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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2383: Fencing with Fairies

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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.

2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition

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I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.

The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.

"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.

That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.

This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

2361: Up to Date on Ys

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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.

2354: They're Both for Monsters

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(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.

2348: I Beat Ys Seven

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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…

2339: Adol Wins Again

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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.

2336: From the Shores of Felghana

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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.

2329: Another Trip Up Darm Tower

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I finished my first playthrough of Ys Origin earlier. I chose to play through for the first time with Yunica Tovah, who apparently handles most like Adol in the subsequent 3D Ys games, but now I'm going through it again with Hugo Fact, who plays impressively differently.

One thing that struck me with Ys II in particular, and it appears to be a pattern that continues with Origin and its ilk, is how much shoot 'em up DNA is in this series. Numerous bosses have distinctly "bullet hell"-style attacks requiring intricate dodging and pattern recognition, for example, but this connection is most obvious when playing Origin as Hugo, since even his basic attack involves firing bullets. Hell, he even has two "options" (sorry, "The Eyes of Fact") floating either side of him to fire additional bullets, which double in number when he uses Boost mode.

It's interesting quite how different a feel this contrasting playstyle provides, since you're otherwise going through pretty much the same levels and boss fights as in Yunica's story, albeit with different cutscenes and a few minor changes here and there. Boss fights in particular are a very different affair when playing as Hugo, since rather than it being necessary to get in melee range as with Yunica, as Hugo you have to play a lot more defensively, attacking from range in suitable openings and taking great care to avoid attacks, since Hugo is considerably squishier than Yunica is. Not only that, but Hugo's individual attacks do quite a bit less damage than Yunica's axe and sword swings, though he makes up for this by being able to attack 1) from a distance and 2) much more rapidly than Yunica.

I'm also playing this second runthrough on Hard difficulty; I'm not quite brave enough for the series' signature Nightmare difficulty yet, but I thought I'd step things up for Hugo, since I felt pretty confident with Yunica by the end of my first playthrough. It's noticeably harder, particularly when it comes to boss fights. I'm not entirely sure if this is down to enemies' boosted stats or simply the different way Hugo plays that I haven't quite gotten used to yet, but I'm finding myself having to retry boss fights more times than I did on Normal with Yunica.

One of the things I like about Ys Origin so far is that although the boss fights are very difficult, I don't think there's been a single encounter in the game where I felt like I was beating my head against a wall. In other words, although I might fail a boss fight several times in succession, I'd make noticeable progress each time, chipping away a little further at the enemy life bar each time until I was eventually successful. It's a matter of practice and skill rather than luck; in some ways, it reminds me quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV raid bosses, where you need to know what's going to happen in the fight before you can even think about being successful; flailing wildly isn't going to work, at all.

Anyway. I'm keen to get through Ys Origin for a second time with Hugo, and then polish it off a third time with the "secret" third character, whose story is quite a bit different from Yunica and Hugo's, from what I understand. By playing all three stories, you get the full narrative; this is an approach that some people find tiresome — particularly if they have to play through the same levels again with a different character, as you do here — but it's something I always enjoy. I really enjoy seeing stories from multiple perspectives, and while Ys is fairly conventional fantasy in many ways, it's well-written, well-localised and features some entertaining, endearing characters, so I'm more than happy to plough through it to see everything it has to offer.

Then after that, there's Time Attack, Boss Rush and Arena Mode, of course, which I'm curious to at least try… so much for being a short game!

2317: 25 Floors Up

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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.