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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One of the things that had me most interested in patch 3.45 for Final Fantasy XIV was the ranking system for the Palace of the Dead dungeon I talked about yesterday. This tallies a score for you whenever you play with a fixed party (be it solo or up to four players) and thus allows you to compare your progress against other players from around the world.

Alongside the introduction of this ranking system came a few rebalancing changes to make soloing Palace of the Dead a lot more practical than it was when it was first introduced; previously, anything above about floor 20 at a push was very difficult if you were by yourself, but now, you can theoretically go up to floor 100 and beyond if you've upgraded your gear enough and your skills are up to snuff.

One of the things I've appreciated about Palace of the Dead since its launch was the fact that since it's largely impossible to "outgear" it — your regular gear has no meaning inside, only your Aetherpool upgrade levels, and even those are capped and synced if they're too high for the floor you're on and the level you are — you had to actually play properly. That means no cheesing mechanics, no standing in AoEs because you have enough HP to just soak them up, and swift punishment if you don't know how to play your job properly and effectively, sometimes in an unconventional party lineup.

Today, I made it to floor 60 solo, initially using Arcanist to go as far as floor 50 (my Arcanist hadn't yet reached level 30 and thus couldn't be upgraded into Scholar or Summoner, but the experience point rewards from completing these floors were enough to get me from 23 to 30 without too much difficulty) and subsequently as Summoner.

Arcanist/Scholar/Summoner aren't classes I've played much in the past, though I found Palace of the Dead's accelerated levelling to be quite a good way to learn how they work. In particular, levelling Arcanist to 60 without Summoner's extra Job abilities was a solid way to learn the basics of how the class worked, then upgrading to Summoner built on that foundation. I am now regretting the fact that I haven't levelled Summoner prior to today, because goddamn, that class is fun.

The reason I picked Arcanist and Summoner to run solo is that they seemed the most naturally geared towards soloing in that they have the option of summoning a tank pet that can maintain the enemies' attention while you cover them in festering boils and fling magic at them. The tank pet doesn't get a lot of use in party play — largely because you normally have an actual human-controlled tank there that can perform the role better than an AI routine — but in Palace of the Dead, Topaz Carbuncle (Arcanist) and Titan-Egi (Summoner) have both proven invaluable, particularly when it comes to the bosses.

And speaking of the bosses, soloing floors 1-60 today has given me a new appreciation of these fights. When tackled in a party of four, they're mostly rather easy (with the possible exception of floor 80's boss, which has been the source of many a party wipe so far), though from floor 60 onwards they do start to have some more interesting mechanics. Solo, however, they all present a pretty formidable challenge as you have to dodge their mechanics, chug potions to keep your health topped up (assuming you're not a healer) and somehow in the middle of all that find time to fling a few damaging abilities in their direction. I'm sure you can already see how helpful a tanking pet would be in this situation!

Thus far the secret to successful soloing seems to be having decently levelled gear — currently mine is around the +64 mark, which has seen me safely to floor 60 so far, and from this point onwards the upgrades from the silver chests are less likely to fail, too, so repeated runs will eventually push it up towards +99, which I suspect will be strongly recommended to tackle floor 80 and onwards.

According to the leaderboards on The Lodestone, no-one on Primal data centre has made it to floor 100 solo yet. I have little doubt that will probably change by tomorrow — I think someone on Reddit from another data centre had done it already — but for now it's fun taking aim for the top spot. And if I don't attain that top spot, well, at least I'll be able to say I've done it.

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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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Final Fantasy XIV's patch 3.45 is coming in early November, and bringing with it an additional 150 floors to the game's current Deep Dungeon, The Palace of the Dead. I am excited.

Palace of the Dead is a great piece of content that I'm pleased has remained popular since its launch. It flips most of the conventions of MMOs on their head and provides something different for people to do, with meaningful rewards and a decent shot of experience points for those levelling alt classes.

Palace of the Dead, in case you're unfamiliar, is a 50-floor dungeon that you tackle in blocks of 10 floors at a time, with a boss on each 10th floor. Each floor consists of a number of rooms arranged in a randomised layout, with an exit portal in one room and a resurrection gizmo in another for if things happen to go south and you don't have a healer. Both of these things are inactive at the start of a floor, so you have to kill enough enemies to turn them on before they can be used.

Some rooms have treasure chests and occasionally monsters drop them too. These come in three different varieties: bronze chests hold consumable items such as Phoenix Downs to resurrect fallen comrades and potions to heal HP; silver chests have a chance to upgrade either your weapon or armour (with the chance getting smaller as they get more powerful) up to a maximum of +30; gold chests reward you with "Pomanders", which are items that have immediate beneficial effects such as increasing your damage, turning all enemies in the nearby vicinity into chickens or frogs, temporarily transforming you into a manticore or removing all the hidden traps on the current floor.

In the last major patch, the Accursed Hoard was also added to Palace of the Dead; these are hidden treasures that have a chance of spawning on each floor. Standing on a spot where a Hoard is hidden reveals it, and if you successfully clear the block of 10 floors, you get one sack per Hoard you found, each of which contains a randomly drawn item from what seems like quite a large selection, ranging from the useless (fireworks) to the very useful (grade V materia) via formerly expensive glamour items.

The thing I like about Palace of the Dead is it takes almost everything the rest of Final Fantasy XIV established in terms of gameplay and throws it out of the window. Item level doesn't matter, stats don't matter and even conventional party composition (one tank, one healer, two damage-dealers) doesn't matter. There's some variation in individual performance according to the upgrade level of your aetherpool gear (which you can only use in Palace of the Dead until it reaches its fully upgraded level of +30, at which point it can be exchanged for a level 60, item level 235 weapon that you can use in the rest of the game) and your character level in Palace of the Dead (which is different to your character level in the rest of the game; you level up at a considerably accelerated rate in the dungeon, but have to reset to 1 every time you restart from floor 1) but otherwise, how well you do in there is entirely down to how well you know how to play your class.

It's interesting to see people realising this for the first time. You can't just ignore mechanics in Palace of the Dead because it's literally impossible to outgear it. You can't stand in area-effect attacks and soak the damage because, again, you can't outgear it. And you can't pull 30 enemies at once and hope to survive because, you guessed it, you can't outgear them. It's all about careful use of your abilities, consumable items and the Pomanders; you have to be constantly aware of the situation of both yourself and your party members, as an unfortunate mistake could lead to a wipe — and if you wipe in Palace of the Dead, you fail that set of floors immediately and have to start again from the last "checkpoint" you reached. (This is particularly heartbreaking if you reach the final boss on floor 50 with 5 Accursed Hoards in your pocket and then wipe because you forgot to pay attention to mechanics.)

The reason I'm looking forward to Patch 3.45 is that it promises not just more of Palace of the Dead, but that its last 100 floors in particular will be very difficult. And not "very difficult" in the sense that the current Savage raids are very difficult — i.e. they get quite a bit easier if you take the time to buff up your gear level — straight up difficult in that you'll have to pay attention, dodge shit and play your class effectively, perhaps in an unconventional party formation.

I'm interested to see quite how they're going to make it difficult. People have been clamouring for difficult ("Savage") four-player content for quite some time now, and Yoshi-P and the team specifically said during the last Live Letter that the lower 100 floors of Palace of the Dead were designed to be just that. What I find particularly interesting is that this is (hopefully) super-difficult content that you don't need to have spent ages preparing to be ready for, because your gear level when you go in doesn't matter; everyone in the entire game, assuming they have Palace of the Dead unlocked (which they can do as early as level 17 rather than having to reach the current cap of 60), has the potential to be a "world first" clear, which is something that has never happened before. Previous "world firsts" in the game were by raiders who were at the absolute top of their game with the best possible gear available, so in most cases it was fairly predictable who the acclaim would go to. With this, however, the title is anyone's.

I'm also intrigued by the proposed ranking system and how it works, since that hasn't been explained in much detail before. We know that there will be rankings for both individuals and parties, and that rankings are stratified by class/job, but we don't know exactly what causes you to score the "points" that determine your place on the rankings. Progress through the floors is a given — the mockup leaderboards we saw during the Live Letter displayed both the floor the characters had got to and their score — but what else will contribute to it? Clear time? Damage done? Kills? Accursed Hoard finds? Treasure chests looted? All of the above?

If they handle this properly, Palace of the Dead has the potential to become an enormously compelling metagame in its own right within the wider context of Final Fantasy XIV, not to mention a great way to learn and level alt classes that you perhaps haven't used much before. I'm very much looking forward to challenging the lower floors of this Deep Dungeon, and hope that it provides a suitable alternative to raiding for those who seek a challenge but perhaps don't have a group, have difficulty getting everyone together at the same time, or simply aren't geared enough.

I guess we'll see soon enough! (Also, I really want to see what happens when you sit on that bench…)

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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.

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.

The post 2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Patch day for Final Fantasy XIV today, and it seems like a good one so far. I haven't yet delved into absolutely everything on offer — partly because I went out for the evening — but what I've seen so far is pretty great.

Of particular note is The Final Steps of Faith, the big new Trial for this patch. This sees players taking on the mighty Nidhogg in a battle to the death as he brings the full force of his rage down on Ishgard and those he believes to have betrayed him.

The Final Steps of Faith is a cool fight, because — at the moment, anyway — it's genuinely challenging, even in its story mode incarnation. It's not excessively difficult by any means — the challenge factor comes from the fact that you actually have to pay attention to mechanics and can't just cheese your way through it. I'm all for this; while there's a certain amount of pleasure in being able to overpower old content with top-end gear, it's always a bit of a disappointment when fights that were once challenging, exciting and dramatic become a matter of simply soaking up all the damage being thrown at you and repeatedly smacking the enemy in the teeth.

I'm sure this situation won't last with The Final Steps of Faith, but for now it's nice to have an important storyline fight carry the appropriate amount of drama for the context.

This got me thinking back to the reasonably hefty amount of time I spent playing World of Warcraft, and how that game never quite got me feeling excited about combat. Things got a little better when I went a bit crazy modding the game's UI and added a "Jukebox" mod that allowed you to play music in combat, but it still never felt quite the same as an exciting encounter in a single-player RPG.

Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, absolutely nails the drama aspect. While the movement-heavy nature of combat means that it's not able to include the sort of cinematic camera work that people have associated with Final Fantasy since VII hit PS1s all those years ago, the combination of amazing music, gorgeously spectacular visual effects and a genuine feeling that you're struggling against a foe of unimaginable power help make the game's most important fights shine as some of the most memorable things I've ever done in a game — and certainly in an online game.

I've now finished the main story (and the enjoyable, optional "post-story" quest, which had a really heartwarming ending) so I find myself pondering what's next for Heavensward. While this patch brings the Dragonsong War plot arc to a close, there are still some unresolved threads that are clearly going to be tugged at further in the next couple of patches, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the stakes will be raised towards some sort of dramatic showdown that will inevitably lead into the next full expansion pack.

And in the meantime, I hear those bloody Moogles need some help with their crafting…

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I got burnt out on Final Fantasy XIV a little while back and haven't felt particularly tempted to go back since — especially since my Free Company had been less than conversational for the last few months, making even the social aspect of the game less worth logging in for than it had been.

At PAX East this week, Square Enix announced an exciting new plan for some future content that has me clamouring to get back to the game once it releases: a new type of activity called Deep Dungeon, which will be familiar to fans of both Final Fantasy Tactics' Midlight's Deep optional dungeon and Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle.

It sounds as if Deep Dungeon is going to be a discrete type of activity for players to participate in, with the eventual plan presumably being to have a number of different dungeons for players to challenge. Initially, there will be just one, called Palace of the Dead.

The reason this excites me so much is because it shakes up the established formula of Final Fantasy XIV — which, don't get me wrong, I like very much, but just needed a break from, thanks to the necessity of grinding the same content week after week in order to obtain the next incremental upgrade. Unlike the current substantial array of static content available in the game, Deep Dungeon has a strong random element, plus a great deal more flexibility than the rest of the game's reliance on the MMO "Holy Trinity" of tank, healer and DPS.

Deep Dungeon sees you and up to three friends tackling a randomly generated dungeon. It also has its own progression system separate from the main game's experience and item levels, mitigating the issue the game currently has of a significant proportion of players outgearing the majority of the current content. The in-game reasons for this are that the dungeon saps your character's strength, and in order to power back up again you'll have to make use of items you find within the dungeon itself, progressing and regaining your strength as you proceed.

If it's anything like Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle — which FFXI veterans inform me, it sounds very much like — then each floor of the dungeon will not only be randomly generated, but it will also have various objectives to complete, as well as challenging boss fights every so often. It sounds like a lot of fun — and I really like the fact that it's seemingly flexible enough to cater to any party makeup from 1-4 players, hopefully leading to some interesting combinations of classes exploring the depths. All-tank runs? Bring it on!

I have questions that will hopefully be answered in the coming months: firstly, what will the point of Deep Dungeon be? Will it be another means of acquiring progression currency, or will it be a completely separate activity? My main concern with it is that it ends up being a Diadem, which sounded awesome in concept but turned out to be a bit toss when it was actually released. Part of this was down to player attitudes, admittedly, rather than any real fault with the content itself, but hopefully the smaller scale of Deep Dungeon will mitigate this risk somewhat.

To be honest, if Deep Dungeon proves to be a significant enough challenge with enough variation on each run, I can see it becoming one of my main activities in Final Fantasy XIV, particularly if I have the option of running it either solo or with friends. And with the promise of score rankings coming in a future update, there's the distinct possibility of some friendly competition, too.

The first Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead, is due to arrive in the game as part of Patch 3.35. I'm planning on jumping back into the game around Patch 3.3 to find out what happens next in the main scenario quest — the story is getting very interesting — but if Deep Dungeon lives up to its potential, 3.35 will see me getting back into things in a big way.

Please don't mess it up, Yoshi-P and co. I have faith in you!

The post 2287: Deep Dungeon is Exactly What FFXIV Needs appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been back and forth on whether or not I should continue playing Final Fantasy XIV for a while now. I do love the game and all it offers, but the long period of time between the release of expansion pack Heavensward and its first major content patch caused me to get significant burnout, and while I did get temporarily enthused around the start of the patch 3.2 cycle, I'm once again feeling that I don't really want to do the endgame grind, nor do I want to raid.

Those who have been following my blog for a while will know that I've been one of the loudest, most enthusiastic people about Final Fantasy XIV ever since the beta of A Realm Reborn. So why the change of heart? Well, a number of reasons, really.

First up is the aforementioned endgame grind. This has always been present in the game — it is an MMO, after all — but first time around it somehow didn't feel so bad, perhaps because I never got "ahead of the curve" and made content irrelevant by outgearing it within a day or two of it releasing. In other words, taking on challenges was always exciting and there was always something to aim for; that aspect is still there, but if anything, I think there's now too much to grind on for what feels like relatively little reward.

Take the Anima weapons, for example — Heavensward's version of the Relic weapons from A Realm Reborn. The first step of this process either requires you to give up a fully upgraded level 50 relic (which a lot of people had at least one of by this point) or to repeatedly run FATEs around the Heavensward areas until you got Atma-like drops at a very low chance. The second step requires you to run ten dungeons that, at the level you're constructing the Anima weapon at, are completely irrelevant to you unless you're collecting gear for alt classes. The final step requires you to collect 20 each of four different items and then do some other bits and pieces.

The first step either takes seconds or hours of boring FATE grinding, though you can at least attempt to get the items from FATEs while levelling another class. The second step is just plain tedious, though it is presumably there as an attempt to keep older dungeons populated for those who are coming up through the 50s. And the third and final step is an absolutely brutal grind that either takes weeks of daily quests or repeated running of dungeons and/or the first (now largely irrelevant) part of the Alexander raid dungeon. Oddly, the jump in item level and power for this final step is significantly smaller than that for the second step, despite the final step being by far the most significant undertaking.

I currently have 8 out of the 60 items required to upgrade my Relic to its (currently) final form, and the next step of the process is coming soon. I just don't feel any inclination to do this alongside grinding daily quest reputation, Tomestones to purchase gear, XP for classes that haven't reached 60 yet, not to mention crafting and gathering, both of which are one of the few reliable ways to make a decent amount of money in the game.

The trouble, then, is not that there's nothing to do as such — it's that there's too much to do, but that too much is based on doing the same things over and over again for weeks or even months. The worst of both worlds, if you will — for me, anyway. There are plenty of people still playing who seem to be quite happy indulging in this grind. Some are even already working on their second or third Anima weapons.

I don't begrudge anyone how they spend their time, but having been playing a bunch of other stuff recently, I just don't want to commit the amount of time necessary to progress at a meaningful pace in Heavensward, because it means that I won't have time to enjoy other games like Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Dungeon Travelers 2, the upcoming Trillion God of Destruction and the many, many RPGs that are still on my game shelves, as yet unplayed. I've tried finding that magic balance between FFXIV and other games, and it just doesn't really exist for me — I always end up going in an "all or nothing" direction, and right now I'm feeling like I would rather play other things.

I'm not hanging up my Eorzean adventuring shoes completely; I fully intend to continue dropping in on the game to see how the plot develops with each new content patch, but I no longer have any desire to stay "current" with content progression, raids or Extreme-level Primal fights. In a way, I'm a bit sad that I feel this way, as FFXIV has been such a significant part of my life for so long — and my wife now plays more than I do — but ultimately, if you're not happy or having fun doing something that is supposed to be enjoyable, then there's really no point carrying on with it.

Alongside all this is the social matter: our Free Company has become very quiet over the last few months. I'm not entirely sure what's caused this and I don't really want to investigate for fear of dredging up any drama that might be involved. But playing the game isn't the same social activity it once was, with Free Company chat a lively place filled with people having fun, joking around and enjoying themselves. Many of the regular faces are still there, but remain quiet in "public", instead preferring to converse in small, private Linkshells rather than the main guild channel. It's made for an atmosphere that isn't anywhere near as welcoming and fun as it once was.

And alongside this is the matter of the overall game community and how it has declined somewhat over the last few months. MMOs always have a problem with elitism at their top end, but Final Fantasy XIV always used to feel like it was one of the more positive, friendly communities out there. Now, though, it's a place where you get yelled at if you don't speedrun dungeons, where newcomers to fights are sometimes kicked out of groups, and where players bitch about people they perceive to be "inferior" to them both in-game and on social media. The rise in popularity of DPS parsers also means that the particularly elitist players have data to hold over the heads of people they think are underperforming, and rather than offering feedback on how to improve, many of these people think that simply quoting them their DPS figure is enough to make them want to "git gud".

This is a generalisation, of course; I've still had plenty of positive experiences in the game in recent months, and I always made a point to be the change I wanted to see in the community by being friendly and conversational when playing with others, offering advice without berating when necessary. But it's just got to a point where this side of things has become exhausting and even stressful at times, and that's not conducive to having fun.

So I'm stepping away. For how long, I don't know, though as I say, I'm pretty sure I'll be back in for the next patch, at least to see how the main scenario storyline develops. Raiding, though? Nope. Sephirot EX? No thank you. Anima grind? No, thank you.

Now, I'm 86 hours deep in Dungeon Travelers 2 and I have grinding to do… he said, without a trace of irony.

The post 2259: Back to Solo Play appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's a new generation of console hardware, and has been for a while! Woohoo!

However, more than ever with this generational changeover in particular, the previous generation of consoles are far from irrelevant, and in fact if you're a thrifty gamer now is a very good time to start building out your PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii libraries.

Why? Because it's damn cheap to do so… for the most part, anyway. Thanks to stores that specialise in preowned games and the dropping prices of new, factory-sealed games due to perceived "irrelevance", you can now pick up formerly £40 games for considerably less than their launch price — often even single-digit prices, which I find enormously entertaining as someone who remembers buying budget, cassette-only releases for 8-bit computers in the '80s and '90s.

I say this having bought a few games at CEX earlier today: I managed to score copies of Lollipop Chainsaw, Bayonetta 2, Xenosaga Episode II, Kingdom Hearts II HD and Enchanted Arms for considerably less than their original asking price. All of them are in good condition — I think all of them even have their manuals, which is reasonably rare when it comes to preowned games.

Right now, then, is the ideal time to invest in games that you've always meant to add to your 360, PS3 and Wii collections, but never got around to. We're at that time when the games are declining in value because the hardware is still readily available and people are still trading them in, but we're not yet at the point where the games are no longer being made and certain titles are becoming more and more rare. In other words, this means it's pretty rare to find games retailing for more than their original asking price, though as the new generation of hardware continues and the old guard fall more and more out of favour, this situation will start to arise more and more, particularly for niche-interest, limited run titles such as Japanese role-playing games.

So if you still have a 360, PS3 or Wii knocking around — and if not, why not? They're all still great systems! — do be sure to take a trip down to your local used game store and see what they have to offer. And if you see something you've always meant to have a go at, but have never gotten around to, it's well worth taking that chance now, because with each passing year, that game you never got around to playing will be getting rarer and rarer, until eventually your only choice if you want to play it will be to pay overinflated eBay and Amazon seller prices. And you don't want to do that, do you? (Although I must admit paying well over the odds for a rare game does make for a good collector's "war story"; some of my most treasured games include Space Channel 5 Part 2 on PS2, which had a ridiculously limited run here in Europe, and Fire Emblem Whatever The One on the Gamecube Was Called, which is likewise apparently rather hard to find these days.)

I anticipate, having recently realised all this myself, that my 360 and PS3 collections are going to grow quite considerably in the next few months…

The post 2239: Now's a Great Time to Buy PS3, 360 and Wii Games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Tonight, we cleared the last area of the new raid dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV… in its "normal" incarnation, anyway. Savage is likely to prove a somewhat stiffer challenge, but regular ol' vanilla had plenty of hurdles to overcome, too.

Now that we've been through all four of the new raids, I thought I'd ponder how I felt about them, and about Alexander as a whole compared to The Binding Coil of Bahamut.

The first thing to note about Alexander is that the overall tone of the whole thing is very different to Coil. Coil represented one of the most serious, dramatic parts of Final Fantasy XIV's story, and over its entirety revealed some very significant background lore about the Allagans and the Meracydians, both of whom we'd seen mentioned (and occasionally explored the relics of) but never encountered, mostly due to them both being long dead.

Alexander, meanwhile, largely concerns the goblins, and much like their Final Fantasy XI counterparts, goblins in Final Fantasy XIV are rather silly, afflicted with distinctive speech patterns and, for the most part, there for comic relief. They're not very threatening, in other words, so for them to be introduced as the main villains of the new raid cycle was… interesting, to say the least.

The overall aesthetic of Alexander is very different to Coil, too. Coil began as an expedition into the bowels of the earth and gradually gave way into a combination of fantastic, otherworldly scenery and pure sci-fi, futuristic environments, many of which were absolutely breathtaking in their scale. Alexander, conversely, has a pretty consistent "steampunk" look throughout its entirety, though Midas does a somewhat better job than Gordias in terms of presenting a bit of variety in the way things look.

This difference in aesthetic extends to the main attraction of the raids, too: the bosses. In Coil, you fought a wide variety of foes, ranging from a giant genetically modified snake to a fearsome dragon god via technologically advanced defence systems, a bioengineered lamia, a robot treant and, of course, the reincarnation of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0's main villain, Nael van Darnus, now going by Nael deus Darnus having apparently changed gender and gone a bit, well, dragonish.

Alexander, conversely, sees you fighting a lot of things in a similar mould: in Gordias, you fight a large steampunk robot thing, followed by a swarm of goblins and large steampunk robot things, followed by a squishy Pepsiman wannabe in what appears to be a sewage outlet, concluding with a battle against The Manipulator, which is a large steampunk robot thing. Midas is a bit better: first you fight a mad scientist goblin who keeps drinking his own concoctions and growing to Hulk-like proportions, then you fight a series of four large steampunk robot things, then you fight the main villain of the plot arc (and his cat), then finally you fight five large steampunk robot things — four of which you fought earlier in the raid — that then combine to make one enormous steampunk robot thing.

While I still like Alexander less than Coil in terms of its aesthetic and enemy designs, Midas is a big step in a better direction. Everything about it is better, from the variety between the four areas to the background plot that is revealed as you progress, which was rather lacking and forgettable in Gordias. It still lacks some of the outright drama that Coil had — the final boss of this particular cycle is an intense fight, but it's more chaotically humorous than terrifying like Twintania, Nael and Bahamut were — but things are improving a lot.

Of particular note is the boss music for the final boss, which I present with some pleasure for you below, in all its '70s anime glory:

Happy with how things have turned out with 3.2. I was getting concerned the game was losing its magic, but it's well and truly back on target.

The post 2231: Initial Impressions on Alexander: Midas appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Been taking my time getting through the new Alexander raid (just the normal version) in Final Fantasy XIV over the last couple of evenings, and thought I'd write down a walkthrough for the first two floors, largely to refresh my own memory and perhaps to provide a convenient service to anyone passing by who wants to know such things.

As with Alexander: Gordias, Alexander: Midas is split into four areas, each of which allows you to get one piece of loot per week. These pieces of loot are tokens that can be exchanged for gear in Idyllshire in the same place you turn in Allagan Tomestones of Esoterics and Lore; like the gear from Gordias, you need varying numbers of tokens for different pieces of gear. Accessories require one bolt, so are the easiest to get, but are also often the smallest upgrade.

The Fist of the Son

Available loot: Bolt (1 needed for accessory), chain (1 needed for belt), pedal (2 needed for boots)

Run through the first area, and use the steam vents to jump up to the top of the room. Pass through the doorway and you'll be confronted with not one but two Fausts. They're much easier to handle than the one in The Fist of the Father, though; one tank take each, keep them together, focus down one at a time.

It's not over, though! After the second Faust drops, a pulsing AoE marker will appear on the floor. Get away from it, as Hummelfaust is going to drop down, dealing more damage the closer you are to its drop spot.

One tank should take Hummelfaust, the other should switch to DPSing and simply batter him down as quickly as possible. Much like OG Faust, this is designed as a DPS check to ensure that your group is going to be up to the job of toppling the subsequent bosses.

Once Hummelfaust is down, hop onto the conveyor belt to reach the boss room.

BOSS: Ratfinx Twinkledinks

This fight initially seems utterly bewildering, but it's actually fairly straightforward. You need to pay close attention to what is happening at all times, though; you might find it helpful to Focus Target Ratfinx to help keep an eye on what he's up to in case you need to target something else.

Before you start, mark the back-left corner of the room as A and the front-right corner as B. You'll be tanking Ratfinx at A, while B is set aside as a no-go area for a later mechanic.

Start the fight. Ratfinx will be reluctant to move as the battle begins, so take the opportunity to establish solid aggro if you're a tank. Once he transforms into his giant form, then you can move him over to A.

Ratfinx will proceed to pummel the main tank about the head, inflicting stacks of Headache, which increases damage taken. When Headache reaches 4 stacks, it becomes Concussion, which stuns you completely. When this happens, you'll see Ratfinx wind up for a big punch much like the one Sephirot does; at this point, the off-tank should immediately use Provoke and hit Ratfinx to take aggro from the original tank, and take the imminent big hit, which is slightly less big if you don't have Headache or Concussion.

Throughout the fight, Ratfinx will cast Bomb's Away, which brings one or more large bombs into the arena. When this happens, someone near the centre of the room should stand in the purple circle to activate the machinery, then at least one person should run to the red pool that forms to the side of the arena. Stepping in this turns you into a gorilla with just two abilities, the first of which allows you to punch bombs away with ease, and the second of which allows you to transform back into your normal form. Punch the bombs to B to keep them safely away from everyone, then change back and return to your normal role.

At various points throughout the battle, Ratfinx will mark a player and cast Glubgloop (or something similar). The marked player should get well out of the way of A, B and where the pools form under the syringes; after the AoE marker appears, a persistent puddle of goop will drop on the floor and stick around for a little while, so keep it out of the way, probably in one of the unmarked corners.

From his second giant transformation onwards, Ratfinx will start casting Boost. When he does this, a player needs to activate the machine in the middle and all players (including the tank) need to rush to the purple puddle to turn into a bird. By flying, you avoid his devastating ground-pound attack; once he's finished doing this, you can use Apothecary to change back into your normal form once again.

Repeat the process, with tanks keeping a careful eye out for Concussion and everyone else watching for Bomb's Away and Boost, and it won't be long before he's down. There are a few additional beasties that show up throughout the fight, but the off-tank can pick these up easily and they don't present much of a threat.

The Cuff of the Son

Available loot: Bolt (1 needed for accessory), pedal (2 needed for boots), lens (2 needed for headpiece)

Run forwards and engage the initial group of enemies. To take a bit of pressure off the main tank, the off-tank may want to take one of the two Gobwalkers. Burn down the enemies as quickly as possible and proceed down the corridor, where you'll be accosted by a number of Goblin Gliders. Tank and spank these, then jump down the passageway on the right of the corridor to be flung into the boss room, where you'll fight four bosses in succession. Don't worry; if you take one down, it stays down.

BOSS: Blaster

Blaster has two main attacks. The first is to drop mines in the arena. These will show AoE markers where they drop, and will continue to pulse afterwards. Do not stand on them, as they deal heavy damage and inflict various status effects in an area.

Blaster's second attack is to mark players; after a moment, he'll drop a Mirage version of himself on them, and after another moment or so, these will charge across the arena in the direction they're facing. Don't be in their way.

DPS down Blaster while avoiding these two mechanics and he'll fall easily.

BOSS: Brawler

Brawler has three attacks that don't have cast bars: you have to rely entirely on visual cues. These cues are related to the fists he holds up when he charges himself with energy; after the blue flash of light around both hands you'll see him have either a red fist, a blue fist or both fists, and you'll have a couple of seconds to handle the mechanic appropriately.

If he raises the red fist, a random player is going to get targeted and damaged. Everyone move away from the boss to minimise this damage; it declines with distance.

If he raises the blue fist, the off-tank should use Provoke to take aggro from the main tank, while the main tank gets behind the boss. Shortly after, the new main tank will take a big hit, but not as massive as the one the original tank would have taken with the Vulnerability debuff Brawler applies!

If he raises both fists, the current tank should turn Brawler around to face the rest of the party; he'll fire a massive dual laser whose damage is split between everyone it hits.

Best way to handle this is to have everyone stacked or lined up directly behind Brawler as the main tank tanks him, then move according to the mechanics. After a mechanic is finished, get back into position and continue.

BOSS: Swindler

This is a weird one that requires you to be observant, but it's not that complicated.

The main mechanic here is Swindlers High and Low Mathematicks debuffs that he applies to various players. High Mathematicks is a purple-coloured debuff icon, while Low Mathematicks is a red-coloured debuff icon. When you receive one of these, stand on a floor tile according to your debuff: if you have Low Mathematicks (red), stand on a red, elevated tile; if you have High Mathematicks, stand on a grey, normal tile. Note that the arrangement of the tiles will shift several times during the battle.

The only other mechanic for this fight sees a player marked with a circle around themselves and a number of orbs above their head. A number of people matching the number of orbs need to be in the circle to prevent horrible messy death.

Dance around according to the debuffs and you'll be good for the final battle.

BOSS: Vortexer

Vortexer will inflict a stacking Vulnerability debuff on whoever is tanking it; the off-tank should use Provoke and take aggro when this reaches two stacks.

Circle AoEs indicate that pools of fiery sludge (similar to Bahamut's attack in Turn 13) will be dropping in these places. Stay out of them, and don't run through them, as they debuff you while you're in them. Also make sure you don't have your back to one.

Super Cyclone is a massive knockback on everyone, centred on the boss. Position yourself so you won't get knocked back into a pool of sludge.

When a player gets marked, they'll drop a waterspout after a few moments. Position this somewhere near-ish and behind the boss.

Several players will get Shiva-style blizzard markers on and around them. At least one person needs to drop this with its circle over the waterspout to freeze it into a block of ice. These will leave a patch of Frostbite-inflicting ice on the ground for a short period, but these will dissipate after a few moments.

When Vortexer starts casting Ultra Flash, everyone (including the tank) needs to hide behind the frozen waterspout and break line-of-sight with Vortexer to avoid being instakilled. After this, the ice block will shatter and the process repeats. Once Vortexer is down, you're done!

The post 2229: The Fist of the Son and The Cuff of the Son appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XIV's new patch came out today, bringing with it some new dungeons and a spectacular new boss fight against Sephirot, The Fiend, one of the Warring Triad previously seen in Final Fantasy VI.

Unlike most of the other Trials that have been in the game so far, the Sephirot battle is separate from the main questline, and having a pop at it earlier revealed why: it's surprisingly tough! Once you know what you're doing, though, it's pretty straightforward. As such, I thought I'd share my observations from a couple of goes today in the hope of helping out anyone struggling with it.

Note that this isn't intended to be a particularly comprehensive guide and I can't remember the exact names of many abilities, but given that the Sephirot fight is largely dependent on observing animations and visual cues rather than cast bars, ability names aren't actually terribly helpful here.

So then. Here's how it works. I think.

Phase 1: That's Not Sephiroth

First phase is pretty straightforward. Main tank should pull Sephirot and turn him away from the rest of the group as normal and proceed to wail on him. Apply DoTs and AoE DoTs as appropriate.

Sephirot has a few different attacks in this phase. He has a conal AoE in front of him called Triple Trial, so this is the main reason the tank faces him away from the group. It doesn't do a lot of damage, but you'll want to keep the MT's HP as high as possible. MT should save cooldowns for the moment though.

Next is a jumping attack away from the MT onto a random player, after which he returns to the MT. Again, the damage isn't horrific, but keep on top of things. Priority after the jump should be topping off and shielding the MT for what comes next.

Sephirot will pull his left arm back ready to deliver a powerful punch. (Note that if you are tanking him, his left arm will be on the right of your screen, as you're facing him.) When this happens, MT should blow a suitable defensive cooldown (Shadow Skin or Rampart is enough) and Convalescence if you want to help out your healers a bit. When the animation completes, the big punch Sephirot was winding up for will deliver a powerful tankbuster in the region of 16-17k or so, though this can be reduced with cooldowns and shields.

Other than this, Sephirot has a large AoE that he blasts out towards a non-tank member of the group, which should be healed through.

At around 60%, Sephirot will become untargetable and spawn a bunch of adds. Both tanks should pick them up and pull them all together for DPS to AoE them. Prioritise the larger adds first, as they hit a bit harder and have more HP. As one set gets close to being killed a second set will spawn, so be ready to pick them up and bring them to the group.

When the adds are down, Sephirot will do his ultimate. You have quite a long time to prepare for this, so make the best use of the time. Sephirot will fall backwards off the platform and nothing will happen for a few seconds. Use the time to heal everyone up, then when you see Sephirot's newly giant hand grab the platform to pull himself up, drop Sacred Soil or other suitable defences ready for the incoming damage.

Phase 2: He Got Big

Tanking Sephirot is less important here, since he stays in one place and fires out mechanics at random players rather than whoever has aggro. Tanks should feel free to switch to DPS stance and wail on him as much as possible.

Note that Sephirot's hitbox is huge and you don't need to be standing anywhere near his model to actually hit him. Target him and stand on the edge of the circle on the ground and you'll hit him no problem; this is important for one of his main abilities in the phase.

At intervals throughout Phase 2, Sephirot will drop blue puddles on the ground. After these have sat there for a moment, he'll slam his fist down on the puddle, knocking everyone backwards. To counter this, stand near (not in) the puddle with your back to the side of the arena furthest away from you — think the final boss of Neverreap. He'll do this three times, so run back into position after being knocked back: first one is always directly in front of himself, then on the left, then on the right.

For Sephirot's other attacks, you once again need to watch his animations rather than cast bars. When he lowers himself down so his head is level with the platform, he's preparing to do a huge raid-wide knockback, so stand in front of him with plenty of space behind you to avoid falling off.

Immediately after the knockback, three adds will spawn: two that you've seen before and one tornadoey whirlwind thing. DPS down the tornadoey whirlwind thing as quickly as possible and it will drop a (harmless) tornado marker on the ground: this will be important in a moment. Then kill the other two adds. Shortly after you've done this, a big flashing arrow marker will appear over the tornado marker, so get in it. Sephirot will probably do a small knockback on you while you're getting into position, so make sure you immediately move back into the tornado: the reason you do this is so that the tornado blows you up in the air to avoid Sephirot's devastating arm-sweep attack, which is an instant KO if you get hit by it.

When Sephirot seems to charge energy into his chest, everyone should spread out because people are about to get hit by energy blasts with splash damage. Simple enough to avoid.

When two players are marked with shining silver markers — the same as in Turn 13 if you've done that — these two players should move to the sides of the arena to bait Sephirot's Earthshaker line AoE move away from the rest of the group. (Yes, this is indeed the exact same Earthshaker that Bahamut Prime does.)

When Sephirot holds two orbs out in front of him… I must confess I'm not entirely 100% on what this mechanic does, but it appears to be something similar to the Angra Mainyu fight in World of Darkness in that the arena is split into two different coloured sections, and you need to stand in the correct one. Perhaps someone can clarify in the comments if you have a better idea.

Shortly before or after the two orbs, Sephirot will summon two towers similar to those seen in later stages of Turn 13. Like those towers, you need to stand in them to minimise raid-wide Bad Stuff happening. Only one person needs to stand in each tower.

After that, these mechanics just repeat, though Sephirot will be flinging small circle AoEs around the place while all this is going on too, but these are easy enough to dodge.

Congratulations, you've toppled The Fiend!

The post 2226: Sephirot, The Fiend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's a reason I frequently quote the Hyperdimension Neptunia series as my favourite game series of all time. And it's not because any of the games are particularly outstanding — though, it must be said, each and every one is far better than most reviews give them credit for — or because they're particularly impressive. In fact, technically speaking, outside of some excellent character models and animation, the Neptunia series as a whole is fairly flawed, though since making the jump to Vita, PC and PS4 rather than PS3, its average framerate has gone through the roof.

No, the reason I love Neptunia so is its comforting familiarity. Firing up one of these games is like meeting up with the sort of friends you always have a good time with. The kind of friends you might not see for months or years at a time on some occasions, but the kind of friends who allow you to pick right up where you left off when you do meet up again.

There are a number of ways the series achieves this. The first and most obvious is through its main cast: the combination of Tsunako's gorgeous character and costume designs, the excellent voice acting (in Japanese, anyway; I haven't spent long with the English dub) and a sharp, witty script really brings these characters to life and, over the course of all the games they've starred in to date, they've developed and become distinct. The Neptunia writers and localisers aren't under any misconceptions that these characters are particularly deep, flawed or, for want of a better word, "literary", but this adds to the series' charm; it's infused with a gentle sense of good-natured humour and an aesthetic that combines the bright, primary colours of a children's TV show with a strong sense of self-awareness and recognition that yes, grown-ups play this and appreciate a few dirty jokes here and there. It's unpretentious and casual; you never feel like you have to make an effort to enjoy spending time with the Neptunia characters, and, perhaps paradoxically, this makes you want to spend more time with them, to find out more about them.

The second way Neptunia brings a sense of warm familiarity to me is through its aesthetic. Developer Compile Heart frequently gets lambasted in reviews for recycling graphical, sound and music assets wholesale from game to game, but somehow this has never mattered to me; I like the fact that you know what a Neptunia game is going to look and sound like before you boot it up. I like the fact that the series has developed its own kind of non-verbal language using its soundtrack to denote what is happening on. And the fact that the same dungeon maps are used from game to game — or even, in some cases, recycled within the same game — has never mattered to me; on the contrary, these places are now familiar and comfortable to me, even if the occupants may differ from visit to visit and occasionally incorporate superbosses that splatter me up the nearest wall.

The third reason Neptunia makes me happy is because the whole thing is clearly infused with such joy and love for these characters and the setting in which they live that it's hard not to smile all the time you're playing. While it's questionable as to whether or not Compile Heart knew precisely how popular the series would become when the original Hyperdimension Neptunia was released in 2010, it's clear to see today, six years later, that the creators still adore their creations as much as the audience do. And, more to the point, the various spinoffs in the series allow fans to celebrate their favourite characters in a variety of different ways, be it through the clothes-ripping hack-and-slash action of Hyperdimension Neptunia U, the strategic battling of Hyperdevotion Noire or the purely "social" gameplay of Hyperdimension Neptunia Producing Perfection. We've seen these girls at work, rest and play over the course of these games, and it doesn't take long to fall in love with them.

Me, I'm at a stage where I honestly think I might be quite happy playing nothing but Neptunia games until the end of time, assuming that Compile Heart continued to explore collaborations with other developers such as Sting (Hyperdevotion Noire) and Tamsoft (Hyperdimension Neptunia U) as well as producing strong mainline installments in the series. Of course, this is an exaggeration, but one thing is true: I never have a bad time playing a Neptunia game, and I never feel sad while I'm playing a Neptunia game; I hope we continue to see them for many years to come.

The post 2182: The Comforting Familiarity of Nep-Nep appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I made a difficult decision today: to quit Final Fantasy XIV. Temporarily, at least.

This is a decision I've been mulling over for quite some time, I must admit, since following the initial excitement over the expansion pack Heavensward, the new content that's shown up since was 1) very, very late indeed and 2) not great. The one thing that had kept me clinging on was the good friends I've made while playing it, but I've come to the conclusion that with the state of endgame as it is now, it's just not fun enough to warrant the endless grind.

Before we go any further, I would like to point out that Final Fantasy XIV is still an excellent game, and its storyline through A Realm Reborn and Heavensward is one of the best Final Fantasies I've had the pleasure of playing over the years. Its battle system is great, its graphics are wonderful, its music is without peer and it has numerous memorable setpieces and boss fights that will doubtless stay with me for years afterwards.

The issue comes with endgame — what you do when you get to level 60, have no more experience points to gain, and hit the ceiling of available content. At this point most people do one of two things: level another class, or get on the gear treadmill to equip their "main" class as well as possible, either simply for the satisfaction of doing it, or with a mind to taking on the game's most challenging content such as raids.

The main trouble with Heavensward endgame as it exists today is that it's not all that different from A Realm Reborn's endgame, only with a fraction of the level cap content that A Realm Reborn had by the end of its cycle of patches. This may be an unfair comparison, but given that most people who played through Heavensward spent months or more at level 50 in A Realm Reborn, the shift back to having a very limited selection of meaningful content to play was somewhat jarring — particularly as people raced through Heavensward's main scenario and initial levelling process to 60 way quicker than they beat A Realm Reborn, despite them being comparable in length.

So what do you do in endgame? As previously mentioned, you gear up. This is primarily accomplished by collecting "tomestones" from running dungeons, daily roulettes and a couple of other sources. There's a weekly cap on one of the types of tomestones — the one that gets you some of the best equipment in the game currently — which means that it unavoidably takes several weeks, even months, to put together a complete armour and weaponry set for just one class, let alone multiple.

There are other means of acquiring gear, of course; the newly added Void Ark raid is designed to get people into better gear without grinding for tomestones by allowing them one piece of gear per week of comparable level to an unupgraded Tomestone piece. And The Diadem, the home to the exploration missions, can drop some seriously good equipment, though in that case it's very much left up to random chance.

Part of the problem with Heavensward's endgame right now is that the high-level raid — the most difficult thing in the game, and source of some of the best equipment — just isn't very interesting. A Realm Reborn's The Binding Coil of Bahamut was spectacular: it told its own story, had unique bosses and music, and was extremely rewarding to play through, particularly once its entire saga was completed and gave you an opportunity to fight A Realm Reborn's "true" final boss.

Alexander, the current level 60 raid, meanwhile, suffers for a number of reasons: firstly, its Normal mode incarnation, designed so those who aren't up to the challenges of raiding could enjoy its story, is far too easy and quite dull. And secondly, said story is not interesting at all, building on one of the more ridiculous side stories from A Realm Reborn rather than the world-shaking drama that Coil offered. For many people, clearing Coil wasn't about gear; it was about seeing a cool story through to its conclusion. And while Alexander has a story, it's not a patch on Coil's.

There's also the fact that Normal mode removes that incentive to progress that Coil had. The only way to see Coil's story was to beat Coil, whether you did that when it was fresh, new and extremely difficult, or when it got considerably nerfed (but was still a stiff challenge) months down the line. With Alexander, you can beat its Normal mode rather easily, even if you have no experience with raiding, and by then you've seen its whole story, meaning its Savage incarnation becomes little more than a more difficult version of exactly the same thing.

This is my main problem, but there's a number of other issues that have been bugging me for a little while too. I was really looking forward to the exploration missions, since they sounded like something new and interesting, but they turned out to be glorified Hunts, and Hunts are rubbish, since all they are is 300 people dogpiling a monster designed to be fought by 8 people, closely followed by at least 150 more people whining in /shout about someone "pulling early". Diadem at least limits the chaos to 72 players at once, but there's no "exploration" going on; within hours of it appearing for the first time, people had already figured out the most "efficient" way of getting the best rewards, which involves standing in one place and fighting the same damage sponge enemies over and over again until some slightly stronger damage sponge enemies show up and hopefully drop some slightly better loot. There was a "loot whore" angle to Diadem that showed promise, but in practice, with the way Final Fantasy XIV is designed in terms of stats, it's not really a concept that works within the game's overall framework.

Perhaps the thing I've found most offputting, though, is the changing attitudes of a lot of the playerbase. I recall complimenting Final Fantasy XIV's community when it first launched for being incredibly friendly and helpful to one another, sharing information and tips with newcomers and cooperating to make the virtual world of Eorzea a better place for everyone. Over time, this appears to have dissipated somewhat, to be replaced with a bevy of whiny players who insult you if you don't speedrun a dungeon, and people who constantly run damage parsers in the background just so they can post screenshots on Twitter and bitch about how awful the Bard they just ran Brayflox with was. The unfortunate elitist attitude of a lot of these players drives off newcomers and makes them afraid to make mistakes, which in turn puts people off trying more difficult content, which ultimately only hurts the high-level players, who can often be found in Party Finder bitching about not having anyone to clear Alexander Savage with.

I'm not sure why this shift in attitude happened, or if it's always been there and I just hadn't been aware of it. I know that a lot of Final Fantasy XIV players that I follow on Twitter seem to have changed for the worse, though, preferring to post screenshots of bad parses and arguments in party chat rather than celebrating their victories.

There's part of the trouble, though, I think; there's not that many victories to celebrate for veteran players any more. Even victory over a floor of Alexander Savage feels somewhat hollow, because everyone doing Savage will have already beaten all those bosses in Normal mode. "I beat The Manipulator" doesn't have the same gravitas to it as "I killed Bahamut!", after all.

With the lack of new victories to celebrate, it's understandable that people might get jaded and want to complain about things. It's understandable that those who want to be challenged with new content would get frustrated and start to take it out on people who haven't been running Savage for several months, or who don't know how to beat Ravana Extreme. It's not particularly okay that these people do this, but it is at least understandable.

And I don't want to be one of those people, continuing to play a game that feels like work and complaining about it endlessly when I could, instead, be doing something more fun — exploring new worlds in other RPGs, or catching up on my backlog, or enjoying some retro classics for the nth time.

Final Fantasy XIV will always be special to me. It's a virtual world that I've spent a good proportion of the last few years in. I made some great friends while playing, all of whom I sincerely hope will continue to be friends outside the game — something I'm confident about, since we all hung out together at PAX and didn't kill each other. And it was the setting for my proposal to my wife. So although my criticisms above may sound harsh, they're entirely personal, and I certainly do not and never will hate the game at all. It's simply time to take a break from it — perhaps indefinitely, or perhaps just temporarily.

Either way, thanks, Eorzea, Square Enix and Yoshi-P; it's been a wild and magical ride for the last few years, and I'm never going to forget it.

The post 2158: Farewell, Eorzea... For Now appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the things I really like about Final Fantasy XIV is how easy it is to switch jobs to one of the other classes. Swap out your weapon (and, more than likely, armour) and bam: you're another class, with no need to create a new character.

This system encourages people to try out more than the class they start with, and provides a great opportunity for players to learn about not just the role they choose to "main", but also other types of character they might run into in cooperative content.

It's actually really interesting to run the same thing as each of the three main types of character — tank, healer, DPS — because the experience is often significantly different for each. And it's not always just a case of "tank stands in front of monsters, DPS stand behind, healer makes sure no-one dies" — one of Final Fantasy XIV's biggest strengths is that its encounters are often designed to keep things interesting for everyone in the party, with tanks, healers and DPS alike being expected to deal with mechanics and take care of themselves as much as possible.

Take something like the fourth floor of the Alexander raid, for example. As a tank, your job is relatively straightforward: stand at the front repeatedly hacking away at The Manipulator's legs until it falls over; try and mitigate as much of the incoming damage as possible. Straightforward, that is, unless you're the off-tank, in which case you'll be frequently sucked into a side "Quarantine" room with a DPS and expected to defeat a not-particularly-tough add before being returned to your party. DPS, meanwhile, are expected to pop exploding orbs that appear around the room, try and position themselves so tanks can intercept damage from laser attacks, defeat additional enemies as quickly as possible and, above all, try not to die. And the healers, aside from keeping everyone standing, have to deal with a unique mechanic in the last phase where they need to keep apart from each other and the rest of the party, lest everyone keel over dead.

It's not always this complex, of course, but even so, walking a few miles in each of the three roles' shoes gives you a better overall understanding of how the game as a whole works, and that's really important when playing cooperatively — if only to know exactly what all those buffs the healers are throwing on you mean, and that you shouldn't Stun enemies when the Dark Knight has Blood Price up!

That and it's just kind of fun to see how the different classes play, because even in ostensibly similar classes (Paladin, Dark Knight, Warrior, for example — all are tanks) there's plenty of variation in play style and overall "feel". You might even find yourself liking a new class more than what you originally considered to be your "main" — it's happened to me twice to date!

The post 2125: Walk a Mile in the Tank's Shoes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Finally cleared Ravana Extreme in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, bringing me up to date on absolutely everything in the game so far with the exception of Alexander Savage, which I'm not in a particular hurry to rush through at the moment.

Ravana, though, was a lot of fun. I'd held off even trying that fight for a while for some reason — I'd got it into my head that it would be "scary", and I didn't want to be a burden on any group who took me along with them. In some ways, this was quite a nostalgic feeling; when I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, the prospect of pretty much any group content was absolutely terrifying, and playing a role with responsibilities more than "dodge shit, do damage" (both important, to be fair) was simply out of the question. Now, of course, my best-levelled, best-geared classes are both tanks, and I have a healer on the way to the higher levels, too, while I haven't really touched my Black Mage — the class I started with — for quite some time.

Anyway. Ravana EX is a challenging fight, to be sure, even with decent gear. There's a lot of damage, and a lot of reliance on party members knowing and understanding mechanics together. But, for me, this sort of fight is the most satisfying kind of battle in Final Fantasy XIV; it's a really fun experience to see eight people working together, moving as a team and doing their best to overcome a stiff challenge. A couple of years ago when I first decided to check out Final Fantasy XIV more out of curiosity — and some fond memories of the 20 levels of Final Fantasy XI I played a few years back — I couldn't have imagined I'd be challenging difficult battles like this, but now I'm happy to be not exactly at the top tier of players in our Free Company, but certainly someone who can be relied on to jump in and try their best at whatever the game has to offer.

I like Ravana EX because there's a nice combination of learnable mechanics with a little bit of randomness thrown in to make things interesting. Ravana does the same moves in the same order for the most part, and the way in which you deal with them is the same. However, things like positioning and who is initially targeted for his most powerful attacks vary with each attempt, so you have to be on your toes. As a tank, there's also some fun mechanics, most notably dodging his frontal cone "Tapasya" (sp?) attack and sharing the damage from his devastating Blinding Blade tankbuster with the offtank; it's certainly a lot more than "stand there and get hit while doing as much damage as you can". Which is nice.

Now that I'm up to date on everything, I'm very keen to see what patch 3.1, which is out in a couple of days, has to offer. A few days ago I commented on the things I'm particularly looking forward to; mostly, I'm excited about the fact that the new content is likely to bring a bunch of people who maybe haven't played for a little while back to the game; they're tricking in already, but there will doubtless be a big surge once the patch is actually available, the main scenario storyline continues and the more impressive new content is ready to be challenged.

In the meantime, since my Dark Knight sword failed to drop in three successful clears of Ravana, it looks like I have a bit of farming in my immediate future if I want to have a decent weapon ahead of the new Relic's arrival in 3.15…

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The preliminary patch notes for the long-awaited Version 3.1 of Final Fantasy XIV were released earlier today, and there's a lot to take in!

Main Scenario

Heavensward's main scenario was satisfyingly complete, with a wonderful final boss fight. But, in the best tradition of Final Fantasy XIV to date, it teased a coming storm, specifically involving a "Warrior of Darkness", who is presumably intended to be some sort of dark counterpart to our own player characters, the Warrior of Light.

Yoshi-P spoke in a Japanese language interview recently in a bit more detail about 3.1 and what to expect from the main scenario. It seems like the game will be moving away from the completely linear main scenario quest it's had to date, and will instead have a number of concurrent storylines. The reason for this is partly practical — parallel storylines afford the opportunity for the devs to unlock group content a bit more quickly rather than relying on linear main story progress — and partly to allow the story to develop in a few different directions simultaneously. It should also — hopefully, anyway — discourage people from skipping the (actually really good, well-written) main scenario quests just so they can get at the new dungeons/trials/whatevers.

Anyway. I'm not yet sure where the main scenario will be taking us, but it's clear we'll be seeing more of the shadowy Ascians, who are the Recurring Bad Guys You Never Actually Defeat that you always need in an MMO. We'll also be seeing the Warrior of Darkness, presumably, and perhaps visiting some strange and wonderful locales. Given that Heavensward appears to be heavily inspired by Final Fantasy IV, it's entirely possible we'll be taking a trip to the moon at some point, though exactly how that will be implemented remains to be seen, particularly as there's still a whole lot of Hydaelyn left to explore.

Dungeons

As I've previously noted, the fact that there are only two new dungeons in 3.1 was initially disappointing to me, but hopefully they should be good fun. The Arboretum dungeon in particular sounds like it has the potential to be interesting and challenging, and Pharos Sirius (Hard) apparently has a bunch of surprises in store; it's not just a run from the top of the lighthouse down to the bottom, as its appearance in the recent trailer seemed to indicate.

On the raid front, the Void Ark 24-man raid dungeon will doubtless be a highlight. It looks like it will have a suitably menacing atmosphere that's a bit different from other dungeons we've seen to date. It also sounds as if there will be some sort of diverging path mechanic, where the three 8-man parties will split off in different directions to do different things at the same time. Whether this is similar to the Atomos fight in Labyrinth of the Ancients, which simply involved three groups doing the same thing in different places at the same time, or something more ambitious remains to be seen. Either way, I'm looking forward to it a great deal — particularly as we're making a big effort to try and get a full 24-person Free Company run going the weekend after the patch.

Trials

Thordan Extreme, or rather The Minstrel's Ballad: Thordan's Reign is the big highlight here. A reprise of the formula from The Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane, Thordan's Reign is a more difficult version of Heavensward's spectacular but disappointingly easy final boss fight. Supposedly its difficulty is tuned somewhere between the current Extreme primals Bismarck and Ravana, and the current "Savage" raid dungeon Alexander, though it was also compared to the notorious Turn 9, still regarded as one of the most difficult fights in the game, even when playing with unsynced item and character levels.

Thordan's Reign will apparently be a ten-phase fight, making it sound as if it will be one of the most complicated fights in the game to learn, depending on how complex each individual phase is. To put this in context, the previous most difficult fights in the game had considerably fewer phases: Turn 5 had five, Turn 9 had four, Turn 13 had four, though each of these phases had a number of different mechanics that had to be dealt with appropriately. It's entirely possible that each "phase" of Thordan's Reign will have just one or two different mechanics at a time, but we shall see!

The Diadem

This is the bit I'm most interested in: the Exploration Missions, in which you fly off in an airship (either borrowed from Ishgard or belonging to your Free Company) to explore floating islands in the sky. Once there, you have 90 minutes to piss about with up to 71 other people, killing monsters, finding treasure, gathering goodies and completing objectives. The rewards are worthwhile, too; Tomestones of Esoterics will be awarded for completing objectives, and treasure chests dropped by monsters will contain item level 210 equipment, which is theoretically among some of the best in the game, though their randomised secondary stats will make them either amazing or useless for anything other than spiritbonding.

The reason I'm most excited about The Diadem is that it's probably the most significant shakeup to Final Fantasy XIV's structure since the launch of A Realm Reborn. Up until now, the game has followed a fairly standard formula: solo content in the open world, group content in linear instances, occasional group open world activities such as FATEs and Hunts. The Diadem occupies a curious space somewhere between an instanced dungeon and open world content; the area you're in is instanced and time-limited like a dungeon or trial, but there may be other players in there at the same time as you and your friends, and the structure is inherently more open-ended than the extremely linearly designed dungeons and trials. In other words, a trip to The Diadem will not be something you can "learn" and then perform by rote like the current dungeons and trials — not that there's anything wrong with that format! — but rather, hopefully anyway, will provide a degree of randomness that will make things interesting to revisit time and time again.

Relic

The new Relic — known as an Anima weapon — isn't launching with 3.1, but is instead coming a month later in 3.15. The previous Relic quest was one of the most notoriously time-consuming activities in the game, intended to be an alternative route to getting one of the best weapons in the game for those who didn't want to — or weren't able to — raid. We know next to nothing about what the new Relic questline will involve as yet, but you can probably count on it involving grinding, revisiting old content, completing objectives and a shared sense of camaraderie with your companions as you're gradually driven mad by what initially appears to be a completely unreasonable, unmanageable set of expectations.

Despite being at times irritating and demoralising, the original Relic quest was ultimately extremely satisfying, as it's the most convincing "build your own lightsaber" moment I've experienced in any game. This was a single weapon that you kept hold of for a long time, gradually improving bit by bit until it was a force to be reckoned with… and eventually transformed into something even more impressive. Doubtless the new weapon will be a similar situation — and those who made the effort to get a Relic weapon all the way to its final "Zeta" form will be rewarded with being able to skip about 10 hours' worth of grinding, apparently, so that's nice. (Of course, it took quite a bit more than 10 hours to make said Zeta, but any bonus is better than no bonus in this instance!)

Gold Saucer

The new addition to the Manderville Gold Saucer is the interesting-looking real-time strategy game Lord of Verminion. This appears to be a surprisingly well fleshed out game in which there's finally a use for all the collectable minions everyone has been racking up over time. Each minion has its own element, stats and abilities, and they're thrown into virtual combat against either the CPU or another player as you attempt to smash up your opponent's structures before they do the same to you. It will be really interesting to see if the player base takes to this, or if it ultimately becomes little more than an idle distraction.

Gold Saucer is also finally being added to the Challenge Log, allowing a much easier means of acquiring MGP for the Gold Saucer's exclusive rewards, most of which are primarily intended for vanity purposes. Simply adding things like the minigames to the Challenge Log will hopefully encourage people to party in the Gold Saucer once again, as when it launched, it was a whole lot of fun, but these days it seems a little bit dead, since people have mostly moved on.

—

Patch 3.1 is out next Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and I'm also looking forward to the inevitable surge of people coming back to the game to check it out, too; hopefully I'll see some people I haven't had the chance to play with for a while. Doubtless I shall be gushing further thoughts on 3.1 over these pages once I've had the chance to play around with it a bit, so Please Look Forward To It.

The post 2117: Preparing for the Coming Darkness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Level 58 on Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV now… almost there! I'm still really enjoying the class, and I'm looking forward to having my full suite of abilities to play with. I feel like I have a good handle on how it all works, now; Dark Knight seems to be a pretty flexible sort of tank, able to mitigate a decent amount of damage Paladin-style as well as heal themselves to a certain degree through abilities like Souleater and a cross-classed Bloodbath.

And the damage. Oh the damage. I haven't played Warrior enough to know what sort of numbers they put out on the road to 60, but Dark Knight is miles ahead of Paladin in terms of killing efficiency. Paladin isn't built for killing, of course, being a mitigation tank, but Dark Knight seems to strike a nice balance between being able to take some hits and put out some impressive damage numbers. It helps, of course, that I'm wearing almost entirely Strength-boosting accessories rather than the HP-boosting Vitality accessories, but I haven't had a problem with having too few HP at any point yet, so I intend to stick with that particular course of action for the immediate future until something comes along that twats me for more than I can take in a single hit.

Mostly I'm keen to get Dark Knight safely to level 60 — and preferably item level 190 — in time for the 3.1 patch on Tuesday the 10th. There's a bunch of interesting new stuff coming to the game that I'd like to be able to explore with my new class, most notably the two new dungeons (for which gear shouldn't be a problem for, since I already have tank gear up to about item level 189 or so) and the Extreme version of The Singularity Reactor fight.

The latter is one of the main attractions of the new patch for many people. Taking a similar approach to the "Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane" fight from A Realm Reborn, it's a remix of the final boss fight from Heavensward with (presumably) considerably more complex mechanics and a higher challenge factor. This is good, since although Heavensward's final boss fight is undoubtedly spectacular, at current average gear levels you can trounce it pretty quickly. It doesn't make the fight any less impressive, of course, but I know I certainly wish it would last a bit longer. Yoshi-P and the team say that the new fight will have a mighty ten phases to learn, so I'm looking forward to seeing how complex it can really be. It has the potential to be one of the most interesting, complex battles in the whole game at this rate.

Other than the more conventional content, the other appealing aspect of 3.1 is the Island Exploration mechanics that are being added. Heavensward added the ability for Free Companies to build their own airships and send them out on exploratory voyages into The Sea of Clouds, after which they'd come back bearing goodies, sometimes having discovered islands in the sky. I haven't looked into this much at all — our Free Company has one particularly dedicated member who has been taking care of our fleet of airships so far, so I haven't really needed to. The Island Exploration system, however, actually allows groups of players — up to 24 at once — to party up and explore some of the strange places the airships have been discovering. Once there, it's a much more freeform experience than the rather linear dungeons in the game. You have 90 minutes to explore, fight things and find stuff. Exactly what you'll find remains to be seen, but we know there is Aetherial gear to be found as well as gathering nodes for miners, botanists and perhaps fishers too. There will also be objectives to complete, which will reward players with the all-important Tomestones of Esoterics, which hopefully will be dished out with sufficient generosity to make Island Exploration a viable alternative to endless Dungeon Roulette grinding.

Then, of course, there's the continuation of the main story. Heavensward's main story was great, in my book even better than that of A Realm Reborn, so I'm interested and intrigued to see where it goes next. The "vanilla" Heavensward experience ended with an intriguing cliffhanger concerning the "Warrior of Darkness", presumably some sort of counterpart to the player character's "Warrior of Light", but it remains to be seen exactly what this means. There's also a number of unresolved teasers from A Realm Reborn's finale that need wrapping up, so I'm hoping we'll see some more information concerning what was going on here, too.

It's an exciting time to be a Final Fantasy XIV player, for sure, and I'm very glad that deciding to make the switch to Dark Knight has got me out of the "rut" I was feeling like I was in with only Paladin at the level cap. I'm really looking forward to putting a level 60 Dark Knight through its paces and seeing what the future holds for the land of Eorzea — more than that, though, I'm looking forward to lots of friends coming back to play the game once there's some new content in place that they haven't run a thousand times already… yet, anyway.

The post 2113: The Dark Knight Rises appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I ran The Aery for the first time in months earlier tonight, and I realised that, having not run it for months owing to being at the level cap, I had forgotten almost everything about it. So in an attempt to brush up on my Heavensward dungeons as I continue to level Dark Knight — and also to provide an excuse to write a guide, which is something I enjoy doing — I present to you some information on how to beat the dungeon bosses in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward. Largely for my own reference.

The Dusk Vigil

Level: 51-52

Boss 1: Towering Oliphaunt

Towering Oliphaunt has a few abilities to watch out for. Firstly, there's Rear, which is an easily dodged area-effect attack around himself, and Prehistoric Trumpet, which hits the whole room.

You should also be aware of his other abilities: Rock of Ages will stun a non-tank player, Wooly Inspiration is a conal pull attack, and Rout is a charge attack. Similar to Wild Charge in The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1, Rout's damage can be split between a party member and the targeted player. It's a good idea for the tank to get in between Oliphaunt and the targeted player when this happens.

Tank tank, healer heal, DPS DPS and this shouldn't present too much difficulty.

Boss 2: Ser Yuhelmeric

Tons of adds appear in this fight. There are two main types: melee adds have a few area-effect attacks, while caster adds have the ability to buff everyone around themselves, including the boss. The tank should try to keep the boss away from the adds.

The only real ability Yuhelmeric has that you need to be aware of is Death Spiral, an attack somewhat similar to Nael's Lunar Dynamo in The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 4. In other words, it's a doughnut-shaped attack that you can avoid completely by ensuring you're in melee range when it goes off.

Boss 3: Opinicus

This is the most complex fight in Dusk Vigil. Opinicus has several different abilities, some of which are easier to deal with than others.

Alpine Draft is a simple line attack that can be avoided without too much difficulty.

Freefall is an attack where Opinicus jumps at a player, destroying any piles of rubble they're standing near. These piles of rubble are important, so try and stay clear of them when you don't need them.

Whirling Gaol is a room-wide ability that causes you to be repeatedly "pushed" towards the middle. If you reach the middle, you'll be stunned and hit. To prevent being dragged in, hide behind one of the piles of rubble.

Winds of Winter is an ability that covers a reasonable area and stacks Wind Vulnerability Up on anyone hit, making Opinicus' other abilities more dangerous. This attack also destroys all current piles of rubble and causes new ones to drop from the ceiling.

Sohm Al

Level: 53-54

Boss 1: Raskovnik

This is a considerably more forgiving version of the Rafflesia fight from The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1. If you've completed that, you'll know what to do here.

Acid Rain is a circular area-effect ability that takes aim for all players.

Sweet Scent causes Dravanian Hornets to spawn and slowly move towards the boss. These deal no damage, but should be killed if your party has low DPS, since they buff the boss if they're in range of Devour.

Devour is an ability that goes off after a player is marked and stunned for two seconds. It's a circular AoE attack, and any hornets in range will give Raskovnik a stacking damage increase.

Finally, Spit is a room-wide attack to simply be healed through.

Boss 2: Myath

Myath will periodically spawn jelly adds around the room, and use attacks based on which ones he consumes. When he consumes a blue add, move away from the party member with a blue marker. When he consumes a red add, stack up on the party member with the red arrow. Remember, blue is poo, red gives head. Or something.

The only other thing to be aware of here is the big green snot add. Kill this as a priority when it appears.

Boss 3: Tioman

Sohm Al's final boss has a number of different mechanics.

To minimise damage from the frontal cone attack Abyssic Buster, tanks should ensure that Tioman is facing away from the party.

Chaos Blast places AoE markers on each player, so avoid these.

Comet is the main ability to be aware of here. Two players will be marked and AoE circles will appear on the ground. When the marks fade, comets will fall where the players were standing, dealing room-wide damage to everyone based on how close they were to where the comets fall. To minimise damage from this, marked players should move away from the party — ideally to an edge — while the rest of the party keeps their distance too.

At around 45%, Tioman will become invincible and you must destroy her wings to continue damaging her. During this time, she will use Heavensfall, which marks a player and then spawns a cluster of circular AoEs on top of them. The marked player should move away from the rest of the party to minimise damage.

Finally, Dark Star is a room-wide AoE that you need to heal through.

After the wings are destroyed, the fight continues as before.

The Aery

Level: 55-56

Boss 1: Rangda

Rangda only has two main abilities to concern yourself with. To avoid being hit with Electric Cachexis, move into melee range with Rangda, similar to avoiding Nael's Lunar Dynamo or Chimera's The Dragon's Voice.

If you get marked with Prey, move to one of the tall pillars at the outside of the room to transfer it and stay safe.

You should also kill adds as they spawn; none of them are particularly tough. Rangda also has a few other AoE attacks, but none of them hit particularly hard, so just heal through them.

Boss 2: Gyascutus

Gyascutus will gain a damage-up buff for every cloud of poison it farts out around the room. To get rid of these, use the Mustard Gas bombs that spawn occasionally to eat one or two of the clouds, then kill them. If the bombs eat four clouds, they will self-destruct, deal damage to the whole room and poison everyone four times. Don't do this.

Boss 3: Nidhogg

Nidhogg's go-to attack is The Crimson Price, which shits out fiery orbs at you. These burn for a few seconds, then blast a line AoE. If Nidhogg faces you and you're not the tank, he's going to cast one of these at you. Step aside to avoid damage.

The Sable Price is Nidhogg's jailing ability. One player will get trapped, and the remaining party members must destroy it before Sable Weave casts, otherwise the trapped player will die.

At about 30% HP, Nidhogg will retreat to prepare his ultimate attack. During this time, you must defeat all the adds and ensure that Estinien remains standing. Tanks should grab the adds as quickly as possible, and healers should divide their attention between the party and Estinien to ensure he stays healthy. When the final add falls, Estinien will put up a shield, which you should dive inside to protect yourself from Nidhogg's ultimate.

After this, the earlier mechanics simply repeat.

The Vault

Level: 57-58

Boss 1: Ser Adelphel Brightblade

The first phase of this fight is a simple tank-and-spank — kill Adelphel's companions first, then knock him down. He'll change form and the fight proper will begin.

When Adelphel casts Holy Shield Bash, he'll jump to a player, stun and hit them. Paladins can Cover this.

Holiest of Holy deals damage to the whole room. Heal through this.

Finally, Adelphel will occasionally charge around the room and leave big explodey balls behind. Do not be near his balls when they explode, otherwise you'll be very sorry indeed. (Huehuehue.)

Boss 2: Ser Grinnaux the Bull

Like Adelphel, Grinnaux has a trash phase first. Batter him down to start the fight proper.

Most of this fight is about dodging the various ground AoEs that Grinnaux applies around the room, but there are a couple of specific abilities to watch out for.

Hyperdimensional Slash lays a red AoE in front of Grinnaux in the direction of a random player. When this goes off, anyone in the way will take damage, and an Aetherial Tear will appear where the attack hits the wall. These Tears will tether to anyone near them and damage them, so ideally bait them all to the same part of the room.

After two Hyperdimension Slash attacks, Grinnaux will cast Faith Unmoving, which will knock everyone directly backwards when it finishes casting. Make sure your back is to part of the wall that is free from Aetherial Tears to stay safe.

Boss 3: Ser Charibert

Filthy rats! Charibert has a bunch of nasty abilities that you need to watch out for. It's a good idea to tank him near the entrance to his arena rather than in the middle.

Altar Pyre is a simple room-wide damage attack. Heal through it.

Holy Chain tethers two players together — run apart to break it, otherwise you'll both take damage.

Heavensflame causes flame rings to appear on the ground. Avoid them.

Charibert's most annoying ability is to summon a row of knights, who will march across the arena and Slow anyone they trample over. Each row will always have a gap in it, so position yourself so they'll pass you by safely or run through the gap to avoid this.

At about 50% HP, Charibert will disappear, then reappear with a bunch of Holy Flames around the room. Kill as many of these as possible, because Charibert's next attack deals more damage the more Holy Flames are left. You can leave one or two Flames up and still be safe when this happens.

After this attack, the cycle repeats, though both Heavensflame and Charibert's knight-summoning become more dangerous: Heavensflame has two sets of flame rings, and two rows of knights appear instead of one.

The Great Gubal Library

Level: 59-60

Boss 1: Demon Tome

This is very similar to Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep, albeit without the time limit. Instead, there are some new abilities to watch out for, including an instant-kill.

The first thing to do is avoid Demon Tome's line AoEs, since these apply a Slow effect. The lines will come down the middle of the room first, then the sides. Position yourself ahead of time to avoid these.

Dark Blizzard III is a circle AoE that targets a random player during the line attacks. Avoid this.

Disclosure is Demon Tome's instakill ability. When it starts to glow, run around the side until you're behind Demon Tome to stay safe. If you're in front of Demon Tome when Disclosure finishes casting, you'll die.

Finally, Words of Winter is a ground freeze attack that causes you to slide while it is in effect. Plan your moves carefully, particularly when Disclosure is casting, and only move when necessary.

Boss 2: Byblos

When Byblos runs to the centre of the room, two books will spawn, with the ability to cast Death Ray at you, a line AoE that, despite the name, doesn't do all that much damage.

When they die, orbs will tether to players. Tethered players need to position themselves so the orb hits Byblos to break his invulnerability period.

In subsequent phases, Byblos will spawn clouds of fumes. Party members should take it in turns to disperse these by running through them, since this causes damage. It's important to manage them, though, as they can interfere with the orbs.

When Byblos isn't invincible, he'll perform Gale Cut on the tank. When this is being cast, the tank should run through Byblos or to the side to avoid it. He also has a Tail Swipe attack on anyone behind him.

Finally, Head Down is a charge attack similar to the one seen in Amdapor Keep (Hard). The targeted player should ensure the line AoE doesn't intersect with any other players to minimise damage. The easiest way to deal with this is simply to run straight at Byblos.

Boss 3: The Everliving Bibliotaph

Three times during the fight, The Everliving Bibliotaph will use Void Summon as a supernatural "Help Wanted" advertisement. In order to prevent his questionable hiring practices, you need to stand on the glowing platforms on the ground. The number of players who need to stand on a platform is indicated by how many lights are lit up on the platform in question. Multiple platforms will highlight at once, so be ready to spread out.

If you get targeted by Bibliotaph, run away from the party to bait the AoE he's preparing for you. Everyone should keep away from this, as it pulses several times, applying damage and Vulnerability Up in the process.

At around 55% HP, Bibliotaph will cast some combination of Deep Darkness and Magic Burst. Deep Darkness covers the outside of the arena and causes a Heavy debuff for about 30 seconds. Magic Burst, meanwhile, deals damage and knockback. Neither are pleasant.

If you're new to Final Fantasy XIV and want some more help, I wrote a bunch of guides during my time at USgamer; some of this information is a little out of date now, but the basic boss strategies and suchlike are still valid.

• Dungeon guides
• Level 50 dungeon guides (up to The Lost City of Amdapor)
• Trial guides (up to Leviathan Hard)
• Labyrinth of the Ancients guide

The post 2108: Heavensward Dungeon Boss Guides (For My Own Reference) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Continuing to level Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I wasn't quite prepared for how much more powerful it feels than Paladin, but I'm really enjoying the overall feel of it a whole lot — much more than Warrior, which seemed enjoyable enough, but didn't quite "click" with me for some reason.

I think the reason I like Dark Knight so much is that it appears to be a little less dependent on strict rotations to perform its job most effectively — or, rather, there's more than one rotation to play around with. I particularly enjoy the fact that when playing Dark Knight it's absolutely okay — even encouraged — to drop out of Grit, the main "tank stance", in order to do some additional damage. This appears to be of particular benefit when fighting single-target bosses, since taking fewer overall hits means that Blood Weapon (increase attack speed, drain MP from enemy with every hit, only available when not in Grit) becomes a more efficient means of restoring MP than Blood Price (gain MP when taking damage).

Even though many of the abilities are somewhat similar in function to those found in Paladin, they somehow feel more satisfying to use. Dark Knight has an area-of-effect damage over time skill called Salted Earth, for example, that bathes an area in black and red lightning, whereas Paladin's nearest equivalent is Circle of Scorn, which has its own little pyrotechnics display but somehow doesn't feel quite as enjoyable to use. Dark Knight also has Scourge, which is a damage over time that can be immediately applied rather than only used at the end of a three-hit combo like Paladin's Goring Blade. When everything lines up nicely and you can apply Scourge and Salted Earth to an enemy before letting rip with a non-Grit Dark Arts Souleater combo for a significant amount of damage, it's a great deal of fun.

Learning my way around Dark Knight has been enjoyable, and it's helping me rediscover my respect for Final Fantasy XIV's combat system. People who come to FFXIV from more traditional, customisable role-playing games are sometimes a bit put out at the relative lack of personalisation FFXIV offers in terms of abilities — everyone gets the same abilities at the same levels, and the only real flexibility is in any cross-class skills you choose to use, but even here there are only certain ones that are particularly useful — but in practice it works enormously well, behaving, of all things, more like a fighting game than anything else. A slow-paced fighting game, admittedly, but a fighting game nonetheless.

Allow me to clarify. Modern fighting games demand that players learn specific button and directional inputs to perform various special moves. In order to get good at a fighting game, you need to develop a certain degree of muscle memory to be able to pull these moves off automatically. Once you've done that, you need to master the timing of these moves to chain them together into effective combos, and then you need to understand what the most appropriate situations to use these individual combos are.

Final Fantasy XIV is exactly the same, just at a fraction of the pace of your average fighting game. Positioning is important; responding to your enemy's moves is important; using the right ability at the right time is important. Even muscle memory is important, particularly if you're playing on controller — while you're not doing Hadoken button inputs to throw a fireball at someone, you do need to be able to remember where you put all your most important abilities and be able to practically automatically perform combos with no gaps for the most efficient possible damage output. For example, on Dark Knight, my average combo runs something along the lines of LT+Y, RT+Y, LT+A, LT+RT+X, A, LT+RT+B, LT+X, RT+B, RT+X, RT+A, RT+LT+B, RT+LT+X, RT+LT+up, RT+LT+A. This pulls an enemy with Unmend, cements aggro with Unleash, kicks them in the bollocks to stun them for a few seconds, drops a Salted Earth on the ground, applies Scourge, blasts them and anything near them with Dark Passenger, does my three-hit aggro combo then my three-hit, Dark Arts-buffed Souleater combo for a nice chunk of damage. And this isn't even getting into the situational weaving in of various defensive cooldowns to ensure that I don't take too much damage, or other skills to support the battle.

That may all sound exceedingly complicated, but I've done it so many times now that it feels "automatic" to be able to perform these abilities in the order that seems to work most effectively at my level. I'm sure I'll have to shake things up a bit as I get closer to 60 and challenging more difficult content, but for now it's extremely satisfying to nimbly pull off these combos without breaking a sweat.

Onwards to 60 then… I should hit 54 tonight, all being well.

The post 2107: Dark Knight Chronicles appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The official trailer for Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.1 came out recently, and it's looking simply marvellous. I am happy about this, because although I feel like I've got over my "rut" with the game, I'd still love to see something new at last. It's been a long time coming, after all.

My initial reaction to the announcement of 3.1 was slight disappointment, but in retrospect this was rather silly. I'll tell you my thinking, though: previous content patches for the game tended to include three new dungeons, a new raid (either a 24-player casual raid of the Crystal Tower ilk, or an 8-player hardcore raid of the Coil ilk) and maybe some new quests and minor mechanics here and there. And gear, of course. 3.1, meanwhile, only includes two new dungeons, one of which is a "Hard Mode" version of an existing dungeon — Pharos Sirius — which immediately made me feel a bit let down that we weren't getting as much new stuff as we had in the past.

But then I considered things a bit more, and there are plenty of interesting things happening outside the dungeons, because dungeons aren't the only interesting thing you can do in the game. They're cool, sure, but I get the impression that Yoshi-P and the FFXIV team very much want to try and shake up the basic formula of the game a little bit having got it where they want to be over the course of A Realm Reborn and vanilla Heavensward. In other words, that means getting people out of the "grind the same thing over and over" mentality and into doing more varied things.

Perhaps the thing I'm most intrigued by — and most mystified by — is the new Exploratory Missions system, whereby individual players, parties, alliances and Free Companies can fly off into the Sea of Clouds with their airship(s), explore a region for 90 minutes, kick the shit out of some monsters, find treasure, complete objectives and gather stuff. This has the most potential to shake up the basic structure of the game, and I really hope it turns out well.

Details are still a bit thin on the ground as yet, but it seems like there will be three difficulty levels for these exploratory missions, with the hardest level being pitched towards Free Companies with their own airships. Monsters will have difficulty ranks between 1 and 6 instead of conventional levels, and there are apparently Hunt-esque "marks" to defeat as well as regular monsters. There will be objectives to complete that will allow players to earn the all-important Tomestones to upgrade their equipment, and treasure chests that contain new Aetherial equipment with randomised stats.

The randomised element of the Exploratory missions is the thing I'm looking forward to the most, to be honest. Exactly how random it is I'm not entirely sure as yet, but I know at the very least there will be several different areas that you can fly to when you start one of these missions — it seems you won't be able to explicitly pick where you want to go and will instead be assigned a random landing point in a random region. The equipment you can find will be scattered in bronze, silver and gold chests, and presumably tracking these chests down will involve actual exploration of the area rather than the current situation in dungeons, where equipment can be found in boss chests and stuff in all the other chests is fairly underwhelming in its awesomeness, usually consisting of either potions or crafting materials.

Aside from the Exploratory Missions, the thing I'm looking forward to the most is the new Minstrel's Ballad trial, which is a considerably expanded version of the final boss fight from the Heavensward story quests. This was an absolutely spectacular fight, albeit not particularly difficult, so it will be exciting to have the opportunity to see this realised as something closer to what the creators apparently originally intended. It will be a ten-phase fight — they stopped short of going for thirteen phases to match the thirteen Knights of the Round — and will apparently be on par difficulty-wise with Extreme-level primal fights and the first area of Alexander (Savage). Hopefully this doesn't mean it will be a glorified DPS check like Alexander is, but from the little I've seen of it so far, it looks like there's going to be some interesting mechanics at play.

Anyway. Patch 3.1 is coming in early November, which isn't far away now. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, and actually a little bit thankful that the new Relic weapons — which are apparently known as "Anima Weapons" — aren't coming immediately, instead inviting us to grind ourselves into oblivion from patch 3.15 onwards.

In the meantime, I've got Dark Knight to level 50 today, so only ten levels to go before I can officially retire Paladin for the most part and start playing a tank class with a bit more damage output at high level! Darksiiiiiiide!

The post 2105: Into Darkness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I decided that I was going to get over my "rut" with Final Fantasy XIV today and get my mojo back, so I booted it up and decided to try something I hadn't done before: give Dark Knight a go.

Dark Knight is the new tanking class that was added in the Heavensward expansion. So far, I've levelled Paladin (the main "defense tank") to 60 as my main, and I have Warrior (the main "wallopy tank") at 50, so I have a reasonable understanding of it. Dark Knight was a bit of a mystery, though; although I'd read a bit about it, I didn't really have a bead on how it might actually feel to play it.

Turns out it feels like a hell of a lot of fun — far more so than the rather weedy-but-graceful-feeling Paladin, and, for my money, also more so than the cumbersome swings and heavy hits of Warrior.

I've only levelled fro 30-34 so far (you start Dark Knight at 30, unlike pre-expansion classes, which start at 1) so I don't have a huge amount of experience as yet, but I've enjoyed what I've done. The class feels like a good balance between the relatively straightforward, set combos and defense of Paladin and the more intricate combos and damage-buffing of Warrior. There also seems to be a bit more in the way of "stance-dancing", since there are a number of abilities that only work when you have a specific status effect active — or in some cases, if you don't have it active. The skill "Blood Weapon", for example, which increases your attack speed and allows you to drain MP from enemies, will not work if you're in the defensive "Grit" stance, but that's fine, since Blood Weapon is an offensive skill and Grit carries a hefty damage penalty, so the two aren't really compatible.

I like this way of playing; rather than Paladin's approach of sticking with Shield Oath most of the time and giving it a bit of Sword Oath only when you have a hefty aggro lead on the rest of your party, Dark Knight allows you to switch back and forth a lot more freely, giving combat a much more dynamic feel. The rhythm I was getting into by the end of tonight's session saw me doing my basic aggro combo, weaving in the "Low Blow" stunning kick (which is off the global cooldown) and also dropping in the off-GCD "Reprisal" proc to reduce enemy damage after a successful parry. Then, when Blood Weapon was up — it actually has a pretty short cooldown — I'd drop Grit, hit Blood Weapon, unleash as many attacks as I could manage — including DRK's DoT, which, unlike PLD's, isn't part of a combo, so can be applied immediately — before switching back into Grit again once Blood Weapon dropped. The timing of Blood Weapon's cooldown usually meant that I could rotate defensive cooldowns at the same time as throwing up Blood Weapon, too, so I could mitigate at least some of the increased damage I'd be taking by dropping Grit's considerable (20%) reduction in incoming damage.

DRK's AoE aggro move is also a bit more intuitive than PLD's Flash, whose radius I'm still not entirely 100% sure of. Unleash, meanwhile, displays a very clear area of effect when you use it, making it extremely apparent whether your positioning is right or not. It's not quite as satisfying as WAR's cone-area Overpower, being a weird-looking spell with an annoying sound effect rather than a distinctly HULK SMASH-style swing of your axe, but I've also found so far that DRK appears to be able to hold aggro pretty well even with only a couple of Unleashes at the start of the fight — perhaps a side-effect of its increased damage when compared to something like PLD.

I'm digging DRK so far, then, and although it's another tank class like my main, it feels different enough from PLD already that I feel like it's going to be enjoyable to level. And who knows? I might even end up maining it if and when I get it to 60.

The post 2092: I Can Have a Darkside If You Want Me To appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I haven't been playing Final Fantasy XIV all that much recently. This is partly down to the fact that I've been really enjoying the other stuff I've been playing, and also due to the fact that the current content is feeling a bit stale and stagnant; Heavensward came out quite a long time ago now, and aside from the introduction of raid dungeon Alexander (which proved to be a little underwhelming after the dramatic insanity of The Binding Coil of Bahamut) there hasn't been much new stuff introduced. Consequently, the grind to get other classes to level 60 — or to gear up my main class, for that matter — isn't feeling all that appealing right now, particularly as there really isn't a huge amount to do at level 60 at the moment: two dungeons, two Extreme boss fights, and Alexander in its Normal and Savage incarnations.

This, along with some of the other stuff I've been playing recently, got me thinking about ways the formula could be shaken up a little — partly to make the grind a bit more bearable, partly to make replays of old content a more attractive option, and partly to address some common complaints of certain aspects of the player base, specifically the lack of challenge in dungeons and the desire to show off your skills a bit more outside of the tippest-toppest highest-level content.

Final Fantasy XIV is heavily based on instanced content such as dungeons and boss fights, so I had an idle thought that the addition of two optional ways of playing this content would make the game interesting: specifically a Time Attack mode, which would reward those who can slice through a dungeon at high speed, and a Score Attack mode, which will encourage "full clears" of dungeons as well as skilful play.

I'm no game designer and I am under no illusions that these ideas would ever be implemented into the game, but I'll share my thinking for each mode, anyway.

Queueing

Added to the existing Duty Finder options — Undersized/Unsynced Party and Minimum Item Level — would be the options for Score Attack and Time Attack. You would only be able to challenge one or the other at a time, but there could potentially be some additional options such as difficulties, whether to run it with level/item level sync or not and so forth. (There could also perhaps be an additional option for a "Story" run, for those who want to enjoy dungeons for the first time as originally intended, which could perhaps make cutscenes unskippable, bosses untargetable until everyone is out of cutscenes and perhaps even force a minimum iLevel sync. Alternatively, not selecting Score or Time Attack could simply assume that the run is for "story" purposes, without the restrictions suggested above.)

Time Attack

There are a few ways this could work. The simplest means would be for the party's clear time to be recorded, starting from when the barrier comes down at the outset of the dungeon and stopping when the dungeon's final boss is defeated. The final time would give the party as a whole a letter grade between, say, D and S — D being the worst, S being the best — and the rewards for the dungeon would be adjusted accordingly based on the grade attained.

Each player's best time is recorded, and this could provide additional incentives: perhaps a small extra reward if you beat your previous best, or leaderboards showing which players/parties/Free Companies/servers have cleared content most efficiently.

A second means of approaching this could be to give the party a fairly strict time limit countdown from when the dungeon starts, with time being extended by reaching checkpoints or defeating particular enemies. This provides the opportunity for failure — something which the game as a whole is lacking a bit, particularly in dungeons, where you can just respawn until the currently implemented and overly generous total time limit expires — as well as the chance to reward efficient play; again, the run should be concluded with some sort of rating system or bonus based on time remaining to encourage speedy runs.

My thinking behind this system is that there are already people who like to rush through dungeons as quickly as possible, and this often leads to conflict with people who aren't as confident or simply prefer to take things slowly. Providing a separate "mode" for those who like to speedrun — as well as incentives for everyone in the party to be on board with speedrunning the dungeon — would, I feel, alleviate at least a certain amount of this tension. Plus trying to beat your best times makes for an inherently satisfying means of rewarding replays of old content.

Score Attack

This would be a little more complex, but the basic principle is the same as outlined above: clear a dungeon, get a grade, adjust the rewards according to how good the grade was.

In this case, the grade would come from the total score the party attains in the dungeon. The score could change via any or all of the following possible events:

• Dealing damage/overall DPS
• Defeating an enemy
• Overkilling an enemy (dealing more damage than necessary to knock its HP to 0)
• Landing hits in rapid succession (skillchains)
• Hitting multiple enemies at once with AoE skills
• Tanks maintaining aggro
• Losing points for non-tanks taking aggro
• Clutch healing (i.e. the same circumstances where a well-timed heal increases the Limit gauge)
• Using limit breaks
• Finding treasures
• Defeating bosses quickly

There could then be a number of point bonuses awarded, either at the end of the dungeon or at checkpoints (likely the bosses):

• Time bonus according to how quickly the section/dungeon was cleared
• Bonus according to the percentage of all enemies in the section/dungeon defeated (encouraging full clears)
• Penalties for party KO's or failing to deal with boss mechanics properly
• Bonuses for achieving specific goals such as overkills, enemies simultaneously defeated and the like

At the conclusion of the dungeon, the party receives a letter grade between D and S, with rewards increasing for better grades.

My thinking behind this mode is that it would force players to play in a slightly different way; it would require cooperation, players playing their job well and being more willing to be thorough about clearing a dungeon. Because well-geared players are less inclined to do full clears of dungeons, the rewards for performing well in Score Attack should provide sufficient incentive for them to play in this mode, since better gear will inevitably allow for the attainment of higher scores.

Someone out there doubtless has a compelling argument as to why both of these are stupid ideas — off the top of my head, perhaps the strongest argument against would be making something so "gamey" fit into the overall lore, though FFXIV isn't above a transparently shoehorned explanation or two here and there. (See: anything PvP; the Crystal Tower weekly quest; anything involving the Wandering Minstrel; the recent seasonal event in which you could meet the developers) To be clear, these are not by any means serious suggestions in the slightest. I do think they'd both be pretty fun, though — and they'd certainly get me pumped up to chase some high scores and best times.

The post 2078: Two FFXIV Ideas That Will Never Get Implemented (Probably) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Continuing with my exercise from the last few days in which I take "requests" from my Twitter followers, today I follow the suggestion of Josh "Musubi Azeyma" Major, a friend whom I originally met through Final Fantasy XIV. Josh requested that I present a hundred reasons why people should play Metal Gear Solid V, because he's obsessed with it right now and thinks everyone else should be too. So, who am I to argue with that logic?

DISCLAIMER: The only real potential issue with this task is that I haven't actually played Metal Gear Solid V, nor do I own a copy. Since we have, however, established that it is acceptable for professional journalists to comment negatively about things without putting in a substantial amount of time with them — or in some cases, without even playing them at all — it's surely fine for some nobody blogger in the wilds of the Internet (albeit one who used to be a professional games journalist) to speak positively about something he has absolutely no experience with whatsoever. So, without further ado, let's begin.

1. It's part of the Metal Gear Solid series, which people have heard of.
2. Hideo Kojima is a cool dude who posts pictures of Eggs Benedict on Twitter and makes jokes about them jiggling like boobs.
3. Konami fucked Hideo Kojima up the ass pretty royally towards the end of Metal Gear Solid V's development, so while buying a copy and enjoying it may support Konami to a certain degree, it also shows your support for Hideo Kojima's creation.
4. The graphics are quite pretty.
5. It's available on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, so unless you're a weirdo who only has a Wii U in the house, you can almost certainly play it.
6. Quiet has nice tits.
7. Quiet is pretty badass.
8. Appreciating Quiet's feminine wiles pisses off the outrage brigade.
9. There are guns in this game.
10. And dogs.
11. And a horse that you can command to shit whenever you want.
12. You can attach balloons to bears and send them flying off into the sky.
13. You can do the same with enemy guards.
14. There's apparently some sort of story that's pretty good.
15. Something interesting happens in the medical bay or something, everyone keeps yammering on about it without actually saying what it is because spoilers.
16. Something about cassette tapes.
17. METAL GEAR?!
18. It is, I am assured, open world without being directionless.
19. It does that thing I like where it presents each mission as its own self-contained "episode", complete with intro and outro credits sequences.
20. Each mission is apparently pretty tightly focused rather than making use of the open world unnecessarily.
21. It's not Splinter Cell.
22. Revolver Ocelot.
23. Metal Gear is a Japanese series that it's apparently still acceptable to like without people calling you a paedophile.
24. There are achievements and trophies in the game.
25. If you're really good at a mission, you get an S-rank and feel all happy.
26. You can tranquilise people.
27. You can kill people.
28. You can sneak up on people.
29. You can charge in the front door of an enemy base brandishing an assortment of improbable military hardware, then blow everything up with reckless disregard for the "Tactical Espionage" part of the game's subtitle.
30. Something about tanks.
31. Anita Sarkeesian's puppetmaster Jonathan McIntosh doesn't like Hideo Kojima for the jokes he makes on Twitter (see #2).
32. Posting things about Metal Gear Solid online at the time of writing is a sure-fire means of getting those sweet-ass clicks.
33. There's a Mother Base that you manage or something.
34. You can get soldiers and dogs and stuff for your base or something.
35. Some of it's a bit like Peace Walker, which I also haven't played but people seemed to like.
36. Kojima has dialled back the "I'M MAKING A MOVIE!!" chaos. A bit.
37. Kiefer Sutherland is like a proper famous actor, innit.
38. The probably-vain hope that David Hayter will show up at some point in the same, growl "SURPRISE", snap the neck of KieferSnake, forcing you to play the rest of the game as Snake with his proper voice.
39. Lid from Hyperdevotion Noire was pretty fit.
40. You can hide in cardboard boxes.
41. You can play as people who aren't Snake if you so desire.
42. Including women. SHOCK
43. But Snake has a robot arm or something, so he's clearly the best.
44. If you're playing this game, you are contractually obliged to put the word "Punished" in front of your Twitter name, because it makes you at least 20% cooler to do so.
45. This coolness quotient increases to 30% if you also scrawl an eyepatch on your avatar using Microsoft Paint.
46. Hurt me more, Snake
47. There's a sweet-ass limited edition PlayStation 4 to tie in with the game's release, because we all know Metal Gear is a series that belongs on PlayStation.
48. There's some sort of online feature, I think.
49. You're banned from soliciting relationships with other people through Metal Gear Solid V's online features, which means you can protect yourself against people who are on the pull through Metal Gear Solid V's online features.
50. Who does that?
51. I anticipate it will be less than a week before someone recreates a scene from this using nothing but Super Mario Maker.
52. Someone already did the microwave tunnel scene from Metal Gear Solid IV.
53. This game is longer than Ground Zeroes.
54. It is also a lot longer than previous Metal Gear games.
55. My friend Josh claims to have spent over a hundred hours on this game so far.
56. A lot of stuff is optional, so you can probably whizz through it a bit quicker if you want to.
57. Something about vagina bombs. (I didn't play Ground Zeroes either.)
58. You like Castlevania, don't you?
59. There are no navel-gazing codec conversations between Raiden and Rose.
60. There are, instead, navel-gazing cassette tapes, but you can listen to these while you're attaching helium balloons to bears.
61. Metal Gear games usually have good villains. (I have absolutely no idea who the villains are in this.)
62. Ditto boss fights. (Likewise.)
63. The old games had good music. This one probably maybe does too.
64. Ditto voice acting.
65. You can level up Snake or something.
66. I think you can possibly maybe level up the other soldiers you collect too.
67. If Quiet's boobylicious outfit bothers you that much, she has numerous other costumes, including being completely covered in blood and Sniper Wolf's somewhat more conservative but still boobylicious outfit.
68. Apparently there's some explanation for why Quiet dresses the way she does.
69. Something about photosynthesis.
70. Or possibly nanomachines. Son.
71. That big speech at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 was kind of cool in how eerily prescient it was.
72. That means that in roughly ten years' time, something in Metal Gear Solid V will probably be looked back on and numerous chins stroked thoughtfully.
73. This installment uses a Roman numeral V instead of the Arabic digit 5, because Roman numerals are, as everyone knows, inherently classier.
74. The Phantom Pain sounds kind of cool as a subtitle.
75. Although it's a bit close to The Phantom Menace for my liking.
76. Although it looks as if Metal Gear Solid V may well be reclaiming the subtitle structure The Phantom [x] from the damage that Star Wars did to it.
77. George Lucas had nothing to do with this game.
78. This game does not feature, at any point, in Disney Infinity.
79. If you play this game, you can talk about it with your friends rather than just nodding and smiling and pretending to know what they're blathering on about.
80. The Steam version might have trading cards or something, I don't know because the Steam store isn't working for me right now.
81. The PC port has to be better than that dogshit effort with the last Batman game.
82. Hey, it's a Metal Gear Solid game that you can actually play on PC without dicking around with emulators!
83. You should still probably play it on PlayStation, preferably on that sweet-ass limited edition console.
84. If you buy one of those sweet-ass limited edition consoles from me when I'm working, do me a solid and also buy the extended warranty coverage and preorder some other stuff.
85. The person who hired me for my part-time seasonal retail job is a huuuuge fan of Metal Gear Solid.
86. I was hired for said job partly because I included the words "nanomachines, son" under the "Skills" section on my CV.
87. I'm running out of things to write here.
88. I'm honestly impressed that I've made it to 88 without much padding.
89. If you buy a physical copy of the game you can put it on your shelf alongside all the previous Metal Gear Solid games for a cool display of the series over time.
90. The uneven sizes of the boxes for Metal Gear Solid over the years — CD-sized PSone cases, DVD-sized PS2 cases, slightly-smaller-than-DVD-sized PS3, PS4 and Xbox One cases — makes for an attractively wibbly-wobbly effect on your shelf.
91. The hardback strategy guide for Metal Gear Solid V is very pretty indeed, and if you can still find a copy anywhere you often get a free poster with it.
92. The softback one is still pretty meaty and can probably do some damage to an assailant if you have it to hand when you come under attack.
93. Even if you have no intention of playing Metal Gear Solid V, tossing the disc case out in front of a passing guard will distract them long enough for you to sneak up behind them and snap their neck.
94. You probably shouldn't do that.
95. Instead, you can indulge such fantasies in the new video game from Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
96. There's some sort of kawaii idol girl posters scattered around the place in the game.
97. Have you considered trying Mad Max as well, which came out the same day? Polygon hated it, which is reason enough to try it.
98. You should probably also give Until Dawn a go if you have a PlayStation 4, because Sony idiotically released it last week and not at, I don't know, Halloween.
99. You can probably edit together some entertaining and silly videos using the next-gen consoles' video capture facilities and software such as the PS4's ShareFactory.
100. If you bugger off and play Metal Gear Solid V, I don't have to keep writing this, and I can get on with playing Super Mario Maker instead.

The post 2062: By Request: 100 Reasons You Should Play Metal Gear Solid V appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've tried PvP in various other MMOs and never really got along with it. I never got far enough through Guild Wars for the PvP to be relevant outside of the single match you're forced to play in the introductory chapter; Star Wars: The Old Republic's PvP was unbalanced garbage; and The Secret World's PvP just seemed too chaotic to be manageable.

The trouble with PvP in a game with RPG mechanics is that it often becomes nothing more than a numbers game rather than a test of skill. In other words, whoever has the best gear will almost definitely win every time. This is particularly apparent in games that make seemingly no effort whatsoever to balance things out for a fair competition, the most egregious example of this I can think of being Blizzard's Diablo II. (To be far, PvP wasn't really the point of that game at all, but the fact it was in there at all in such a gleefully unbalanced state was just baffling.)

One of the nice things about Final Fantasy XIV's PvP is that it puts everyone on a pretty level playing field by syncing gear levels to a relatively low standard — iLevel 80 for level 50 PvP and iLevel 150 for level 60 PvP. This means that even if you haven't spent months farming content for the very best gear, you can still be both competitive and an asset to your team, making PvP as a whole a lot more accessible to a wider bunch of people. Which is good, because it's pretty large-scale, with 72 participants across three teams fighting it out all together in most cases.

Seal Rock is the newest addition to Final Fantasy XIV's PvP lineup. The previous PvP matches on the Carteneau Flats saw you either capturing and defending points from enemy assault, or simply attempting to defeat as many of the enemy teams as possible. The "Seize" mode you play on Seal Rock, meanwhile, is a slightly more involved, dynamic affair that requires coordination and teamwork, challenging your team to activate and hold Allagan Tomeliths that activate at random at various points across the battlefield, with the ultimate goal being to score 800 points before the other teams.

Points are scored by holding onto the Tomeliths; when one is in your team's possession, your Mammets gradually download data from it until it runs dry, at which point new Tomeliths will activate after a short period, and the process continues. The twist is that not all Tomeliths are created equal; there are B-, A- and S-rank varieties, with B-rank Tomeliths being worth the least potential number of points and S-rank Tomeliths being worth the most.

It's not as simple as just charging for the most valuable Tomelith, though. At times, it can be more advantageous to watch the other two teams scrap over an S-rank while you sneak around behind their backs and capture all the other ones for a greater total number of points than the S-rank by itself is worth. Add to that the fact that every time one of your team members is knocked out, your team loses a few points, and you have a mode where confrontation is something you want to avoid as much as you can unless you have a significant numbers advantage, at which point it's enormously satisfying to steamroller members of the enemy team.

What I think I like most about playing PvP is how different it feels from the PvE content. PvE can often feel quite "by rote" after a while, particularly in the more scripted encounters, and while this is satisfying in its own way at times — I've described the more intricate boss fights as being delightfully dance-like — PvP keeps you on your toes, challenging you to respond to new and unexpected situations as they crop up, and no two matches are ever quite alike. This makes it fun and enjoyable even if you're on the losing side, particularly as matches are wrapped up within 20 minutes at the very most, usually less.

I haven't quite figured out what the best strategies are quite yet, but I've been enjoying the experience a great deal so far, and I'm looking forward to battling those scoundrels of the Maelstrom and the Adders again soon.

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It's not that I've gone off the game per se — I still see myself playing it for many years to come — it's more that I've got out of it what I wanted to get out of it so far. The Heavensward storyline was exciting and dramatic — and, for my money, better than A Realm Reborn's main quest — and the Alexander raid dungeon was an enjoyable challenge, though we're still yet to clear its Savage incarnation.

Trouble is, outside of levelling alternate classes there's not a huge amount to do at level cap right now.

This is the exact situation A Realm Reborn (and, I imagine, most MMOs) found itself in at launch, of course; the difference here, however, is that whereas it took me a good few weeks to make it to 50 in A Realm Reborn — I reached the level cap a while after the more dedicated players in my Free Company — I got through Heavensward pretty quickly. This was deliberate, of course; I binged on the new story content because it was enjoyable and interesting, and also because I wanted to see everything that the expansion pack had to offer. I also wanted to avoid inadvertently being spoiled on the storyline, since Final Fantasy XIV is that rare example of an MMO where the story is actually worth paying attention to and even told pretty well.

Consequently, I got to the "end" a lot more quickly than I did with A Realm Reborn, and consequently I've found myself with a lot more "dead time" with stagnant content. Sure, I could run Alexander over and over again to try and get some more gear sets. Sure, I could level other classes — I probably will do this at some point. Sure, I could run the current two level 60 dungeons over and over to get as many Tomestones of Esoterics as possible to gear up one or more classes.

Trouble is, I simply don't have a lot of motivation to do so right now. And that's sort of fine by me, really; whenever I play an MMO I always find myself in a weird place where I'm really enjoying the experience of playing the game and getting good at it — I maintain that Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few games I genuinely consider myself to actually be pretty good at — but also feeling a strange sense of "guilt" that I'm not playing any of the other million and one games that have been staring at me from my shelves for the last few years. Conversely, I play a game that isn't Final Fantasy XIV and I feel a similar sense of "guilt" that I'm not playing Final Fantasy XIV more. I can't win. Stupid brain.

On balance, though, this "dead time" is actually proving to be rather welcome, as since I have little inclination to log in right now for anything other than my weekly raiding commitments — and the group as a whole is pretty half-hearted about the whole thing at the moment, to be honest — I am having plenty of time to delve into other experiences. I managed to get the Platinum trophy on Omega Quintet. I'm working on the Platinum trophy for Hyperdevotion Noire. I am loving the shit out of Sword Art Online on PS4. And I'm also really enjoying Splatoon, Heroes of the Storm and any number of other games right now.

The trouble with any hobby that has a lot of different elements to it — be it gaming, music, reading, movies or whatever — is finding that perfect balance where you can enjoy all those different elements at different times and not feel like you're neglecting any of them. Right now, even though I know that I don't have much motivation to play Final Fantasy XIV, I still feel like I'm neglecting it because I'm not logging in to talk to my friends. So perhaps I still haven't quite found the right balance there. But eh. I'm not going to worry about it for the moment — a new content patch for the game might rekindle my interest for a while, but in the meantime I'm going to cut right back and enjoy the other experiences I have on the go right now.

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I'd heard Alexander was significantly easier than The Binding Coil of Bahamut and was mildly concerned about this, but there are two things that set my mind at rest, having run through the first area now: 1) it's not easy, though it's straightforward enough once you know what to do, and 2) "Savage" mode is coming in a couple of weeks for the truly hardcore. (And it has different loot from the sound of things, too, unlike the Savage mode of Second Coil of Bahamut, which was largely a "bragging rights" sort of situation.)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Alexander. The concept itself is pretty weird: an iron giant raises itself out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, but stops moving just as its hand grasps the bank. Through a convoluted series of interactions with the local goblins, you manage to find a way through the portal that is in its hand, and start working your way through in an attempt to find and destroy the core; the giant, it seems, is a Primal, and while it's active, even if it's not moving, it threatens to suck the very life out of the land.

Once inside you're in a cool, mechanical and metal environment. It's a big contrast from the previous raid dungeon, which made heavy use of the neon-glowing Allagan aesthetic, but since Heavensward as a whole has a lot of neon-glowing Allagan stuff just in its normal content, it seems the devs made the wise decision to not continue down this road with the new raid. Fine by me.

The bosses so far are appropriately steampunky in nature, and unlike Coil, which tends to be a short run to a single boss, the first level of Alexander features two bosses. The first is pretty much a pushover, but it's fun that it's more than just a single thing to fight. The main boss of the level, meanwhile, is a fairly involved fight that demands everyone knows what to do and performs their role appropriately. It's a little more forgiving than Coil was — mistakes are less likely to immediately wipe the whole group, though they will put you all at a disadvantage — but still challenging. We managed to clear it within a couple of hours, though, and even went back in to go get some more loot for those who lost the rolls after we'd finished.

We're hopefully going to jump in and see some more of it over in the weekend; I'm curious to see what mechanical mysteries the later levels have in store, and excited to be running with my regular group again.

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Spoilers ahead!

I was pleased that the team went all-out and gave us a full-on Final Fantasy finale. The final dungeon, the Aetherochemical Research Facility, gradually gets weirder and weirder as you progress through it, until you eventually reach what is clearly The Final Boss Room, in which you're set upon by not one but two Ascians, the dark-robed ne'er-do-wells whose evil machinations have been behind most of the Bad Things happening in Eorzea throughout the Final Fantasy XIV narrative.

Delightfully, this battle against the Ascians even does the typical Final Fantasy thing of unfolding across multiple forms, with the "merged" form of the two Ascians creating "Ascian Prime" and battering you with some of the most spectacular attacks in the entire game. Lest you thought that Final Fantasy XIV would lose some of the series' trademark spectacle owing to the fact that its multiplayer nature makes cinematic camera angles and lengthy spell sequences impractical, this confrontation very much dispels that notion.

That's not the end, though. The battle against Ascian Prime — the conclusion of which finally sees recurring villain Lahabrea apparently dealt with once and for all — is followed up by an eight-player Trial in the research facility's Singularity Reactor, in which you face off against Ishgard's Archibishop, Heavensward's main villain.

This being Final Fantasy, however, you don't just fight a doddering old man with an obscene amount of hit points. No; shortly before your battle with him, he draws upon the power of the Eyes of Nidhogg to channel the spirit of Ishgard's legendary king Thorden — he who, with his knights twelve, originally laid Nidhogg low and took the great wyrm's eyes — and become a Primal incarnation of the ancient king. Naturally, this involves him growing to approximately ten storeys in height in the process, and his bodyguards, the twelve knights of the Heaven's Ward (do you see what they did there) undergo similar transformations prior to your final battle against the whole sorry lot of them.

The actual battle against Thorden and the knights is amazing. Final Fantasy veterans will doubtless recognise this setup as an excuse to bring in the notorious summon "Knights of the Round", and indeed the final boss battle is effectively you fighting Knights of the Round, complete with ridiculously overblown attack animations — including, at one point, the reactor in which you're fighting seemingly floating up into space, then your entire screen shattering to bring you back to reality. (This animation is pretty much a direct reference to Knights of the Round's appearance in Final Fantasy VII, whose attack animation "Ultimate End" was the most powerful ability you could equip your characters with in the whole game.)

It's a fitting end for Heavensward's story, which has overall been a great addition to the ranks of Final Fantasy narratives throughout history. And it leaves some nice open teaser threads at the end ready for future content patches and the continuation of the story — most notably the character Estinien's possession by the spirit of Nidhogg, the latter of whom is understandably pissed off at the world for numerous reasons, not least of which being the fact that he had his eyes scooped out, and some thousand years later, was killed by some young upstart claiming to represent the spirit of the planet itself.

Anyway. It was good stuff, and sets the scene nicely for the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, which must be due pretty soon now. (Indeed, the ending cutscene shows Alexander rising out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, though it is as yet impossible to enter the great iron giant.)

I'm glad I beat the story (and the two "post-ending" dungeons Neverreap and The Fractal Continuum, both of which are a lot of fun — and pleasingly challenging) and am looking forward to seeing what's next. In the meantime, I have an official full-on review of the expansion to write for Gamespot, so watch out for that soon.

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Heavensward has achieved that which I wasn't sure it would be able to do: it's surpassed A Realm Reborn in almost every possible way, but particularly when it comes to the main story. While A Realm Reborn had a solid narrative that chronicled your character's humble beginnings up to their awakening as the Warrior of Light and beyond, taking in their victories over the fierce Primals of Eorzea and the Empire's ultimate weapon in the process, I found the Final Fantasy XII-style political manoeuvring that made up a significant part of the plot to be less interesting than something a bit more, for want of a better word, "JRPG".

Heavensward, meanwhile, feels more like a "Final Fantasy". This isn't to say that A Realm Reborn didn't feel like Final Fantasy at all — I described it as one of the best new Final Fantasies in recent years back when I reviewed it for USgamer, after all — but Heavensward feels more like a traditional Final Fantasy.

It achieves this in a number of different ways. For one, it tones down the political machinations that gradually built up over the course of A Realm Reborn, and which came to a rather shocking climax at the end of patch 2.55, Before the Fall, which acted as a prelude to Heavensward. These narrative threads are picked up and explored further — though some look as if they're going to remain unresolved until a later content patch — but for the most part Heavensward is an all-original story.

For another, the narrative feels more like an epic journey. In A Realm Reborn, you spent a lot of your time going back and forth between the three main areas, and, aside from the initial quest where you leave your starting city to go and visit the other two, it didn't really feel like the typical JRPG journey of gradually getting further and further away from your starting point, with more and more outlandish things happening as you go. Heavensward, meanwhile, does adopt this style of journey, beginning in the familiar snowy wastes of Coerthas, some of which we had the opportunity to explore in A Realm Reborn, but before long giving way to the lush forests and rocky mountains of the Dravanian Forelands, the otherworldly floating islands of the Churning Mists and the Sea of Clouds, the mysterious abandoned city of the Dravanian Hinterlands — an important location to Final Fantasy XIV lore as a whole, as it turns out — and, ultimately, a final region which doesn't feel at all like a typical MMO field, instead very much feeling like an authentic JRPG The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

The journey you undertake throughout the narrative is emphasised by some lovely narration from David Warner upon your first entry to each area. A Realm Reborn had plenty of florid prose, but Heavensward refines this with some almost poetic writing that gives the game a very distinctive voice and tone throughout. It feels strange to compliment the writing in an MMO, a type of game not particularly known for stellar storytelling (Hi, World of Warcraft!) but Heavensward really doesn't skimp on this front, and it's all the stronger for it.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the story ends — and, of course, getting involved with what comes after that. It can't be long now until the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, and I'm very intrigued to see how all that fits in with the overall lore. Previous raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut turned out to be extremely relevant to the original game's lore — and even more relevant to Heavensward, as it happens — so I'm looking forward to experiencing Alexander's encounters and story to see what happens.

For now, though, I'm still flagging a bit after all the excitement of the weekend, so I think it's time to get some sleep.

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The separately-sold "expansion pack" as it existed in the '90s and early '00s is something of a rarity these days, typically confined to the MMORPG subgenre, while other types of games tend to leverage the high-speed Internet connections most people have these days by offering lots of smaller bits of piecemeal downloadable content.

In some ways, this works well; the "a la carte" approach of piecemeal DLC means that you can pick and choose the things you want to bolt onto your game for a lower price without potentially being stuck with some things you don't want. On the flip side, however, in my experience, a lot of DLC — though not all — is significantly less substantial in terms of content and value for money than your average expansion pack. There are exceptions, of course — Oblivion's Shivering Isles DLC springs to mind, as does Burnout Paradise's additional island whose name escapes me right now — but those are actually both getting back into "expansion pack" territory again, and thus are outliers to a certain degree.

Bungie's MMO shooter and "thing that isn't Halo" Destiny had its new expansion announced recently, and it's kicked up a bit of a fuss, specifically over its pricing. The base game of Destiny has plummeted in price since its original launch, meaning that the new expansion — which costs the same as a full game at £40/$60ish — will, in most cases, be more expensive than the main game. But that's not what's got people riled up: the problem is that there's a super-expensive "Collector's Edition" coming that features some exclusive content that can only be acquired through this special edition.

Nothing unusual, you might think, until you hear that the Collector's Edition is only available as a bundle deal including Destiny, its expansion and the pieces of DLC that have been released to date. This means that fans of Destiny who want to get their hands on the exclusive content pretty much have to buy the game and DLC again just to play the expansion. And the alternative means of buying the game for new players — a bundle including Destiny and its expansion for around the £55 mark — effectively means that new players are getting the expansion for considerably less than veterans.

I can't say I care a whole lot personally because Destiny simply isn't my type of game, but what surprised and dismayed me a bit about the whole situation was this interview on Eurogamer with creative director Luke Smith — a guy I don't know that well myself, but who used to work with my brother and was, as I recall, part of the 1up crew. Smith was, to my recollection, always rather outspoken about things, particularly when it came to companies doing shitty things, so it was a tad disappointing to read his responses to Eurogamer coming out as little more than PR-fed "we can't talk about this" nonsense. And if it was PR-fed, the PR company wants sacking, because Smith's responses did nothing to alleviate the concerns of players who are upset over all this, and more than likely infuriated them further.

The reason I brought up Heavensward at the beginning is because it's actually in a similar position to Destiny's expansion. Final Fantasy XIV itself can be picked up for a pretty low price these days, but Heavensward is not-quite-full-price-but-nearly. The difference, however, is that both existing and prospective players have plenty of choices of how they pick it up. They can buy A Realm Reborn and Heavensward separately. They can buy a bundle including both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. They can buy Heavensward by itself, in standard and special editions. And they can buy most of these options in both physical and digital formats.

As such, even though Heavensward might seem expensive for an expansion pack — though it's worth noting that in terms of content, it's seriously rivalling A Realm Reborn's base game, at least in terms of story length, sidequests and open-world areas — the player base has had absolutely no objections to how it's been positioned and sold. In fact, I've seen more new players in the game in the last week or so than I have for a very long time — and those new players won't even be able to touch any of the Heavensward content until they complete A Realm Reborn and its five subsequent content patches.

But they don't mind, because they've been given options, and those options have been made clear. Where Bungie is falling down with Destiny — and where they're going to lose a lot of previously loyal players if they're not careful — is this communication side of things. Smith's responses suggested that Bungie was either unwilling or unable to listen to player concerns on these matters; it may well be a matter of the company's hands being tied by publisher Activision, but still. That's not how you build loyalty. That's how you destroy loyalty.

P.S. Heavensward is amazing. (Sorry.)

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Paladin often drew some criticism — or, rather, accusations of being "boring" — for the fact that it was a relatively straightforward class to play, with only two real combos of abilities to use in different circumstances compared to a much wider array of things to do if you're playing a Warrior. Its main perk over its raging counterpart, however, was its survivability; Warriors have a ton more HP than Paladins, but they also take more damage, while Paladins have fewer HP but a lot more in the way of defensive abilities to mitigate or even nullify damage.

Still, though, I understand the criticisms; once you unlocked all the abilities to form your basic combos, it very much became a case of pressing ability 1, 2, 3 and occasionally stepping out of enemy ability telegraphs. Post-50, though, things get a lot more interesting.

The oddly-named Sheltron, for example, is an ability whose usefulness doesn't become immediately apparent. What it does is guarantee that you will block the next physical attack you take. Blocking an attack is usually determined by random chance, influenced by the stats on the shield you're wielding alongside your sword. Sheltron guarantees a block, and while blocking doesn't nullify damage altogether, it does reduce the damage by a significant amount. It also has the handy side-effect of restoring some of your magic points when the block goes off, meaning that the Riot Blade combo is no longer the only way to regenerate MP.

Blocking also allows you to counterattack with a move called Shield Swipe, which is actually one of the Paladin's more potent offensive moves, and also inflicts a status that prevents the enemy from using abilities of the "weaponskill" type. It's not quite as good as a Stun or Silence, but it can be helpful and give a moment's grace. The damage is very nice, though — particularly as it's been buffed since its original incarnation — and it also now generates aggro, meaning you're not losing out by weaving in a Shield Swipe when it's up.

The other ability I've had the opportunity to play with now is Goring Blade, which follows on from the Riot Blade combo, previously used just for regenerating magic points to allow you to keep casting Flash, your main means of controlling larger groups of enemies at once. Goring Blade, meanwhile, has a solid initial hit followed by a damage-over-time effect. Paladins don't do a lot of damage generally — it's not their role, after all — but adding the ticks of damage to what you're doing anyway — particularly if combined with other DoT effects like Circle of Scorn and Fracture — you can actually put out some fairly respectable numbers. Plus Goring Blade has like the coolest visual effect of all Paladin's moves that I've unlocked so far.

I just reached level 56 this evening, which is a level at which I unlock another new ability. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I'm very much looking forward to finding out and experimenting with it — one of the most exciting things about the new expansion is the fact that everyone is getting these new abilities at the same time, so there isn't yet an established "right way" to do things. As such, experimentation is key, and it's really rewarding to work out an efficient use of abilities for yourself.

But anyway. That's three days in a row I've talked about Heavensward. (It's really, really, really good.) I promise I will attempt to talk about something else tomorrow. Probably. Maybe.

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It's been an odd adjustment to move from the rather freeform, "pursue your own goals" gameplay of a level cap character back into the routine of doing quests, exploring and all manner of other things. But I'm enjoying it a lot, particularly as so far Heavensward is proving itself to have a wide variety of things to do and ways to earn those all-important experience points.

The main story quests have been very good so far. They always were mostly quite interesting (though in the post-50 ones there was quite a lot of lugging boxes around and other menial tasks in between the more dramatic moments — not exactly the Warrior of Light's finest hour) but Heavensward has raised the bar somewhat.

One way in which it's done this is through the use of instanced quest battles — scripted encounters that take you out of the main multiplayer world and put you in your own private little area to complete objectives. In A Realm Reborn, these were usually fairly small scale but fun; in Heavensward they're much more ambitious affairs with their own unique mechanics. One particular highlight relatively early on sees you running through one of the earlier dungeons by yourself in the attempt to rescue a prisoner — while you do so, their captors start filling the place with poison gas, so you have to deal with that as well as finding a way to release them.

The main story itself is interesting and feels more focused than A Realm Reborn, too. Taking a somewhat darker overall tone, the plot thus far has seen the Warrior of Light (you!), one of your erstwhile companions and two other characters who each played roles in A Realm Reborn exploring the lands beyond Ishgard in an attempt to stop a war between the Dravanian dragons and Ishgard that will doubtless end with much death and destruction on both sides.

A Realm Reborn set up dragons mostly as fearsome, dehumanised foes to be treated with respect but defeated nonetheless. They played a relatively minor role in the overarching storyline until the latter hours and the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline, but they were there nonetheless — and as you progressed, particularly through the Bahamut narrative, it became very apparent that they weren't quite the simple foes you might have expected them to be based on their appearances in other fantasy media.

Heavensward runs with this theme, with both the main story and sidequests going some distance to help us understand the dragons a little better. One questline in particular sees you helping out an Ishgardian who is essentially a "racist" of sorts against dragons — he refuses to believe they are anything more than monsters, but as you complete his quests, both you and he come to see that the dragons apparently have feelings and society just like the humanoids of the world.

The sidequests are kind of interesting in that they further your understanding of the game world much like in A Realm Reborn, but unlike the base game, the darker tone seeps in quite often, with many quests ending in less than perfect circumstances. In some regards it feels like some cues have been taken from Nier — also published by Square Enix — by demonstrating that sometimes, even with your best intentions and god-felling skills and abilities, you simply can't bring about a happy ending for everyone. It's sobering, but very much in keeping with the overall tone.

Then you have boss fights in which you and seven friends take on a giant insect god with a penchant for swinging four gigantic swords around at once, and you remember that this is still very much a Final Fantasy game at heart — and oh, do I love it for it.

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It's good.

The story follows on directly from the end of the 2.55 story arc, which I won't spoil here for those who haven't seen it in all its ridiculous and tragic glory. Suffice to say, however, that it provides good reason for the Warrior of Light (that's you!) and occasional companion Alphinaud to head in the direction of Ishgard, a region which had previously been closed off to outsiders, but which became a little more open-minded after seeing how you (and seven friends) fended off an absolutely massive dragon towards the end of A Realm Reborn.

The city of Ishgard itself is beautifully rendered, being somewhat similar in design to a cross between Final Fantasy XI's cities of San d'Oria and Jeuno. It has its own very distinctive character that is separate to the three previous city-states we had the opportunity to visit in A Realm Reborn — the verdant, nature-filled environs of Gridania; the tall towers and tall ships of Limsa Lominsa; and the juxtaposition between extreme affluence and extreme poverty of Ul'Dah — with an austere, almost unwelcoming facade and some beautiful architecture. The kind of place where you'd be slightly afraid to touch anything, lest you befouled or defaced it in some way or another.

Outside the city, things get interesting. Early on, the main scenario quest sends you off in two separate directions: in one direction lies the Coerthas Western Highlands — a snowy, mountainous region similar to the existing Central Highlands region, but with more in the way of sheer cliff faces and inconvenient but impressive-looking lumps of rock all over the place — while in the other lies the Sea of Clouds, a floating archipelago of islands in the sky where skies are often clear and blue by simple virtue of the fact that the islands are above the clouds, but whose altitude drops the temperature to less-than-inviting levels. There's a huge contrast between these initial two areas; Coerthas is drab, monochromatic and somewhat grounded in reality for the most part (huge dead dragon corpse aside), while the Sea of Clouds is dramatically colourful, the stuff of pure fantasy. I haven't proceeded further afield just yet, but the main story is shortly to have me heading for Dravania, home of the dragons, so I'm interested to see how that compares.

One really striking thing about Heavensward is its sense of scale. A Realm Reborn was no stranger to sprawling environments that were impressive to behold, but Heavensward takes it to a new level. Ishgard is gigantic and imposing in the same way an old cathedral is; meanwhile, the field maps are huge in terms of both surface area and variation in altitude — the latter aspect of which is, in part, designed to accommodate the new flying mounts you can ride around after completing the surprisingly enjoyable task of hunting down a number of hidden "aether currents" scattered around the region.

Another striking thing about Heavensward is nothing to do with its architecture, however: a good 80-90% of the original voice cast appears to have been replaced, meaning some characters sound quite different to how they sounded in A Realm Reborn, with several even having picked up regional accents (primarily Yorkshire so far) in the intervening period. It's initially somewhat jarring, but overall the quality of the voice acting is much better than A Realm Reborn. This isn't particularly difficult, however, because although A Realm Reborn had an excellent localisation (albeit one that diverged quite a bit from the original Japanese script and took on something of a life of its own) its voice acting was passable at best and woefully awful at worst. At least in English it was, anyway; the Japanese voice acting makes use of well-known voice talent like Rie Tanaka (Hyperdimension Neptunia) and Eri Kitamura (Senran Kagura) and as such has always been pretty good, but it's clear that the English dub was perhaps, to put it politely, done a little bit on the cheap side.

It's not entirely surprising, mind you; A Realm Reborn was a huge risk for Square Enix given Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0's critical and commercial failure. As such, the decision to perhaps skimp a bit on the voice acting budget — many scenes in A Realm Reborn and indeed Heavensward also are unvoiced — was understandable. However, since A Realm Reborn achieved the seemingly impossible and rescued an all-but-dead MMO from oblivion, turning it into one of the company's greatest success stories in the process, it's gratifying to see that a bit more effort has been put into aspects of the presentation such as voice acting — even if the change in some characters' voices is a little surprising the first time you hear it.

I'm yet to try out a huge amount of the new gameplay features — I'm concentrating on levelling my main class Paladin to 60 before levelling anything further — but the new skills for existing classes look interesting, and the altogether new classes seem to be really cool, though it looks as if "lolDRK" is going to become the new "lolDRG". (Context for those unfamiliar: for the longest time, Dragoons (DRG) were notorious for dying a lot, due in part to their low magic resistance but also due to awkward animation locks on certain skills making it difficult to move out of the way of attacks; hence, "lolDRG" as the response to a Dragoon's inevitable death; Dark Knights (DRK), however, appear to be ready to take up the mantle for themselves, from what I've heard so far.)

Oh, and the music is amazing. And the story is interesting. And I've fallen in love with this stupid game all over again. There goes the next few years of my life…

The post 1977: To The Heavens appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As the "true final boss" of the game, I was hoping that the Bahamut Prime fight would be pretty spectacular, and sure enough I wasn't disappointed. Here's a video (from my character's perspective as a Black Mage) of our clear:

The fight is not only a suitably challenging battle to bring the main endgame raid of "vanilla" Final Fantasy XIV to a close, it's also a fitting conclusion for a Final Fantasy game. Japanese role-playing games are often known for getting a little… peculiar in their final confrontations, with final bosses often being fought in space, in clouds of darkness, in strange swirling miasmas or inside the cores of planets. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV, your battle against Bahamut Prime takes place within Bahamut's own heart — Bahamut Prime, it seems, is not literally Bahamut himself (since he is both absolutely massive and in the process of being regenerated by the various Coils) but rather a manifestation of his will and rage.

This doesn't stop him being a formidable opponent, mind you. The fight combines mechanics from a number of earlier battles to create a confrontation where you have to use everything you've learned about handling mechanics to be successful. There's heavy amounts of damage. There's people taking responsibility for ensuring the group isn't wiped out by carelessness or inattention. There's puddles of nasty shit on the floor that you have to drop carefully. And, of course, there are Divebombs, Final Fantasy XIV's most notorious enemy ability, first introduced in the Turn 5 fight against Twintania, later seen in a somewhat different format in the Turn 9 fight against Nael deus Darnus and finally seen from not one but two independent sources in the Bahamut Prime battle.

Divebombs are notorious because in the case of Turn 5 in particular, they were the "roadblock" that stopped a lot of groups from progressing further, simply because they're tricky to handle properly and can have devastating consequences for the whole group if handled incorrectly. Their inclusion in each of the three "final" battles in the three separate parts of Coil shows the battle designers' awareness that they are a challenge — albeit a surmountable one — and a desire to test players' abilities to the maximum, often without the helpful visual telegraphs that many of the other enemy attacks in the game have.

But anyway. You didn't come for a deconstruction of the mechanics of Final Fantasy XIV's raids. (Probably.) You came to hear me enthuse about beating a spectacular final boss fight — and, if you've watched the video, you'll see that it most certainly is.

As I've written about a few times previously on these pages, I'm a big fan of well-done final confrontations, and a big part of an effective one in my book is good use of music. Turn 5 and Turn 9 (the previous "final bosses" of the game prior to the introduction of Final Coil) both had great music that was unique to the fight (or "almost unique" in the case of Turn 5 — it's also used for the final boss of the main 2.0 storyline as well as a later confrontation); Turn 13, meanwhile, makes stunningly effective use of the game's main theme song "Answers".

"Answers" is one of the first things you hear in A Realm Reborn, since it accompanies the dramatic introduction sequence that depicts the end of the 1.0 world through the Calamity — an event that those who played the original incarnation of Final Fantasy XIV actually lived through.

The Calamity saw the descent of the artificial moon Dalamud as a result of the machinations of Nael van Darnus, an overly ambitious Imperial legatus and the main antagonist of the 1.0 storyline. As the moon approached Eorzea, however, an unexpected thing happened: it burst open to reveal a very angry Bahamut, who proceeded to lay waste to the realm in his somewhat understandable rage — after all, you'd be pissed off if you'd been locked inside a moon since ancient times, wouldn't you?

All looks lost for Eorzea, but the intervention of Archon Louisoix, a major character in the 1.0 storyline and quests, sees something mysterious happen that no-one quite understands or remembers. Everyone wakes up five years later in a realm that is somewhat different to what it once was, but still very much intact. This is how A Realm Reborn kicks off, but the main storyline then goes off in its own direction and the truth of what really happened in the Calamity doesn't start to be revealed when (if) you venture into the Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Through your explorations of the three Coils, you discover not only the truth behind the Calamity, but also what happened to a number of important characters who had apparently disappeared or died — most notably, Louisoix himself and Nael. Needless to say, everything comes back to Bahamut in the end — but during your investigations you also discover exactly what it was that led to Bahamut's imprisonment inside the artificial moon, and why he's so full of rage and resentment towards humanity.

Since "Answers" is a song so closely tied to this storyline, it's fitting that it should be the accompaniment for its final conclusion. And it's used beautifully throughout the fight, too, beginning with the mournful baritone lyrics speaking of suffering and pain, moving through the gentler, sweeter female lyrics that speak of "the land's light of justice" and walking free before eventually culminating in the gloriously thick-sounding choral finale. The music isn't just played straight through, though; the simple, sparse baritone singing is used in the fight's first phase, the female lyrics come in in the second phase as you start having to deal with Bahamut's minions as well as the dragon god himself, and the explosion of passion that is the finale comes as Bahamut Prime begins casting his ultimate attack Teraflare: a devastating blast of flaming energy that, assuming you survive, signals the beginning of the end.

Final Fantasy XIV uses music spectacularly well throughout to help with its storytelling. Each of the story's main confrontations are accompanied by their own unique theme tunes, many of which have relevant lyrics. The presentation of the game's absolutely, positively, definitely final battle (until Heavensward, obviously) is no exception to this, and I'm very excited to hear what Soken and his team come up with to accompany our new adventures.

It's now 1am, though, and since I've had like three hours sleep, I think it's probably time I caught up a bit.

The post 1975: Bahamut Down appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Turn 12 is an enjoyable fight, though. It took a bit of practice to get it right, but we eventually got there without too much difficulty and frustration. It's interesting in that it's quite unforgiving of any mistakes you might make, but also relatively straightforward and easy once everyone knows what they're doing. There's a lot less in the way of randomness than some of the other encounters (particularly in Coil) so there's a lot less in the way of unexpected things for the party to deal with — any unfortunate happenings can usually be traced directly back to someone doing something wrong somewhere.

Interestingly, a guildmate pointed out that the fight is very unforgiving because unforgiveness is an important narrative theme of the confrontation itself. I won't spoil the story context of it for those who are yet to clear and hoping to remain unspoiled — it's a significant narrative moment in the grand scheme of Final Fantasy XIV's overarching storyline, particularly the spectacular cutscene that follows your victory — but I found it really cool that the mechanics of the game mirrored the narrative themes so nicely. It's a subtle thing, but as someone who is very much interested in the different ways interactive entertainment can tell stories, I liked it very much.

I've been a little burnt out on the game recently, as prior to the imminent expansion Heavensward it's been going through its longest drought of new content since it launched, and it's been hard to motivate myself to keep running the same things over and over again, particularly as in some cases the things I "need" to run for various quests are things that have been in the game since launch, and as such I can probably do them in my sleep. (The Aurum Vale is a bit of an exception; I kind of like that there's a dungeon that can still kick the arse of an unprepared or complacent party, even if it can be frustrating to plough through sometimes.)

There's also the fact that with Heavensward comes a level cap increase, too, and as such a lot of the shiny, top-end gear that everyone's been stocking up on will probably be irrelevant in a matter of weeks following the expansion's release — though not much has been revealed about new gear as yet, so it will be interesting to see how they deal with the discrepancy between character level (currently capped at 50, rising to 60 with Heavensward) and gear level (currently capped at 130, with a couple of individual items being level 135) without revamping the whole system. (Or perhaps they will revamp the whole system, I don't know. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.)

Running T12 tonight, though, reminded me the main reason I play this game; it's not to always be running new and exciting things, it's not to bring down fearsome foes — though that's cool — and it's not to experience the story (which is also great) — but instead it's to have a good time with people who have become really good friends over the course of the last couple of years. The feeling of camaraderie you build when playing a game like this over a long period is unlike anything else in all of gaming, and it's a delight to be able to team up for nights like tonight, where everyone bands together against a common challenge and helps each other out.

So yeah. I may be a little burnt out on grinding for tomestones and the current gear treadmill, but there's still plenty of life in Eorzea's champion Amarysse yet; and I have no doubt whatsoever that Yoshi-P and his team will deliver a spectacular experience with Heavensward that will make me fall in love with the game all over again. Only 6 days until Early Access starts… man, I better finish Omega Quintet before then…

The post 1970: Phoenix Down appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Secondly, the more "major" news for many was the announcement that Trails of Cold Steel — known to Japanese fans as Sen no Kiseki or its previous unofficial English moniker Trails in the Flash — is also coming West. Not only that, the first of its two chapters is pretty much finished and almost ready to go.

For the unfamiliar, Trails of Cold Steel is part of the Legend of Heroes series by Falcom, a long-running and deeply, deeply respected series of role-playing games. We haven't had a lot of them over here in the West, but PSP (and later PC) installmentTrails in the Sky First Chapter came out a few years back to critical acclaim — I wrote some words about it here — and its own Second Chapter is coming shortly having nearly killed poor Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur, who worked on the mammoth job of translating its extremely substantial script.

After the initial joy at the announcement came some concern from long-standing series fans who had played Trails in the Sky's follow-up games Zero no Kiseki, Ao no Kiseki and Trails in the Sky Third Chapter. Unlike many of the previous Legend of Heroes games, the Kiseki games have a deep relationship with one another, with each of the three "groups" of games (Trails in the Sky, Zero/Ao no Kiseki and Trails of Cold Steel) unfolding on a different part of the same continent. The games all refer to one another and act as "prequels" to one another, so some fans were concerned that newcomers to Trails of Cold Steel would be thrown in at the deep end having missed three whole games' worth of lore and background. And the Kiseki series is not what you'd call light on lore; in fact, it features some of the most well-realised worldbuilding of any RPG I've played.

Brittany "Hatsuu" Avery of Xseed, one of my absolute favourite people in the games industry, took to the Xseed blog to address some of these concerns. And she's certainly set my mind at rest.

To summarise, the reasons why we're not getting Zero and Ao — yet, anyway, since there's a strong suggestion that they will come at a later date, probably on PC — is partly due to technological and marketing concerns. Zero and Ao are PSP games, you see, and while there are still a few PSP games trickling out here and there due to their Vita compatibility — Trails in the Sky Second Chapter will be one — the PSP as a platform has technically been "dead" for some time. As such, it makes sense to push out Trails of Cold Steel for PS3 and Vita, since both of those platforms are still relevant at this time — PS3 is on the decline somewhat, but while developers such as Idea Factory/Compile Heart, Nippon Ichi and Square Enix have made the transition to PS4, there are still a number of PS3 titles incoming for the next year or two at least. Vita, meanwhile, for all the press' attempts to declare it "dead" every few weeks, is enjoying a small-scale but successful existence as the go-to platform for fans of role-playing games and other Japanese fare.

Hatsuu also notes that Xseed took this decision with the full approval of the games' original developers Falcom, whose original intention was always that the three sub-series of the overarching Kiseki storyline could stand on their own and be played in any order. In fact, what you'd get from playing them "out of order" would be an experience and perspective on the overall story unique to Western players and different to what Japan had. Kind of like the difference between watching the Star Wars films in chronological order of release or watching them in "canonical" order from I-VI.

Trails in the Sky First Chapter was a stunning game that I enjoyed very much, and I'm glad to see the rest of this highly regarded series is coming West. It may not be in the "right" order and that may have a few snooty fans being a bit salty, but I'm more than happy to support Xseed taking on ambitious projects of this magnitude and delivering them with aplomb. Xseed are one of my favourite developer-publisher-localisation outfits right now, and they deserve the support of anyone who loves Japanese games.

The post 1963: Cold Steel appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Sound Shapes, if you're unfamiliar, is ostensibly a platform game, but with a few peculiar twists, the first of which being that you don't play as a "character" as such, instead this weird sort of ball thing that can switch between "sticky" and "non-sticky" states at will. When in its default sticky state, it can stick to certain walls and even ceilings; when in its non-sticky state, it moves faster and can jump further. These are the only controls you use in Sound Shapes; where the game gets interesting is in the sheer variety of ways it uses these very simple mechanics.

The "sound" part of the title comes from the fact that the game is heavily music-based. Elements of each screen you visit — no scrolling here; only old-school 8-bit style flick screens — move in time with the music, and the collectible objects in each level are "notes" that affect the soundtrack once you've picked them up. Indeed, when you make use of the level editor, you're not only putting together some fiendish platforming puzzles, you're also composing a piece of music.

And there's a surprising amount of variety, too. Shipping with a number of different "albums" and providing plenty more to explore online, Sound Shapes sees you exploring a number of different environments according to special guest musicians and artists. The first "world"'s art is done by Capy, for example, while the second is a collaboration between Jim Guthrie on music and Superbrothers on art. The two contrast hugely; Capy's world is very organic and smooth, looking like it's been drawn in flat-shaded vector graphics. Guthrie and Superbrothers' world, meanwhile, looks very much like their well-known game Sworcery, but appears to be some sort of introspective reflection on the futility of modern everyday office life.

What I like about Sound Shapes is that it's arty without being pretentious about it. You can treat it as a straightforward platformer if you like, or you can treat the stages as works of interactive art, where the overall multimedia experience has been crafted to put a particular image in your mind, or make you feel a particular way. Some are more successful than others, but all are satisfying and fun to play.

I've been really surprised at quite how good Sound Shapes is. It's a shame I didn't pick it up sooner, really, but I'm having fun with it now, at least; I can recommend it if you're in the mood for some straightforward, pick-up-and-play platforming with a very distinctive, striking audio-visual aesthetic.

The post 1961: Sound Shapes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't been outright against it or anything; it's more that I've never really seen the need for it in my life.

A bit of context for those less familiar with it, then: PlayStation Plus is required for you to play online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4. (It is not required to play online with PlayStation 3 and Vita.) This aspect of it I can take or leave, since I don't play a lot of online games — Final Fantasy XIV is the only one I play with any regularity, in fact, and I play that on PC.

PlayStation Plus also allows you to upload save games to "the cloud" so that you can easily, say, transfer them between different devices or delete a game and restore your progress later on. Again, I haven't had much need for this; the one and only time I wished I had it was when I had a downloadable review copy of Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection on Vita, subsequently got a physical copy (because I like physical copies) and discovered that it was impossible to delete the downloadable version without also deleting its save data due to Vita's somewhat restrictive file system. If I'd had PlayStation Plus, I would have been able to back up my save, delete the downloadable version then bring it back in to play with the physical version.

PlayStation Plus also provides you with discounts on games from the PlayStation Store each month. These are often quite significant discounts, but you do have to bear in mind that you're paying the subscription fee each month, so you're perhaps not saving quite as much as you think you are.

And finally, PlayStation Plus provides you with "free" games each month. I put the term "free" in quotation marks because you don't own them in the same way as you would if you'd actually bought them outright, either in physical or downloadable form. Rather, you have unlimited access to them for as long as you continue to subscribe to PlayStation Plus; they're effectively extended rentals, if you like.

Now, this latter aspect had been the part I'd probably been most "against", because I like to own my games, preferably in physical format, and PlayStation Plus didn't seem especially compatible with that mindset. What I hadn't counted on, as I've discovered since I signed up for my trial period on my new PS4, was the fact that PlayStation Plus actually provides you with a risk-free means of trying out some things you'd perhaps found interesting, but didn't really want to hand over the money for in case they weren't all that good.

This month, for example, one of the "free" games on PS4 (and PS3 and Vita, for that matter) is a title called Race the Sun. This is an independently developed game in which you fly a low-polygon spaceship across a randomly generated low-polygon world that changes every real-time day, attempt not to crash into anything and usually fail. It starts extremely simple, almost insultingly so — I nearly put the game down a few moments after starting it because it seemed so bare-bones and simplistic — but gradually grows in depth and complexity as you complete objectives and "level up", with new mechanics gradually unlocking as you progress through the levels. Now I'm about halfway through the unlocks and finding it an addictive little affair; the somewhat Star Fox-esque aesthetic is appealing, the music is good, the gameplay is frustrating but addictive and it has a somewhat more satisfying feel than your average mobile phone endless runner — which, let's face it, is basically what it is, with a few extra knobs on.

Would I have spent money on Race the Sun? Well, I certainly wrote about it a bit when I was still working at USgamer, as I thought it looked interesting. It had never quite looked interesting enough for me to actually want to hand over the cash for it, though, and as such it initially passed me by, though I still contemplated it every time I saw it in a Steam sale.

Here's the power of PlayStation Plus, then; it allows me to investigate these games that I've found interesting but, for one reason or another, never bought my own copy of. There's no risk in me doing this, and I get a decent selection to choose from each month. It's more effective than a demo because you get the whole game. And it's less morally questionable than piracy because you're still paying for the game and the devs are getting a cut — it's just getting to them via different means.

And if I end up actually really liking something I've got through PlayStation Plus? There's nothing stopping me actually buying a copy to keep permanently in my collection even if I let my subscription lapse.

So okay, I admit it; I should have probably checked PlayStation Plus out sooner. But better late than never, huh?

The post 1939: Ah, So That's What PlayStation Plus is For appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Since we're approaching the release of expansion pack Heavensward, which will feature an all-new raid set inside giant fortress/robot thing Alexander, The Final Coil of Bahamut has been "nerfed" slightly in order to allow a few more people to make it through. Specifically, the "Echo" bonus that was gradually introduced in previous Turns has been brought in, giving anyone who enters an immediate 10% boost to their maximum HP, damage dealt and healing.

This doesn't make the encounters easy, by any means — although we've all cleared Turn 10 (aka The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1) several times, today we had real difficulty with it for some reason. So after a while we gave up and took a look at Turn 11, which none of us had seen at all before.

For the unfamiliar, the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline in Final Fantasy XIV is effectively a direct follow-up to how version 1.0 of the game ended — with "The Calamity", which saw artificial moon Dalamud called down from the sky, only to burst open and reveal a very angry dragon god called Bahamut, who promptly proceeded to blow seven shades of shit out of Eorzea. Archon Louisoix — grandfather of Alphinaud and Alisae, the former of whom is a main character in A Realm Reborn's main storyline and the latter of whom serves as the "protagonist" of sorts for the Binding Coil of Bahamut narrative — did something appropriately spectacular when all hope looked lost, leaving a number of adventurers temporarily trapped in limbo until they woke up five years later in an Eorzea that was in the process of being rebuilt. What happened to Bahamut? That's the question that the Binding Coil of Bahamut sets out to answer, and you gradually discover bits and pieces about what really happened as you progress through it.

That's not all, though. Although Final Fantasy XIV's setting of Eorzea is very much "swords and magic" fantasy, with a hint of magical technology lifted pretty much directly from Final Fantasy VI, there's also a hint of sci-fi in there. Like any good sprawling role-playing game worth its salt, Final Fantasy XIV has an ancient race of long-dead weirdos who left mysterious, technologically advanced relics all over the world. The background of said weirdos — known as the Allagans — runs as an interesting undercurrent to everything else that is going on, and is specifically explored through both the Crystal Tower and Binding Coil of Bahamut story arcs, with it being necessary to complete both to get the full picture — or at least, everything that has been revealed about them so far.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is where some of the most interesting, exciting and surprising developments in this aspect of the game's overall lore come, and it's also home to some of the most spectacular visual settings in the whole game. By jumping head-first into the sci-fi angle, the Binding Coil of Bahamut is free to let loose with some enormously creative, absolutely massive environments that are quite unlike anything seen anywhere else in the game. Turn 11 in particular, which we saw for the first time tonight, is quite astonishing to behold, unfolding in and around an enormous scale model of the artificial moon Dalamud, and I understand that 12 and 13 are even more spectacular. I'm looking forward to it.

The thing I'm looking forward to most about this, though, is the fact that it represents the "true final boss" of the game as a whole as it exists today. And, while I haven't spoiled myself on the encounters in Turn 12 and 13 as yet — though I can pretty much figure out who/what you'll be fighting there — I have had a listen to the music. And it's going to be quite the experience battling with this — the music from Turn 12 — in the background, I feel.

We have a big hydra… thing to flatten first, though, and we're taking another pop at it tomorrow. Wish us luck!

The post 1923: Target: Bahamut appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Golden Rules

As a DPS class, your job is to maximise your damage output as much as possible — but at the same time, you're no good to anyone dead. Black Mages wear light armour and have significantly lower HP values than melee DPS classes, so try and avoid taking damage as much as possible. If it's avoidable, you should be avoiding it — even if this comes at the expense of a spell you're in the middle of casting.

In other words, if you find yourself in an area-effect marker and you're in the middle of casting a spell, don't hesitate, move, even if this interrupts your cast. The only exception to this is if your cast bar only has about 10% or so remaining, in which case the spell will still go off even if you start moving. Learn encounters and be able to anticipate attacks so you know when it's safe to stand still and let off some spells and when you should be prioritising movement. If you outgear content, you may be able to survive some big hits, but this isn't a good habit to get into. Particularly heavy hits will interrupt your cast anyway, so just get out of the way, okay?

Black Mage Basics

Learn how Astral Fire and Umbral Ice work. Astral Fire increases the damage from your Fire spells but nullifies MP regeneration. Umbral Ice increases your MP regeneration at the expense of damage for your Fire spells. Thunder spells are unaffected by whether you're in Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, so should be cast while you're in Umbral Ice and regenerating for your next barrage of Fire spells.

Blowing a Thing Up

Black Mages have two real modes they'll be in depending on content: single-target, used for bosses and individual enemies, and area-effect, used in dungeons and particularly on big pulls.

When attacking a single target, here's the sequence of spells you should be using:

Fire III -> Fire -> repeat Fire until 770MP or less -> Blizzard III -> Thunder I -> Blizzard I -> repeat

This has (apparently) been calculated as the optimum DPS rotation for most Black Mages, since it allows you to cast pretty much continually. The 770MP threshold is there so that you have enough MP to cast Blizzard III once — which puts you into Umbral Ice status and thus starts your MP regeneration — and get off a cast of Thunder I (which deals damage over time) even if you haven't yet had a "tick" of MP replenishing.

Why not Thunder II or Thunder III? Because they cast considerably slower. Once you hit level 50, Thunder II will be largely irrelevant, and Thunder III should be saved for your "Thundercloud" procs, which allow you to instantly cast a Thunder spell to deal all its damage immediately plus the damage-over-time effect it usually does.

On that note, because Thunder III has a stronger, longer damage-over-time effect than Thunder I, if you hit a Thundercloud proc before Blizzard III in the combo above, replace the Thunder I with another Blizzard I or Scathe, since there's no sense "overwriting" the Thunder III status effect with an inferior effect. The only exception to this should be if there's only a couple of seconds left on the Thunder effect.

When to Hit Firestarter and Thundercloud

If the target currently doesn't have a Thunder effect on it, Thundercloud can be hit immediately to bump up your DPS somewhat — remember to use Thunder III rather than Thunder I. If the target does currently have Thunder on it, it may be worth saving it for the Umbral Ice phase; the immediate cast may allow you to get an extra Blizzard I or Scathe in there at the end for a small DPS increase.

Firestarter should be used immediately if in Astral Fire, and never in Umbral Ice. If you get a Firestarter with your last Fire before your Blizzard III and it's too late to cancel the Blizzard III cast, don't panic; cast Blizzard III -> Thunder -> Blizzard I as normal, by which point your MP should be back at full, then drop in a Transpose. This puts you back at Astral Fire I status, which is a slight damage decrease from Astral Fire III, but still enough to make the free Fire III from Firestarter meaningful. After using Firestarter in this way, continue from Fire.

Blowing Several Things Up

When facing three or more targets, it's probably more efficient to use area-effect spells. Here's a sequence of spells that works well and is apparently, again, optimised for maximum DPS.

Fire III -> Flare -> Transpose -> Fire III -> Fire II -> Fire II -> repeat from Flare

This combo allows you to use Flare considerably more often than the frequently seen Fire III -> Fire II until 250MP -> Flare and thus represents an increase in damage potential.

Target an enemy as close to the centre of the group as possible. If the enemy you're targeting is down to about 20% HP or less, switch to another target with more HP so you don't have your cast interrupted by the enemy being killed before you get your spell off.

Double and Triple Flares

Flare normally costs all your MP and requires at least 250MP to cast in the first place. As such, it usually leaves you with 0MP in Astral Fire III status, which is no good to anyone. As such, Transpose is normally used immediately after Flare to regenerate some MP, and indeed this is how the sequence above is built.

However, there's a couple of little tricks Black Mages can use to get more than one Flare off in quick succession. All you need to do is get at least 250MP back, which can be done using either an X-Ether potion or the skill Convert, which sacrifices some of your HP to give you some MP.

To perform two Flares in a row, do one of the following:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare
Fire III -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

To perform three Flares in a row, simply combine the two:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

Since Flare has a long cast time, it's worth using Swiftcast on the final Flare in one of these sequences to make it cast instantly.

Note that triple Flare in particular generates an enormous amount of aggro, so either warn your tank that you're going to do it, or make use of the level 34 Bard skill Quelling Strikes — which Black Mages can use as a cross-class ability — to reduce the aggro you're generating before you unleash the beast.

Also note that X-Ethers, Convert and Swiftcast all have cooldowns of varying lengths (Swiftcast is back up quickest, then Convert, then X-Ethers), so don't double or triple Flare carelessly; save it for when you're dealing with a large group or need to deal a massive amount of damage very quickly.

Staying Safe

Black Mages have a few skills that help them stay safe, chief among which are Manawall and Manaward. Manawall will absorb two physical attacks before it's dispelled. Manaward will absorb up to 30% of your maximum HP's worth of damage before it's dispelled. Both have a time limit and a moderate-length cooldown, though, so you can't simply keep them up all the time.

It can sometimes be tough to tell which are physical attacks and which are magic attacks. As a general rule, anything that involves elemental damage — fire, ice, thunder, wind, water — is probably magic, while everything else is physical. Note that the earth damage Titan does seems to be considered to be physical damage rather than magic damage despite it being elemental in nature.

One interesting side-effect of Manawall — and the game's damage system in general — is that if you don't take any damage from something, associated Bad Things won't happen either. This means that Manawall, when used effectively, can be used to avoid status effects and knockbacks. Learn which encounters allow you to do this.

Another interesting ability that Black Mage has is Aetherial Manipulation, which causes you to fly through the air to a target player. This is useful for getting out of the way quickly — or in trials like The Whorleater (Extreme) where you're at risk of falling off the platform, it can be a lifesaver.

Finally, squishy party members and tanks alike will thank you for casting Apocatastasis on them, which reduces elemental damage for a short period. Plus it makes a great noise. Note that once someone has had this cast on them, they can't have it cast on them again for a short period. The ability also has a cooldown period, so only use this when it will actually be of benefit to the party member in question!

The post 1909: How to Black Mage appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Okay. Over the next couple of days, I'm going to share what I've learned from playing Paladin and Black Mage in Final Fantasy XIV. Paladin is a tank class, while Black Mage is a DPS class. Both are very different and have nothing to do with each other; they are collected together here simply because they're the two classes I have the most experience with.

I'm also not claiming to be the be-all, end-all authority on either of these classes; I'm simply sharing what I know in the hope that it will be of some use to other players like me who enjoy the game, enjoy challenging the higher-end content like Coil but who aren't five-days-a-week, six-hours-a-night hardcore raiders.

All right then. Let's begin with Paladin.

Note: The following information assumes a level 50 character with access to all its abilities at the time of writing, but is mostly applicable to lower-level play, too; you simply don't have as many abilities to use.

Paladin

As a Paladin, your job is to get punched in the face in lieu of the rest of your party. This is what tanks do. Paladins differ from the other tanks — Warriors — in that they have a lower amount of overall HP and damage output, but a greater selection of defensive abilities. Warrior, conversely, relies on a combination of self-healing tied to damage output, much higher damage output overall and significantly higher base HP.

Remember, as a tank your job is to maintain "aggro" (also known as "threat" or "enmity" depending on who you're talking to) rather than dealing a lot of damage. You can check aggro in two ways: the coloured gems in the target list on the left of the screen — ideally you want them to be red, indicating that those targets are targeting you and not others — or the little bars that appear over the job icons in the party list in the top-left corner. Know which abilities generate the most aggro: any damage will generate aggro, but Savage Blade and Rage of Halone are specifically designed to generate more than usual. Flash generates aggro over a circular area around you, as does Circle of Scorn. And Shield Lob generates aggro at range. Provoke does something a little different, which we'll talk about later.

Paladin is arguably the "easier" of the two tank classes to play, so for those trying tanking for the first time — like me, when I started Paladin — it's a good choice. Warrior is more complex, with lots to keep track of at once, so if you're uneasy it's a good idea to save that for later.

Getting Ready

In a four-player dungeon, make sure you are in Shield Oath. This makes you take less damage and also increases the amount of aggro you generate. In an eight-player trial or raid, agree with the other tank who will be "main tank" and who will be "off tank". If you're main, go with Shield Oath. If you're off, go with Sword Oath unless you'll both be picking up separate enemies at the same time, as in the Battle in the Big Keep trial, in which case you should both be on Shield Oath in most situations.

The Pull

As a tank, it's usually your job to kick off an encounter. In a four-player dungeon where you are the only tank, you should do this by running towards the group of enemies and using Shield Lob on what you intend to be your initial main target — some tanks like to mark this target to make it clear to their party which target they should attack first. The reason you should use Shield Lob rather than just running in and using a close-range attack is that it allows you to get an immediate, ranged head-start on aggro generation, because once the DPS and healers get going, you're going to need that head-start, particularly if there's a gear disparity between you and them.

Run right through the group of enemies to the other side, then turn around so you are facing the rest of your party and the enemies are facing away from the party. (This is so any enemies with "cleave" attacks — cone-shaped attacks that hit multiple targets — won't hit other party members.) As you do so, use Flash at least twice, and Circle of Scorn if it's ready to use. This extends your head-start on aggro on your main target and also builds aggro on the surrounding enemies.

You Got 'Em, Now Keep 'Em

What you do next depends on how many enemies you're dealing with.

If you're fighting a single enemy — like a boss, for example — then go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone repeatedly. This is the simplest possible tanking situation, and you are unlikely to lose aggro like this. If you are, make sure you are using Shield Oath.

If you're fighting a small group of enemies (two or three), go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone on the main target, drop in a Flash every couple of times around the combo and change targets every couple of times to make sure you generate aggro on the whole group. Healers generate aggro by healing, so making sure you hit each member of the group every so often — with your main focus being on the main target — means that enemies are less likely to peel away and clobber the healer.

If you're fighting a large group of enemies (three or more), as you will probably be doing on a "big pull" or a speedrun of a dungeon, go with Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Flash. Although Riot Blade produces less aggro than Savage Blade and Rage of Halone, it has the convenient side-effect of regenerating MP, which you'll be expending with every Flash. By doing this combo, you have effectively bottomless MP with which to keep using Flash and keep the attention of the group. Make sure you move so that Flash hits all the enemies, but try and keep all enemies in front of you and facing away from the party as usual.

Getting 'Em Back and Tank-Swapping

Lost aggro on an enemy? This is where Provoke enters the picture. Provoke is notorious for having the worst tooltip in the whole game, so here is how it works: when you use Provoke, your aggro level on the target is set to the value of the person who currently has the highest amount of aggro, plus one. "One aggro" is not very much, so if you don't follow up Provoke with something, you'll lose the target again and have pretty much wasted the ability.

As such, good Provoke practice is to use Fast Blade -> Savage Blade, then Provoke, then Rage of Halone to secure your lead on aggro. Alternatively, you can Provoke then Shield Lob if you need to pull in an enemy that has moved away from you. In a pinch, so long as you follow Provoke with something, you'll probably keep the enemy on you.

Tank-swapping is simply deliberately using Provoke as above — including the follow-up hits — to take another tank's target off them. This mostly comes into play during Coil and Extreme Primal fights, when taking too many stacks of a debuff a boss gives you will cause you to die. You can also use this to switch places with a main tank that seems to be struggling to mitigate the incoming damage if you know you'll be able to handle it better.

Cooldowns and You

Paladin's basic combos are easy to learn and less complex than Warrior's, so much of the skill is in knowing when to use your "cooldowns" — the abilities which have a persistent effect for a short period, then take a short while to "cool down" before they can be used again. Here's what they do:

Fight or Flight increases damage and, consequently, aggro. This is good to use at the beginning of a fight and indeed whenever it's up. You're never going to be going toe-to-toe with a good DPS numbers-wise, but this will help.

Rampart decreases the damage you take by 20%. It has a fairly short cooldown so in most dungeons you can simply use it when it's available. In trials, which tend to be more "scripted" fights, you'll want to save it for when you know big hits are coming. The Triple -> Spark attack the boss in The Chrysalis does is a good example, as is Ravensbeak in Turn 9 (though if you're doing Turn 9, you probably don't need a guide like this); you'll still take a chunk of damage, but your healers will thank you.

Sentinel decreases the damage you take by 40%. It has a shorter duration and a longer cooldown than Rampart, so it's an ability to be used a little more carefully. Again, if you know a big hit is coming, Sentinel is a good ability to use. In long fights, use Rampart first, then Sentinel, then in most cases Rampart will have cooled down by the time you need to soak another big hit.

Convalescence increases the amount you are healed by for a short period. If you are getting low on HP and want to help your healers out, popping this will get you fighting fit in no time, so long as you do it quickly enough. It is worth setting up a short macro to announce when you are using this so that the healers know you need healing in case their attention has been on other party members. That macro looks something like this:

/p Using Convalescence! <se.1>
/ac "Convalescence" <me>

Awareness means you won't take critical hits for a short period. This is most useful during large pulls where you are taking lots of hits in quick succession — an unlucky run of criticals could do significant damage. It's also useful to pop before a big hit if you have time; an already damaging move critting could knock you to the floor if you're not prepared.

Bulwark increases your likelihood to block with your shield, which reduces damage. Again, it's particularly useful to use when lots of hits are coming in at once, but it's also good to use if both Rampart and Sentinel are on cooldown. Unlike those two abilities, it's not a guaranteed damage reduction as there's a degree of randomness as to whether or not you'll block each hit, but it's better than nothing.

Tempered Will doesn't reduce damage at all, but it has two important functions: it cures Bind and Heavy status, and also makes you temporarily immune to any abilities that would normally cause you to move against your will. Titan's Landslide and Leviathan's deck slams are good examples. By popping Tempered Will before these moves go off, you'll be able to continue standing where you are without worrying about being knocked off, but don't get too overconfident with it!

Hallowed Ground makes you temporarily invincible for a very short period. Note that there is a short "animation lock" between triggering the skill and it actually activating, so it's not an immediate "don't lose" button. This is good to use during large pulls if the healer isn't keeping up with the incoming damage, or when you know a big hit is coming and you're not at full HP or your mitigation cooldowns like Rampart and Sentinel aren't available. It also has a very long cooldown, so in most situations you'll get just the one chance to use it effectively. It's also useful to macro this so the healers know they won't have to heal you for a short period; follow the same format as for Convalescence above.

Good Places to Practice

If you're new to tanking, it can be daunting to think about what to try doing — no-one likes to mess up, after all, and if the tank messes up it's pretty obvious. Here are some good fights where you can get some solid practice:

Brayflox's Longstop is a good low-level dungeon to familiarise yourself with tanking effectively. Its final boss Aiatar demands that you both move it out of the pools of poison it spits and keep it facing away from the party. As a low-level dungeon, though, you don't have access to all of your abilities.

Wanderer's Palace is probably the first level 50 dungeon you'll unlock, and it's very easy to outgear it. This is a good place to practice doing larger than normal pulls, though be sure to check with your party if they're okay with this before charging in!

Wanderer's Palace (Hard) has a final boss that is good practice for moving and positioning enemies. Keep it out of the swirly areas on the ground, otherwise he'll be considerably buffed; move him effectively throughout the fight so you don't cover too much of the arena with unsafe areas.

Labyrinth of the Ancients, the first of the 24-player Crystal Tower raids, has far too many tanks, but the first encounters in this dungeon are good for practicing picking up enemies and grouping them together for area-effect classes like Black Mage to kill as a group. The Atomos fight is also good practice if you volunteer to be the one who picks up the additional monsters that appear and bring them to your comrades standing on the pad.

The Chrysalis, a trial towards the end of the main storyline, is good practice at cooldown management. In particular, pay attention to when the boss casts Triple and Spark; that's the time to use Rampart or Sentinel to mitigate the incoming damage.

The Howling Eye (Extreme) is a good fight to learn about how two tanks are used. Not only do you need to keep the two additional enemies Chirada and Suparna away from one another, you'll also need to tank-swap the Spiny Plume enemy to prevent either of you taking too many stacks of the "Thermal Low" debuff and dying.

Thornmarch (Extreme) is another good fight to practice working together with another tank amid absolute chaos going on around you. You'll need to Focus Target your partner, and tank-swap the boss at the appropriate time. At the same time, you'll need to make sure you're positioned somewhere that isn't going to get other people hurt.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1 is pretty straightforward until the last boss. When it splits in half, one of the two tanks will have to Provoke it off the other and drag it elsewhere, positioning it so that neither its frontal cleaves or its tail swipes hit other players. With the enormous "Echo" buff on this content now, there's not much to worry about here.

Good luck! Tomorrow, Black Mage.

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So far as "game content" goes, there wasn't a huge amount of new stuff in this one — the main attraction was the one new Trial on the Steps of Faith, which we'll talk a little about in a moment. But "content" was never really the intention of this patch; it was always intended to be a narrative-centric patch to send off Final Fantasy XIV version 2.x with a suitable bang and prepare the playerbase for what might await them in Heavensward.

I shall endeavour to refrain from major spoilers in this post, but a few mild ones may slip in.

The storyline for Before the Fall Part 2 primarily concerns the Dravanian Horde's initial assault on the isolated land of Ishgard, a nation which was once part of the Eorzean Alliance alongside Ul'Dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa, but which subsequently closed off its borders and effectively locked the majority of its people inside its city walls. The Dravanians — who are big fucking dragons — have been making incursions into Ishgardian territory for some time thanks to a longstanding war between the two nations, and indeed the adventurers of Final Fantasy XIV repel their attacks on a number of occasions through the dungeons you challenge over the course of your career.

This time it's different, however; there's rumblings of one of the Great Wyrms making an appearance, and before long due to various unfortunate circumstances and villainy, the Ishgardian protective wards on the giant bridge The Steps of Faith are under assault from Vishap, probably the biggest enemy in the entire game, and his assembled Dravanian forces. The new Trial sees you and seven companions battling Vishap as he makes his inexorable progression across the Steps of Faith, hopefully taking him down before he breaches Ishgard's last line of defence.

Following the pattern of past patches, this big battle (and it's a pretty huge, quite challenging battle) isn't the endpoint of the story; far from it, in fact. The overall conclusion to the A Realm Reborn storyline is quite genuinely shocking, surprising, dramatic and emotional. Oh, and long; the game warns you before triggering these cutscenes that you're going to be sitting and watching for quite some time. It's a worthy watch, though, and it drives home the fact that on the whole, A Realm Reborn has done a significantly better job with storytelling than pretty much any other MMO out there. You'll care about these characters and what happens to them — be it triumph or tragedy, and for sure there's a bit of both in the ending.

The finale isn't perfect — some have already criticised the parts where it takes agency away from the player character, though it didn't personally bother me all that much — but it forms a fitting conclusion to A Realm Reborn, bringing a sense of closure to the storylines that have been running for the last couple of years now while simultaneously building anticipation for Heavensward through the introduction of some new characters, the reintroduction of some we haven't seen for a while and an extremely intriguing cliffhanger right at the very end.

Now all we have to do is wait until June to find out what happens next… although in the meantime, we still have the Final Coil of Bahamut to defeat, so I'm sure that will keep us busy until the expansion arrives!

The post 1898: A Realm Concluded appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Warrior is one of the two tank jobs in the game — i.e. their job is to maintain the attention of enemies and get punched in the face so the rest of the party doesn't get punched in the face. Having gained a lot of experience with how Paladin does things, I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical about how different Warrior could possibly be. After all, their reason for existing is the same, and it's not like damage-dealing classes where you can make a distinction between ranged and melee characters; a tank is, by its very nature, a melee class.

I've been pleasantly surprised by how different it feels, though. This is down to several factors, both mechanical and aesthetic.

On the mechanics front, Warrior initially appears to be a more complex class to play. Whereas Paladin only really has two main "combos" of abilities to worry about — one for single-target threat generation, one for maintaining your stock of MP so you can keep aggro on larger groups — Warrior has several more, each of which has its own function. There's a basic aggro-generating combo that is the backbone of your single-target tanking, but there are also two combos that branch off the damage-increasing "Maim" skill, one of which reduces the enemy's damage output, another of which reduces their resistance to a particular kind of damage while increasing the healing you receive. Alongside this, fighting as a Warrior in your tank stance builds up stacks of "Wrath" which, when they reach five, can be expended for one of several special abilities.

So, to put things simply, there are more buttons to press as Warrior — or, more accurately, more different combinations of buttons to press according to the situation. Paladin is mostly about managing your defensive abilities to mitigate as much damage as possible; there's still an element of this with Warrior, but it's a much more aggressive, active class with self-heals and attacks that inflict various status effects.

Aesthetically is the other big different. Although most classes in Final Fantasy XIV work off a 2.5 second global cooldown (i.e. 2.5 seconds has to elapse before you can use another ability) and consequently play at the same "pace", Warrior and Paladin feel worlds apart due to their animations and sound effects. Paladin's sounds are higher in pitch, the animations more fluid; Warrior's animations look more cumbersome and make lower-pitched, heavy-sounding impacts. The reason for this big difference is the difference in weapons, of course — Paladins use a one-handed sword and shield, while warriors use axes as big as themselves — but it's surprising quite how pronounced the contrast is between the two classes, even though the basic "pace" of how they play is very similar.

Having got Warrior to 50, I'm not sure if I'll do much more with it, but I'm glad I've experimented with it and now have the flexibility to use it in endgame content when I want to. Overall I prefer the faster-feeling fluidity of Paladin, plus I know that class a lot better and thus feel more confident using it in difficult fights, but I'm not going to rule out a bit more axeplay in the future!

What's next? Probably Bard, which I've already got to level 40; while a ranged DPS like my Black Mage, Bard plays very differently owing to the fact you don't have to stand still to use abilities and don't have as much of a set skill rotation as Black Mage does. After that it's on to the classes I haven't used much or at all before: Monk, Dragoon, Ninja and Arcanist (which becomes both Scholar and Summoner).

The post 1896: Mastering War appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

FFXIV's endgame raid is split into three main parts. The Binding Coil of Bahamut (which consists of Turns 1 to 5) is mostly — mostly — trivial in terms of difficulty these days owing to the fact that the average gear level of a level 50 character who plays a reasonable amount each week now exceeds the level these encounters were designed for by a considerable margin. As time has gone on, The Binding Coil of Bahamut has also been "nerfed" in terms of mechanics — i.e. made easier — and parties challenging it are now given a substantial buff to their HP, damage dealt and healing when they walk in, though those looking for a bit more of a challenge can optionally turn this buff off.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut reaches its conclusion with Turn 5, a notoriously difficult fight that sees a party of eight taking on Twintania, a very angry dragon. Turn 5 remains a challenge for many groups to this day not because Twintania is particularly difficult to kill in terms of her HP and damage — the aforementioned gear issue here makes the encounter much easier than it once was — but because everyone in the group needs to have a solid understanding of most of the fight's mechanics in order to succeed. Again, the power creep has meant it's easier to recover from critical errors, but if you don't know how to deal with her notorious Divebomb attack, for example, you're going to die and quite possibly take the rest of the group with you.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is followed up by the Second Coil of Bahamut, which consists of Turns 6 to 9. These are significantly more challenging, even with the "Echo" buff to player HP, damage and healing. Mechanics are more unforgiving — though again, a number have been nerfed over time — and they're still not exactly the sort of encounters you can pick up and expect to coast your way through without knowing anything about them. Groups need to work together and be able to communicate effectively in order to pass through these challenges, and it all comes to a head with Turn 9.

Turn 9 remains notorious as one of the hardest fights in the game, even with the Final Coil of Bahamut subsequently being added after it. It proves to be a considerable roadblock to many groups, and indeed our party has been working on beating it for many weeks now.

The reason why it's such a challenge — even more so than Turn 5 — is because of its extreme complexity. In this one fight, which takes in the region of 10 minutes to complete, there are roughly as many mechanics as you'd see in at least four separate boss encounters earlier in the game. There is a lot to learn, and it feels like an insurmountable challenge the first time you jump in, but as our group have proven tonight, taking it a step at a time and practicing together whenever we get the opportunity allows you to eventually reach success.

And my God what a wonderful feeling it was as that HP bar dropped to 0% tonight. We'd had several close calls earlier in the evening — first a 9%, then a 10%, then a 6% — but there was no guarantee that we were going to beat it. But beat it we did, and many celebrations were had; now we have until June to make it through the Final Coil of Bahamut before the expansion pack Heavensward comes along and gives us an entire new raid set in Alexander to take on.

I'm looking forward to the challenge. The feeling of jubilation at finally defeating this notoriously difficult boss this evening is unlike pretty much anything I've ever experienced in any other game — and at least part of that comes from the game's multiplayer element. It wasn't just my victory, it was our victory. We worked together, we practiced, we communicated, and eventually we prevailed. And it felt great.

We poked our head into the first turn of Final Coil this evening, but didn't get anywhere, as expected. That's an adventure for another day! In the meantime, here's our clear video:

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Triple Triad, for the uninitiated, was a card game introduced in Final Fantasy VIII. It's a very simple game, although optional advanced rules can make it surprisingly brain-melting, particularly when they're used in combination. And it's a flexible enough game that, by playing around with these rules, a player with a "better" deck of cards isn't necessarily always going to beat someone with "bad" cards.

For those who have never encountered the game, here's how it works: There's a 3×3 grid onto which you and your opponent take it in turns playing cards from a hand of five. (This means there will be one card left over at the end.) Cards have four numbers on them, corresponding to the four edges of the card. When you lay a card down and it "touches" the edge of another card (for example, you played a card in the middle-left space while there was already a card in the central space, meaning the right side of your card is touching the left side of the card already there) you compare the numbers. Under the normal rules, if the number you laid down is bigger than the number that was already there, you flip the card and claim it as your own. (For example, using the situation above, if the card in the middle had a "4" on its left edge, and the card you laid had a "5" or higher on its right edge, you'd claim the middle card.) Whoever has the most cards under their control when the board is filled wins. Simple.

The advanced rules fall into several different categories. Variations on "Open" mean that you and your opponent reveal either three or all of your cards from the outset, allowing for a degree of forward planning. "Random" disallows you from using the five-card decks you've built yourself, instead pulling five random cards from your complete collection. "Order" forces you to play the cards from your deck in the order you put them in there. "Chaos" forces you to play the cards from your deck in a random order. "Reverse" flips the normal rules on their head, meaning smaller numbers now beat larger numbers — this rule makes a "bad" deck suddenly very good. "Ascension" causes cards of the same type to inflate in value the more of them that are placed on the board. "Same" allows you to claim cards if you put down a card and the numbers on two of its sides match two cards already on the table. "Plus" is a similar rule, only instead of matching numbers, the two sides must add up to the same value. Both "Same" and "Plus" can set off combos, too, allowing you to potentially take the whole board in one go with a lucky or well-planned move.

As you can imagine, combining these rules can make for a game with a surprising amount of flexibility, and change the feel of it altogether. But even in its basic form, Triple Triad is a surprisingly compelling little diversion, and the more you play it, the more cunning little strategies you'll spot and be able to adopt. Final Fantasy XIV allows you to challenge various non-player characters around the game world to a game — who may potentially give up some rare cards if you beat them — and also to play other players. In the latter case, you have the option of customising the rules to your liking, or throwing caution to the wind and having a "Roulette" match in which the rules are determined randomly. There are also regular tournaments — the first one started today — in which you have a set period of time in which to complete (and hopefully win!) as many games as you possibly can in order to score points and get yourself on the leaderboard.

It's an extremely well fleshed-out version of a game that was a lot of fun to play against the computer in Final Fantasy VIII; it's even more fun to be able to challenge friends to a game thanks to Final Fantasy XIV's massively multiplayer nature.

And if nothing else, it's something to do while waiting in a queue for a dungeon…

The post 1870: Cards, Cards, Cards appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As previously noted, it's a long and gruelling — though not especially difficult — process.

First you have the quest to acquire the weapon in the first place. This is an involved, multi-part affair that involves tracking its timeworn and weathered form down — usually from the depths of a monster-infested area — and then setting about finding the materials that master weaponsmith Gerolt needs to restore it to its former glory. Rather inconveniently, these materials can only be found in the somewhat uninviting lairs of Eorzea's Primals Ifrit, Garuda and Titan, so having already floored these massive enemies once during the course of the main story, you're now tasked with killing them again. This used to be a genuinely challenging task, back when the base Relic was pretty much the best weapon you could get in the game, but it's become almost trivial now thanks to how well-geared the vast majority of the level 50 population is now. There's also a dungeon to run (Amdapor Keep, which was the hardest four-player dungeon in the game when it launched, but which again has now become somewhat trivial) and two more boss fights against a Chimera and a Hydra that are new to the Relic questline.

After all this — and a bit of testing out the unfinished form of the weapon on unsuspecting members of Eorzea's beast tribes — you're finally blessed with an item level 80 weapon, which can be upgraded to item level 90 and made to glow in a rather fetching "this is special!" manner through the judicious application of Thavnairian Mist, a rare concoction that can only be acquired by exchanging Allagan Tomestones with collectors of rarities. Tomestones are a special currency rewarded for completing content at level 50 — since you no longer get experience points at this level, having reached the level cap, they form the basis for progression beyond this point. Pretty much anything that involves other people will reward you with Tomestones, be it four-player dungeons, eight-player Trials, twenty-four player raids or the extremely tough challenges of the Binding Coils of Bahamut.

This form of the weapon, known as Zenith, used to be pretty much the best weapon you could get outside of downing Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut — a tall order even for well-geared players even today — and acquiring one of the Allagan weapons. But as time went on and the game gradually expanded with each new patch, so too did the Relic quest.

It began with Atmas, a step which, for many, proves an insurmountable obstacle, but which sets the pace for the amount of commitment required to finish this lengthy process. Atmas are small crystals containing the souls of fallen warriors, and can be acquired randomly by participating in FATEs — public events that occur every so often in each of the game's zones — and completing them successfully. There are twelve Atma in total to collect, meaning you'll have to visit twelve different zones to participate in FATEs. In game terms, this step was designed to get level 50 players helping out with low-level FATEs, since a tweak to how experience points were awarded in the game's early days saw people turning to instanced dungeons for quick experience points rather than wandering around out in the open world helping one another.

The cruel twist in the Atma step was that once you'd acquired all twelve Atma, all that happened when you "upgraded" your weapon was that it lost its cool glow from the Zenith step. Its stats didn't change at all. But it was still an important step, because it made your weapon ready for the gradual upgrade process that came next.

By exchanging further Allagan Tomestones with a collector in Mor Dhona, you could acquire books telling tales of the "Zodiac Braves", and you're told that by recreating these tales of derring-do using your Atma Relic, you can improve it considerably. What this boils down to is a set of objectives — 100 specific monsters to kill, three specific dungeons to complete (or, more accurately, three specific bosses to beat), three specific FATEs to participate in and three specific levequests (short, repeatable quests) to complete. You had to do this nine times in total; each completed book rewarded you with a small increase to the stats on your Atma weapon, so it gradually improved over time. When all the books were completed, your Atma weapon regained its glow — a more substantial one this time — and became its Animus form.

Next up, you're told that you can improve the weapon further — and, crucially for this step, customise it — by infusing materia into a "sphere scroll". In order to do this, you need the sphere scroll itself (which costs yet more Tomestones), seventy-five pieces of Alexandrite as a catalyst to infuse the materia into the scroll, and at least seventy-five pieces of materia of the appropriate types to give your weapon the stats you want. Alexandrite can be acquired by participating in FATEs, bought with Allied Seals acquired by beating the giant monsters of The Hunt, or by digging it up using Mysterious Maps acquired from a strange old lady in Mor Dhona who appears to have been using them to clean her kitchen. The more materia you attach to the scroll, the higher the chance that the infusion will fail; fortunately, you only lose the materia if this happens, while the Alexandrite remains in your possession. Your reward for successfully infusing seventy-five points' worth of stats into the sphere scroll? Your Relic's Novus form, which has a somewhat more imposing glow.

For a while, again, Novus was the pinnacle of what you could have in terms of weaponry, and it was particularly powerful due to the fact that you could customise it. The materia to do this — particularly for popular stats like Determination (which increases damage) and Critical Hit Rate (which increases the likelihood an attack will deal considerably more damage than usual) — didn't come cheap, and the only other alternative was to "Spiritbond" equipment by using it to defeat monsters either in the world or in dungeons, then turn this equipment into materia, with random chance determining whether you'd get the kind of materia you wanted or a useless alternative. Thus, Novus was a long, difficult and expensive process for many, but taking the time to complete it would give you a strong weapon that would see you through pretty much anything the game could throw at you.

Then came another step. By "soulglazing" your relic and using it to collect soul energy — known colloquially as "light" owing to the fact your weapon glows with varying levels of intensity when it acquires this energy — you could make it more powerful still, improving the stats you'd infused into the Novus by a set amount according to the combinations and amounts you put in. In order to acquire light, you simply had to do pretty much anything that involved other people — dungeons, trials, even FATEs. Light was acquired at a very slow rate, however, and many resorted to running the same things over and over again for hours at a time in order to gain light most effectively. In practice, however, you could gain light at a good rate simply by playing the game as you normally would, attempting to acquire Tomestones to gear up your armour to match your increasingly powerful weapon. Upon filling your Novus with light, you'd be able to turn it into its Nexus form, the ultimate incarnation of the Relic you found all that time ago, and a weapon that you've truly helped to make your own.

But your efforts don't end there. Through this whole process, you've been developing a relationship with both a scholar of these ancient weapons and a local master blacksmith, and it eventually becomes clear that it's possible to recreate the legendary weapons of the Zodiac Braves themselves — but in order to do so there is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat convoluted process involved that requires you to do the dirty work of four separate individuals who have what you need to complete the weapon, but who aren't about to give their prizes up quickly.

By far the most gruelling part of this phase is acquiring specific items from specific dungeons. These are drops similar to the Atma in that there's only a random chance of you acquiring them when you complete a dungeon, and no guarantees. Consequently, you may find yourself running one dungeon lots and lots of times in order to acquire one specific item; at the other end of the spectrum, however, sometimes you get lucky and acquire it straight away. It's unpredictable and, at times, infuriating, but oh so satisfying when you get what you need.

After completing this epic slog, you're rewarded with a brand new weapon, recreating the form of one of the Zodiac Braves' weapons and infused with the soul energy you collected using your Relic. (These Zodiac weapons take the form of iconic weapons from past Final Fantasy games such as Excalibur for a Paladin, Kaiser Knuckles for a Monk, Yoichi Bow for a Bard and so on.) This is the stage I got to tonight: I now have Excalibur and its companion Aegis Shield.

But there's one final step to go: embracing the weapon's apparent sentience and sense of will, and forging an unbreakable bond between the two of you. In order to do this, it's another light grind similar to that for the Nexus, but this time instead of having to collect it all in one weapon, you gradually fill up twelve "mahatma" with soul energy, and the process is considerably quicker than before. This is the final step of a quest that's been in the game since launch, and your reward is a weapon that is likely to be the absolute best piece of equipment you can get until the expansion Heavensward arrives later this year and makes all this work irrelevant. (Actually, that's not quite true; producer Naoki Yoshida has said that those who put in the work to complete this questline will have a leg-up on whatever comes next come Heavensward time. Thankfully.)

It's a slog, to be sure, and it's even something that a lot of players will find offputting and want nothing to do with — thankfully, there are numerous alternative means of acquiring weapons, so even if you're playing multiple classes you don't have to go through this epic grind for all of them — but by God it's satisfying to reach a milestone in. I've likened it before to the idea of "building your own lightsaber" in a Star Wars game — something which has never been given the gravity it deserves, even in the Star Wars MMO The Old Republic — and it's true. By the end of this process, your weapon, even though it's just a collection of numbers, is part of you and your play style, and an important part of your character as a whole; the unbreakable bond between character and weapon isn't just for lore reasons — you'll feel it yourself as a player, too.

So wish me luck as I proceed on the final chapter of the Relic quest; I'm hoping to have Excalibur's "Zeta" form before I head off to PAX later this week. We'll see if I'm successful!

The post 1868: A Relic Reborn, Again (and Again) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We're starting to reach that point in Final Fantasy XIV now. It's still eminently possible for players to get from level 1 to level 50 and beyond and complete all the PvE (Player vs Environment, or regular cooperative) content without too much difficulty — though Second Coil and Final Coil are still an insurmountable barrier for all but the most skilled players — but that's not, by any means, all that there is to the game any more. In fact, there's been numerous different potential "career paths" in the game since it launched, and these have only continued to grow and expand with their own "endgames" as the game has blossomed over time.

There's crafting, for example. Serious crafters will have levelled all of the crafting classes from 1-50 to get all of the possible cross-class abilities, and will have worked on their equipment to get it strong enough to create the more difficult crafts. They'll have worked out a good skill rotation to use for crafting items — much like a high-level PvE player works out a suitable skill rotation to maximise their damage output — and they'll have their own goals in mind, be it making millions on the market board from producing the most desirable items, or simply being able to make cool stuff for their friends.

Then there's gathering; much like crafting, gathering has its own endgame with new equipment to acquire and more and more difficult-to-obtain items becoming available over time. There's less of a "skill rotation" element to this — although skills are still relevant — and these classes act as a good complement to their crafting counterparts.

Then there's desynthesis, which ties in with crafting: through desynthesis, it becomes possible to turn items back into their component parts, which can sometimes yield rare items which either sell for a decent amount of money or which can be used to produce desirable items. Levelling this skill is its own, separate, convoluted process from crafting, but it pairs well with the crafting classes.

Then there's PvP (Player vs Player) combat, which takes either the form of small four-on-four battles in a little arena, or large-scale multi-alliance battles on a large map. Opinions vary fairly wildly as to whether PvP is actually any good or not — and the queues to get in to it are frequently hellish — but there are dedicated players out there who know all about the PvP-exclusive abilities and have access to some of the cool-looking PvP-exclusive equipment.

And most recently, the Manderville Gold Saucer provides a couple of career options for adventurers who tire of the XP and Tomestone grinds: Chocobo racing and Triple Triad. Chocobo racing has its own complex metagame that would make an interesting standalone title in its own right, and Triple Triad likewise.

In reality, most Final Fantasy XIV players dabble in most of the above at one point or another, prioritising one thing above all others at any given moment. At present, for example, I'm prioritising getting my "Zodiac" weapon for at least one of my classes; after that, I'm intending on spending some serious time chocobo racing when I'm not attempting to take down Second Coil and, hopefully, subsequently, Final Coil.

There's a ton to do. And it's incredibly daunting. And I love it.

The post 1865: Virtual Career Choices appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And they've done a great job! Gold Saucer has plenty of activities to participate in — although I with they'd have put in a Final Fantasy VII-style Battle Square with increasingly challenging handicaps — and lots to aim for. Only trouble is, it gives a game that is already bursting with content even more long-term goals for people to fret over — though for a game designed to be played over the long term, I guess that's not really an issue.

Highlights so far are, of course, card game Triple Triad, last seen in Final Fantasy VIII, and the chocobo racing, which is far more fun than it has any right to be. The best thing about these two attractions is that even low-level players can enjoy them — you only have to have reached level 15 to go to the Gold Saucer, which is a nice change from a lot of the other content that has been released over time, which is primarily aimed at endgamers.

Triple Triad is a simple card game in which two players face off against one another on a 3×3 grid. Drawing from a hand of five cards each, players take it in turns to place cards in one of the cells on the grid. Each card has four numbers corresponding to its four edges. If you put down a card next to another card and the facing edge "beats" the card that is already there (i.e. it's a higher number), then you take control of the other card. Whoever has the most cards under their control when the grid is filled is the winner. There are numerous other optional rules, but the basic game is simple to understand, hard to master and extremely addictive — thanks in part to the collectible aspect of it, with cards coming from beating NPCs, beating specific bosses in dungeons and numerous other sources.

Chocobo racing, meanwhile, is implemented similarly to Final Fantasy VII. You don't directly control the chocobo so much as encourage it to do things; you can make it accelerate, which costs stamina, and determine its horizontal position on the track; you don't need to worry about steering around corners, however. You can pick up Mario Kart-style items to help yourself or hinder your opponents, and special tiles on the course can likewise help or hinder you. It's immensely competitive and a whole lot of fun, with progression completely separate from your character's main levelling. It's practically a whole metagame in itself; I'm looking forward to exploring it in depth.

The other attractions are fun, too. Simple timed button-press minigames see you hitting things with hammers and punching Gilgamesh in the face, and "Gold Saucer Active Time Events" (or "GATEs") take place regularly and involve large numbers of players at one time doing everything from platforming challenges to stealth missions and dance competitions. There's a lot to enjoy.

I'm happy that Gold Saucer has ended up being a lot of fun. It provides some welcome relief from the grind elsewhere — particularly at endgame — and has the scope to develop further in the future. For now, I'm looking forward to expanding my Triple Triad collection and rising through the ranks of the chocobo racing leagues… yeah, this game still has its hooks in me as deeply as ever.

The post 1863: Gold Saucer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, as I've noted in previous posts, one of the toughest fights in all of Final Fantasy XIV. Up until the Final Coil of Bahamut launched with patch 2.4 a while back, this battle was effectively the "true final boss" of the game, demanding that all eight party members know their jobs well, can learn mechanics and know what to do when. Since Final Coil became a thing, it's been gradually made a bit easier, but it will still absolutely obliterate any party who goes in there unprepared thanks to more than a few instant-kill mechanics, plus some seriously hard hits from both the boss and the additional enemies that show up over the course of the fight.

It's been a strong test for our assembled group, but it's brought us together and helped us understand how we all play. I've been developing some strong tanking skills — they're demanded in this fight, particularly if you take it on, as we are, with just one tank — and that's been helping me play better elsewhere in the game.

It's been an interesting personal journey so far. When I first started playing FFXIV, I had a ready-made group of acquaintances to play with thanks to the fact that someone I knew from 1up.com and Twitter invited me to come along. I was still somewhat anxious about playing with people I didn't know, though, particularly if it was in content that was new to me. I chose a DPS class (Black Mage) because they're perceived as having the least responsibility, at least in the early stages of the game — in late endgame encounters, they have a lot more to do — and they're less likely to get everyone killed. I didn't like running things without at least one person I knew, and I was nervous about asking for help.

There are still times today when I don't like running with strangers — usually if they're the aggressive, unpleasant, rude, elitist type — but I'm much more confident about it. I'm also happy to jump in on the healer or tank roles — roles which have direct responsibility for ensuring the rest of the group doesn't get killed. Black Mage will always have a space in my heart, of course, but I'm spending a lot of my time tanking on Paladin at the moment, and really enjoying it; I don't know if it's my "main" as such — my Black Mage is technically further advanced thanks to its progress in the lengthy Relic weapon quest — but it tends to be my default choice when given the option these days.

Anyway. Exciting times are ahead, since on Tuesday patch 2.51 is released, and coming with it is the long-awaited arrival of Gold Saucer and Triple Triad. I'm looking forward to it a lot; after that, it won't be all that long until PAX East!

In the meantime, I guess it's back to jobhunting, though…

The post 1861: Raid Night appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Akiba's Trip is quite an unusual game, although perhaps not by Japanese standards. Combining elements of dating sims, visual novels, RPGs, brawlers and open-world action adventures, it all adds up to a curiously satisfying experience that, while relatively brief compared to some other games — my first playthrough took me about 20 hours, and that was with doing pretty much all of the available sidequests as well as a bit of fiddling around trying to level my skills up and collect some collectable things — proved to be highly enjoyable.

A highlight, as with many Japanese games, is the care and attention which has been poured into characterisation, both visually and in terms of writing. The localisation team at Xseed has to take some of the credit for the amount of personality the game has, too; as translations go, this is absolutely exemplary, remaining (so far as I can make out with my limited knowledge of Japanese) reasonably true to the original script while simultaneously incorporating plenty of cultural elements that will be familiar to Westerners.

A particular highlight is the main character, who is handled somewhat like the player's character in the Persona series, in that he doesn't speak out loud all that much — although he does have a couple of lines here and there, they're mostly confined to inner monologue — but the player is frequently given the option of how to respond to a particular situation. In many cases, the options given all lead to the same outcome, but the available choices are frequently hilarious; there are some real crackers towards the end of the game in particular, with my favourites being "It's dangerous to go alone! Take thi– I mean me!" and "I'm going to turn his dark utopia into a dark u-nope-ia!". (You kind of have to be there.)

These dialogue options do occasionally have a purpose, however, and that's the choice of route and subsequent ending that you get. Partway through the game, the story splits in a few different directions according to the various different heroines you encounter. I haven't seen how different these routes are yet — and I'm disappointed that there isn't a route for Kati Raikonnen, an incredibly endearing member of the main cast who, being "foreign", has a tendency to speak in what is represented as "Engrish" by the translation — but I'm keen to find out. It appears that this will be a painless process, too, since after clearing the game once you can turn on the option to specifically mark the dialogue options that will change affection levels between you and the heroines. Not only that, but there's no real need to do sidequests after your first runthrough — indeed, there's no real need to do sidequests at all if you don't care about trophies, though the money they get you is nice — and so you can zip through subsequent playthroughs pretty quickly, especially if you've taken the time to upgrade your weapons and clothing and carry them over into your New Game Plus.

I really wasn't sure what to expect when I booted up Akiba's Trip. I think I was expecting some sort of fairly straightforward brawler set in Akihabara, but what I actually got was far more akin to something like Yakuza. A surprising amount of depth, in other words, and an extremely well-realised setting that makes a great backdrop for the various stories within.

I hope we get the opportunity to revisit Akihabara at some point in the future; given that this version is actually the second game to bear the Akiba's Trip title — the first never made it out of Japan — that's not beyond the realm of possibility. I'll be there if and when it happens!

The post 1846: Akiba's Tripped appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's a very peculiar game by modern standards. Not quite RPG, not quite adventure, not quite dating sim, not quite open-world sandbox game, Akiba's Trip is a thoroughly interesting experience that seems to get more rewarding the longer I continue playing it.

One thing that sprang to mind while I was playing it the other day is something I also felt when playing games that are spiritually somewhat similar: Shenmue and Yakuza being the two that I think of immediately. The thing I thought about was how nice it is to have a game world that is small, but dense. Akiba's Trip unfolds in a single district of Tokyo, split (in the Vita version, anyway) into maybe ten or so different areas, all of which are interlinked in various ways. Yakuza was the same, unfolding in a single district, and Shenmue saw you progressing through just a few different areas of a town. (Shenmue II got a little more ambitious, but still split its story into several distinct "chapters", each of which unfolded in a relatively small geographic area.)

If you take this approach and do it well, it gives an extremely strong sense of place to the setting. The setting almost becomes a character in its own right, as you start to recognise distinctive landmarks in each area, and know that if you want [x] you need to go to [y]. It also encourages the player to wander round, explore and drink in the atmosphere: although Akiba's Trip features a fast-travel system, for example, I've found myself deliberately walking from one end of the map to the other just so I can get a stronger feel of this lovingly modelled setting.

Okay, Akiba's Trip in particular has some technical limitations holding it back — the poor old Vita can't cope with all that many people wandering down the streets at the same time as you, for example, and the shops that you can go "in" tend to amount to a simple buy/sell menu rather than a further environment you can explore — but the combination of visuals, sound and personality that the game boasts makes it an experience where it's fun to just wander around and see what you can see — particularly when unexpected things happen.

This isn't even getting into the meat of the game, though: there's a strong and interesting story surrounding the man-made vampire-like "Synthister" creatures; there's plenty of mystery surrounding several of the central characters; there's an entertaining series of sidequests involving the main character and his hikikomori (shut-in) little sister; and even the non-plot-related sidequests help to flesh out the world by bringing you into contact with a diverse and fun array of incidental, supporting characters.

Plus, why on Earth wouldn't you want to play a game where you defeat enemies by pulling off their trousers?

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That "someone" was a person whom I only knew as Codex Vahlda, a Final Fantasy XIV player on the Gilgamesh server whom I became aware of this morning after a casual browse of Twitter.

I didn't know Codex at all. I don't even play on his server, so it's unlikely I would have come into contact with him unless he randomly showed up in a Duty Finder group for running a dungeon, since those pull players from several servers to make complete groups.

Sadly, I'll never have the opportunity to know Codex, as he passed away recently due to complications from renal failure. Both he and his family and friends seemingly knew that he was going to pass on, and it was as he lay on what was to become his deathbed that Final Fantasy XIV players from around the world, and from several different servers, all gathered in the same place — the beach in Ward 1 of the player housing district Mist — and held their own vigil for our fallen adventuring comrade.

Normally, this sort of thing is an event that you tend to hear about after the fact, but I happened to be online just as someone on Twitter was posting about the vigil taking place on Ultros, the Final Fantasy XIV server which I call home. Largely out of curiosity, I logged in to take a look at what was happening, ran down to the beach and, sure enough, found a line of players facing out to sea, "wind-up sun" minions out, bathing the group in a soft light, contemplating whatever they chose to be contemplating as they paid their respects to Codex. I joined them.

After a moment of quiet reflection, people spontaneously began letting off fireworks and balloons — these are items you can acquire in the game and are intended for use upon celebratory occasions such as seasonal events or the newly added "Eternal Bond" wedding system. It was a celebration not only of Codex's life, but also of how one stranger could bring all these disparate people from all over the world together in one place to do the same thing. It was a really, really beautiful moment, and extremely moving.

It's easy to think of the Internet at large, social media and online games in particular, as utterly "toxic" (that's a favourite word of critics at the moment) environments in which everyone is constantly at one another's throats. But every so often something happens that reminds you that an awful lot of human beings are fundamentally decent people, and that regardless of where you're from or what — if anything — you happen to believe in spiritually, the cycle of life and death is, pretty much without fail, something that will always bring us closer together with one another.

Rest in peace, Codex; I never knew you, but I hope wherever you are now, you feel the love of all the strangers who came together to celebrate your life today. May you forever walk in the light of the crystal.

The post 1798: Starlight Vigil appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Ultimately, the drama itself wasn't particularly serious — no-one was hurt and no damage was done, though arguably an ill-thought-out prank by an outgoing member was not the best means of handling the situation — but what I found interesting was the discussions that followed it up.

Essentially, the conclusion that many of us came to is that communication is important. It may sound like a simple piece of advice — common sense, obvious, even — but it's so easy to forget, even in an inherently social situation like a massively multiplayer online game. In a Free Company the size of ours, it's inevitable that cliques form, friendships blossom and smaller subgroups start doing things together. That's the natural way of things, and it's not necessarily a bad thing at all. That is, until it starts having a negative impact on the group as a whole for whatever reason — perhaps some members see these smaller subgroups as somewhat exclusionary; perhaps the subgroups find it difficult to relate to other people; perhaps everyone could just stand to be a bit more open and honest with one another.

There were a number of contributing factors in this instance that I won't bore you with now, but suffice to say that a lack of communication was the root cause of the issues we suffered. And, positively, said lack of communication was correctly identified quickly as the root cause of these issues, and people have been making determined efforts to try and make things right. Although the initial "drama" wasn't particularly pleasant or fun to witness, it turns out it ultimately had a positive impact; people are talking more, cooperating more and doing more things together. Plans have been put in place for more organised cooperation on the more difficult things the game has to offer, and people are just generally being more helpful and pleasant towards one another.

It's testament to the overall quality of people we have in the Free Company as a whole that the active members — many of whom could be argued to be implicated in the whole exclusivity/lack of communication thing — have taken this stuff happening on the chin, haven't got angry and upset and have done something positive from it: they've learned from it, identified things that we can do better and differently for one another, and ultimately the Free Company will hopefully be a far more pleasant place overall as a result.

Me, I'm mostly just glad it all seems to be over and done with for now. I hate to see friends fighting with one another, or — in this case — just misunderstanding one another. It's a great pity that the situation led us to lose a few Free Company members who had been with us since the beginning — and people I enjoyed playing with, moreover — but these things happen, and ultimately we'll be a stronger group as a result.

Now let's all just enjoy the game!

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We were both quite keen to get back today due to the release of Final Fantasy XIV's fourth major patch, dubbed Dreams of Ice. This is the penultimate big patch in the series before the full-scale expansion drops next year, and as such the main storyline is starting to build to a climax. Alongside that, one of the principal "side stories" — that of the super-difficult endgame dungeons The Binding Coil of Bahamut — finally comes to an end in this patch, so the most dedicated of raiders can take on what is effectively the game's "true final boss" with their friends. Meanwhile, there is plenty of other stuff to keep slightly less hardcore players occupied.

I haven't done everything yet, not by a long shot, and I wasn't expecting to in the space of a few hours this evening. I have, however, had the opportunity to check out two of the new dungeons — Snowcloak and The Sunken Temple of Qarn (Hard) — and play through roughly half of the new episode of the main storyline. I haven't yet taken on this patch's "big fight" against ice queen Shiva, but that's coming up, and since my friends and I are yet to clear the Second Coil of Bahamut, the Final Coil of Bahamut is probably some weeks or even months away yet.

There's plenty of new stuff to get stuck into, though, and once the initial excitement of brand-new content has worn off in a few days, there's a lot of gear to set my sights on. The addition of a new endgame currency (and the retirement of one) has led to a new "tier" of equipment being added to the game, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact that has on the already spectacular amount of damage that my Black Mage puts out without breaking a sweat. I'm also intending on gearing up my Paladin a decent amount, too, because 1) it's already catching up with Black Mage and 2) I'm really enjoying the tanking I've been doing. With our regular group seemingly putting me in one of the tank roles for the Second Coil of Bahamut, it will probably pay to have some better gear, too, anyway.

But now it is 2:45am and I am very tired. Both Andie and I rallied a bit once we got home and started playing, but now I am abundantly ready to go to sleep and hopefully wake up rather late and reasonably refreshed tomorrow. I have the rest of the week off, so I intend to enjoy it fully by bumming around not doing very much at all except playing Final Fantasy XIV. No change there then, huh?

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In order to explain the situation for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV, indulge me a moment, veterans, while I define a few things.

One of the main systems in Final Fantasy XIV is known as the Full Active Time Event (or FATE) system. These are essentially "public quests" that spawn at predictable points on the map, but on an unpredictable schedule. Some spawn more frequently than others; some are required to progress in certain quests; some are more "popular" than others owing to their convenient location or rewards on offer.

There are three important things to note about FATEs: firstly, they're time limited, usually providing you 15 minutes to complete the main objective, which is generally plenty of time; secondly, if you are standing inside the blue circle that represents the FATE area on the map and hit just one enemy once — even if it's just a glancing, accidental blow from a weapon better suited for channeling powerful magics than melee combat — you are considered to have "participated" in that FATE; thirdly, the number of people who participated in a FATE the previous time it spawned determines how difficult it is the next time around: in other words, at peak periods, FATEs are designed to be challenging for larger groups of people, whereas if the last time a FATE spawned no-one took part in it at all, the next time it appears it will probably be completable by a (well-geared) solo adventurer, perhaps with a chocobo companion in tow.

Completely separate from FATEs is a newer system called The Hunt, in which each area in the game has three Elite Marks that players can hunt down for substantial rewards: a B-rank mark, which you can fight solo, and which only offers rewards if you have a specific Mark Bill inviting you to hunt it down; an A-rank mark, which requires about 4-8 people minimum to take down, but which offers rewards according to how much you (and, in most cases, your party) contributed to the kill; and an S-rank mark, which is much more powerful but works along the same lines as the A-rank marks in terms of rewards. We're mostly concerned with A-rank marks here, since S-rank marks have special conditions that need to be fulfilled before they'll show up in most cases, whereas A-rank marks will just show up regardless.

A-rank marks spawn on predictable schedules — you can see the timers ticking away for the server I play on right here, for example — and appear roughly once every four hours. What normally happens is that hunting parties will gather when the first marks on the list are approaching the "four hours since last killed" mark, then spread out and start looking for the beasts to respawn. There then follows a phenomenon that has become known as the "A-Train", where hunting parties move from zone to zone and pick off all the A-rank marks on the list one at a time until they're all dead, at which point the parties will all disband — unless there's the possibility of an S-rank showing up — and reconvene again when the first timer on the list hits four hours. It's like clockwork; it's perhaps not how the designers intended the system to work when it was first designed — and indeed, it's been tweaked and reorganised several times since it launched — but if you can get involved (which is usually as simple as throwing up a Party Finder ad with the word "Hunt" in it) it can be both fun and rewarding, if not particularly challenging in most cases.

Anyway, the point here is that when an A-rank mark shows up, a horde of players normally follows — and I do mean a horde. We're talking maybe 30 or so people minimum, and usually much more than that.

When I was sauntering around the lands of Western La Noscea earlier today, hacking and slashing my way through some FATEs in an attempt to collect the very last Atma crystal I needed to upgrade my Paladin's relic weapon into its Atma form, I happened to stumble across one of these gatherings, who had showed up to fight the giant crab Nahn. Nahn, as it turned out, had spawned right in the middle of the FATE I had actually run to this area to complete, and as such there was something in the region of 50 people standing around, killing Sahagin indiscriminately to clear the area ready for the big group push towards Nahn. The important thing to note here is that the Sahagin they were hacking, slashing, punching and setting fire to (depending on class) were parts of the FATE I had shown up to complete, so as far as the game was concerned, when that FATE's boss fell, over 50 people had participated in it.

I'm sure you can imagine what happened a little later, after Nahn was defeated and after I returned to the area to complete the same FATE again as it happened to appear while I was passing through.

Yes, believing that 50 players being in the area, battering Sahagin left, right and centre, was a representative example of the zone's population at that particular hour, the game adjusted the difficulty of the FATE to cater not to little old me and the two other people who happened to wander into the FATE at the same time as me — oh no — but instead to the 50+ people who were no longer present, now doubtless considerably further down the tracks of this particular run of the A-Train.

I didn't notice this initially. I thought that the "trash" enemies that you have to defeat before the main boss monster showed up were a little stronger than I remembered, but I thought nothing of it. My companions and I slaughtered our way through them until the boss showed up, at which point I, as the Paladin — a protector "tank" type — got its attention by smacking it firmly upside the chops with my shield, and then began inserting my sword into various parts of its anatomy while my companions got busy with magic spells and poking it with a spear respectively.

I figured something was amiss when the health bar of the boss was moving very slowly despite us all unleashing our most powerful attacks. To put it in context, the boss' health was declining at roughly the same speed as a well-geared party taking on Ramuh Extreme, currently one of the most challenging fights in the game. Fortunately, the boss didn't receive a damage buff at the same time as his vastly increased hit points, otherwise we would have been in real trouble.

We persisted, though, shaving away a tiny sliver of health with each hit. Andie happened to be passing by at one point, and joined the fray to contribute a bit of extra damage from her Bard class. We were making progress, a tiny bit at a time, though the longer the fight was going on the more exhausted my Paladin was getting, my ever-declining TP (Tactical Points, used for triggering physical attacks) getting perilously close to the zero mark. I had the boss' attention pretty firmly, though, so I eased off the powerful attacks and let my (TP-free) automatic basic attack do its work for a little while.

The timer ticked down. We were into single digits of minutes remaining, despite the fact that we'd all entered the fray with the full 15 minutes on the clock. The boss was barely at 50% of his HP, and I was starting to doubt whether or not we'd be able to beat it. Still we persisted.

"DIE DAMMIT!" I typed in frustration, on the /say channel so that my companions (whom, aside from Andie, I didn't know) could "hear" me.

"for real!!!" came back the response from one of them. We'd shared a moment. It was nice. Still we fought on.

My TP had recovered a bit by now, so I triggered my Fight or Flight ability — which temporarily increases my Paladin's damage output — and started hacking away with a bit more gusto once again. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, but the boss' health bar seemed to be going down noticeably faster. It looked as if we might just make it.

In fact, it was beginning to look like we'd make it just as the timer hit zero. Would we pull it off?

Sadly not. At less that 1% HP remaining, the timer expired and we failed the FATE. Our characters all fell to our knees and wept for the 15 minutes of effort we'd just put in — and, of course, to add insult to injury, I didn't get an Atma crystal from that FATE either.

I don't regret the experience, though. As I say, I shared a moment with those other people who were there at the same time as me, all doubtless thinking the same things, willing their characters to do just that little bit more damage. When I happened to run into them again doing another FATE in the area about half an hour later, we exchanged pleasantries and had a laugh about how the new FATE was quite a bit easier than our earlier tragedy. Then we went our separate ways. It was a real "ships in the night" moment, but it made what would have otherwise been a frustrating experience into something highly memorable — and, indeed, something I ended up wanting to write about at length.

I've got one more Atma crystal to go before my Paladin's weapon and shield can be upgraded, hot on the heels of my Black Mage's weapon reaching the powerful Novus (second-to-top) upgrade phase recently. If I can have more experiences like the one I just described, though, I really don't mind it taking a little longer; shared hardships like that — while fairly trivial in this instance — can bring people closer together, even if it's just for a moment or two.

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I'm not saying I'm the best at it, or anything, and I'm certainly not one of those players who makes passive-aggressive comments in the vague direction of those they believe to be "beneath" their skill level (aside: earlier today there was one such jerk in 24-player raid Syrcus Tower berating a newbie tank for what he perceived as a lack of skills, and I was gratified to see all 23 other players admonish him for being an "Internet tough guy"; he shut up shortly afterwards) but I do feel pretty confident that I know how most of the things in the game works, and I'm comfortable helping and advising newcomers with how best to proceed.

As I say, this is a nice feeling, and it occurs to me that there haven't been all that many games — or indeed activities in general over the years — that I can honestly say that about. I like board games, for example, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert at, say, Agricola (as my unbroken losing streak will back up), Carcassonne or Catan. Likewise, I like performing music, but I'm realistic about my own abilities; I know there are plenty of people out there who are much better than I am. And likewise, I enjoy writing, too, but again, know that there are a lot of people who are better at that than me, too.

Final Fantasy XIV, though, I feel like I'm largely on top of my game. Sure, I haven't cleared everything yet — The Second Coil of Bahamut still remains elusive, though this is more a scheduling issue than anything else right now — but I have completed some of the most difficult content, such as The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 5 and the Extreme difficulty version of the Ramuh boss fight. I have a damage-dealer, healer and tank class to level 50 and at least reasonably well-geared in all cases — very well-geared in the case of my "main", which is the Black Mage damage-dealer class. I know all the dungeons inside out because I've run them so many times. I know most of the Primal fights pretty well — with the exception of the Extreme mode variants, which I've only done once each — and I'm confident I could talk newcomers through most of The Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Knowing that I'm actually not some newbie scrub who constantly needs help from other people has actually helped me in a personal sense. Being able to complete all this content and even lead expeditions into some of the game's most challenging dungeons and encounters has meant that I've developed my own sense of confidence and assertiveness. I still have some way to go — I'm hesitant about asking people multiple times for something I really want to do, because I don't want to be a bother, for example — but I'm a lot better than I was.

This particularly comes to mind with regard to the game system added in patch 2.3, known as The Hunt. The Hunt is a take on Final Fantasy XII's system whereby you're given "marks" to find out in the world, then substantial rewards for beating them. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV's take on this system, there are three "tiers": B-rank, A-rank and S-rank. B-rank hunts can be soloed and you only need to do one per week to get a decent reward. A- and S-rank, meanwhile, require groups of people to beat.

The Hunt is, frankly, one of the most poorly implemented things in the whole of the otherwise pretty consistently excellent Final Fantasy XIV. It offers rewards that are much too big, and it is designed in such a way as to encourage enormous groups to power through it rather than smaller parties being able to take on these challenging monsters without being hassled by others. There's something of a reputation of A- and S-rank monsters getting "zerg rushed" by hordes of players looking to make some quick endgame currency, and on occasion the sheer number of people showing up for the more lucrative marks can cause game crashes and freezes. Not so good.

By far the worst thing, though, was the fact that it caused a fair amount of tension in the community because, at least initially, no-one quite seemed able to agree how they should be handled. Should the person who found a hunt mark be allowed to engage it in combat whenever they felt ready, or should they wait for other people to turn up first? Is it acceptable for someone to call out a "pull time" for a hunt, even if they weren't the person who found the monster? Is it acceptable to "reset" a monster (by moving it far enough from its spawn point that it restores all its HP and the fight effectively starts over again) in the name of giving people who haven't arrived yet the chance to get some credit for the kill? (In the latter case, the official answer to that is "no"; it's regarded as harassment due to the fact that doing so not only resets the monster's HP but also individual players' hidden "contribution points" to slaying the mark, which could potentially affect the rewards they receive.)

Said tension led to arguments — bitter, public, loud ones, as players formerly happy to cooperate with one another were suddenly at each other's throats over how they wanted to play the game. A number of people decided to take charge and say that this was how things were going to be done from now on, and if you didn't follow their arbitrary rules, they'd do their best to get you blacklisted by as many other players as possible. Not pleasant… and certainly not conducive to someone like me, who still suffers a certain degree of social anxiety in an online environment, wanting to join in the "fun".

However, the other day, I can't remember why, but I bit the bullet and gave it a go. I joined a hunt party and killed some monsters with them. And I had fun. The people involved were nice. No-one was yelling at each other or accusing others of "doing it wrong". (It helped that it was relatively early in the day in server terms, and consequently there were fewer people online.) It inspired me to go back again and get some more rewards. And then to make my own party and lead it — something I wouldn't even have considered even just a few weeks ago.

Having conquered that anxiety-inducing hurdle, I feel like I'm in a good place; I'm happy with my own level of skill at the game, and happy that I can help others out. I'm also happy to have a positive influence on those around me — I've defused more than a few potential arguments among hot-headed players in parties I've been involved with — and generally be a good member of the game's overall community.

Can't really ask for more than that, can you? And it's that feeling that means that, even as I have somewhat less time to play now that I have a full-time job, I'll be sticking with Final Fantasy XIV for quite some time to come, yet.

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Direct sequels are quite rare in the Japanese role-playing game space; long running series like Tales of and Final Fantasy typically take each new installment as a completely new experience, with the only things each have in common being perhaps some story themes, some item and skill names, maybe a few character names or references, and little else.

There's a fairly good reason that direct sequels are pretty rare in this particular genre, of course: they're damned difficult to do well, and if you're not altogether careful you'll open yourself up to accusations of simply recycling old content. This is a criticism that has been levelled at Xillia 2 and not altogether unjustifiably — the majority of towns, field areas and dungeons you'll visit in the early part of the game are lifted wholesale from the original Tales of Xillia with very few changes.

It's what you do with that recycled content that counts, though, and in the relatively few examples of direct sequels in the JRPG space, it's been handled pretty well. Final Fantasy X-2, for example, eschewed its predecessor's very linear path around the world in favour of having everywhere open from the outset, and multiple things available for you to work on at any given time. Final Fantasy XIII-2, meanwhile, fragmented its experience into a slightly messy tale of time travel with a non-linear narrative, completely at odds with the much-maligned linearity of its predecessor. And Tales of Xillia 2 effectively starts you at the other end of the world from its predecessor, showing life in the games' unusual setting from a pleasantly different perspective.

That's not all, though. While Xillia 1's world was relatively open to exploration, you still unlocked things in a fairly linear progression and tended not to go places until you were told to. In Xillia 2, meanwhile, you still unlock areas of the world according to your progression through the main story, but on regular occasions you are left to your own devices to explore, take on sidequests — many of which are repeatable or randomly generated — and simply do as you see fit in the world.

In this sense, Xillia 2 actually ends up feeling a lot more like a crossbreed between traditionally Eastern and Western approaches to role-playing games. You have the tight, linear, character-driven narrative of a Japanese role-playing game coupled with the freedom to go and see what's over that hill, in that cave, through those wood as seen in Western titles like the Elder Scrolls series.

In fact, Xillia 2 also takes some heavy cues from Japanese role-playing games that do things a little differently, too — most notably the latter two Persona games. Like those two classics, Tales of Xillia 2's protagonist is pretty much silent, though he does have plenty of personality despite not saying all that much. And like those games, your party members have their own unique individual storylines that are ascribed almost as much importance as the main narrative.

One of the strongest things about the original Xillia was the feeling that this was a real group of characters that had their own individual personalities, feelings and opinions on everything. Offhand comments in the field, frequently hilarious post-battle mini-scenes and the Tales series' trademark Skits all helped contribute to an atmosphere of these characters feeling like real people that you were meant to care about rather than collections of stats. (Mechanically, they're all very distinct, too, as it happens, but for me it's the personality of them all that really shines.) Xillia 2 continues this with aplomb, this time giving you somewhat more freedom to make choices as to how the main character responds to things. Certain choices will affect your relationship values with your party members, while other choices will change the outcome of scenes. It's an interesting change from Xillia 1's very "hands-off" approach to story, and it works well, particularly in the context of making the sequel feel distinct from its predecessor despite reusing a lot of content.

I'm yet to beat the game — I'm juggling it with the ever-present Final Fantasy XIV at the moment — but I'm looking forward to seeing how it all concludes. If you enjoyed (and beat!) the previous one, I can strongly recommend Xillia 2; as a sequel, it hits all the right notes, and you absolutely will not be disappointed with the opportunity to spend more time with these wonderful characters.

If you never played Xillia 1? Well, get that sorted right now, soldier; you're missing out.

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Rorona Plus is an interesting game, and one with good pacing. Beginning with simple tasks for which the time limit you're given is ample — leaving you with plenty of time to take on other tasks to build up your relationships and reputation in the town — the game gradually progresses in such a way that what is the same amount of in-game time starts to feel more and more claustrophobic. The things you're tasked with making start taking longer to produce, and the journeys outside the workshop to gather ingredients and battle monsters take up longer stretches of time, too.

Fortunately, to counterbalance this, you have a number of additional systems open up as you progress — you're able to "wholesale" items to the shops around town, allowing you to simply purchase useful "intermediate step" ingredients for more complex recipes rather than having to make them every time, and Rorona gets an assistant who can either be sent out to gather ingredients or craft items independently or Rorona. I must confess I didn't make nearly enough use of these facilities in my first playthrough, but you live and learn; I now recognise that in order to get everything done to such a standard as to unlock the numerous alternative endings to the game, it's necessary to make heavy use of them.

Herein lies the interesting thing about Rorona Plus: despite having the trappings of a conventional Japanese role-playing game, the meat of the gameplay is actually more about management and strategy. In order to see the most success, you'll need to plan your time effectively, and set up systems in order to save time whenever possible. Some of these can be constructed yourself — a furnishing system added in the Plus version allows you to build various items that confer helpful benefits on Rorona and her party — while others, such as the aforementioned wholesale and assistant systems, unlock naturally as you progress in the game, though some can be unlocked sooner if you trigger certain events more quickly.

I'm looking forward to playing through the game again knowing what I know now — plus I believe some stuff can be carried over to another playthrough — and seeking out the other endings. Whether or not I'll go for all of them remains to be seen — I'm keen to play the rest of the series, after all! — but I've had a blast so far, and I'm happy that there's plenty more where that came from.

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There's a sound argument for these releases, of course: some people might be coming to video games with the new generation and thus may have never had the opportunity to play things from the PS3/360 era — so why shouldn't they be able to play these games in their "definitive edition", as Tomb Raider called it? In the case of Halo, the upcoming Master Chief Collection will bring together games from two generations of consoles on one platform and allow players to jump straight to favourite moments rather than having to play all the way through four games. (It also misses out the two games widely regarded to be among the strongest installments in the series — ODST and Reach — but never mind, eh.)

I do find myself resenting the idea of a game that didn't come out all that long ago — The Last of Us — getting a "remastered" release, though. As I say, I understand the reasons for it, it just feels a little… I don't know, cheap. Particularly given that most of the truly exciting, original titles for PS4 and Xbox One aren't coming until next year at the earliest — this leaves 2014 as, as one of my soon-to-be-former colleagues put it, The Year of the Remaster.

Twist: At least, I thought I resented the idea of a remaster. Until I purchased a copy of Atelier Rorona Plus recently — a remake of a game that didn't come out all that long ago that hasn't even jumped generation: it's being released on the same platform it was originally released on!

Atelier Rorona Plus is, as the name suggests, a rerelease of Atelier Rorona, the alchemy-themed RPG/strategy game from Gust that I started playing a while back then had to stop due to review commitments. But this is far from a straight remaster — there would be little point rereleasing it on the same platform otherwise. No, Atelier Rorona Plus instead rebuilds pretty much the whole game in a number of ways.

Visually, it's had an overhaul. While the environments and 2D art are mostly the same, the 3D polygonal characters have been totally revamped to be more in line with their 2D counterparts — in the original, the polygonal characters looked far too young in comparison to the hand-drawn art and, while it wasn't a dealbreaker by any means, it was a little distracting. The new character models look gorgeous, and bring the game much more in line with its more recent sequels.

But, notably, it's not just the visuals that have had an overhaul. The gameplay has been tweaked and adjusted, too, with a whole ton of nice little features that make the whole experience more streamlined and smooth to play without sacrificing any of its depth. The battle system has been redone, the crafting system around which the game revolves has been revamped, the quest system is clearer, there's less aimless running around… basically everything that needed fixing has, so far as I can make out, been fixed.

Now that's how you do a remake. Full review coming soon as one of my last pieces on USgamer.

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I wasn't quite sure what to make of it initially. It's one of those games where there was a fair amount of negative buzz surrounding it quite early on, led by an early review from IGN that wasn't altogether kind. But if my experiences with Time and Eternity were anything to go by, I knew very well that "popular" opinion was something I was unlikely to mesh with, and thus I went in to The Witch and the Hundred Knight with an open mind.

I was very pleasantly surprised. What we have here is a very unconventional Japanese RPG in every respect. It's not turn-based, it's not party-based, it's not overly moe or ecchi, it's not a comedy. Instead, it's an action RPG with a surprisingly dark, deep storyline, and one of the most interesting main characters I've had the pleasure to hang out with virtually in quite some time.

Metallia, the eponymous Witch, is a horrible person. Or at least she initially puts herself across as one. She's foul-mouthed, she's quick to anger and she's aggressive. She appears to have no qualms about inflicting bloody revenge on those she feels to have wronged her, and she seems utterly miserable and bitter about everything.

Over the course of the game, we learn about her. We get to see her gradually letting new people into her life, and starting to seemingly trust them. We get some hints about where all that bitterness and rage has come from. And, quite early on, we also learn that Metallia is not long for this world — though not why immediately.

We observe all this through the eyes of the Hundred Knight, a supposedly mythical figure that Metallia summons at the outset of the game to do her bidding. The Hundred Knight is the player avatar, though, so you have a certain degree of autonomy from Metallia's wishes, and indeed can express your opinions non-verbally at various points throughout the game. You're still bound to Metallia, so progress in the overall plot is largely determined by eventually fulfilling her wishes of destroying the "Pillars of Temperance" and spreading her swamp around the world, but between those predictable story beats, the Hundred Knight gets involved in a number of distinct adventures, each of which forms itself into a neatly contained episode of the overall narrative.

A particularly effective episode is the seventh chapter in the game. I won't spoil the details for those who are planning on playing the game for themselves, but suffice to say that it tells a complete, surprising and interesting self-contained story with a surprisingly emotional payoff. It explores both Metallia and the other members of the cast who have joined by this point, and blends both humour and pathos to a surprisingly effective degree.

The pathos aspect is what I think I've found most surprising about The Witch and the Hundred Knight so far. Developer Nippon Ichi is typically known for relatively light-hearted fare, though in some cases (ZHP is a good example) there's often a more thought-provoking core underneath the exterior fluff. The Witch and the Hundred Knight is, I think, the first Nippon Ichi game where the "dark" aspect has been very much pushed to the forefront, with any comedic moments being somewhat incidental rather than the other way around. The narrative is bleak and, at times, genuinely sad without resorting to being overly "gritty". It's a stark contrast to what I wrote about a short while ago with regard to triple-A games; compared to Thief, which wants desperately to be treated as an 18-rated movie, The Witch and the Hundred Knight never feels like it's trying too hard and, consequently, ends up coming across as far more genuinely mature than Thief ever did despite being considerably more colourful and stuffed full of stylised, bizarre characters.

Anyway. As I noted in my review for The Witch and the Hundred Knight, I'm sure not everyone will be into the particularly abrasive personality of Metallia and her adventures, but if you're after an interesting action RPG with a compelling, unusual story and some satisfying, challenging game systems, you could certainly do far worse, so check it out if you have the chance.

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My love of the Persona series is well-documented on these very pages, but I'm particularly pleased the three spinoff titles are all making it West. I'm especially excited about Dancing All Night — as evidenced by yesterday's post, music games are very much my jam, and Dancing All Night is looking very lovely indeed. I can take or leave Persona 4 Arena Ultimax for now — I'm still yet to beat the first one, though I will get to it eventually — and Persona Q intimidates me a little as someone who is still yet to play an Etrian Odyssey game. But all of them are appealing in one way or another; all of them are games I will play and love.

And then there's Persona 5, which we know next to nothing about so far. I'm really looking forward to this. The Persona team's previous game on consoles was Catherine, which turned out to be seriously great — not to mention a hefty challenge — and set a certain level of expectation for what a Persona 5 might look like. I'm thinking cel-shaded visuals interspersed with anime cutscenes, and that same sense of exquisite stylishness that has permeated the series since at least its third installment.

As for the others, I would worry that they're milking Persona 4 dry were it not for the fact that all the spinoff games featuring the Investigation Team and pals are very different beasts. Of the upcoming titles, only Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is remotely similar to a Persona 4 game we've already had — and given that game's surprisingly visual novel-ish nature, I don't mind all that much, since it's the story that's the important thing, rather than the fighting. (Although competitive players might disagree.)

As for Persona Q and Dancing All Night, though? I can't wait to give them a try — particularly, as I say, the latter. Rise was adorable in Persona 4, and the opportunity to spend another game in her company as she does what she does best — singing and dancing in an indefatigably cheerful manner — is not something to be passed up, particularly with the prospect of other Persona 4 stars putting in an appearance, too. Yu, Persona 4's original protagonist, looks particularly fetching strutting his stuff — I very much like how he's taken on a lot more of his own personality since the original game thanks to spinoff titles and the official anime adaptation.

But sadly we have a fair while to wait before we can get our hands on them. Persona Q and Ultimax aren't showing up until autumn of this year, and Dancing All Night and Persona 5 are next year. Still, the fact they're not just around the corner is probably a good thing — gives me time to clear my backlog a bit, not to mention review the several games I've got on my plate at the moment!

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It helps, of course, that Project Diva F is an excellent rhythm game. It doesn't do anything too complicated with its gameplay — it's just tapping or occasionally holding buttons to the beat, sometimes breaking for some analogue stick-flicking rather than button-pressing — but has a good scoring system that rewards you in a number of different ways: overall accuracy, successfully completing high-pressure "technical zone" sequences and unlocking the "true" end to a track by completing another special bonus zone. You can then bump up the challenge factor through a nifty risk/reward mechanic whereby it becomes easier to fail a track, but in exchange you get considerably more "Diva Points" to spend on goodies if you successfully make it all the way through.

I tend to judge music games based on how "in the zone" they make me feel. A good music game makes you feel at one with the rhythms in its tracks, and you feel like the buttons you're tapping have a real connection to the song. This doesn't necessarily mean just tapping out the beat — I recall vividly explaining to my friend Woody way back when that the various button-presses in Vib Ribbon didn't necessarily follow the vocal lines or the drum beat, but were in fact more like what you'd do if you were drumming your fingers to the song, and the note patterns in Project Diva F are much the same way. Sometimes you're tapping out the rhythm that Miku and friends are singing; others, you're following the guitar line, or the drums, or something else that is prominent in the soundtrack. Learning each track is a matter of familiarising yourself with what you're "playing" at any given moment, and how it fits in with the song as a whole.

In short, Project Diva F gets me feeling very much "in the zone" while I'm playing. It's one of those music games that's hypnotic to play, though the fact that notes come from all directions means that you're not left with that strange "the whole room is scrolling!" feeling that I always got from lengthy Guitar Hero or Rock Band sessions. The background videos are a lot of fun, too, featuring Miku and her friends getting up to various misadventures just like real pop stars in real music videos.

And the customisation. Man. I have a thing for playing dress-up in video games, and Project Diva F does not disappoint in this regard at all. Each of the game's characters has a hefty number of different costumes to unlock, with various accessories on top of that. Then you can decorate each of their rooms, and unlock amusing, silly cutscenes when they interact with the items. Some of the items even have a practical function — setting Miku's alarm clock puts her to sleep, for example, and she'll wake herself (and you) up when the timer expires. Arguably not all that useful on a TV-attached console such as the PS3, but a nice touch — and I can see it being cool on the Vita version we're supposedly getting in the West relatively soon.

I haven't even touched the frankly terrifying Edit Mode yet, in which you can cut your own music videos and set up your own playable note patterns to your own music. If I jump down that particular rabbit-hole, I can see myself getting thoroughly lost, so I've held off for now. But I'm sure I'll investigate at some point in the near future.

If you're a fan of music games as I am, be sure to check it out; don't worry that you might not know many of the songs — you'll pick them up by the umpteenth time you play them to perfect your score!

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So what the hell is Atelier Rorona and why should you care? Well, it's… I guess it's an RPG? It certainly has all the trappings of a typical RPG — hit points, experience points, levels, skills — but it's not at all your usual "band of plucky heroes saves the world" affair. No, instead it's a rather smaller-scale affair in which you play a young girl called Rorona who is tasked with saving the alchemy workshop in which she works by fulfilling a series of increasingly unreasonable requests. These all come from Meredith Alcock, the head of the Ministry of Arland, who is keen to stamp out alchemy in favour of industrialisation for his own, presumably greedy reasons. Failure to meet the requirements of the assignments brings your game to a premature end; successfully completing them means you're immediately presented with another one until you reach the conclusion of the game.

Amid all these assignments are numerous visual novel-style narrative paths that are woven throughout the course of the game, and which you can advance by improving your relationships with various characters by performing additional tasks for them. There are numerous endings to the game, and it's designed to be replayed several times. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to attempt to play as much of Rorona as possible before moving on to Totori, or if I'm going to cycle around Rorona, Totori and Meruru several times in sequence. Either way, I'm presently enjoying the experience enough to want to try and see as many of the endings as possible.

It's not necessarily the narrative that is the biggest draw in Atelier Rorona though. No, this being a Gust game, the emphasis is very much on an in-depth crafting system, which is excellent yet enjoyably distinct from that seen in Atelier's stablemate Ar Tonelico. In Ar Tonelico, crafting was a means of seeing various interactions between the characters and getting to know them a little better — plus getting some great items out of the experience in the process. In Atelier, meanwhile, the crafting system is the core of the game: it's the way you complete most of the assignments in the game, and the solution to most of the quests you're presented with to earn money or improve your relationship with other characters.

The reason it's so interesting is because it's a lot deeper than simpler systems seen in other games that require you to do nothing more than combine specific items to get a brand new item. In Atelier Rorona, you have to take the quality of your ingredients into account — and things like organic ingredients spoil over time — as well as the various "traits" they have attached to them. In many cases, these are nothing more than flavour — if you make a metal ingot that is "stinky" it doesn't affect the stats of any items you subsequently create using it, for example — but in others you can do things like boost the base effect of a healing or attack item, improve the stats on equipment and improve its quality beyond that which its component items would normally provide.

There's a lot of number-crunching involved to optimise your alchemy, and you can't always count on having perfect ingredients available, so sometimes you'll have to improvise somewhat. The ability to do this is reflected by some ingredient items for recipes being a generic category rather than a specific item. For example, when making a "Spring Cup" item that contains liquid, the exact liquid you put in there is up to you — it could be water, it could be tree sap, or something altogether more unpleasant. The items you choose to put in there will affect the final quality of the item, and experimentation is often very rewarding.

Key to doing well in Atelier Rorona is managing your time effectively, because everything you do causes the in-game clock to tick away, counting down towards each new deadline. Whether you're crafting something or going out into the field to gather ingredients and fight monsters, everything takes time, so if you want to optimise how you're playing the game — which is presumably important when going for some of the endings — you'll need to plan your time well. Probably better than I'm doing right now, but I'm fine with just seeing which ending I get first time, then specifically attempting to pursue one or more of the others on a subsequent playthrough.

If the other two …of Arland games are as enjoyable as Atelier Rorona I can see myself spending a hefty amount of time on this series. It helps that Rorona has an amazing soundtrack — I shouldn't expect anything less from Gust after Ar Tonelico's magnificence in that regard — but the gameplay is rock-solid too. I'm looking forward to crafting a whole bunch more pies, bombs and mysterious liquids over the next few weeks, and I don't doubt I'll report further on my progress as I continue.

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And lordy, what a lot of non-story content there is. There's sidequests to do, which tend to have fairly modest rewards but challenge you to battle powerful monsters and master the game's various mechanics. There's a crafting system, which requires you to discover new recipes for various items, then gather the materials for them either from enemies or "harvest points" in dungeons. There's the Scout system, in which you send out numerous NPCs on your behalf to check out dungeons and potentially manipulate the items, enemies, drop rates or experience point gain in particular areas and occasionally discover completely new places. And there's little tricks like earning money by gathering an item called "Invisible Cloth," purchasing a cheap costume, combining it with the aforementioned Invisible Cloth to make a new item of clothing and then selling them for 1.5 million credits a pop.

All of this side stuff is conspiring to prevent me from advancing the game's story. Said story is immensely entertaining as it always has been in the Neptunia series, but Victory's mechanics and optional content are far more solid than even Neptunia mk2, which certainly had plenty of things to do. The combat system has been refined into something that is immensely enjoyable to repeatedly engage in, the difficulty has been ramped up considerably over the rather straightforward mk2, and just chasing down these sidequests and items is extremely addictive.

Although the Neptunia series is widely derided by the mainstream press, I'm consistently impressed by what it's managed to achieve over the course of three games. What initially began as something of a cheap joke at the expense of the games industry and the "console wars" in particular has developed into something much more over time — each of the game's main characters has been developed into their own unique person with a distinctive personality. Okay, there's plenty of standard anime tropes at work, but combined with the fact that these characters are supposed to represent games consoles and manufacturers, it really works; why wouldn't PlayStation be a tsundere who enjoys nothing more than working too hard, and why wouldn't she have a sister afraid of never quite being able to match up? Why wouldn't Nintendo live in a vibrantly-coloured candyland but actually be ruthless, cold and prone to bouts of completely irrational anger?

By nearly 60 hours into Victory, I'm no longer really thinking of the Neptunia cast as "the Sega one, the PlayStation one, the Microsoft one"; they've become great characters in their own right, and their interactions with one another are a real highlight. In fact, such is the popularity and success of the series in its native Japan, it's got its own anime spinoff which I'm curious to watch at some point, and there are several new games on the way, too.

I find it quite odd but also rather pleasing how much this game series has resonated with me since I first picked it up on a whim out of interest one day. "Objectively" speaking — in as much as it's possible to be "objective" when talking about pieces of entertainment — there are far better games out there, both in terms of gameplay and technical proficiency, but something about the adventures of Neptune and the gang has really spoken to me ever since that clunky first game, and has ensured that any time something with the words Hyperdimension Neptunia is released, it's pretty much an instapurchase for me. It's been a while since a "big-name" game has elicited that sort of feeling from me.

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Velocity, in case you've never come across it before, is a game from the Brighton-based indie developer FuturLab. It began its life as a PlayStation Minis title for PS3 and PSP, then was subsequently ported to Vita with numerous enhancements as Velocity Ultra. So positive was the reception to the first game, it seems, that the team at FuturLab is currently in the process of putting together a sequel — a sequel that's looking rather fab, if the early version I had the good fortune to play at the recent <a href="http://www.usgamer.net/articles/egx-turning-up-the-velocity" target="_blank">Eurogamer Expo</a> is anything to go by.

But I want to talk about the original today, or rather Velocity Ultra. I reviewed Velocity Ultra a while back for USgamer and enjoyed it a lot, but I must confess that in the process of reviewing it, I didn't make it through every little bit of content it had to offer — largely because doing so would have taken significantly longer than I had time for, and also because I'd already seen a lot of it in Velocity's previous incarnation as a PlayStation Minis title.

I've been going back to clean up what I missed in the game recently, though, and I'm reminded of what a fantastic game it is. Beginning as what appears to be a relatively straightforward top-down shooter, the game gradually evolves, changes and grows in complexity as it progresses; firstly, you get the ability to teleport over short distances (including through walls); then you get the ability to drop telepods at strategic points in the level in order to teleport over long distances and take alternative routes. By the time you get through all 50 of the game's main levels, you're practically playing a different game.

Things are mixed up along the way, too. Sometimes you'll have levels that are filled with enemies; other times they'll be complex maps with multiple paths. Other times still you'll have a very tight time limit and have to get through as quickly as possible. Different types of level require different strategies.

Where the truly addictive gameplay in Velocity comes in, though, is medal-chasing. Upon completion of a level, you're ranked according to how many survivors you rescued, how many points you scored and how quickly you successfully completed the level. Attain the highest accolade in all of these categories without dying once and you'll earn a "perfect" medal, and it's chasing these "perfects" that is so ridiculously addictive. The reason for this is that the difficulty of achieving the goals is pitched just perfectly; it's always just tantalisingly out of reach rather than seemingly impossible. Pretty much anyone with a good handle on the mechanics will be able to attain at least a few Perfects along the way, though it does get significantly more difficult as the levels become more complex.

And then there are the secret levels. Secret levels! I can't remember the last modern game I played that had secret levels, and yet here they are in Velocity, unlocked through getting your tiny Quarp Jet into places you wouldn't normally expect it to go, usually as a result of checking the map and spotting something out of place. There are a further 20 secret levels on top of the 50 main levels, and not all of them use the standard game mechanics. There's a 10-level Thrust-inspired minigame, for example; there's a twist on FuturLab's earlier game Coconut Dodge; there's even a version of Snake. Successfully contend with all those and you have the incredibly challenging but rewarding and addictive "Red Zone" and "Blue Zone" levels in which time limits are tight, the pathways tighter and the slightest clipping of a wall will destroy you.

I was delighted that the upcoming Velocity 2X felt so much like the first Velocity when I played it at Eurogamer Expo — and particularly pleased that the brand new sections where you get out of your ship and run around for some platforming sections make use of pretty much the same mechanics, with the only real difference being that you're now affected by gravity. I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel, but in the meantime, I've got a whole bunch of Perfect medals to try and attain, so if you'll excuse me I'm going to challenge a few more before I go to sleep.

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I've been playing a much more recent game and making notes, however. The game isn't demanding that I make notes, but I'm getting a strange sense of satisfaction from figuring the game out for myself rather than immediately reaching for the walkthroughs, as is the common approach these days.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I'm now 40 hours into and probably about halfway through the plot, I estimate. I could have raced through and finished by now, I'm sure, but there's something about this game in particular — even more than the previous two Neptunia games, which I adored in all their flawed glory — that is making me want to take my time and soak everything up.

It's a different kind of wanting to soak things up to something like Ar Tonelico, though. In the case of Gust's oeuvre, I wanted to continue immersing myself in the world; spend more time with the characters; see every possible conclusion to that lengthy story that I'd been enjoying so much. With Victory, meanwhile, my enjoyment is coming from the game mechanics as much as the setting and characters.

The three Neptunia games have a fun setting and some immensely entertaining characters, you see, but I wouldn't call the world especially "immersive". The only real "exploring" you do is going into dungeons, and these are primarily designed for being 1) a place to fight monsters and 2) a place to harvest items for use in crafting and/or quests. There's a lot of repeated content — some dungeons are just variations on the same map, a la Phantasy Star Online and Dragon Age II — and thus they're best regarded as a backdrop for the more interesting stuff that's going on with the game mechanics.

More so than any of the previous Neptunia games, Victory is a case of a number of individually simplistic systems and mechanics coming together to create something significantly more complicated and deeper than the sum of its parts would appear to create at first glance. Sure, you can play through Victory without exploring these aspects of it, and that's a perfectly valid way to play. But since mk2 in particular, I've found the gameplay of this series so satisfying that I want to indulge myself in all its nuances as much as possible.

Let me explain what I've been doing and taking notes on this evening. In doing so, you'll hopefully see how the different individual systems at play in Victory combine to make something that is a surprisingly deep experience.

Each dungeon in Victory has a bank of monsters you'll encounter. Like mk2 and unlike the first game, you can see the monsters on the map and attack or avoid them as you desire, though a single monster figure on the field actually represents a party of enemies that might include other opponent types.

Each monster drops at least one item, most of which are "trash" items that don't have any use by themselves. But most of these items are used either in crafting recipes — crafting an item once means that it's then available for purchase in all of the game's shops, so it's something you need to do — or for completing quests. Already we have several overlapping systems here — exploring dungeons leads to combat, which leads to the acquisition of items, which can be sold, used in crafting recipes or traded in for quest rewards.

As well as tangible rewards, quests also manipulate the game's "shares" mechanic that has been around since the first game. I haven't studied the effects these shares have in great detail yet, but if it's anything like the first two games, the characters associated with a particular nation will be powered up or down according to how high their shares are. In my experience, it's not a huge increase or decrease, but I'll need to analyse things more comprehensively to figure that out. In mk2 the shares values also determined which ending you got; I don't think that's the case in Victory but I could be wrong.

Now, here's the twist on the usual "monsters drop shit" thing — partway through the game, you gain access to a mechanic called Scouting, whereby you can send several NPCs off to scout dungeons while you do other stuff. Depending on how much you pay them and their level of proficiency, they may come back with items, money or, more importantly, a report that something has changed in the dungeon they were scouting. This could be a change in the amount of credits monsters drop or the experience points they award, or it could be a shift in the harvestable items or the monsters wandering around the dungeon.

The latter two are significant, because they are the only means of acquiring some items that are, again, used for crafting or completing quests. Most dungeons have at least one optional boss monster, and it's usually these that are manipulated through the Scout system. Normally, these optional bosses are referred to as "Dangerous", which simply means they're tougher than the other stuff in the dungeon and have their own cool battle theme. However, a Scout spotting a shift in the monster patterns may turn them to either a "Risky" monster, which drops chips that can be used to burn discs with specific characteristics, abilities and stat improvements on, or a "Tough" monster, which drops medals that can be traded in to acquire the actual discs required to make use of this mechanic.

Whether a "Dangerous" monster becomes "Risky" or "Tough" when a scout finds it — actually finding something at all is determined largely by chance, but is influenced by both how much you pay the scout and their own abilities — is decided by whether a "flag" item in a dungeon is standing or broken. If it's standing and your scout spots a change in monster patterns, you'll come across a "Tough" monster; if it's broken, you'll meet a "Risky" monster. These shifts in monster patterns only last for one in-game "day", though, so if you've sent your scouts off to random places all over the world and they've all found new monsters, you'll need to decide which ones to take on. It becomes necessary to think about where you send your Scouts and why, otherwise it's a bit of a waste of time.

This "flag" system also determines which harvestable items become available when a scout spots a change in the items available in the dungeon.

Confused? I was initially, too, because the game doesn't explain this in great detail, which I was initially a bit annoyed about. However, having sat down and actually taken some notes this evening on each dungeon — what the normal lineup of collectable items and monsters are, and the differences that successfully Scouting it has, both with the flag broken and standing — I now feel like I understand this game mechanic. It isn't explained in great detail because it's not something you need to use to finish the game. You're told regularly by NPCs that you don't need to do quests and you don't need to use Scouts, but if you do, you'll find more cool stuff.

I could, of course, have simply gone to GameFAQs and looked all this shit up myself. But there's something inherently very satisfying about figuring out how it all works myself. It makes me feel like I'm really "beating" the game at what it's doing — learning how to leverage its rules to my own advantage, rather than simply getting someone to tell me how to do it. It's something I can see myself doing a lot more in the future, as I'm appreciating the game a great deal more as a result.

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For those who haven't read my numerous enthusiastic rants on the previous entries in this much-berated series, allow me to get you up to speed.

The first Hyperdimension Neptunia was critically panned for numerous reasons, but I found myself enjoying it a huge amount despite its crap 3D graphics, repetitive gameplay and clunky mechanics. It established some immensely endearing characters, and it was largely this fact that encouraged me to check out the subsequent entry in the series.

Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 was more of a reboot than a sequel, since it didn't really acknowledge the first game existed. It was superior in almost every respect — better graphics (though the frame rate was still on the low side), an almost infinitely better battle system, more streamlined mechanics and massively better music — but kept the things that were good about the original game: the wry, self-referential sense of humour; the endearing, memorable characters; the amusing setting; the gorgeous 2D art. It was one of the few games I actively wanted to play all the way through and see every single bit of content it had to offer — including the surprisingly dark "conquest" ending that took a considerable amount of effort to unlock.

Now, I'm playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, the third game in the series. This is more evolution from mk2 than the revolution that mk2 was over the original, but that's fine; I loved mk2, so I'm happy to effectively play it again with a bunch of refinements. The adorably ditzy Neptune is back in the lead role this time around, after giving up the spotlight to her sister Nepgear in the previous game, and there's been a strong focus on the rather tsundere girl who represents the PlayStation platform, Noire so far in what I've played. (This is absolutely fine by me, as I have a total crush on Noire.)

I'm still quite early in the new game so far, so I'm hesitant to comment on it too much. What I instead wanted to mention was an Extra Credits episode I watched earlier today, in which the different between game mechanics, the dynamics they create and the aesthetic reasons to play were explored. It got me thinking about the various JRPGs I've been playing recently, and how not all of them would appeal to everyone — even among JRPG fans.

Given the diversity of the games industry today, it's very difficult and not particularly helpful to say that you're a fan of a specific "genre" of games any more, because these genres exclusively describe game mechanics. "I like RPGs," people will say, implying that they like games that involve hit points, statistics and equipment. And yet if I plonked Skyrim's biggest fan down in front of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, they'd probably look at me in disgust, walk out then never speak to me ever again. (I'm seeing my friend Tim tomorrow night, who is possibly the biggest Skyrim fan in the world; I might try it. Though he probably won't walk out of his own house in disgust.)

What we should actually start doing a little more is considering our tastes with regard to things like subject matter, mood and the aesthetics described in the Extra Credits piece. Hyperdimension Neptunia doesn't appeal to me because it's a JRPG — though I enjoy those mechanics and the related play aesthetics — it appeals to me because of its characters; because of its bright colours; because of its light-hearted nature and refusal to let you take it seriously. We're talking about a series of games where one special attack allows you to summon Keiji Inafune in the form of a sword, then hit things with it; and another where a girl using an electric guitar as a weapon smacks an enemy into a giant microwave and then turns it on for massive damage. We're talking about a series of games in which Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft's gaming platforms are personified as a series of young girls who rather aptly embody many of their inspirations' key characteristics.

Despite superficial similarities, I wouldn't necessarily expect someone who enjoyed, say, Ar Tonelico to enjoy Hyperdimension Neptunia — though there may be some crossover. (I love both, for example!) Ar Tonelico has its light-hearted moments but, for the most part, takes itself reasonably seriously; Neptunia, meanwhile, is flippant and silly. Both are emotionally engaging but in completely different ways; Ar Tonelico is dramatic and affecting; Neptunia feels like hanging out with old friends.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing more of Neptunia V, particularly as the story seems to have some interesting, mind-bending twists this time around. It's early days yet, but I'm already having a blast, and I anticipate spending a considerable amount of time on this game.

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This is my first encounter with the Atelier series. I do, in fact, own all three PS2 games (known as Atelier Iris)  and all three PS3 Arland games (Atelier Rorona, Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru) plus the first entry in the new Dusk series (Atelier Ayesha), but this is my first time playing them — they're all games that I picked up when I saw good deals a while back, and subsequently added them to my stack of Stuff I'd Like to Play at Some Indefinite Point in the Future.

From what I understand, each "subseries" in the Atelier franchise as a whole does things markedly differently. The PS2 games, from what I can make out, appear to be rather more conventional JRPGs with a lot of game mechanics brought across from the Ar Tonelico series — no bad thing. The PS3 games, meanwhile, if Atelier Rorona is anything to go by, are an interesting twist — and not at all what I expected.

In Atelier Rorona, you play the titular heroine, a young girl with a bit of a self-confidence problem. Rorona is currently employed in an alchemy workshop as a means of paying off a debt to the alchemist Astrid. Rorona is a lovely girl, but unfortunately Astrid is not particularly popular, and as such the kingdom of Arland is doing its level best to get her workshop shut down so factories can be built on its location. It's up to you to make sure that doesn't happen.

On the surface, Atelier Rorona resembles a fairly straightforward JRPG. You have big-eyed anime characters who chat to each other at great length via the medium of 2D emote portraits, text and voice acting. You have hit points, experience and levels. You have "dungeons". But it's not a JRPG. No, in fact, it's actually more of a strategy/management game, in which the most important thing is not pushing through the story or powerlevelling your characters, but instead making careful — very careful — use of your time.

The flow of gameplay in Atelier Rorona is pretty straightforward. Roughly every three months or so of in-game time, you're given an assignment by the kingdom of Arland; meet the deadline and everything's fine, but fail to meet the requirements and your alchemy workshop will be shut down, prompting an immediate Game Over. The assignments generally require you to turn in items of one or more different types, with your overall evaluation score for the assignment as a whole being calculated on a combination of the number of items you submitted in total, their quality, and the variety of different types of item you submitted.

Completing assignments isn't the only thing you have to do, though. No, as well as ensuring that your workshop survives for the next three months, you also have to try and improve its dreadful reputation by taking on smaller-scale quests for the local populace, and improve your relationship with your friends by taking on quests for them. And in the meantime, you need ingredients, of course, so you'll need to spend a few days every so often going on a jaunt into the forest/ruins/mines to go and collect things. And in order to protect themselves on said jaunts, your party needs equipment, of course, which means you need to synthesise the raw materials needed then take them to the friendly local blacksmith to forge them into something new.

It's initially overwhelming, but once you get into the groove of prioritising what you need to do vs. what you want to do, it's a lot of fun.

What I find particularly interesting is that while it's clearly a strategy game, its approach to things is very different to the high level of abstraction found in Western games. Were this a Western-developed game based on the same premise, you'd be spending a lot of time in abstract menus, dragging icons around and that sort of thing. Combat would perhaps be resolved automatically. There's nothing wrong with that approach, of course; it's just a little too dry for my tastes. Which is why I appreciate the amount of time and effort which Gust has made to infuse Atelier Rorona's tiny world with a great deal of character.

In order to do various things, you need to wander around town and visit people. In the process, you'll stumble across things happening on various occasions, with further events happening according to your friendship level with your various party members. We get a strong feeling of who Rorona is and how she relates to the people around her, not to mention a strong sense of unfolding narrative, but the core gameplay is straight up hardcore strategy/management.

It's actively stressful to play, but enjoyable in the process; there's just enough light relief with the characters and story sequences to keep things interesting. I'm already very much enamoured with the Rorona's rather tsundere best friend Cordelia, who hasn't explicitly said so yet, but clearly has a big chip on her shoulder about her short stature. I'm looking forward to the inevitable explosion about that at some point, but in the meantime I have a batch of incense to make that just won't wait…

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Ar Tonelico Qoga, as the third game is known, is a peculiar beast. While it's the most outright "perverted" of the series — the previous two games had plenty in the way of innuendo but stopped short of being overly fanservicey, a couple of scenes where the heroines were clad only in towels aside — it's also probably the most open-minded of the three with regard to the subject matter it tackles. This is a game that revels in sexuality in all its forms as one of its themes, and if you feel somewhat uncomfortable playing it, I feel I know Gust's work well enough by now to say that it's probably intentional that you feel that way.

Let me qualify the above statements a little. Insofar as the game is "perverted", one of its core gameplay mechanics involves the female "Reyvateil" characters (essentially glass-cannon mages if you want to assign them a traditional RPG party role) stripping off their clothes throughout the course of battle. While, yes, this is gratuitous and unnecessary and etc. etc. (for the record: I am an unabashed (well, mildly abashed) pervert and have no issue with pervy fanservice in my entertainment) they do at least make an attempt to justify the reason for this happening to a certain degree in a narrative sense: Reyvateils are artificial human-like life forms that are basically equipped with Wi-Fi (bear with me) and communicate wirelessly with the titular tower of Ar Tonelico in order to produce the magic-like effects of their Songs. By stripping — or "purging", as the game calls it — the Reyvateils are able to get better reception, so to speak, and can absorb more magic from the tower. This translates, in gameplay terms, to the "Burst" gauge, which represents how powerful the Reyvateil's spell will be if you set it off right now, increasing at a much more rapid rate according to how few clothes she is wearing. (They stop short of her getting fully naked, I might add — after purging three levels of clothing, she's down to her skimpies, and purging a fourth time triggers her powerful (and surreal) "Flipsphere" über-attack, at which point her clothes magically reappear.)

Read all that back again, and I'd forgive you for never wanting to give this game the time of day. A game whose female characters strip off in exchange for increased magical capabilities? Sounds like some sort of Male Power Fantasy. And perhaps it is.

Thing is, though, Ar Tonelico Qoga is far more interesting and intelligent than just pretty girls getting almost-naked. For starters, it's worth noting that after a certain point in the game, all the male characters will strip off at a moment's notice too — performing each character's best attack causes all their clothes to fall off and for you to get a good look at what each of them are packing underneath their armour. Doctor Hikari Gojo's fundoshi in particular is a sight to behold.

But no. It's not even about characters getting naked. Much like the previous two games in the series, the really interesting stuff comes about thanks to the "Dive" mechanic — a system whereby you can increase the power of the two Reyvateils by taking a wander through their "Cosmosphere" — a multi-level psychic world that exists within their subconscious. By exploring the two heroines' Cosmospheres, you learn a great deal about them — facts that simply don't come up explicitly in the game's "normal" plot, but which can help inform your reaction to things that go on once you know them.

As is par for the course in the series, each level of the two heroines' Cosmospheres focuses around some sort of problem that they are having — be it a difficulty coming to terms with who they are, the strange influences other aspects of their personality have on them, or simply something they're having trouble admitting or dealing with. By interacting with the Reyvateil and the other characters in her Cosmosphere, the protagonist Aoto forges an incredibly strong, incredibly intimate bond with the heroines and gets to know them in a way that no-one else in the world does.

This leads to some really interesting scenes, many of which are touching on territory I can't recall exploring in a game before. And unlike the gaudy excesses of the strip-centric battle system, they're handled sensitively and with care; clearly composed by someone who knew what they were talking about.

I'm trying not to spoil anything here for those of you who are reading this and intend to play through this fascinating game, but I feel I should give one example to highlight what I'm talking about, and that is the character who, in one of her Cosmosphere levels, essentially "comes out" as being a submissive or "bottom" with somewhat masochistic tendencies. Given what you know about this character by this point, her confession is not altogether surprising, but what is surprising is that it is actually referenced and explored through more than simple innuendo.

"Don't take off the chains," she says after a convoluted, embarrassing and humiliating sequence of events for her, where Aoto is about to give her her freedom. "I feel safe when I'm in the chains, so long as you're there."

I'll confess to not knowing anything about BDSM and related sexual preferences, but I found it fascinating to see this character opening up about her secret passions and desires like this. It wasn't treated as a kind of "wish fulfilment" scene for male players, either; it was simple, to the point and helped me to understand one aspect of this particular character. In short, it's the sort of thing I'd like to see explored in more games; sadly, it's abundantly clear that very few "triple-A" producers would greenlight a game that delves into such subject matter, though thankfully there's always the "lower-tier" games such as Ar Tonelico willing to step up to the plate and try something new.

As guilty as I feel for what occurred in the bad ending, I should probably go to bed now and absolutely not try to get a better ending now. Right? Right. Suuuuuure.

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It was a really interesting game on the whole, and one that clearly knew its (small, niche) audience very well. I found it particularly interesting that instead of making a direct sequel to the first game, which apparently sold pretty well in Japan but bombed over here due to appalling review scores, they instead chose to reboot the setting and characters, creating a game which newcomers could happily start with but which those who played through its predecessor could appreciate on a deeper level. Neptunia mk2 wasn't a retelling of the first game's story — it was a completely new tale that pretty much assumed the first game didn't happen. This was a little jarring at first, as characters showed up whom I thought should know each other having played the first game, and the characters IF and Compa were obviously retconned to be childhood friends. Over time it ceased to matter, though, and it became clear that Neptunia mk2 was intended to be taken on its own merits without the baggage of its predecessor — a sensible choice, I'm inclined to think.

Besides proving to be a good jumping-on point for the series (the physical package's apparent rarity aside), Neptunia mk2 also dialed back its reliance on rather forced game and anime references for its humour, instead opting to focus on its distinctive and entertaining (if rather archetypal) characters. The one notable exception to this was in the game's "true ending" path, where there's a wonderful scene shortly before the final boss that features the "older sister" characters (meant to personify the seventh-generation consoles plus the ditzy Neptune/Sega, who has no idea what she's doing and is more interested in cookies than ruling the world) arguing over whose console is best, while the "younger sisters" (who are really the main characters of the game, and who personify the current-generation handheld systems… and, err, the Game Gear) sit and play Monster Hunter together while talking about how awesome Shenmue was.

A side-effect of the above is that the game's endearing sense of humour can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone, regardless of your knowledge of the video games industry as a whole. Those who have been playing for a long time, however, will appreciate the numerous sly nods and winks throughout — an area called Atari Marsh; a city called Sim City; characters called Cave and Falcom; and enemies that resemble everything from Tetris blocks to Dr Kawashima's freaky floating head from the Brain Age/Brain Training series.

The overall plot, which is essentially an anti-piracy, pro-"reward the creators of the content you enjoy" parable, initially appears to be a bit heavy-handed with its message, but this is nicely subverted by the time the previous game's protagonist Neptune puts in an appearance and berates the other characters for "sounding a bit preachy and stuff". It has a good narrative arc, building to a suitably dramatic conclusion and one of seven different endings — including a shockingly dark one that is quite impressive in its brutality. (Though it could possibly have gone even a bit further than it did.)

One of the most interesting things about it is its female-centric nature. While there's a lot of fanservice in it — within five minutes of starting, there are three quasi-"bondage" scenes; several characters are prone to flashing their panties at every opportunity (and the in-game camera is happy to encourage this); and a number of the "event" pictures feature a childishly amusing "jiggle" feature that… well, you can probably imagine — it's difficult to look on the game as being particularly anti-women.

In fact, it's very positive about a lot of things to do with sex and gender. The whole (enormous) party of playable characters is made up of women, for starters, and while many of these use anime archetypes as the basis for their personality, they're all their own individual characters with their own quirks and ways of interacting with each other rather than being nothing but shallow stereotypes. This team of ass-kicking women doesn't once rely on a man to help them out throughout the course of the entire story — and in fact, the few faceless appearances that men do make throughout the plot tend to depict them as shallow, image-obsessed borderline sex pests, with the exception of the boss character Brave, who is more of a Transformer than a man anyway. (Any good that Brave does for the male gender's representation in the game is immediately undone by Trick, however, who it's not an exaggeration to say is a revolting robotic paedophile, and one of the most delightfully odious characters I've had the pleasure of virtually beating up for a long time.)

There are also no unnecessary romantic scenes in the game, though there's a subtle implication that all the main characters in the story are gay and that there's nothing wrong with this whatsoever. (Because, you know, there isn't.) This doesn't mean lesbian melodrama or anything, either; rather, it's simply accepted that some of these girls like each other a bit more than others, and this is depicted in the way that they interact with one another with obvious tenderness and care. It's clear that these characters and their relationships have been written with genuine affection and a desire to make them believable people rather than just tits and arse, and I came away from the experience feeling like I had a good understanding of who they were, who they got along with the best and who they clashed with. It was one of those experiences where the final credits rolled and I felt like I was going to miss the characters, which is always a good sign.

So that's that. It's all done. No more Neptunia… at least until March, when the third game in the series arrives and I will inevitably become obsessed all over again.

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With that in mind, some people have been expressing curiosity about this game after hearing me talk about it, so I am going to use this post in an attempt to share some facts about it that may help you reach a decision as to whether or not you would find it an enjoyable experience. Not everyone will like it, and that's fine — I really enjoyed it, but I recognise its flaws.

So here we go then.

It's roughly 50% visual novel. Story scenes in Hyperdimension Neptunia are selected from a menu rather than occurring naturally during exploring a town or something, and are all presented in a head-and-shoulders visual novel style. In a twist on the usual way in which VNs are presented, however, the portraits are animated — they breathe, change expressions, have lipsyncing and move their heads. It's not quite the same as a fully-animated anime scene (or indeed in-engine cutscenes) but it looks very nice and the art is lovely.

The other 50% is old-school JRPG dungeon crawler. You'll spend your non-story time in Hyperdimension Neptunia wandering through a variety of rather samey dungeons. There are a very limited number of environments, and only a set number of layouts to explore. Objectives are generally either "reach the exit" or "kill the boss", with occasional "collect [x] of [y]". Structurally, it's nothing special, and the "collect [x] of [y]" or "kill [x] of [monster]" objectives are largely dependent on luck, which some may find frustrating. The game is non-linear all the way through, however, meaning if you're struggling on one dungeon (or even the final boss!) you can simply shoot off and do something else for a bit.

There are random encounters. A hangover from the old days of JRPGs, random encounters are the bane of some RPG fans' existence. They are present and correct in Hyperdimension Neptunia. Whether or not you get irritated by random encounters will play a big part in determining whether or not you will have an enjoyable time.

The combat system is GREAT. To counter the potential annoyance of random encounters, the combat system is hugely enjoyable. Taking its cues from Xenogears, each character has a set number of Action Points to spend per turn. Three of the PS3 controller's face buttons are assigned to different attacks (each costing a particular number of AP) by default, and as each character levels up they learn new moves. These moves must then be manually assigned to individual button presses in any of the possible combinations of four buttons that make up a combo. Different moves have different "end bonuses" if placed in the fourth slot of the combo — some allow the combo to continue registering after the fourth button press, others allow the party member to "switch" with one in the back row, effectively granting the player a free turn, and some characters have the magical girl-esque ability to transform. It's great fun setting up and naming your own combos, and there's a pleasing almost puzzle-like element to working out which ones will flow nicely into other ones while still leaving you with enough AP to be effective.

You can customize a whole ton of stuff in combat. You can rename button combos and apply your own images to certain special attacks. Other special attacks that you find throughout the course of the game are all based on old Sega games, allowing you to do things like summon the dude from Altered Beast or Alex Kidd to lay the smack down on your enemies.

There's a really weird item system. Rather than a conventional item system, Hyperdimension Neptunia makes use of a strange "crafting" system in combat to handle healing and the like — you can't heal outside battle, except by leaving or completing a dungeon. There are four crafting materials that you collect and/or purchase, and different combinations of these are required to activate each character's unique "item skills", each of which has a time when it occurs, a trigger condition and a target. For example, a basic healing item skill might be "When damaged and HP is 50% or less, heal 30% of HP in exchange for 5 of one item and 5 of another." The twist is that each character only has a limited number of "item skill points" which can be funneled into any of their item skills — one point equates to a 1% chance that when the condition is fulfilled at the appropriate time, the skill will trigger. For example, the character IF has a skill that will resurrect any fallen party members with 50% HP at the end of her turn, but this is only absolutely guaranteed to happen if you put 100 points into that skill. You can shift these points around at will — even during combat, except in the middle of a combo — and it adds an interesting degree of strategy to an otherwise attack-focused combat system, but it's bizarre, only sort-of works as a concept and will almost certainly piss some people off. I quite liked it by the end of the game, but it takes some adjustment to get your head around.

There's a "skip animation" button in combat. If you're starting to find the endless fighting rather dull, you can simply tap the L2 button to skip any animation, whether it's a regular attack by you or the enemies or a lengthy piece of JRPG "final attack" showboating. This means that you can romp through combats super-quickly if you're not too concerned about watching animations.

There's a bunch of grinding later in the game if you want to get the best ending. There are three endings to the game that are dependent on whether or not you recruit three characters in the story — a "bad" one if you don't recruit any of them, a "good" one if you recruit one or two of them and a "true" one if you recruit all three of them. Getting all three of them involves manipulating a mechanic which is never explicitly explained in the game, and requires replaying a lot of dungeons that are, by that point, far too low-level for you and thus almost insultingly easy. Fortunately, you can make use of the aforementioned "skip animation" button to rip through most of these dungeons in a minute or less.

The in-engine graphics aren't great. While the hi-res visual novel scenes look lovely, the in-game graphics look distinctly PS2ish and suffer from a fairly poor frame rate when compared to their mediocre quality. This is, apparently, fairly common practice for the developers Compile Heart and Idea Factory, and doesn't affect the enjoyment at all, but those who appreciate super-pretty graphics will only find functional visuals here. That said, the animations are nice and the characters all have plenty of personality about them.

The music is annoyingly catchy, but limited. There aren't many different music tracks in the game, which means by the end you may well be tiring of some of them. That said, they are catchy, recognisable themes that you may well find yourself humming along with, and there are multiple battle themes rather than the same one all the way through the game.

The game offers both Japanese and English voiceovers. Both have their merits, though some parts haven't been dubbed into English, meaning they're just text. On the whole, the Japanese voice track is superior in terms of acting quality (though beware the high-pitched voices if that sort of thing bugs you), but it's nice to hear the American voice actor who plays Yukari in Persona 3 again on the English track.

The game is genuinely amusing… if you're a fan of Japanese media and video games. The game prides itself on affectionate lampshading of anime and video game tropes, with the characters regularly breaking the fourth wall to talk about their role in the game. There are also plenty of optional scenes with references to various video games and anime, though some feel a little forced. If you don't like things being very obviously referenced, the humour in this game may not be for you. See also:

The game is stuffed full of innuendo and fanservice. The party in Hyperdimension Neptunia is exclusively female, and male characters throughout are very limited, mostly represented as silhouetted portraits alongside the huge, animated head-and-shoulders shots of the girls. There's a lot of boob-related humour, particularly surrounding the discrepancy in size between several party members' breasts, and a number of comic misunderstandings that initially appear to be somewhat sexual in nature but later turn out to be something far more innocuous. There's also a clearly-underage openly-lesbian character (though it's implied that most of the characters have at least a slight inclination in this direction), you'll see a lot of pantsu-flashing and suggestive positions (see below) over the course of the game, most of the girls wear incredibly impractical outfits (see below), and their boobies bounce on the special "event" pictures that normally accompany a character's first appearance (see below!). It's all fairly harmless and there's nothing outright pornographic; it feels cheeky and light-hearted rather than malicious or exploitative and is certainly no worse than anything seen in popular anime, but some may object to it or find it embarrassing.

There's a bunch of DLC, 90% of which is completely unnecessary. For the true Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, the game carries a wide selection of downloadable content, most of which takes the form of free additional quests that can be added into the game. Most players who download these will be very surprised to discover that a lot of them have recommended levels well into the hundreds, while the level cap in the game is just 99. You can, however, purchase extensions to the level cap to take it right up to 999, along with "boosters" to increase the various characters' stats if you're really struggling. None of these are essential, and these high-level dungeons provide the exact same experience as the rest of the game, so they're really not worth downloading. (If you do want to grind to 999, it will take you roughly the length of the rest of the game put together doing the same dungeon over and over and over again. Methinks someone was having a laugh with this DLC.)

The other 10% of the DLC should probably have been in the game in the first place. There are four pieces of DLC that are worth buying — two "battle tickets" that allow the use of otherwise non-playable party members in combat, and two additional characters who have their own sequence of event scenes. Again, none of these are essential — the additional characters' plotlines tend to be kept fairly separate to the main core of the party, and you get plenty of characters over the course of the main game to fill up your party — but it's curious that these weren't just included on the game disc. (They're not on-disc DLC, either — each is a 100MB+ download.) Given that you can find a copy of the game for not-very-much-money fairly easily these days, I didn't really object to paying a couple of extra quid to see what I might be missing out on — as it happens, they were a nice addition, but I'm not sure I would have missed them if I chose to forgo the DLC.

The characters are memorable and adorable. For all the game's flaws, the thing that kept me coming back over and over again until the very end was the cast. While most of them are recognisable anime archetypes, the self-aware nature of much of the game's humour means that they're not above calling each other out when they're behaving in a particularly stereotypical fashion. The central cast of the ditzy, airheaded Neptune, the pink and fluffy cries-at-the-slightest-provocation girly-girl Compa and the rational, sensible but somewhat tsundere IF complement each other perfectly, and poor old IF, as the "straight man" (well, woman) of the ensemble usually ends up having to deal with the aftermath of all the other characters' idiosyncracies. She's by far the most sympathetic character by the end of the game, but there's something eminently likeable about all the rest of them, too.

So there you go. A list of facts about Hyperdimension Neptunia. Don't go into it thinking it's going to be the best thing ever because you will almost inevitably be disappointed. If you have a lot of patience for what is essentially a combination of an old-school, combat-heavy JRPG and a visual novel, however, there's a highly enjoyable experience with some very memorable characters and some endearingly self-referential humour to be had here. If that sounds like your sort of thing, give it a shot.

I'll be starting the sequel tomorrow, and I understand that's a superior experience. I'll be interested to see quite how different it is.

The post 1098: Nepgagaga Complete! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I fancied something light-hearted and silly, so I chose Hyperdimension Neptunia. I knew nothing about this prior to starting to play, and just knew that it was rather silly, very Japanese, packed with rather unnecessary fanservice (that I secretly quite enjoy) and not necessarily what you'd call "good" by the traditional definition. However, given that many of the games I've enjoyed most of all over the course of the last year have not been what you'd call "good" by the traditional definition (Nier springs immediately to mind) I was willing to give it a chance.

I think I'm going to like it.

Hyperdimension Neptunia casts you in the role of Neptune, a personification of the cancelled console the Sega Neptune. Cast out of Celestia by her goddess sisters (each of whom represents one of the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii respectively) and forced to fend for herself in the lands of Gamindustri, it's up to her to… well, I don't really know yet, as I haven't got that far and the events in the intro left her with amnesia which she conveniently points out is to help the players understand what is going on. I swear I'm not making any of what I just said up. This is indeed a game that represents the seventh-generation "console wars" as ridiculous anime-style battles between anthropomorphised hardware manufacturers.

Besides the silly premise, which I have a lot of time for, there actually seems to be quite an interesting game under there, too. The game unfolds in several distinct components — visual novel-style storytelling sequences; a "between missions" bit where you can shop, read background information and discover sidequests; and dungeon-crawling. The game isn't really a traditional JRPG in terms of structure — there's no wandering around field screens or towns, for example, and the story scenes all unfold using head-and-shoulders shots of the characters rather than in-engine graphics, like a visual novel rather than a standard JRPG.

Where the interesting gameplay comes in is in the dungeon-crawling component. Structurally, this is very straightforward — you wander around a dungeon finding treasure chests and occasionally getting into random battles. The characters in your party each have "dungeon abilities" that recharge over time that allow them to do different things — Neptune can smash through obstacles, for example, while Compa, a character who appears early on, can trigger tough battles at special summoning zones to temporarily lower the random encounter rate, and IF, another early character, has the ability to lead the way to normally-invisible treasure chests.

The battle system is turn-based, but makes use of an "ability points" system, whereby each character has a certain number of points that they can spend on their turn. Each move they do costs ability points, and up to four moves can be chained together into a combo. Certain moves allow the combo to continue registering with second, third, fourth sets of four button pushes, and the longer a combo goes on for, the better.

It's this combo system that provides some rather daunting complexity to the battle system. You're not limited to the basic skills the game provides for you. Rather, you can redefine pretty much any combination of four buttons to perform any of the character's unlocked skills to create custom combos. Some skills are learned through levelling up, others through acquiring CD-Rs and CD-R/Ws with skill information on. CD-Rs have preset skills; CD-R/Ws have customizable skills that you can rename and visually tweak by importing an image from your PS3's photo library. So yes, you can have a spell that summons, say, Twilight Sparkle to kick some ass. This is, as they say, awesome. And hilarious. It also gives people an actual reason to load some images into their PS3's photo library, which is surely worthy of praise.

So thus far it seems like an interesting game, albeit one with more than a few flaws. On the technical front, the frame rate and graphics aren't all that great (though the visual novel scenes look lovely and feature animated characters); the dungeons look like they might be a bit "samey" over time; and the game doesn't do a great job of explaining its more complicated aspects in detail. But, for me anyway, part of the joy in this sort of thing is in discovering the hidden secrets for oneself and working out just what the fuck is going on.

It's early days yet, but I've enjoyed what I've seen so far. Let's see if it has what it takes to keep me playing in the long run!

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If you own a PS3, it's entirely possible that you're already familiar with this strange little game, but in case you aren't, here's the pitch.

The bulk of your time will be spent in Survival mode. Here, you are cast in the role of one of the game's many, many unlockable animals (beginning as either a Pomeranian dog or a deer) and tasked with surviving as long as possible. As soon as you're thrown into the post-apocalyptic Tokyo streets, time starts passing, and you only have 15 years in which to secure your animal's legacy. By hunting for food (other creatures if you're a carnivore, plants if you're a herbivore) to keep your hunger bar at bay, marking territory and finding a suitable mate, you'll ensure your species' survival into the future. By completing various objectives that appear at regular intervals, you'll earn "Survival Points" which act as your score and as a form of currency with which you'll unlock additional content as you play through the game.

As you play through Survival mode, you'll come across scattered data items hinting at the game's backstory — the reason the humans disappeared. Collect enough and you'll unlock a "story mission" in which the game flow is much more directed. Progress through the story to learn the truth while playing Survival to unlock additional content.

To describe Tokyo Jungle in such simple terms is to do it an injustice, though. It's a game about crazy emergent stories. Like that time your army of gazelles successfully took down a gigantic pig by unleashing a kick so devastating it practically launched said pig into orbit. Or the time your lone alley cat, near death by starvation, launched a kamikaze attack on a zebra and won. Or the time your dog bit a cow on the arse and was then trampled to death.

Things only get more bizarre and surreal when you start finding various items of equipment for your animals. Your stories start to become like the rantings of a madman. Remember that time that the beagle in a poker visor and green wellies chased a rabbit back and forth across Shibuya Station for five years before getting eaten by a crocodile? Remember that time the army of hippopotami in bikinis successfully fended off an attack from an army of chickens? What about that time your pig in a straw hat snuck through the bushes while the cats were fighting the chimpanzees and joyfully eviscerated all of them?

In many ways, Tokyo Jungle is a bit like a roguelike. While its levels aren't randomly generated, there is a degree of randomisation to the objectives you're expected to complete, and starting a new game with a new kind of animal tends to put an interesting twist on how your dynasty will unfold. The relentless pursuit of longer and longer survival periods and high scores — that's what the game is all about. Simple. Effective. Addictive. And batshit crazy. It's hard not to love it.

The post #oneaday Day 983: The Mighty Jungle appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In an about-face from recent activities, I've been playing a relatively mainstream game today in the form of Final Fantasy XIII-2. Despite being a big release, however, one could put forward the argument that the Final Fantasy series is actually becoming somewhat niche again thanks to mixed opinions on the more recent titles.

Said mixed opinions are largely due to the fact that here is a series that is absolutely not afraid to reinvent itself every so often — with varying results.

Up until Final Fantasy IX, you pretty much knew what you were getting — a traditional-style JRPG with random battles. Sure, each one had its own unique ability system, some of which worked better than others (FFV's Job system was a highlight for many, while FFVIII's ridiculously abstract Junction system was both needlessly overcomplicated and far too easy to game) but for the most part, you could rely on the fact that you'd have a lengthy quest involving dungeons, towns, a world map, an airship and eleventy bajillion random battles along the way which, from FFIV onwards, used the series' iconic Active Time Battle system, offering gameplay somewhere between real-time and turn-based.

It was said prior to FFIX's launch, however, that that particular game would be the last "traditional" Final Fantasy title. And in many ways, that game did feel like a farewell to the series, featuring numerous references to all the previous entries in the franchise, a great story, some lovable characters and an utterly bewildering finale. It was also to be the last Final Fantasy to grace the PS1.

Final Fantasy X, the first entry in the series to arrive on the PlayStation 2, shook things up. While it was still fundamentally an RPG with random battles, a lot of elements which people had taken for granted had changed completely. Gone was the traditional experience and levels progression system, replaced with the Sphere Grid, a flexible system that allowed for a degree of character customization — or a lot of character customization if you elected to play in the "Advanced" mode. Also gone was the traditional world map, with the whole game structured as one continuous journey through the world rather than jaunts through key locations punctuated with running across a peculiarly-scaled map screen. Also gone was the Active Time Battle system, replaced by a more cerebral turn-based system in which players could manipulate turn order with the use of certain abilities. It was a neat system, but Active Time Battle returned with Final Fantasy X-2 — itself a departure for the series by being the first ever direct sequel to a previous Final Fantasy game.

Final Fantasy X-2 was great. Some people hated it for the fact that its tone and attitude was so different to that of its predecessor which, despite all its changes, told a pretty good tale, despite having one of the most irritating main characters the franchise has ever seen. Some people hated it for the fact it was as camp as a row of pink tents. Some people didn't even give it a chance after seeing the seriously cheesy intro sequence. But beneath the girlish nonsense lay a deep JRPG with an excellent character development system that combined elements of FFX's Sphere Grid and FFV's Job system.

Then came Final Fantasy XI, which was an MMO. This caused even series mainstays to shy away, and also proved that Square Enix had a lot to learn about making MMOs. It was difficult, progress was painfully slow and its tech was rather janky — due in part to the fact it was a cross-platform release on PC and PS2 (and later Xbox 360). But somehow despite this it was still recognisable as a Final Fantasy on some level — particularly once you started getting into the story missions and boss fights. You'd be forgiven if you skipped this one, however, as it required a time investment that many players aren't able or willing to give. That said, it's still going relatively strong today, meaning there must be something there that people like.

Final Fantasy XII reinvented the series once again, taking a few lessons from Final Fantasy XI and applying them to a single-player game. Ditching the concept of random battles altogether, Final Fantasy XII took place in an open world divided into zones, much like an MMO, and saw combat taking place on the field. There was a far greater focus on exploration and freedom than in any previous Final Fantasy game (except, arguably, the very first one, which pretty much plonked you down in the world and told you to get on with it with nary a hint of coherent plot) and, for the first time in the mainline single player series, the game focused far more on game mechanics than plot. This wasn't a bad thing — it was great fun to play, and the new systems worked brilliantly — but the plot was rather lacking, ending up as a rather poor imitation of Star Wars without the space combat. It just wasn't a very interesting story, which caused it to suffer. This, coupled with the fact that the game was so fundamentally different to what people thought Final Fantasy was — despite the fact it had been continually reinventing itself since X — caused many people to treat it with a degree of caution. The soundtrack was a bit rubbish, too — a big deal in a series that was known for its stirring, memorable music.

And then came Final Fantasy XIII, the first "next-gen" Final Fantasy. Conscious of the fact that some JRPG fans had shied away from the Westernness of XII, XIII took on a much more traditional JRPG structure. It was linear for the most part, it featured battles which took place on a separate screen, it had a levelling system somewhat reminiscent of FFX's Sphere Grid and it had a strong cast of characters participating in a plot best described as "bewildering". It was certainly a spectacle to watch, and remains one of the best-looking games of all time to this day. Unfortunately, its extreme linearity coupled with the fact that it was still throwing tutorial messages at you by the time you were a good 20 hours into it caused many people to, again, respond negatively to it.

Now enter Final Fantasy XIII-2, a game where Square Enix seem to think they've learned from the mistakes of the past. And in some senses they have done — gone is the straight line corridor design of XIII and in are much more open-plan areas which require exploration to discover all their secrets, for example. But in some senses, they've taken a few steps backward, too — the plot, for one, which is complete nonsense, even for a Final Fantasy game. There's a lot of time travel, though it's not until a good while into the game that you start to see this used in an interesting manner with parallel timelines and whatnot. Chrono Trigger it ain't. For the most part, it's used as a bit of a lazy excuse for whatever disastrous event is afflicting the next location you go to — it's always "a paradox", and dealing with it usually involved beating the snot out of some giant monster. 16 hours in and this format is starting to change up a bit, though, so I'm hoping for a bit more variety later in the game. (Yes, obligatory disclaimer here: I haven't finished it yet.)

There's a few technical issues which mar the experience, too. While XIII was criticised somewhat for its relative lack of character interaction, it did at least have properly-directed and blocked scenes for all the important conversations. XIII-2 occasionally takes the lazy way out, with characters standing woodenly in place and flapping their mouths at each other. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that the character you aren't controlling at the time you initiate the conversation freezes in place when the conversation starts, meaning that if they're in a position where they block the camera, the entire cutscene might be watched through their back. And sure, Serah has a nice bum, but it's nice to see the faces of people you're talking to.

All that said, these considerations don't stop XIII-2 from being an enjoyable game. They stop it from being a truly great, essential purchase game, but they certainly don't stop it from being fun. The battle system is straightforward and satisfying (if a little easy for the most part) and there is certainly plenty to do — and usually plenty of options for things to do at any one time rather than forcing the player down a linear path, too. There's a lot to like and a bit to dislike. If you hated XIII, it's worth a look to see the changes that have been made. If you hate Final Fantasy or JRPGS in general, it's probably not going to change your mind. If you're one of the relatively few people who enjoyed XIII, you'll enjoy the new (if batshit crazy) plot with numerous guest appearances from recognizable characters. And if you passed up playing XIII because of its mixed reviews, you can still get an enjoyable experience out of this thanks to its "Beginner's Primer" feature as well as numerous explicit explanations of past events throughout the course of the game.

Were I to believe in review scores (which I don't, really) I would give it a solid 7. Good, not great. Worth playing, but not essential. Flawed, but enjoyable.

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Through some judicious trading-in and knowing where to go to get some decent deals, I managed to score copies of 3D Dot Game Heroes, Red Dead Redemption and Split/Second. And you know what? They're all awesome. Here's why:

3D Dot Game Heroes

This one is incredibly simple to discuss. If you liked The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past then you will like this, because it's the same game. Well, actually, that's not quite fair as there are a few extra bits and pieces that the old Zelda games didn't do, such as the ability to customise how your sword upgrades and so forth. But overworld, dungeons, bombs, hookshot, boomerang, bow and arrow, empty bottles and all manner of other distinctly familiar things are present and correct.

The twist is, of course, it's in 3D. Sort of. It still plays like the 2.5D game that LttP was, it's just rendered in a gloriously different "3D pixel" look, where characters are still familiarly 8-bit in appearance and animation, but have some depth to their appearance. There's also a gorgeous tilt-shift effect on the camera as your character moves from the foreground to the background, too, which gives you the impression you're looking down onto a tiny, tiny world made of blocks.

One of the most entertaining things about the game is the character editor. You can build your own character one block at a time and animate them to be your avatar in the game. It's great fun, and enormously satisfying to see your creation wandering around the game world wielding a sword which is about five times their size.

It's a tough game, as the older Zelda titles tended to be, but never overly unfair, at least not in the part I've played thus far. There's plenty to see and do and, in good Zelda tradition, there's a ton of completely optional sidequests too.

Split/Second

Or Split/Second: Velocity to give it its full name, complete with unnecessary subtitle. How many people have wandered into a shop, seen that and asked if they have "the original Split/Second in stock"? Some people really are that stupid.

Anyway. If you've played the demo you probably know what to expect. Race cars, blow things up. What the demo doesn't quite prepare you for is how utterly involving and terrifying the full game is. The whole thing is tied together with a beautifully-produced "TV show" aesthetic that uses graphic design, special effects and music straight out of an American version of a TV show such as Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares or the like. Only instead of dealing with an ailing restaurant, there are cars and big explosions. And the explosions are big. Many levels see you gripping on to the controller for dear life as, for example, a cruise liner in drydock comes sliding down towards you as you pray desperately you make it through to the other side.

Then there's the non-race game modes. "Air Strike" sees you attempting to survive as long as possible while a helicopter gunship fires missiles at you, for example. It's an enormous amount of very silly fun, and is a game that features one of the most consistent and stylistically-appropriate aesthetics that I've ever seen in a game. So hats off to Disney's Black Rock Studios for that.

Red Dead Redemption

Aka "that cowboy game" or Grand Theft Horse-o. Red Dead Redemption is a spectacular achievement, with an enormous world to explore and ride around, tons of things to do besides the "story missions" and a real sense that you're part of the twilight years of the Old West. The game is plain fun to play, whether it's in single-player or the peculiar multiplayer mode, and there is enough stuff there to keep you busy for a very long time. Hopefully, though, this won't mean that it falls into the trap Grand Theft Auto has traditionally fallen into, meaning that no-one will ever finish it. That would be a shame, as the writing and voice acting are very good and deserve to be seen.

The one thing I will say about this one, though, is that it's one of those games that almost feels too big. Once you get to the stage where you can ride off freely, a couple of hours into the game, you're confronted with this massive open world and your brain's first reaction is to go "Which way? MAAAAAAAHHH" before dribbling out through your ears. Fortunately though, whichever way you ride off in you'll find something to do, whether it's one of the "challenges" that require you to hunt down particular pieces of wildlife, a "Stranger" who gives you a sidequest that you can complete at your leisure, a random in-world event such as bandits attacking a stagecoach or, indeed, the game's story missions.

EDIT: Also, you can punch a horse in the face. How could I have forgotten to mention that?

EDIT: Also, this.

So these three are certainly plenty to keep me busy for a while. And there's still a growing pile of shame to get through as well. Ye Gods, what have I done?

The post #oneaday, Day 125: 3D Red Split Dot Dead Second Game Redemption Velocity Heroes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

• Agent Norman Jayden is the only character in the game who doesn't pronounce the name "Norman" correctly.
• Those facial animations are incredible. There's a number of scenes where characters show "genuine" emotion.
• I dig the fact that the interface conveys emotions. If a character is scared or nervous about something, the interaction icon for it wobbles about to varying degrees. Same for the "thoughts" you can pull up by pressing L2.
• Say what you like about QTEs, Heavy Rain's are some of the best around. Several of them actually left me with sweaty palms.
• The integration of Sixaxis motion controls in the QTEs is a nice touch. Thumping someone around the head by actually slamming your controller into their face is immensely satisfying.
• I didn't think the voice acting (a common criticism) was that bad. The characters sounded like real people, which is something video game actors often forget. The simple fact that the characters puff, pant, wheeze, grunt and moan convincingly as well as just talking helps with this.
• The camerawork is very realistic. I don't think there were any parts where the camera stays completely "still". It always has a slight "hand-held wobble" to it.
• The game is genuinely emotionally engaging throughout. I can't put my finger on why, but I know that once I started playing, I didn't want to stop. As a result, I've finished it two days after acquiring it. With no regrets.
• Finally we've got a game who can make CG characters cry reasonably convincingly…
• …but still not kiss very well.
• This is the first game I've seen where characters can actually put on and remove clothes without having to cut away to avoid animating cloth.
• I'm now intrigued to try another playthrough, knowing what I know now. It likely won't have the same emotional impact, but I'm interested to see if there were any… ahh… "clues" throughout.

Right. Enough, otherwise I'll get into spoiler territory. Off to bed!

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So where was I last night? Heavy Rain is the simple answer to that.

The gamers among you will already be familiar with this game and you'll probably have your own opinions on it, but for those of you who haven't come across it yet or were asking about it, here's what it's about.

Heavy Rain markets itself as "interactive drama". Despite being on the PlayStation 3, it's keen to distance itself from the idea of traditional "video games" and by its own admission isn't afraid to "break with conventions". This basically means that it's an interactive movie where you take part in the murder/kidnapping mystery story as four protagonists (none of whom are guaranteed to survive to the end credits) and interact with the world, making choices about how to act, what to say and so on.

Those of you who have played adventure games before will think this all sounds terribly familiar, but it's the means through which Heavy Rain is executed which makes it something a bit different from the norm. For starters, it doesn't play like a traditional "adventure" as such. You don't have an inventory screen, for one thing, there are no status screens, menu bars or anything like that. Interaction all takes place by moving your character around the various locations and small icons popping up with "movements" depicted on them. The movements are intended to mimic what your hands would actually do to take that action in reality, so for example, opening a door is often a case of pulling down (to move the handle) then "out" (to open the door). It also makes use of the motion sensitivity of the PlayStation 3's controller, so, for example, to kick a door down you might "throw" the controller down (obviously making sure you hold on to it).

It's an interesting method of interaction that was first seen in the developers' previous game, Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit, as it was known in Europe) – a game which also had pretensions of being a movie rather than a game, including the "New Game" option on the title screen being replaced by the "New Movie" option.

The thing I particularly like about Heavy Rain is the emotional engagement factor. The story is unashamedly adult, and that doesn't mean gratuitously violent or sexual (though the game isn't afraid to show either) – it means a mature story that deals with themes and emotions that (I imagine) children would find difficult to comprehend, such as bereavement, anxiety, depression and, at times, outright panic. There are quite a few things that happen (and I won't spoil anything here) that it's unusual to see handled in a "video game" with the same degree of care that they are here – at least, I think so. There are others who feel differently, but in a sense I think the fact that this game means different things to different people (whether those things they feel are positive or negative) is a good thing.

One protagonist, Ethan, suffers from anxiety, depression and discomfort around crowds, all things which I've had experience of. His reasons for suffering these things are very different from mine, but I can understand the emotions which he is going through which are depicted in the game. Much of the early part of the game revolves around his increasingly uncomfortable relationship with his son, and the game does awkward silences well, too. You have the option to sit Ethan down next to his son, but when the conversation options run out, there's not necessarily an indication that it's "time to move on" – you could find yourself sitting in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes, and unlike other games where you're constantly pushed on to the next objective, sitting in uncomfortable silence feels like an important part of the Heavy Rain experience.

The term "interactive movie" will inevitably conjure up images of the terrible video-based games that were around in the mid-1990s, but it's good to see that with the advent of impressive, realistic graphics that can be rendered in real-time that we can finally have a movie-like experience with some interactions that are rather more meaningful than "movie stops, click a button to see the next clip". There's a touch of the Uncanny Valley about the characters to some, but there's no doubt that particularly when it comes to facial animations and lip-sync that these are some of the most realistic controllable computer-generated characters you'll see. I remember being struck by this some time ago when this first promotional video was shown:

Interestingly, this movie is from several years back, and the characters look even better now.

I played for a while last night and the game clearly had an impact on me, as I feel like I spent most of the night dreaming about it. I don't often dream about games, movies or books, so there must have been something there which had an "impact" – even Mass Effect 2, absolutely the best game I've played recently both in terms of story and gameplay, didn't have the same effect.

I look forward to seeing how the story continues, and if the developers' much-vaunted "YOUR DECISIONS MATTER!" schtick is genuine.

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