not having an open world you can freely explore, its excellent storytelling and descriptive narration builds a wonderfully convincing setting that gives the strategic sequences genuine meaning and drama. And, as a result of that worldbuilding, your units in the strategic sequences become more than just sets of stats and abilities; they become people. People who you don't want to see die, because yes, this game has permadeath.

The question of being "more than just a soldier" is one of the main narrative themes explored in the game, and it's a rather wonderful moment when you realise that you, the player, are having the same epiphany that the characters in the game are. There are some wonderfully touching sequences with Yuuto and the Spirits as they get to know one another, and you're right there with them. And, as the narrative ramps up and you bring more and more allies with you, the tension becomes palpable as you take them into battles that you really don't want to see them lose.

I don't want to say too much more because part of the wonder of Aselia the Eternal is exploring the experience for yourself and discovering everything this remarkable work has to offer. Suffice to say if you enjoy in-depth storytelling — and lots of if — and aren't averse to a bit of red-hot strategy action, you should most certainly check it out. And then strongly consider supporting JAST's recent release of the sequel Seinarukana, which I'll be investigating for myself in the near future!

The post 2295: You Should Play Aselia the Eternal appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I only have a couple of trophies left before I have the Platinum on Gust's action RPG Nights of Azure, and I'm coming away from the game very impressed. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it to begin with — though I adored its aesthetic and narrative — but once I got my head around its unconventional systems and subversions of standard RPG mechanics, I was well and truly enraptured.

The game has excellent combat. I was concerned that it would be a little hack-and-slashy when I first started playing, but as it progresses and you open up more and more systems and options for yourself, it becomes really interesting. In fact, oddly enough, one game that I'm constantly reminded of while I'm playing Nights of Azure is Final Fantasy XIV, of all things; while the two games may not appear to have much in common initially, one being an action RPG and one being a hotbar-and-cooldown-based MMO, I maintain that Nights of Azure is what Final Fantasy XIV would play like if it was a single-player action game.

Perhaps I should clarify that. Both are based on making good use of a gradually expanding roster of abilities that you unlock bit by bit as you progress through the game, rather than outright customisation (though Nights of Azure has considerably more customisation when it comes to equipment than FFXIV, with up to four items being equippable, each having both an effect on Arnice's stats and some sort of special effect). Both are based on a combination of open world adventuring (albeit in Nights of Azure's case, said "world" being just one town) and linear dungeons with boss encounters. And in both cases, said boss encounters are based heavily on learning the boss' attacks, how to avoid them, making sure you don't stand in area of effect markers, and recognising when it's safe to attack.

This latter aspect is particularly apparent in the later hours of the game and especially the "epilogue" chapter after you beat the final boss for the first time. The "epilogue" is actually a retread of the last chapter with some additional content and the ability to raise Arnice to the level cap of 11 rather than the previous 10; she also gains the ability to transform into Nightmare form as well as her previous Demon, Moon Rabbit, Phantom and Armour forms. More importantly, totally completing this final chapter unlocks the "true" ending, which I haven't seen yet, since I'm cleaning up the last few trophies first.

Throughout the game, there are a number of boss battles. These are all very good and have a nice amount of variety between them, but for me, the absolute highlight of the game's battles has been the optional "Abyss" battle in the Arena. The Arena is initially designed as a place to practice the various techniques you'll need to use in the game, ranging from chaining long combos to defeating enemies using only your summoned Servans. "Abyss", meanwhile, is the culmination of everything you've learned, in theory, pitting you against the toughest individual foe in the game over the course of several phases; a fight that rivals some of Final Fantasy XIV's raid bosses in its complexity.

Let me explain how I beat the fight and you'll see.

Your opponent is a demon girl fiend — Yfritte, I believe, though don't quote me on that. She's a level 11 opponent — enemies in the game go up to level 15, and your Servans can level this high with an appropriate ability, though Arnice herself can only level to 11. Unlike similar-looking enemies you might have encountered elsewhere in the game, Yfritte (as we'll call her, even if she isn't) has about a bazillion HP and, it becomes clear immediately after engaging her, isn't going to go down without one hell of a fight.

You start across the Arena from Yfritte with no Servans summoned. I summoned all my Servans immediately — my main party consisting of Alraune (healer), Plumie (ranged damage dealer), Toy Trooper (group of damage dealers) and Toy Sentinel (single damage dealer, hits lots of times) — and straight away set off Toy Trooper and Toy Sentinel's Burst attacks to deal some initial damage to Yfritte.

Using Arnice's Blood Sword, I alternated between using the Special attack, which knocks Yfritte down for a couple of seconds, and the Weak attack, which, with the Vlad's Crest item I had equipped, restored Arnice's SP quickly enough to perform Special attacks almost indefinitely, effectively stun-locking Yfritte. This process repeats until about 80% of her HP, at which point she summons two Manticores.

The Manticores can Paralyse you and your Servans, so it's a good idea to have status-repelling abilities or equipment on at least Arnice and your healer. They also have a nasty multi-hit fire breath attack, so staying behind or to the side of them is a good idea. Continue alternating Weak and Special attacks to repeatedly knock them down until Arnice's Transformation bar fills, at which point the combination of Servans I had equipped allowed me to transform into the speedy Moon Rabbit form.

Moon Rabbit's Special attack needs 100SP, but it's a huge area-effect attack that hits lots of times — and, with Vlad's Crest equipped, this means that 100SP is regenerated almost immediately if you hit more than one target with it. It also inflicts Bleed for some damage over time, so it's good for upping your average damage per second. I repeatedly triggered Moon Rabbit's Special Attack, taking care to catch Yfritte and the two Manticores in the AoE, until the transformation ran out, by which point the Manticores were dead and Yfritte had a chunk of life missing.

There now follows a short phase where Yfritte is by herself. She flings missiles at you from a distance, some of which home in on you, and sets off close-range area effect abilities when you're up close, some of which are powerful enough to one-shot Arnice. Distract her with your Servans — use Alraune's Mega Heal to top up their HP if necessary — and return to the Weak-Special combo to keep her off-balance.

After a while, she'll summon a huge number of level 1 Shadows. Move away from Yfritte and hack and slash through the Shadows to build up both SP and the Transformation bar. It's potentially worth unsummoning your Servans at this point, as the Shadows don't hit hard and if you keep clear of Yfritte (and avoid her missiles) you won't take a lot of damage. Plus when you re-summon the Servans, they'll have full SP again, although their HP will be where you left it, so be ready to heal if necessary.

I had a second deck of Servans set up to transform Arnice into Nightmare form, so I took the opportunity to use this powerful transformation once the bar was full. Nightmare form has a wide arc ranged attack that hits multiple times as its default weak attack, so spamming this and avoiding Yfritte's missiles does a significant amount of damage in a short space of time. Once I was safely in Nightmare form, I switched back to my initial deck, summoned Alraune for healing purposes just in case a shot got through, and prepared for the next phase.

The next phase comes when Yfritte summons a huge blue area of effect marker on the ground. This inflicts poison and is also slippery ice, so having status resist abilities or equipment is a good idea, particularly on Alraune. The Mermaid's Tear item completely nullifies any area-effect abilities, so this effectively allows Alraune to shrug it off and continue healing you. Don't summon any other Servans until the AoE disappears, since they're dumb enough to blindly charge straight into it, get poisoned and die straight away. Once it goes away, however, go nuts; return to the Weak-Special combo to knock Yfritte off balance until the next phase starts.

Next up, Yfritte summons a doll who chucks toys at you, which can be easily avoided, and a spirit-type who we'll affectionately refer to as the "bullet hell fairy". Kill the doll first, since it's not got many HP and will go down quickly. The bullet hell fairy is a little more troublesome, since she repeatedly summons large groups of bullets which then explode for significant damage. You can see where they're going to appear and get out of the way of them; use the Follow command on Servans to get them out of harm's way. They're always in the same formation: one at "twelve o'clock", then two more at "eight" and "four". Take care to continue dodging Yfritte's bullets and close-range AoEs while you deal with the fairy.

By now we're getting close to the end, but there's still a couple of phases to go. Yfritte will do another big AoE — red this time — so deal with it the same way: unsummon everything except an immune Alraune and perhaps pelt Yfritte from afar with the Blitz Shooter if she refuses to come out of her little safe space. When the AoE disappears, you're on the home straight.

Yfritte will summon some Shadows again — level 7 this time, so they don't go down so easily. Re-summon your Servans and get them to hack and slash their way through the hordes, though keep an eye on where Yfritte is so you don't get caught out by a one-shot AoE at this late stage in the fight. Build up SP with Weak attacks and clear an area with a Special from the Blood Sword, preferably catching Yfritte on the outside of it so you can knock her down for a bit of damage. Repeat until you charge up another transformation; it's a good idea to pick Moon Rabbit for this one for the large Special AoE, though Nightmare works too, since its ranged attack covers a wide area. Basically you want to rip through as many Shadows as possible while still hitting Yfritte in order to keep your SP topped up.

Towards the end of the fight, Yfritte will summon a Stone Hellion — the same really annoying ones that were in earlier Arena battles, equipped entirely with nothing but one-shot abilities with huge AoEs. Fortunately this one goes down a little easier than the boss-class ones in earlier battles, so catch him in a Moon Rabbit Special if you can while continuing to hit Yfritte. Take care to avoid all his big AoEs — Moon Rabbit's speed is really helpful here — and continue pelting Yfritte with everything you've got while making sure to stay clear of her bullets and AoEs as well as ensuring you don't get overwhelmed by shadows… and eventually, hopefully, you will prevail with time to spare.

The post 2284: Nights of Azure: Encounter in the Abyss appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Two of my favourite games of all time are Cavia's Nier and Ganbarion's Pandora's Tower. They're both gloriously unconventional takes on the role-playing game genre, mechanically and narratively, and they're both extremely rewarding to engage with. They were also both the recipient of mediocre to middling reviews when they were first released, and have since — at least, in Nier's case — broken free of that critical mire and attained cult status.

I've only played a couple of hours of it so far, but Gust's Nights of Azure looks like joining these two overlooked classics in "flawed masterpiece" territory, as it has a lot in common with these two ambitious titles.

Nights of Azure casts you in the role of Arnice, a half-demon woman tasked with slaying Fiends and keeping a young woman called the Saint safe so that she can perform a ritual that will seal away the evil Nightlord and prevent the world from falling into perpetual darkness. There have been numerous Saints throughout the generations, but this time around the young maiden who has been chosen happens to be one Lilysse, a woman with whom it quickly becomes very apparent that Arnice has previously had an extremely close relationship with. Like, lovers close.

The two women are polar opposites in many ways. Lilysse is carefree and demure, while Arnice is confident and serious, though she has an easily rattled side to her. Their reunion after what has seemingly been quite some time apart begins with the two displaying that characteristic awkwardness around one another that two former lovers often show, but it's obvious that there are still feelings there — particularly once Arnice starts finding crystallised memories around the city that forms the backdrop to the story, and when she starts exploring dream sequences that give you the option of either exploring the overall lore of the setting or the relationship between Arnice and Lilysse.

The gameplay of Nights of Azure isn't your standard action RPG. There's a bit of Castlevania in regard to the gothic opera aesthetic; there's a bit of Shin Megami Tensei in the demon-summoning mechanics — the majority of your damage output in combat will come from your summoned demons; Arnice is mostly there to give orders and support; there's a bit of 3D brawler action in terms of the basic controls; and there's even a touch of the Souls series in there with regard to one of the game's two main currencies being "blood" which can be used either to power up Arnice or purchase things.

Combat is fairly straightforward but satisfying. Arnice has a weak and a strong attack — initially with just a sword, but later with three other weapons — and a special attack that consumes her SP bar. She also has four decks of up to four Servans each to summon, and these also cost SP to summon. When a Servan is summoned, it performs a special ability, so it's tactically advantageous to wait for a good moment to summon them rather than getting them out right away; once they're out, they also have access to a Burst ability as well as their skills that they use automatically. This Burst ability is strong and tied to the Servan's role in the party, be it tank, damage dealer or healer, and is limited by the Servan's own SP bar.

The Servan stuff is interesting because it reminds me of the good bits of Japanese collectible card games on mobile: you collect units, you level them up and upgrade them, you customise them with attachments, and you take a suitable deck into battle with you to deal with any encounters you might face. Unlike Arnice, Servans level up just by engaging in combat — no Blood required — and gain access to more abilities as they reach higher levels. Arnice can find or purchase Fetishes throughout the game, too, and these can either be "actualised" into a new Servan, or given to an existing Servan to buff them up. Servans' skills can also be customised by giving them various items.

The structure of Nights of Azure is pretty intriguing, too. All the main action goes on at night-time, and you're limited to bursts of 15 minutes in the action stages before you have to go back to Arnice's home base. In practice, this never really becomes an issue because you'll reach a checkpoint or finish an area long before the timer expires in most cases. After coming back from the evening's adventures, Arnice does some "daytime activities" that can result in the acquisition of skill points in four different fields, which can then be spent to acquire different abilities. She's also able to take on quests aside from the main story, which are generally either "kill [x] of [y]" or "find [z]", but reward her with useful items and currency. There's also a battle arena where she can take on combat challenges with specific conditions to clear, with varying rewards on offer according to what her score is when she's completed the challenge in question.

All in all, it feels like a very, very odd game so far — though this isn't a bad thing at all. It feels inventive and interesting rather than being same old, same old, and I'm interested to see how it develops further. The core narrative of the relationship between the two leading ladies is intriguing and compelling, and the whole narrative is dripping with initially unexplained mysteries, supported by the overall aesthetic having a wonderful otherworldly feel to it — drenched in blue mist with character models that look like flowing pencil sketches, somewhat similar to the Atelier series.

And the music. Oh gosh. How wonderful is the music? Combining Michiru Yamane-style gothic rock tracks in the action stages with some distinctly Shoji Meguro-style jazz and funk back at the hotel and some beautiful solo piano pieces during the more heartfelt moments, the soundtrack is absolutely lovely.

It's a pity the translation is so atrocious, riddled with typos and grammatical errors — and one of the PSN trophies even refers to the protagonist by the wrong name, presumably an erroneous transliteration from the original Japanese — but ultimately even these flaws don't detract from an immediately intriguing, compelling and downright bizarre action RPG that deserves a great deal more love and attention than I can guarantee it's (not) going to get from the gaming community at large.

The post 2266: Nights of Azure: A Peculiar Game Destined for Cult Status? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The other night, Square Enix held a livestreamed event showing off some information about their upcoming RPG Final Fantasy XV. It was, I think, the biggest deal I've ever seen any company make about one single game, and as a marketing exercise, it was enormously successful — despite the rather irritating hosts (I now have even less desire to check out Kinda Funny Games than I did before, which wasn't much) the event did a good job of teasing the game as well as uncovering some genuine surprises.

This latter aspect is no mean feat in this day and age of leaks and rumours, and it was almost ruined earlier in the day when Gamespot "accidentally" (yeah, I'm sure you hated all the traffic you got) leaked the game's September 30th release date. Fortunately, the other surprises — and there were several — were successfully kept under wraps, and Square Enix were even able to have a bit of fun with the knowledge that the release date was already out in the wild rather than doing the usual po-faced corporate thing.

So what's so exciting about Final Fantasy XV then? Well, for me, the most interesting and exciting thing about it is the fact that Square Enix is clearly going all-out on this one. They are taking it very seriously and obviously throwing an enormous budget at both the game and its extended universe.

Yes, I said extended universe: that was one of the biggest surprises of the presentation for me. Because Final Fantasy XV won't just be telling its story through the game, though this will naturally be the main focus. Alongside the game we're also getting a prequel anime series, depicting how the main character Noctis and his friends became so close, and a feature-length CG movie called Kingsglaive, which shows a parallel story to the game focusing on Noctis' father King Regis. Not only that, but we're also getting a mobile game that actually looks like it might be quite fun, and is actually part of the main game's world.

Final Fantasy XV does have a bit of an uphill struggle ahead of it, however, for numerous reasons. Although Final Fantasy XIV built a considerable amount of goodwill for the series — particularly among lifelong Final Fantasy fans — its audience was relatively limited compared to the rest of the series thanks to its status as a massively multiplayer online game, and a subscription-based one at that. Its single-player predecessors, the three games in the Final Fantasy XIII series, however, had a somewhat peculiar reception — Final Fantasy XIII was roundly praised on its original release, but since then it has seemingly become fashionable to bash it, with complaints ranging from the protagonist Lightning being boring (she isn't), the game systems being too simple (they aren't) and the tutorial being 20 hours long (kind of true, but it actually keeps the early hours of the game moving along at a good pace).

Not only that, but Final Fantasy XV is a radical reinvention of how we play Final Fantasy. Or, at least, that's what people think. In truth, Final Fantasy hasn't been what the people complaining about XV's systems think it is for quite some time now, and XV is simply following a pattern of the game gradually experimenting, changing and innovating with each new iteration.

The reason why people feel that XV is such a sudden shift in direction — even though it really isn't — is because their frame of reference is still, for whatever reason, limited to Final Fantasy games up to maybe X at the latest, and X is the point where the series started getting a lot more experimental than it had been.

That's not to say, however, that the series had rested on its laurels; on the contrary, despite the early installments in particular seeming quite similar in terms of mechanics, each did something very different. Don't believe me? Well, all right. I'll prove it.

• Final Fantasy: First in the series. Eschewed static character classes in favour of the ability to "promote" each of the classes to a more powerful, effective version partway through the game. Established the "Jobs" that have been used in many other Final Fantasy installments since.
• Final Fantasy II: Eschewed a traditional progression system in favour of an Elder Scrolls-style "level it up by doing it" system. Get more HP by getting hit. Get more MP by casting magic. Get more strength by hitting things. Took some getting used to, but was an interesting twist on the standard RPG formula, and is all the more remarkable considering it came out in 1988.
• Final Fantasy III: Returned to a traditional levelling system but combined this with the ability to switch character Jobs without having to completely respec or reset levels. You could change your party makeup on the fly without having to change characters, in other words.
• Final Fantasy IV: First 16-bit installment in the series. First use of the Active Time Battle system, which combined the strategy of turn-based combat with a real-time element. Stronger emphasis on story and characterisation through static, non-customisable characters.
• Final Fantasy V: Revamped Final Fantasy III's Job system and made it even more flexible with the ability to equip abilities you had learned from other Jobs, allowing you to effectively create hybrid characters. Used Active Time Battle.
• Final Fantasy VI: One of the most impressive games on the Super NES, both technically and in terms of storytelling. First use of the "learning abilities from equipping things" system used in several other installments — here, abilities were learned by equipping Espers, the summonable creatures. Used Active Time Battle.
• Final Fantasy VII: First 32-bit installment in the series, first CD-based installment in the series and first 3D polygonal installment in the series. A spectacular achievement of the time, both technically and in terms of storytelling. Introduced Materia, which have made an appearance in a couple of other Final Fantasy games. Used Active Time Battle, brought to life in animated 3D rather than relatively static 2D for the first time.
• Final Fantasy VIII: First installment to have realistically proportioned characters. Outlandish character development system in which character level was less important than the Guardian Force (summon) you had equipped on the character, and what magic spells you had Junctioned to stats. An unpopular installment due to its initially baffling and easily gamed mechanics, but a solid story and visually very impressive for the time. Used Active Time Battle.
• Final Fantasy IX: A supposed "return to the roots" of the series, featuring less realistically proportioned characters but maintaining the polygonal characters on pre-rendered backdrops aesthetic of VII and VIII. Brought back the "learn things by equipping stuff" system, this time with abilities attached to equipment. Used Active Time Battle.
• Final Fantasy X: First entry on the PlayStation 2, and first entry to have full 3D polygonal environments both on the field and in battle. Also first entry to have voice-overs, which also meant the end of being able to rename your characters — except for the protagonist, whom no-one ever said the name of throughout. Did not use Active Time Battle, instead using a turn-based system with a manipulable turn order called Conditional Turn-Based Battle. Also eschewed traditional levelling in favour of the "Sphere Grid" system, which allowed either a little or a lot of control over character development depending on if you chose the original or "advanced" version at the outset of the game.
• Final Fantasy X-2: First direct sequel in the series. Returned to Active Time Battle, but revamped it with variable length turn bars. Also brought back the Job system, but revamped it with the ability to change Job in mid-battle. First non-linear entry in the series, with the whole world map open from the outset and the freedom to tackle challenges in whatever order you want, level and gear permitting. Also featured multiple endings according to how much optional content you saw.
• Final Fantasy XI: First massively multiplayer installment in the series. First entry since the original Final Fantasy to feature a player-created character. First entry to use a freely rotatable over-the-shoulder camera rather than fixed camera angles. First entry to feature pretty-much-kinda-sort-of-real-time combat.
• Final Fantasy XII: First single-player installment to feature MMO-style pretty-much-kinda-sort-of-real-time combat. First truly open-world single-player Final Fantasy in which it was possible to run from one end of the world to the other without having to go to a separate "World Map" screen. First (and only) use of the License and Gambit systems, allowing for a considerable amount of character customisation and tweaking of party members' AI respectively.
• Final Fantasy XIII: First PlayStation 3 entry in the series. First use of Paradigm system, allowing for switching of roles in mid-battle — though these weren't the old Jobs from past installments. Changed focus in battle from micromanaging turn-based combat to switching your party lineup (and, consequently, abilities) to respond to situations. Had a lot more tactical depth than people in the last few years gave it credit for.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2: Built on XIII's base systems and mixed things up a bit with two fixed party members and a third slot taken by recruitable, trainable, nameable monsters. Featured an absolutely baffling non-linear time-travelling storyline, showing everyone that XIII's linearity perhaps wasn't such a bad thing after all. First Final Fantasy to have DLC. (Oh, yay.)
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: First second sequel in the series. First game to focus exclusively on one character (with the arguable exception of Final Fantasy XI, though you try doing anything solo in that game). Featured a Job-like system where you could change outfit in mid-combat for access to different abilities, and each outfit had its own independent Active Time Battle-esque bar. Allowed free movement and dodging in combat. Featured a non-linear, time-limited structure designed to be replayed.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Second attempt at a massively multiplayer installment in the series. Massively ambitious — too much so. Gave players a great deal of freedom but not enough direction. Had a seamless open world. Technically impressive — if you could run it — but a disastrous failure.
• Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn: The most impressive "phoenix from the ashes" I've ever seen. A Realm Reborn ditched its predecessor's more unconventional aspects and adopted a more traditional MMO structure with a heavy focus on matchmaking cooperative content and a Job system in which you could individually level Jobs as if they were completely different characters. The most story-heavy MMO I've played for some time, and a true love letter to fans of the series, with guest appearances from characters including Gilgamesh, Ultros, Shantotto, Lightning and numerous others. Expanded by Heavensward.

So as you can hopefully see from that breakdown, Final Fantasy has consistently reinvented and updated itself with each installment. While the entries between IV and IX all used the Active Time Battle system for their battles, their core progression mechanics were very different to one another. And from X onwards, the series became considerably more experimental with both battle and progression mechanics; its only look back to the "line up in a row and take it in turns to hit things" approach was X-2, and even that did plenty of interesting things with the basic format.

Now we've established that Final Fantasy has been pretty consistently inventive throughout its considerable lifespan, XV's approach doesn't seem quite so scary a change. And it seems even less scary when you actually play either the Episode Duscae demo that came out around the time of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD — we didn't even get into spinoffs in the list above, otherwise we'd be here all night — or the recently released Platinum Demo, which primarily acts as a showcase for the game's engine and basic mechanics.

My friend Chris described Final Fantasy XV's approach to combat as taking the philosophy behind turn-based combat and applying it to a real-time depiction. This is why you don't button-mash — you hold a button down to attack. You have time to consider what you're doing rather than hack-and-slash. You have limited resources to use for casting spells or defending. The strategy is there, it's just in a slightly different form to what we might be used to.

And, having spent some time with both Episode Duscae and Platinum Demo, I'm convinced. The fluidity of the combat animations and how seamlessly you can switch from one weapon to another mid-combo is sure to make for some interesting battles, and once party members and more spectacular abilities start coming into play I don't doubt we'll be seeing some truly exciting setpieces, of which the battle with Behemoth in Episode Duscae is just a tame example.

Final Fantasy may not be what it used to be, then, but it's never really been "what it used to be", because it's reinvented itself with each and every installment. Embrace and enjoy the change — XV genuinely does look like it's going to be a real work of art when it's finally with us at the end of September, and I for one can't wait to get my hands on it.

Or, if you really can't deal with Final Fantasy doing new things… well, there's always Bravely Default, which absolutely is doing what Final Fantasy used to do, and I say that with great fondness.

The post 2265: Final Fantasy XV's Going to Be Something Special appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I cleared Megadimension Neptunia VII's True Ending path this evening, after a horrible moment where I thought I hadn't triggered it and would have to do the whole thing through again (which is actually not quite as monumental an undertaking as you might think) — and I was very impressed with one of the most satisfying finales I've seen in a story-based game for quite some time.

Mild spoilers ahead.

At the core of MegaNep's overarching narrative is the story of Uzume Tennouboshi, a new character to the series who, like the series regulars, embodies a games console — in this case, Sega's ahead-of-its-time Dreamcast. For those unfamiliar with their gaming hardware history, the Dreamcast was a 128-bit console that came out towards the tail end of the console generation that was primarily 32- and 64-bit: that of the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. It was astronomically powerful in comparison to its contemporaries and was home to some wonderful games, many of which are still fondly remembered today. But for one reason or another, it was regarded as a commercial failure, and both it and its games dropped out of mainstream distribution after just a couple of years, with the 128-bit era only starting in earnest once the PlayStation 2 shattered all expectations of what console gaming was all about following its launch in 2000.

Uzume's identity and background is initially a mystery to Neptune and company, but over the source of MegaNep's complete story, her past comes to light. Having once been a goddess to what is now Neptune's domain of Planeptune, she was voluntarily sealed away due to the fact that she was unable to control her "illusion" power and largely forgotten about; an allegory for the Dreamcast being released onto the market too early and developers and publishers alike arguably not being sure how to make best use of this new power on offer.

The main villain of the piece is revealed very late in the story to be the darker side of Uzume, representing her irrational hatred and bitterness at feeling abandoned by her people. Through a complicated series of happenings too twisty-turny to describe in detail here, Neptune and her friends eventually manage to help Uzume come to terms with her past and realise that her memories have become tainted by hatred and regret; her people, in fact, loved her and cherished her, and it was with a heavy heart that they saw her sealed away for the protection of everyone.

There are two endings to MegaNep: one in which Uzume sacrifices herself to ensure her dark counterpart is not able to send a horde of monsters from her delusional "Heart Dimension" into Neptune's Hyper Dimension, and another in which Neptune and her friends refuse to leave her to die, and ultimately help her to overcome her darkness. This latter one is the True ending, and it demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the team at Idea Factory and Compile Heart hold the Dreamcast in considerable esteem; the truth about Uzume's past is described with such a wonderfully warm feeling of fondness that it's hard not to feel extremely nostalgic if you happened to be there when it all happened in our world, and the Neptunia series' biggest strength — characterisation and the feeling of bonds between these characters — really shines through as everyone expresses their love for Uzume and she, likewise, expresses her love for them.

What also made the ending satisfying, aside from this wonderfully genuine-feeling appreciation for the Dreamcast and its games, was the Neptunia series trademark "Thank You Corner", where the cast completely break the fourth wall and address the player directly, thanking them for playing and showering them with praise for beating the game. This is always a lovely moment in every Neptunia game, but in the case of MegaNep it feels particularly heartfelt; it's obvious that the words coming out of the mouths of the characters are actually those of the series' creators, expressing their gratitude for the series having gone from strength to strength over the years, overcoming the adversity of its early installments' poor reviews, widespread ignorance from the press and self-professed RPG "experts" that persists to this day, and ultimately becoming a genuinely rather wonderful franchise that I really don't want to see the back of any time soon.

In many ways, it was like a "curtain call" for the game, and while previous Neptunia games have handled this in much the same way, there was something about this moment in MegaNep that made it more satisfying and touching than it's ever been before. It's a rare and wonderful feeling for a creative work to seem like it's talking directly to you, but the Neptunia series has always felt that way, and never more so than with Megadimension Neptunia VII.

Onwards to the post-game, then; I have trophies to clean up and Colosseum battles to fight! (And in the meantime, I promise I'll find something new to write about soon.)

The post 2233: MegaNep's True Ending: A Love Letter to the Dreamcast, and to the Player appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, I finally finished Megadimension Neptunia VII for the first time. Took about 62 hours or so in the end; that was taking it fairly leisurely through the game and taking the time to unlock stuff here and there that I perhaps didn't need to do on a first playthrough. Next up for me is a New Game Plus run in which I go for the "true" ending, which leads on to a post-game segment during which you can clean up any bits and pieces you didn't finish off first time around. Or trophy hunt.

For now, though, I want to talk about my experiences with the game after a complete playthrough.

The first thing to say about the game is that, as I've mentioned before, this is Compile Heart's finest work to date. There are no significant technical issues beyond a couple of very minor frame drops in a few places; the script and translation is excellent (although there are a few more typos than there should be); and the gameplay is satisfying, enjoyable and well-balanced.

The first and last points there address two of the biggest criticisms the Neptunia series has had since its inception. From the original PS3 game onwards, the series — and Compile Heart's work in general — had been plagued with technical issues, most notably atrocious framerates that weren't really justifiable given the relative simplicity of the graphics compared to bigger-budget titles that ran a whole lot better. And, again, from the original game onwards, game balance has been an off-and-on problem: the original game (and the total overhaul Re;Birth1) was inconsistent in its difficulty, erring on the side of "suddenly way too hard" without warning; sequel mk2 and its Re;Birth counterpart was much too easy (and rather short, although it does still have the widest variety of endings in the series); Victory and Re;Birth3, meanwhile, got the closest to nailing the formula, but still had a few elements that could be a bit of a pain, most notably the heavily RNG-based Scout system.

So how does MegaNep counter these original problems? Well, in the case of the technical issues, it seems that Compile Heart is significantly more comfortable developing for PS4 than PS3. MegaNep runs at a pretty consistent 60fps pretty much all of the time; the only time it drops is in particularly busy scenes such as the "sakura"-style dungeons with cherry blossoms everywhere. MegaNep is even an improvement over the company's last game Omega Quintet, which ran very nicely in battle scenes, but which juddered a little bit in the (admirably large and sprawling) field areas. It's not going to win any awards for looking amazing, of course, but the graphics are perfectly acceptable and, as is the norm for the series, the character models and animations are very nice indeed.

As for the gameplay balancing, Compile Heart really feel like they've nailed it this time around. At no point did I feel like the game was too easy or too difficult, and progression was paced well. It's not a game that you need to grind to level 99 to be able to beat the last boss, either; my clear party consisted of characters between levels 40-60 (Nepgear being the highest at 60, not that I show her any favouritism, nosirree) and they dispatched the last boss without any difficulty. In other words, it's a game that you can stumble your way through from start to finish without running into too much trouble, but if you go a little off the beaten track from the linear storyline, there are plenty of ways to challenge yourself — and plenty of things to do in New Game Plus, too.

The game systems, having been significantly revamped from the Victory/Re;Birth formula, work extremely well. Skills don't feel over- or under-powered, and the basic combo attacks each character can perform are actually useful for things other than building up the EXE Drive meter now, too. Each character feels unique, too, with a variety of different skills, weapon types, combo arrangements and multi-person formation attacks to play with; there are a clearly number of "optimal" party setups that provide you with the most flexibility in terms of formation and partner moves in particular, but the systems are balanced well enough that you can take pretty much any combination you like into battle and have a good time. Oh, and while there are a few recycled dungeons from past games — it's series tradition by this point — there's also a ton of brand new, original content, including the wonderfully inventive (and infuriating) Neplunker dungeons as well as the mapless Senmuu Labyrinth.

Now, narrative and characterisation has never really been an issue for the Neptunia series, though my one criticism has been that it tends to have slightly weedy finales, particularly the final boss fights, which have previously been quite underwhelming at times. Pleasingly, MegaNep's finale (at least in the ending I got) is spectacular, dramatic and even emotional; it really tugs on the heartstrings as you see what these characters — characters who many players have spent many hours with — are going through to resolve the latest crisis.

The story in general is very good; split into three distinct acts, each with their own focus and expanding scale, it's interesting, enjoyable, varied and clever. It's not a rehash of the previous games' stories at all and it has worthwhile things to say, but it's never forgotten the series' roots in satire and parody. It's laugh-out-loud funny in places, tearjerkingly emotional in others. It's the best script the Neptunia characters have ever had to work with, and, like so much else about this game, feels like such a magnificent step up from the previous games that it's a delight to see. I'll talk more about this after I've seen the "true" ending and how it resolves things in an alternative manner.

In other words, it's not just a great Neptunia game, it's a great RPG, period. The only thing that saddens me is the fact that so many people will write it off without even giving it a shot for themselves; still, I guess that makes it all the more special for those of us in the know who can enjoy and appreciate it, both on its own merits and as, to date, the absolute pinnacle of the series.

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The post 2228: MegaNep: Thoughts After a First Playthrough appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's been a lot of discussion over this topic on Twitter recently, thanks in part to the recent release of Fire Emblem Fates and its somewhat controversial localisation by Nintendo of America. There's a lot of noise and ill-informed opinion being thrown around by both "sides" of the debate, so I thought it would be a good time to stick my own oar in and muddy the waters still further.

There are basically two sides to the argument over Fire Emblem specifically. It's actually a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of simplicity we'll look at two core beliefs.

On one side, you have people who are arguing that they want a literal, authentic recreation of the Japanese original, only in the English language. They want character names to stay the same; they want conversations to unfold in the same way; they want all the same content that the Japanese players had in the game.

On the other, you have people who are arguing that during the localisation process, changes are both necessary and inevitable in order to fit the needs of the new market. The exact definition of these needs varies according to who you speak to — some suggest it's to do with a corporation (Nintendo of America in this case) wanting to continue curating a very specific brand image, while others suggest it's a cultural thing: things that are acceptable, palatable or recognisable to the original Japanese audience may mean nothing to an English-speaking demographic.

Both sides have their points. I've enjoyed localised games that err very much on one side or the other. Slice-of-life visual novels, for example, very much benefit from remaining true to the original Japanese as much as possible: interpersonal relationships in particular unfold in very different ways in Japan, and maintaining things like the honorifics in a text help to reflect the different ways people defer to one another according to perceived social hierarchy. Along the same lines, role-playing games that are very much steeped in Japanese culture — the Persona series is a good example — also benefit from remaining as true as possible to the original Japanese script as much as possible, since, like visual novels, the relationships between characters are often dependent on Japanese societal norms rather than Western ones.

On the other side of the fence, some more drastic localisations have been very good, too. Few people would argue that the Ace Attorney series is extraordinarily well written in its English incarnation, but it's very different to its Japanese counterpart, largely because a lot of the puns and jokes in the original Japanese simply wouldn't make sense in English. Same with the Neptunia series, whose original translation by NIS America is the source of some ire for more die-hard fans, but which has also remained the standard by which the series continues to be localised today. And the same with Final Fantasy XIV, whose floridly Shakespearean script was so good in English a lot of the changes actually ended up backported into Japanese.

Personally speaking, my priority for the most part is getting to play games that I wouldn't otherwise have the chance to play. I don't like content being cut and I don't like feeling that the experience I'm having is noticeably inferior to the Japanese original, but if it's a game I want to play and the changes are relatively unobtrusive — Dungeon Travelers 2 is a good example, since this is technically "censored" in places through the modification of a few images, but the changes are minor at best, and the game probably wouldn't have seen release if they hadn't been made — then I'll happily support the efforts of companies who attempt to bring games over as unscathed as possible.

I can't say I feel massively strongly about Fire Emblem Fates in particular because I have no real attachment to the series, but there are a number of issues with the localisation that I really don't like. One is the removal of content that wasn't offensive in the first place — the "head-patting" minigame, which is a reflection of the Japanese tendency to use head-pats as a sign of affection — not necessarily attraction or lust — between characters. Another is the outright butchering of the script that has taken place in a number of parts, most notably the support conversation between two characters which was an in-depth discussion of finding common ground, honour among thieves and whatnot in Japanese, but which has been replaced with four screens of them going "…" to each other in English. That is not, in any way, acceptable localisation, because it's completely changing the original intent of the scene.

Now onto the point I wanted to make with the title of this post: the "localisation means changes" brigade have a couple of favourite arguments. Let's take them in turn.

You want a literal translation? Run the script through Google Translate and see how you like it.

This is by far the most common, and it's based on a flawed assumption: the fact that people asking for a "literal" translation are literally asking for a literal translation, when they're not. In a way, it's their own fault for using the word "literal" perhaps incorrectly; "authentic" or "true to the original" might be a better description, but "literal" is the term that people tend to prefer to use, so let's stick with that for now.

No, as I discussed above, the people who want a "literal" translation are not asking for the text to be run through Google Translate, because, among other reasons, the differences in grammar between languages butchers the original intent of the scene beyond all recognition. What they are asking for is the scene to be correctly translated into its closest possible English equivalent, without any changes based on perceived appropriateness according to Western cultural norms. What they are also asking for is the maintaining of the text's "Japaneseness" as much as possible: that means maintaining the use of honorifics and concepts with no direct translation such as senpai and the use of onii-san/onee-san to people who aren't your brother/sister.

That's not a particularly unreasonable ask, is it? Doesn't that show a degree of respect to the original creators, an awareness of your audience and also has the added benefit of potentially teaching people about another culture? Some games actually run with this concept; visual novel Steins;Gate, for example, features an interactive hyperlinked glossary of Japanese terminology used in the game, including Japanese Internet memes and slang as well as more widespread cultural concepts.

So no. People asking for a "literal" translation aren't asking for the script to be fed through the mangler that is Google Translate. So stop responding to arguments they aren't making.

You want the authentic experience? Just learn Japanese. Oh, I forgot, learning a language is more difficult than complaining.

The whole point of localisation is so that new audiences have access to works from other cultures. Through a culture's art, we can learn about them, understand them, appreciate them — or, in some cases, be happy with what we've got ourselves! By mangling the cultural authenticity of a text, be it by inserting random Internet memes — which not only spoil the character of the piece in most cases, they also date it horribly — or by stripping out elements that made it authentically "Japanese" in the first place, you're doing a disservice to the original work, and to the audience who wants to know more about another culture that they find fascinating.

Moreover, a lot of people who argue in favour of drastic localisation changes are the same people who are constantly bleating on about buzzword of the moment "diversity" — used here to mean "celebrating anything that isn't by a white man". Isn't stomping all over the text of another culture using Western sensibilities the very antithesis of the "diversity" that seems to be the Holy Grail among progressive types at the moment?

Anyway. Asking people to learn Japanese isn't a terrible argument: not only does it let you play the original versions of localised games, it also gives you access to a huge library of titles that never make it across the ocean. But it's also not a particularly practical option for a lot of people. Japanese is a complicated language that takes a long time to learn, and some people simply don't have the right kind of mindset to effectively study a new language, particularly if they're a little older and their brain finds it more difficult to take in entirely new language-related information. Should people who are unable to study Japanese for whatever reason be denied access to authentic experiences? No, of course not.

I've seen both sides of this argument unfolding recently and it's frankly getting rather tiresome — mostly because many of the arguments, as we've seen above, are based on mistaken assumptions. This has been a worryingly growing trend over the last few years, and it's this, in part, that has led to the overwhelmingly negative atmosphere a lot of online interactions carry over their heads these days; everyone is afraid to offend everyone else.

In this instance, I would be inclined to defer to the opinions of people who passionately consume Japanese games and other media, and who want an authentic experience from their localised material. It's not as if we're short of Western experiences for people who find heavily Japanese titles "too Japanese" or otherwise inaccessible for some reason, and ultimately keeping things as true to their original form as possible helps everyone to understand each other that little bit better, which is surely the best possible outcome to all this.

But I'm sure this argument will keep raging and no-one will pay any attention to what I've said here, so what do I know…

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Anyway, Ar Tonelico II. It's… well, fantastic. I must confess to having not been as immediately smitten with it as I was the first game, as the conflicting art styles between the field and battle sprites (and between the field sprites of the first game and the second game) were initially a little jarring. (Seriously, everyone has really, really big hands and massive feet on the field maps and it's very disconcerting to begin with.) But after not very long at all, I found myself looking past this rather superficial consideration and immersing myself in what turned out to be a very pleasingly deep and meaningful story packed with good characterisation and questionable translation from the original Japanese. (On that note, though, the translation was at least understandable despite a few errors, and certainly no worse than some visual novels I've played.)

Spoilarz Ahead

Ar Tonelico II stands on its own, but also fits into the current "trilogy" as the sort of "dark middle episode". Whereas the first Ar Tonelico was rather bright and breezy most of the way through, the land of Ar Tonelico II is a bit bleaker. The people are struggling, there isn't enough land for everyone and everyone is clinging to the seemingly hopeless desire that the land's Holy Maiden will be able to create "Metafalica" — a verdant green land summoned through the use of Reyvateil Song Magic. Plenty of political machinations and backstabbings threaten to fuck everything up completely (and pretty much do on several occasions over the course of the entire narrative) but, this being a JRPG, our plucky band of heroes are there to wander the lands, right wrongs and eventually figure out how in the world they are going to help everyone find hope for the future.

Ar Tonelico II's story is nice in that it isn't quite the clichéd "Big Bad wants to destroy the world" business. Sure, there's world-threatening stuff going on and the eventual aim of the game is to save the world from an unpleasant fate, but it's not quite what you might expect. For starters, you spend most of the game not being quite sure who the "good" and "bad" guys are. There's no sign of a single easily-identifiable antagonist who is fucking shit up and needs a good Omnislash to the face; no white-haired pretty boy accompanied by tubular bells and organ music every time he appears. In fact, over the course of the narrative, none of these characters are presented as one-dimensional — most of them go through some sort of change and/or growth as the story progresses.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ar Tonelico II in this regard is the fact that the final boss "Mir" from the first game is actually a party member in the second — though you don't know this when you first meet her, and in fact it's entirely possible to go through pretty much the whole game without noticing this or figuring it out, depending on the choices you make and the optional events you witness. Not having played the first game won't affect your enjoyment of the second, but if you have played the first game, the moment where you find yourself going "Wait… OH. Mir?!" is a "big reveal" on a par with Darth Revan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or SHODAN's first appearance in System Shock 2.

Herein lies one of the interesting things about the first two Ar Tonelico games in general: "good" and "evil" aren't absolute. In Ar Tonelico, we get some insight into why Mir is the way she is and why she is so angry about everything — and it's easy to find yourself sympathising with her rather than just wanting to kick her ass. In Ar Tonelico II, by spending some time with her as a (relatively) normal person, we get to find out a whole lot more about her — what happened to her in the distant past, what led her to her actions in the first game, and how she feels about what has happened to her then and since. If you follow her "route" through to its complete conclusion in Ar Tonelico II, it's a really wonderful story arc for one of the most interesting, troubled characters I've encountered in a very long time. I don't yet know if she shows up in Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third game, but I'll be very happy to see her again if she does.

The overriding theme of the Ar Tonelico series is that of bonds between people, and this is particularly apparent in the second game. The main theme of Ar Tonelico II's story is that the more intense a relationship between two or more people, the more painful it is. The more people you surround yourself with, the more "alive" you feel from being part of something bigger than yourself, but the more pain you suffer when you lose those precious people. The world-ending chaos at the end of Ar Tonelico II is not brought about by a desire for dominance or a display of power, but instead out of a simple desire to not feel that sharp pain of loss any longer. If everyone was able to abandon their physical bodies and live on purely as an individual spiritual entity, the primary antagonist's theory goes, no-one would have any need for other people, no-one would feel the pain of loss, and everyone would be happy in their complete and total individuality. But, responds the protagonist, no-one would be truly alive then. Life would not have meaning drawn from the people around you and the hardships you work together to overcome. You'd be little more than data.

It's an interesting and somewhat bittersweet message, but it works hugely well in the context of both the overarching plot and the smaller, individual character-led stories that unfold over the course of the whole game. I'm all for exploring deep and thought-provoking themes through interactive entertainment, and Ar Tonelico II successfully achieves that without sacrificing the "spectacular" side of its overall experience. It's still recognisably a JRPG with all the over-the-top pyrotechnics and anime-style special attacks that entails, but at the same time it's a complex and emotional tale far beyond the "Evil Guy Is Over There, Go Stab Him" trope that people (largely incorrectly) assume still characterises the genre.

In other words, just go play it, all right?

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Let's take the stage I've got up to now — "Phase 2" in game terms. In the first Ar Tonelico, the change from Phase 1 to Phase 2 marked the point where you were out of the "exposition" chapter and into the plot proper. Phase 2 was also the point where you had to choose between the two heroines, and then had two completely separate (but related) storylines to follow along with. The paths then reconverged towards the end of Phase 2 and remained together for the (completely optional) Phase 3, which offered the "true" ending of the game.

Phase 2 in Ar Tonelico II is a bit different. Rather than, like the first one, being set in the same locations and simply branching off in two different directions, Phase 2 of Ar Tonelico II takes place in a completely different area that works completely differently to the environment you've spent the previous 12 hours in. The early part of the game is, aside from its many and varied peculiar gameplay systems, relatively conventional — you visit towns and do stuff in them, then you go to dungeons. Then you go back to towns. And so on. The linear plotline is broken up by an optional "hunting" sidequest in which you can track down various "I.P.D."-infected Reyvateils to add to your "Girl Power" arsenal (I'm not even going to get started explaining that, I'll be here all day) but for the most part, you're doing the usual JRPG business.

Phase 2, meanwhile, takes place in an environment that changes according to your choices. Early in the Phase, you're introduced to a new mechanic known as the Infelsphere. This virtual world works in a similar way to the "cosmospheres" found inside the heroines' minds, but rather than reflecting their inner turmoil and anxieties, the Infelsphere represents the relationship between the two heroines and how they understand each other. Events unfold in the Infelsphere in which you have to make choices as to how to respond, and the choices you make in the Infelsphere subsequently affect what parts of the "real world" open and close to you. Your eventual goal is to get to a specific location by navigating your way through a maze of these pathways that open and close according to how the Infelsphere events unfold, with each point on the path containing some sort of "trial" to overcome. This might be as simple as defeating a monster, or it might be a challenge such as successfully smuggling biscuits past the penguin-like "Pippen" creatures.

Thematically, in each of these trials, you're "proving your love" to one of the heroines, which subsequently provides you with keys to unlock new events in the Infelsphere, and so it continues. It's a really peculiar, really interesting structure that not only offers some unconventional JRPG gameplay in the "real world" sections, but also provides some intriguing insights into the characters and the way they respond to various situations in the Infelsphere component.

You'll notice I haven't really mentioned the plot in this description, and that's deliberate, as discussing the plot surrounding all this would be a massive spoiler, so I'll spare you that — for now, anyway. What I am finding particularly pleasing about Ar Tonelico II as a whole, though, is that even if it didn't have a compelling plot and awesome characters — which it does — it would still have rock-solid gameplay with an absolute bucketload of things to do. It is just one of the many, many examples out there that prove JRPGs are far more than the "ATTACK, MAGIC, ITEM"-fests that ill-informed detractors of the genre assume these games still are.

They haven't been that way for a long time, people. So if you haven't played a JRPG since Final Fantasy VII I strongly recommend you check out what the genre has done since then — you might just be very pleasantly surprised by what you find.

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In the original Ar Tonelico, we were introduced to the basic combat system; then the way it worked when you have the magic-using Reyvateil characters in your party; the Dive system, in which you could explore the inner recesses of the heroine's mental "cosmosphere" worlds; the "bedtime conversations" system whereby the protagonist and the heroines could get to know each other a bit better (and subsequently unlock deeper levels in the cosmosphere); the "Grathmeld" crafting system, whereby you could take all the junk you'd acquired from the hundreds of NYO?!s you'd killed and turn them into various items, then enjoy some amusing scenes as the heroines try and convince you to let them name the item something ridiculous; and the "Install" system, whereby you're able to insert crystals into the heroines (and yes, they relish the opportunity for innuendo inherent in this process) to power up their various abilities and customise the effect of their spells.

In Ar Tonelico 2, meanwhile, we're first of all introduced to a new and rather odd combat system in which the two sides in the combat alternate attacking and defending for a set period of time — when attacking, you have to press buttons corresponding to the party member you'd like to attack and combine it with a directional button to do a specific move; when defending, you have to time button presses carefully to protect the back-line Reyvateil "mages" from attack, if they're present. The way the Reyvateils work is then introduced — a weird meter in the corner of the screen reflects what they want the front line to do, and fulfilling their demands provides bonuses, helping them to cast more effective spells more quickly. Then, once again, we have the Dive system, which works largely as it did before, albeit with a lot more multiple-choice bits where you have to say the right thing to proceed. Then we have the "I.P.D." system, whereby part of the plot dictates that you have to subdue and capture Reyvateils that are infected with I.P.D., which hasn't been explained yet. Then we have a slightly different crafting system, whereby certain items can only be crafted in certain places (you can only make food in a restaurant kitchen, for example), and the same recipe has different outcomes depending on which heroine you get to help.

Then things get a little odd. "Dualstalling" replaces the "Install" system from the previous game, and is the only way of levelling up Reyvateils, who no longer gain experience normally. Instead, at regular opportunities, you have to let them take a bath in water infused with crystals you've collected or purchased. During the bath (which looks rather large and luxurious, I must say), they wander around a bit, and if they pass over one of the crystals they dropped in, they gain a temporary special effect until the next time they bathe. And if you drop in toys (bath toys, you pervert) and scented oils, different effects might emerge. Oh, and if both heroines are bathing together, they'll often chat about things, too, which helps improve their "sync" value, which in turn helps them fight more effectively together in combat.

Then we have the "Dive Therapy" system, which I was introduced to in tonight's session. Now the subdued I.P.D.-infected Reyvateils have a purpose — they can be "cured" by one of the characters, who is a Dive therapist. Indulging in Dive Therapy involves talking to the Reyvateil and attempting to manipulate her mood to its ideal level on a meter at the top of the screen. Administering various treatments can affect the rate at which this meter changes with each response you give to their statements. Some responses increase the meter, others drop it, and each infected Reyvateil has a "sweet spot" where the meter needs to be in order to be cured.

That's not all you can do with them, though. The cured Reyvateils then bugger off and scatter themselves around the world to form a fan club for one of the heroines, and their affection for her increases as they see her doing cool stuff. When their affection maxes out, they will help out — exactly how, I'm not sure yet, but we'll see.

Oh, and also through the "Girl Power" system you can "equip" rescued Reyvateils to help the protagonist out in various ways. They then level up and improve their abilities and… waah, my head hurts.

All these weird and wonderful mechanics may sound overwhelming, but they're introduced at just the right rate. You're shown a new concept, then given a period of time in which to explore it in practical terms. Then another one comes along, and you can explore that. And so it continues. The nice thing is that only a few of these mechanics are "spoiled" in the game's manual, meaning the existence of things like the Dive Therapy system and various other bits and pieces are a nice surprise when you come across them for the first time. (Unless you've read this post first, of course.)

On the one hand, it's nice to be ready for all the game's mechanics and be able to refer back to a manual when you need to. But on the other, it's quite interesting (and oddly liberating) to play a game that trusts you to experiment a bit and figure out what on Earth (Metafalss?) is going on. Take the Dualstalling system, for example — while the help menu in the game explains roughly how it works, it's only by fiddling around with various arrangements of bathtime goodies that you'll figure out the most effective means of letting your mage-ladies wash their stinky bits and level up.

Basically, Ar Tonelico 2's more esoteric features are something you'll either be on board with or not. As you've probably gathered, I love them — and besides, are they really any more weird than summoning giant chariot-riding penis demons by fusing cards together, or sucking the magic out of monsters to somehow attach to your own strength? No. No they're not. So shush.

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Ar Tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica is a surprisingly different beast to its predecessor in many ways. Its Japanese incarnation came out in the same year as the first Ar Tonelico hit Western shores, but it wouldn't be until 2009 that North American and European players would get their hands on it. That actually makes it a surprisingly recent game, released in the twilight of the PS2 era. This might explain why I never really paid it much mind first time around (besides being unfamiliar with the prequel, obviously) — everyone (including me) was already well and truly enraptured by "next gen" by that point, though games like Persona 4 (which also came out in 2009 in Europe) had shown me that the previous generation still had plenty to offer.

The whole Ar Tonelico experience has had a complete overhaul in Ar Tonelico 2. Gone are the distinctly PS1-ish isometric-perspective graphics (though I actually sort of miss them now), replaced with hand-drawn backdrops in towns and a pleasing combination of polygons, flat objects and fixed camera angles to create "3D" dungeons. The sprites, too, have had a bit of a change in aesthetic — they have peculiar, stylised proportions now, which frankly has taken a little adjusting to, but the improved amount of emotive animation on them makes up for the fact that everyone has really, really distractingly massive hands.

The biggest change is in the battle system, however. I liked Ar Tonelico's battle system, as it combined conventional JRPG turn-based battling with an interesting magic system that encouraged you to find creative ways to finish battles "well" rather than quickly. It was a bit repetitive by the end, however, and it was consistently way too easy pretty much all the way through the entire game.

Ar Tonelico 2's battle system, meanwhile, is a completely different beast. It's still sort of turn-based, but not in the same way as its predecessor. Instead, the two sides in the conflict each take turns to attack and defend. When it's your turn to attack, you have a limited amount of time to use your two "vanguard" (front line) characters to attack; when it's your turn to defend you have to carefully time button presses to protect the back line Reyvateils from taking damage. The Reyvateils make demands on you during battle, too, requesting that you perform specific attack moves by pressing the button for the corresponding front line character and a particular direction. Fulfilling these demands gives you various bonuses that make the battle turn in your favour. It's interesting, as it means you have to really concentrate on every battle rather than just mashing the "attack" button, but I'm yet to have a significantly challenging battle to show its full potential just yet.

The "Dive" system makes a return, and is almost identical to its predecessor. You get to know the game's heroines in the real world by talking to them at campsites and inns, then "dive" into their mental "Cosmosphere" world to find out more about their various inner struggles and problems. Overcoming these problems helps them craft new Song Magic which you can then use in battle — plus these are entertaining mini-stories in their own right. Diving is mostly the same, though there are a lot more situations where you're given a choice of responses to a particular situation and must pick the correct one rather than simply following it through.

In "new, weird gameplay mechanics" news we have the new Dualstall system, which replaces the "Install" mechanic from the previous game (which allowed you to boost a Reyvateil's abilities by plugging various crystals into her… spells in a rather suggestive manner). Dualstalling essentially means flinging the game's two heroines into a bath infused with magic crystals, nice-smelling bath oils and bath toys and letting the attached abilities, uh, be absorbed. The heroines will also have a good chat in the bath, so this is a good way of building up their "Sync" gauge, which helps them work together better in battle.

So far I'm about four hours into the new game and enjoying it a lot so far. The change in aesthetic and gameplay style gave me a bit of "culture shock" initially but that thankfully soon faded, and I'm now enjoying the story and characters just as before. It's interesting to note that the game still feels recognisable as an Ar Tonelico game, yet has a different setting (albeit in the same overall world), different characters and different gameplay mechanics. I'm assuming that the third game (which is where the series made the jump to PS3) will be "similarly different", too, judging by a quick flick through the manual.

Further reports as events warrant.

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The most immediately striking thing about Ar Tonelico for a new player coming to it for the first time in 2013 is that it looks old. It's also worth noting that it came out in 2007, so it actually looked pretty old when it first came out. That said, after a few hours of play, the low-resolution isometric-perspective sprite-based graphics cease to matter on a technical level, and the amount of character and personality in them starts to shine through. A friend of mine just noted that the visual style is actually something of a successor to stuff like Secret of Mana and the like and that's a great comparision — I'm kicking myself for not figuring that out sooner.

Outside of the in-game graphics, Ar Tonelico has some absolutely lovely character designs. Lyner may look fairly "generic JRPG hero" in his stylings, but at least he has some personality about him. The two heroines Aurica and Misha are both attractive and appealing in completely different ways, and a plot twist I won't go into here sees you interacting with Misha in both her "spunky young girl" and "equally spunky young woman" forms. The third Reyvateil introduced later in the game also proves herself to be an interesting character in her own right, again with her own unique visual style and "appeal elements".

One of the most interesting things about the game to me — and the thing I'm intending to write about this Wednesday — is the game's multi-route, multi-ending structure. Now, this could very easily be a recipe for disaster, as multiple endings in lengthy RPGs are often a good method to ensure your players won't see all of the awesome story content you made. That's not necessarily a bad thing — it's kind of cool when you can discuss a game with a friend and discover they had a completely different experience to you — but it's also frustrating to some people who like to know they've got everything they can out of a game before moving on.

Ar Tonelico's multiple endings and routes are handled in a rather peculiar manner. There are three "phases" to the game, each of which is a complete story arc in and of itself, complete with final boss confrontation at the end of each. Early in the second "phase", you have the opportunity to go with one of the two heroines and experience their story. Aurica's story gives you an overall view of what is going on in the overarching plot of the game, while Misha's story gives you a more personal view of what is going on with her and how she is relevant to everything. If you play Misha's route first, there are a number of scenes you see completely without context that don't really make sense. If you play Aurica's route, however, you play an important part in these scenes. The two paths then converge towards the end of the second phase, and the game then apparently ends — the credits roll and everything.

There's a twist, though. In a post-credits sequence, you get to run around and do all the usual JRPG "our party's splitting up, say goodbye" business, but once you've done all that, you're presented with another choice: live a happy life with [insert girl you chose here], or refuse to accept that as "the end" and move on. If the latter option is chosen, you find yourself entering a completely optional third phase that is about 20 hours by itself, and which leads to the "true" ending.

Except in that third phase, there are four possible endings, three of which relate to one of the three heroine characters — the latter of whom only becomes a major player in this third phase. The third phase is pretty much identical regardless of which girl you picked earlier, but the very end — if you fulfilled some very precise conditions — allows you to pick between the girl you chose earlier and the new addition. There's also a "bad" ending relatively early in the third phase that basically says "I can't be bothered with all this sidequesting, let's just get this over with".

So that's a total of… hang on… (counts) six endings? Fortunately, there's absolutely no need to play through the game six times to see all of them — instead, you can play through once, save before the "big decision" in phase 2, play one route to either the end of phase 2 or to complete completion in phase 3, then go back and do the other route, stopping wherever you didn't stop first time around. In my case, I played Aurica's route through to total completion, then played Misha's route to the natural end at the conclusion of phase 2. I don't feel like I missed out on anything, and it only required me to play less than 10 hours over and above what I'd already played anyway. And I feel rewarded for having done so — I have a deeper understanding of the story as a whole, and particularly the characters.

So that's Ar Tonelico — a really, really excellent JRPG and surprisingly thought-provoking if you can look past the notorious innuendo (of which there isn't anywhere near as much as people make out). It's also in possession of I think the best soundtrack I think I've ever heard in a JRPG… though I'm about to start Ar Tonelico 2 as I type this, so I may well be revising that statement in the near future!

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The Answer is a curious beast. All the while I was playing it, I had a big question in my mind, appropriately enough. That question was "should this exist?"

It's a fair question. Does it need to exist? I certainly wasn't unsatisfied with the way Persona 3's original story ended, but I was also excited by the prospect of it continuing, which is why I immediately picked up a copy of Persona 3 FES as soon as it came out, despite having bought the original at full price. (Both are still on my shelf. And yes, it has taken me this long to finally get around to actually beating FES. For those who aren't keeping track, FES came out in 2008. It is now nearly 2013.) I was excited by two things: firstly, the prospect of a "director's cut" of the main Persona 3 story, and secondly, by an additional 20+ hours of gameplay that resolved more than a few unanswered questions posed by the ending.

On balance, I think I am glad that The Answer exists, because the story that runs through it and particularly its ending are very satisfying — at least, they are if you've played through all of The Journey beforehand. I just wish that the execution was better.

It's sort of difficult to imagine how they could have done it differently, however. The core concept of The Answer is that the party have trapped themselves in the situation they're in through their own regrets and desires, which means that they're literally stuck in the same place at the same time on the same day until you beat it. This means none of the awesome "life sim" aspect of Persona 3 — no going out and going to school, no balancing whether or not you should go to Track Team or Music Club after school, no hanging out with the drunken old monk in the bar in the evening, no singing karaoke to build up your Courage statistic. Just dungeons. Fighting. Lots of fighting.

I like Persona 3's combat system. (I prefer Persona 4's ability to let you take direct control over all your members, but I still like Persona 3's.) There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of an add-on campaign involving a whole bunch of fighting using what is a very good JRPG combat system. However, what is wrong with The Answer's gameplay is that it is regularly cheap, unfair and controller-flingingly frustrating, particularly when it comes to boss battles, and especially later in the game.

A key part of the Persona 3 combat system is learning the various weaknesses of enemies and then exploiting them to knock them down. Knocking all the enemies in an encounter down at the same time allows the entire party to unleash an "All-Out Attack" for massive damage, so generally speaking your aim in any battle is to knock down the enemies as efficiently as possible to trigger one of these, as they will usually if not finish the battle immediately, they will certainly tip the scales in your favour.

Here's the annoyance with The Answer's bosses, though — many of them have these weaknesses as in The Journey, but they also have passive abilities that allow them a not-insignificant chance of automatically avoiding any attack with the attributes they are weak to. For example, in one encounter there are three enemies — one is weak against fire, another is weak against ice, another is weak against wind. The one who is weak against fire has the "Evade Fire" skill, which means that on a significant number of occasions when you attack it with fire and attempt to knock it down, you will simply miss. The other two also have the corresponding "Evade [x]" skills, making it very difficult to actually knock them over and deal damage. I'm all for a bit of a challenge factor, but because these mechanics are so heavily based on luck rather than skill or strategy, it just felt incredibly cheap any time I died because of them.

To add insult to injury, The Answer's final boss, while spectacular to look at as all good final bosses should be, was almost insultingly easy to beat, making the big finale more of a test of patience more than anything else. Actually, I can't be too mad about this, because if I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to that final battle as I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to numerous other boss battles on a number of occasions earlier in the game, I would have probably been very annoyed. As it happened, I was able to take it down in one attempt, meaning the story kept flowing nicely at the moment when it needed to be pacy.

So after completing the whole shebang I am left with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am happy that I saw the story end conclusively. I am satisfied that I successfully beat a very difficult game. But at the same time I am a little annoyed that a game as brilliant as Persona 3 has been slightly soured in my memory by the amount of annoyance The Answer gave me.

Am I glad The Answer exists? Yes, I think I am. Will I ever play it again? No fucking way!

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I read this piece on Game Informer tonight. It made me cross. If you can't be bothered to read it yourself, the gist of the piece is that Xenoblade Chronicles, one of the best games of the generation (in my humble opinion, anyway) "deserved better than what [Nintendo] forced [it] to be."

To be fair to the author Chris "Warcraft" Kluwe, he does commend the game's strengths: its excellent world, its inventive, creative ideas; even going so far as to say that the game had the potential to be "this generation's Final Fantasy VII". But to say that the Wii "laughs at [developer MonolithSoft's] dreams… and flushes them down the toilet of GameCube-era hardware Nintendo likes to call cutting edge" is a spectacularly blinkered viewpoint.

The fact is, it's unlikely that Xenoblade Chronicles (and its spiritual successors The Last Story and Pandora's Tower) would ever have been released had it not been for the Wii. The Wii's lower demands in terms of asset production means that a sprawling, ambitious game such as Xenoblade Chronicles can be produced on a fraction of the budget of an HD title. Even then, though, MonolithSoft had to cut corners; the "gasping fish mouths bobbing up and down through beautifully crafted dialogue" that Kluwe refers to are a symptom of this.

The sad fact is that Japanese role-playing games are not the unstoppable juggernaut they once were. Where once they were a system seller, now they are a niche interest at best. The "mainstream" has shifted well and truly to the West; even Square Enix's venerable Final Fantasy series is seen as little more than a particularly well-polished curio these days. Big-budget role-playing titles for HD consoles such as Lost Odyssey and, to a lesser extent, titles like Nier (aside: which I'm currently playing and is awesome) struggle to find a substantial audience (compared to "triple-A" titles, anyway) and, by extension, the ability to recoup the enormous spend necessary to craft a beautiful world in high definition and 5.1 surround sound. So developers and publishers simply aren't taking the risk because it's, well, too risky.

But the Wii gives them a platform to make these titles without having to spend as much money and time on the creation of assets. It's not a case of Nintendo "shackling an obviously talented team like MonolithSoft to the ball and chain of the Wii because [they] want to sell waggle" (for just one of many things wrong with that statement, Xenoblade Chronicles features no waggle whatsoever). It's a case of Nintendo giving talented teams the opportunity to do what they do best and then release them to a market of enthusiasts who are still clamouring for these titles. Yes, the Wii has a lot of waggle-based crap. But it also has an impressive library of Great Games That Absolutely Fucking No-One Has Ever Heard Of Ever Because They're A Bit Weird Or Nichey And Have 480p Visuals.

Just because JRPGs don't sell well compared to titles like Call of Duty and Mass Effect doesn't mean that no-one wants to play them any more. In fact, the audience for the genre is probably actually the same size that it's ever been; the difference is that the Call of Duty players have sprung up around them and outnumber them considerably. Given the simple choice between making something that will make fans happy and something that will make a metric fuck-ton of money, the vast majority of publishers will take the latter option. That's simply "good business", and there's nothing wrong with that at all — developers gotta eat, after all. But to deride Nintendo for providing a platform eminently suited to developers who actively want to create niche titles for console — games which often provoke intense passion among their fans (as you can probably tell from this post) — is simply ridiculous.

It's an age-old adage in the games industry that graphics do not maketh the game. Never has it been more true than in this strange period where we have two HD consoles and one SD system. Would Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower have been better games had they been released on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3? Absolutely not. (Pandora's Tower, in fact, would have been considerably inferior due to the fact it actually makes good use of the Wii's unique control scheme.) They would have been better-presented games, sure, but the core gameplay in all three cases is brilliant — and, to add insult to injury, the graphics for all three aren't even what you could possibly describe as "bad" — just low-resolution. There's a difference — sadly, one seemingly lost on many reviewers who describe their visuals as "muddy" or "poor" and, in many cases, knock a point off the final score in punishment. I defy anyone who has stood on the Makna Falls overlook in Xenoblade Chronicles, seen the beautiful afternoon sunlight and shadows in the castle courtyard in The Last Story or stood atop the Observatory gazing towards the Thirteen Towers at sunset in Pandora's Tower to say that these games have "poor" visuals.

As such, I implore those of you who are gamers to stop caring so much about titles having pin-sharp graphics, fully orchestrated soundtracks and a voice cast of Major Hollywood Talent. Yes, these things make games more impressive and exciting to watch and play, but given the choice between a world made up of nothing but HD first-person shooters starring Morgan Freeman (with the world's population of racist teenagers on backing vocals via Xbox Live) and a world where I can play 100+ hours of Xenoblade Chronicles in 480p with a selection of unknown (but excellent) British voice actors, I know which I'd rather spend my time in.

That's just me, though. I illustrate my blog with stickmen, so take my word with a pinch of salt if you wish.

(Edit: Here's an unedited picture of Pandora's Tower running in 480p taken with my iPhone camera. Looks pretty lovely to me.)

The post #oneaday Day 828: It's Time to Get Over the Graphics Thing appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As a European, I was lucky enough to be able to play the Nintendo-published, MonolithSoft-developed Wii role-playing game Xenoblade Chronicles last year. It ended up being my favourite game of 2011, and many North American gamer friends were suitably jealous that I had been able to play it through while they hadn't. I didn't feel too guilty, though, because North America has its own branch of Atlus and doesn't have to depend on other publishers to bring titles like the Persona series over.

But I digress. Xenoblade Chronicles is out tomorrow — April 6 — in North America, and here is why you should play it if you're an American. Or even if you're not.

The Japanese role-playing game genre is often accused of stagnation and a lack of innovation. This is, in fact, not particularly true — even the much-maligned Final Fantasy XIII was trying things which other role-playing titles hadn't attempted before. Okay, they weren't always successful, but it was at least attempting to innovate.

The real issue is actually that for whatever reason, Japanese role-playing games (and, to a certain extent, Japanese-developed games in general) have lost the resonance they once had with the core gamer audience in the West. Players are quick to judge them as clichéd and derivative before moving on to whichever game starring men in armour with guns is the flavour of the week. Specific attempts by Japanese developers to create games that appeal to Westerners end up having limited niche appeal despite their quality (see: Platinum Games' Vanquish, which isn't an RPG but demonstrates the point effectively) or end up being laughable attempts to pander to the Japanese image of what a Westerner supposedly wants (see: The Last Remnant).

Xenoblade Chronicles is a remarkable game because it nails that balance between Western and Japanese sensibilities, making a game that combines the positive aspects of WRPGs (freedom, exploration, a degree of sort-of-non-linearity) with those of JRPGs (stronger storytelling, more memorable, well-defined cast members, a firm sense of being unafraid to continually up the ante). The result is quite brilliant, and a significant step forward for the genre in one possible direction it way wish to take in the future.

The game casts players in the role of Shulk. Initially, he seems like every other teenaged JRPG hero, but a number of aspects make him stand out. He doesn't whine. He's not moody or angsty. He's just a guy, but he has a personality. He has friends, too, who form your early party in the game, and these, too, don't fall into the trap of clichéd character archetypes. This pattern continues throughout the course of the whole game. Even the "small furry thing" character introduced later in the story isn't typically irritating — he's quirky and silly, sure, but his character is defined well, and he proves to be more than just a means through which to provide silly slapstick gags.

The diverse, likeable cast you find yourself travelling with over the course of Xenoblade Chronicles' lengthy adventure provides several highlights to the game experience. Firstly, and most simply, they're a good ensemble cast who help drive the story forward. That's not their only function, however. As you might expect from an RPG, they each have their own role to play (natch) in combat, and finding the best combinations of three characters to take into battle is a key part of the experience. This affects not only your battle effectiveness, but also one of many stats that the game tracks in the background — Affinity.

Affinity is, quite simply, how much characters like each other. Characters with high Affinity with one another fight better alongside each other, but as their relationship develops, they also have the opportunity to participate in numerous "Heart to Heart" events that are scattered around Xenoblade Chronicles' vast world. These short sequences provide the opportunity for two party members — not necessarily including protagonist Shulk — to spend a little alone time with one another and get to know each other a little better. These typically involve multiple-choice conversations, providing the "correct" answers to which will give a big boost to the pair's Affinity with one another. (Giving "incorrect" answers often provides very amusing exchanges and still gives a smaller Affinity boost, however, so you shouldn't feel like you have to reach for the walkthroughs immediately.)

Affinity doesn't just affect combat and unlock Heart to Hearts, however; there's a host of little touches in the game that it affects, most notably during and after combat. Rather than simply yelling individual stock "battle victory" phrases, characters will often have short conversations with one another. This banter between characters is a real highlight of the experience, and while you will have heard everything they have to say a good few times by the end of the game, they remain entertaining and endearing.

Speaking of combat, Xenoblade Chronicles' battle system is a refreshing change from the turn-based systems that Japanese role-playing titles usually adopt. You control a single character out of the three in your active party, and are able to freely move around during combat. You and your party lock on to a single enemy at a time and automatically attack it, though many battles involve multiple assailants. In order to gain the upper hand in battle, it becomes necessary to make use of the unique skills the character under your control has.

Most characters have more skills than it's possible to hold in the "quickbar" at the bottom of the screen, so it becomes possible to customize the way they play to your own personal style. Some skills manage aggro, some attack areas, some provide more damage or inflict status effects when unleashed from beside or behind an enemy. Some skills are dependent on other characters doing things like knocking the enemy down or stunning them, and the AI which controls the other two party members does an absolutely astounding job of keeping up with what you're doing and understanding the strategy you're going for. It's very rare that you will be cursing the game for causing you to fail — more often than not it's a result of you either adopting a poor strategy, or simply needing to go and do something else for a while until you're a little stronger. This doesn't mean you have to resort to grinding, either — inevitably there will be some quests you have missed that you can go back and do, and returning to earlier-visited locations often throws up even more things to do.

Another great thing about the combat is that you can elect to control any of the game's cast in battle, not just Shulk. Each character plays in a significantly different manner to all of the others, so if you find yourself getting bored of the same old skills over and over, simply switch to another character for a brand new experience. Fed up of tanking? Spend some time with Sharla, a ranged character with healing abilities. Or Melia, a magic-user who can summon elementals that either provide ongoing buffs or can be "unleashed" to deal direct damage. Or the aforementioned small furry creature, whose skill names are genuinely hilarious.

Perhaps the strangest but coolest innovation in the combat, however, is the fact that you're occasionally presented with "visions" of the immediate future, usually when a character is either about to die or be afflicted with a debilitating status effect. A countdown timer starts, and you're given the opportunity to either do something to take attention off the enemy's target or warn another party member. If you do the latter, you're able to pick one of the warned character's skills to unleash — usually either a healing or aggro-management skill — and hope for the best. If you do the former, you have until the countdown timer depletes to do something very special, or your party member will suffer their grisly fate. It's a neat system that isn't overused.

Outside of combat, there's plenty to do, too. Exploring each of the game's massive zones rewards you with experience points and uncovers part of the map as you discover each sub-area. There are collectible items scattered around each area at random, with rewards on offer for collecting whole sets. Those who find item-hunting frustrating, however, may instead complete these quests by trading with other non-player characters. There are rare monsters to take down, loot to find, secret locations to discover. Xenoblade Chronicles' world is more than just a pretty backdrop for combat — it's a rich, beautifully-rendered environment in which to spend time, and it looks gorgeous. This may be a Wii title, and it may have been even more lovely to see it in HD, but it doesn't detract from the fact that the hugely-varied vistas you find yourself running and fighting over throughout the course of the game look simply magnificent. There's a waterfall you'll come across partway through the game which is genuinely breathtaking to look at, for example — you'll know it when you see it.

If the game's combat, quests and exploration aren't enough for you, there's also a deep Achievement system to delve into. Since these Achievements aren't online-connected, they're simply there as challenges for you to undertake, and all provide you with experience point rewards. In essence, they're mini-quests (although some will take you the majority of the game to complete) and rarely feel as "gratuitous" as some examples seen on Xbox Live and PSN. Rather, they provide yet another means of getting an enormous amount of entertainment out of an already vast, sprawling title.

This isn't even getting started on the deep crafting system, which allows characters to team up to create enhancements for their weapons and armour, with the results of their collaborative efforts dependent on their Affinity and compatibility with one another. Or the fact that the game allows you to change the time and fast-travel at will, eliminating a lot of the inconvenience and backtracking endemic to the genre. Or the colony-building minigame. Or the fact the voice acting is all British rather than American, giving the game a unique aural aesthetic in a genre typically dominated by whiny teenagers and squeaky-voiced females. Or the fact that when you're all done, you can New Game+ it and do the whole thing again with your levels, Affinity and a suitably broad spread of awesome equipment intact — something I will be doing when North America gets its hands on the game tomorrow.

Xenoblade Chronicles is, in short, a magnificent evolution of the Japanese role-playing game genre. While it's easy to dismiss it as "an offline MMO" or "a Final Fantasy XII wannabe", the reality is something quite different. This is truly a game that is greater than the sum of its already-fantastic parts, and one which will have you bellowing "Now it's Reyn time!" at your friends for months to come.

(Grab yourself a copy soon, though, as this is the kind of game that will get pretty tough to find pretty quick.)

The post #oneaday Day 808: Xenoblade Chronicles is Out Tomorrow, and Here's Why You Should Play It appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant (aka Shadow Hearts II) is, quite simply, a must-play JRPG. Whether you're a devoted fan of the genre or a jaded veteran who decries its supposed lack of innovation in recent years, there is a ton of stuff for you to like in this epic PlayStation 2 title from Nautilus (née Sacnoth).

Let's rewind a moment before we get into specifics. Is it necessary to have played the original Shadow Hearts to appreciate its sequel? As you'll recall, I noted that the previous game hadn't aged hugely well, with its pixelated prerendered backdrops, wooden animations and low-budget voice acting bearing the brunt of the ageing process. It's still a solid game, but those who expect a bit more than a PS1 RPG that runs at 60 frames per second may find themselves suffering from culture shock for a little while — whether or not that culture shock is insurmountable depends entirely on the individual.

To answer the question, though, yes and no. That may be a copout answer, but it's true. Shadow Hearts: Covenant's story stands completely by itself as a self-contained tale, but it also follows on directly from the first game's narrative. There are a number of shoutouts throughout the course of the adventure which refer back to prior events, characters and locations, too, which will delight series veterans. In short, if you can't stomach the old-school sensibilities and aesthetic of the original, you can jump into Covenant without guilt, but those who are willing to play the two games one after the other will have an altogether deeper experience to appreciate.

What makes Covenant a more easily-palatable title than its predecessor, however? Many things, starting with the presentation. Rather than taking the old-school approach of polygonal characters on a prerendered backdrop, Covenant features fully 3D environments, albeit with preset camera angles a la Final Fantasy X. The characters have been infused with a great deal more detail, too, with hair and fur looking particularly good, and some excellent animations thanks to motion capture. Alongside this, the voice acting has been given a kick up the arse, with a full English dub, fully-voiced cutscenes for the more important story scenes and none of the original's corner-cutting. Were it not for the lack of widescreen support, this game wouldn't look out of place today being released alongside titles like Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story.

Like its predecessor, Shadow Hearts: Covenant revels in the fact it has an eccentric cast who rarely fall into standard JRPG tropes. While protagonist Yuri initially appears to be the moody "Squall" type, he quickly shows himself to be a deeply-nuanced character who undergoes some significant development over the course of the story. As he's joined by the other cast members, who include a puppeteer, an exotic dancer/fortuneteller/aromatherapist, a female German World War I officer (whose nationality and occupation quickly becomes completely irrelevant) and a fricking wolf among others, it becomes abundantly clear that we're not dealing with a conventional sort of JRPG setup here. To its credit, the game plays things admirably straight all the way through, which makes its more humorous scenes all the more effective — and proves that it's not afraid to make its characters suffer a little along the way in the name of drama. It doesn't descend into exaggerated melodrama at any point, and for the most part resists the temptation to get too wacky. Characters occasionally make a few "fourth wall"-breaking comments, though these are spread far enough apart to be effective and amusing rather than feeling like the game is going "LAUGH, DAMMIT!" A few characters are a little underdeveloped and underused over the course of the story (and one in particular is introduced much too late to give the player a chance to get to know them as well as the others) but this is a relatively minor niggle — those who are most important to the narrative are well-defined, deep, likeable cast members whom it's a pleasure to spend time with.

An RPG often lives or dies by its story, and thankfully Covenant provides a good one that I won't spoil here. But those who play for the joy of discovering things and building up an unstoppable fighting force won't be disappointed, either, for Covenant provides a brilliant combat system that puts many recent titles to shame. Based around the cool "Judgement Ring" system of the original game whereby successful actions are determined by timed button presses, and featuring multi-character combos, an array of wonderfully silly character-unique abilities and a flexible but simple magic system that allows for the detailed customisation of characters, Covenant is a satisfying game to play even during plot downtime. While each "dungeon" only contains maybe three or four different types of enemy tops (plus a boss, usually), combat is such a joy and the encounter rate is so finely tuned that it never becomes a chore. The fact that grinding seems relatively unnecessary if you take a little time to go and do some sidequests — which are worth doing, incidentally, as they feature some of the best scenes in the game — is also a pleasing development.

In short, the whole thing comes together to create a joyful whole that will keep you busy for about 40-60 hours depending on how much optional stuff you want to do. It's a good length — while it's approximately twice the length of its predecessor, it never feels like it's outstaying its welcome, with a wide variety of locations to explore, treasures to find and creatures to fight. Completionists who like to explore and find all the hidden secrets in a game will be amply rewarded, while those who simply want to charge ahead with the plot won't find themselves punished for wanting to progress.

As I said at the beginning, Shadow Hearts: Covenant is, quite simply, a must-play JRPG. Should you have the opportunity to pick up a copy, do so. I'm disappointed I didn't take the time to explore this series sooner, as it's shot to somewhere around the top of my list of favourite games of all time. I am, however, very glad that I took some time away from the mainstream, from current-generation consoles and from the shitstorm surrounding Mass Effect 3 to immerse myself in a true, underappreciated classic. You should try it, too.

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