2467: Encylopaedia Eorzea

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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.

2452: Dark Cloud, Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2437: Ultimate Fencer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2400: Final Fantasy XV Delayed for All the Right Reasons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2392: Blood and Wine

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Finished The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine this evening. Spoilers follow!

While I think, on the whole, Hearts of Stone was my favourite part of the complete opus that is The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine’s main story comes a close second.

Blood and Wine’s effectiveness comes from its exceptional use of juxtaposition. The bright and vibrant colours of the France-inspired region of Toussaint contrast strongly with the rather dark main storyline, and likewise does the duchy’s self-professed love of “virtuousness”, pomp and circumstance clash rather a lot with how things really are.

On a more macro scale, Blood and Wine is effective because it is so different to the rest of The Witcher 3. The lands that you’re exploring aren’t dirty, poverty-stricken regions in which everyone except the very richest is fighting for survival. The narrative you’re following isn’t something of earth-shattering importance. And the overall tone outside of the main narrative is filled with plenty of levity and even a few in-jokes here and there, though none so obtrusive as to spoil the overall atmosphere that CD Projekt Red has spent three games crafting so masterfully in the series.

I particularly liked Blood and Wine’s narrative for being a vampire-centric plot, since I’m a sucker for that sort of storyline, particularly those that humanise vampires and make them complex characters. Villain Dettlaff in Blood and Wine is most certainly a complicated character and, to be sure, he commits some truly reprehensible acts, but at the end of it all there are some very difficult decisions to make as to who is really to blame for everything that transpired, and whether things could have been done any differently.

Blood and Wine’s take on vampiric mythology reminded me quite a bit of White Wolf’s classic series of role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade (or, perhaps more accurately in The Witcher’s case, Vampire: The Dark Age). We have “higher vampires” treated almost as the aristocracy of the monster world thanks to their intelligence and ability to make rational — albeit often rather emotional — decisions. Said vampires are split into clans that scattered around the world. Said vampires tend to show a more monstrous side when driven into a frenzy or provoked, and at this point display numerous supernatural abilities. And, of course, it’s nowhere near as easy to get rid of a vampire as having some garlic hanging around your neck then sticking a stake through their heart.

So effective was Blood and Wine’s take on vampire mythology that I’d love to see CD Projekt Red take on the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise at some point. I have no idea whether or not that will ever happen, given that the last Vampire game that was supposed to show up — based on the World of Darkness at large, not just Vampire — became vaporware at some point a few years back, and thus the status of the license is perhaps questionable. Even without the license, though, I’d love to see CD Projekt Red tackle at the very least a Vampire-esque title.

What might that look like? Well, I envisage something along the lines of the wonderful Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, only with a more well-realised setting thanks to the improved technology since that classic came out in 2004. I have great faith in their vision for a futuristic dystopia city in Cyberpunk 2077, but I’d love to see their take on the undead underbelly of a modern city, too. It doesn’t necessarily need to be fully open-world a la Grand Theft Auto — in fact, the past few entries on this site have probably made clear I’d rather it wasn’t — but there should be plenty of opportunities for The Witcher-style plot branches and decision-making, since the tabletop version of Vampire was always about shades of grey in morality and trying to balance your own dwindling Humanity against the influence the Beast had over you — as, indeed, was Bloodlines.

Seeing Regis and Dettlaff in action in one of the climactic scenes of Blood and Wine made me very much want to play a game with their superhuman abilities — and, let’s face it, even though I wasn’t a big fan of The Witcher 3’s combat, anything is better than the wild flailing of the original Bloodlines.

More importantly, though, good games of Vampire are often about avoiding conflict rather than seeking out trouble; indeed, a number of the clans you are able to represent in the game have rather poor martial skills, their abilities instead lying in the ability to persuade, sweet-talk, seduce, bribe, intimidate, sneak, hack and all manner of other alternatives to baring fang and claw. And with the whole The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has proven beyond all doubt that it is excellent at developing interesting, compelling, well-written stories in which often simply talking your way out of a perilous situation is an option on the table. That strength of the developer as a whole would lend itself well to a Vampire (or Vampire-inspired) game; perhaps one day, in my dreams, it will happen.

For now, I think my time with The Witcher 3 has come to a close; just shy of 100 hours for the main story and both expansions, I feel I’ve very much got my money’s worth, plus there’s a whole host of things I can go back and do if I ever feel like playing it again. I’m very much glad I played it through to completion, but right now, I think it’s time for a palate cleanser. C’mon down, Gal*Gun…

2391: You Can Go to That Mountain

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My lukewarm feelings towards The Witcher 3’s open-world nature got me thinking a bit today as I progress through the Blood and Wine expansion pack, which, unlike Hearts of Stone, suffers from some of the same issues I had with the main game: most notably the numerous distractions that the game world offered having a detrimental effect on the overall pacing of the main story.

I got thinking: is this a fundamental problem I have with open-world games in general, or is it something that seems particularly glaring with The Witcher 3? After a little reflection, I have to conclude that, for me anyway, it’s the latter.

I thought back to my time with Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U and how much I enjoyed exploring the vast open world that game offered — and why I think much more fondly of that game’s open world than I do of The Witcher 3’s.

I think it’s to do with the emphasis the game places on its different elements. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, while the main story was interesting enough, it was, oddly enough, mostly a minor distraction from the real meat of the game: exploring the planet Mira fully. The game got a fair amount of criticism for this on its original release, but I found that it worked really well. Xenoblade Chronicles X’s emphasis was not on telling that single main storyline; its emphasis was firmly on making you believe that you were exploring an alien world, acting as part of a brave team of humans who were slowly finding out more about where they had ended up, and putting out the numerous fires that result when people of various backgrounds and cultures are all thrown into a rather desperate situation together with one another.

Xenoblade Chronicles X’s story, in other words, was nothing to do with those cutscenes and boss fights and whatnot; its story was your story of how you came to Mira, worked your way up through the ranks, got yourself a Skell and proceeded to become one of the leading authorities on the flora and fauna this strange and diverse planet had to offer. Along the way, you’d help out with various things that happened, and all the things you did had an impact on the world. Help someone with the preparations for building a water treatment plant, for example, and the next time you pass a big lake, said plant will be there.

The Witcher 3, meanwhile, is the opposite type of RPG to Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I’d either describe as being mechanics-centric or featuring a quasi-emergent narrative. The Witcher 3, by contrast, has a specific story to tell. Sure, there are a number of branching points and different endings you can get based on the choices you make along the way, but the main story beats between the beginning and the end are largely similar for the most part.

When you place this much emphasis on an ongoing story, it absolutely kills the pacing if the narrative suddenly comes to a grinding halt while the protagonist goes off and does something completely unrelated to the main plot. This was made all the more apparent to me with Hearts of Stone, which chose to focus pretty much entirely on its central plot with minimal distractions along the way, and was all the better for it. I’ve also been enjoying Blood and Wine a lot more by following its main plotline and minimising the number of times I get distracted by side content. I can always come back and do that side content later, anyway; after you finish the main story of The Witcher 3 and its expansions, it basically turns into the Xenoblade Chronicles X style of RPG: no clear “main” narrative to follow, just the things you choose to engage in, whatever they might be.

I also found myself thinking why this bugged me so much with The Witcher 3 when I’ll happily spend hundreds of hours grinding in a JRPG more conventional than Xenoblade Chronicles X, often putting the plot on hold in the process. And I think it’s largely because, despite their reputations for strong, linear narratives, many modern JRPGs are very much mechanics-centric rather than narrative-centric. In many cases, the most time I’ve spent with a JRPG comes after the end credits roll, when progressing through the story no longer matters and it becomes purely about the mechanics — Compile Heart games are always particularly good for this.

I don’t know. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like The Witcher 3, because I absolutely, definitely do. I think it’s more that The Witcher 3 received such gushing, unequivocal praise from press and public alike around its launch that I, coming to it rather late and thus free of most of the hype, am seeing the warts where a lot of people didn’t — or chose to look past them.

Or perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man who doesn’t like open-world games. Who knows? Either way, I’m going to see Blood and Wine through to the end, because I absolutely want to know what happens. I do not, however, feel the same draw with The Witcher 3 to see everything and do everything that I do with something like a Compile Heart RPG — and consequently will probably put it down for good once those end credits roll — and I think I’m fine with that.

2390: Hearts of Stone

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I finished The Witcher 3’s first expansion pack Hearts of Stone this evening, and I’ve come away thoroughly impressed. In fact, I’d be inclined to go so far as to say that I enjoyed the tightly focused (and somewhat shorter) experience that was Hearts of Stone’s main story considerably more than the main story of Wild Hunt and all its various distractions.

Hearts of Stone benefits from not trying to be too grand in the story it tells. It concentrates largely on a single character — one Olgierd von Everic, who happens to be the initial contact to start the expansion’s questline — and proceeds to weave an interesting, mysterious and thought-provoking tale with a few enjoyably Silent Hill-esque twists along the way.

Hearts of Stone, I feel, benefits considerably from playing it the way I played it: ignoring all other sidequests I had in my journal and simply ploughing through the entirety of the main story from start to finish. Perhaps I would have felt less lukewarm about Wild Hunt as a whole if I had tackled its main scenario in this way; certainly for a good 90% of the Wild Hunt main narrative, I was considerably outlevelled for the challenges it offered, making even supposedly climactic encounters rather trivial at times. (I tried using the “enemy upscaling” option, but this led to ridiculous situations where starving wild dogs could rip me to shreds at a moment’s notice rather than Geralt slicing through them like butter, and consequently turned it right back off afterwards.)

Anyway, hard to say in retrospect; certainly I can say with confidence that the best way to play Hearts of Stone is to play through the entire main story without getting distracted along the way, since this gives it an excellent sense of pace and progression, leading to an absolutely brilliant final area that was far more interesting and enjoyable than pretty much anything in the main game.

Hearts of Stone also fixes a few other issues I had with the main game, most notably certain instances of combat. While I got through Wild Hunt using the same old combo right the way through, Hearts of Stone had some really cool boss fights that demanded careful dodging and timing of attacks as well as observing enemy attack patterns. Some of the encounters were even vaguely puzzly; a late-game encounter with a wraith that jumps in and out of paintings proved to be particularly memorable for this reason.

The best thing about Hearts of Stone is that it concentrates on what the whole The Witcher series has always done best: tell interesting, personal stories with bags of characterisation, filled with shades of grey morality and some agonising decisions to make. Olgierd makes an excellent central character as he’s quite a piece of work, but not quite enough for him to be considered loathsome beyond redemption. On the contrary, Hearts of Stone’s tale has such a driving force behind it because it’s clear that there’s a chance, however small, that Olgierd can find redemption and peace if only all the pieces fall into place.

The other highlight of Hearts of Stone is Gaunter “Master Mirror” O’Dimm, whose exact role I shall refrain from spoiling for the benefit of those yet to play the expansion. Suffice to say that from his initial mysterious introduction through his occasional enigmatic appearances at various points throughout the main story, he proves to be an extremely effective character whose intentions are never entirely clear — at least until you discover the truth about him, that is, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself.

I got to the end of Wild Hunt feeling like the more I played The Witcher 3, the less I liked it; it was starting to feel a bit like a chore by the time I beat the main game, but Hearts of Stone has reinvigorated me, and now I’m very much looking forward to jumping straight in to Blood and Wine, the pastel-coloured fairy-tale adventure in the land of Toussaint that has had me so intrigued ever since I first saw how different its vivid screenshots seemed in comparison to the drab colours of the main game regions. It certainly has a lot to live up to after Hearts of Stone, mind you, so let’s hope it delivers.

2336: From the Shores of Felghana

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

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

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

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

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

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

1930: Fun with Harmonics

Spent some more time with Omega Quintet today, and I am, as I may have mentioned a couple of times already, absolutely thrilled with how enjoyable it is — and that it’s much more than a reskinned Neptunia. Don’t get me wrong, you know how much I love me some Neptunia, but I’m glad that Compile Heart and Idea Factory weren’t resting on their laurels with this one; it would have been very easy indeed for them to simply lift Neptunia’s admittedly very fun combat system and plonk it in Omega Quintet, but instead Omega Quintet has something all of its own.

Perhaps “all of its own” isn’t quite the right description, mind, since Omega Quintet’s combat is executed as something of a curious blend between the battle systems from the Atelier series, the Ar Tonelico series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII. That’s quite a mixture, but it works really well, particularly when you pull off something as enjoyably silly as this:

The above sequence was recorded at just level 20, by the way; I shudder to think what numbers the girls will be putting out by the end of the game.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t bombard you with the complete combat system right from the get-go; it gradually increases in complexity over the course of the first few chapters at a fairly sedate pace, allowing you to get comfortable and familiar with each new concept before a new one is introduced. Ultimately, by the time the complete battle system has unlocked, you should be well familiar with all the possibilities it has to offer. At about 15 hours or so in, I haven’t seen everything the system has to offer, yet; for some, this may draw unfavourable comparisons to Final Fantasy XIII, which was lambasted for having a “20 hour tutorial”, but it’s worth noting that Omega Quintet does sidestep this issue a little by being somewhat less linear than Final Fantasy XIII was; at any given moment, there’s a bunch of sidequests to do, hidden treasures to find, new areas to open up, items to craft, special items to unlock and all manner of other things to do. (And besides, there was nothing the fuck wrong with the way Final Fantasy XIII did things, anyway. So there.)

Here’s roughly how the system works. Like the Neptunia games, you can get the advantage at the start of combat by attacking an enemy before they come into contact with you; conversely, letting an enemy touch you from behind will give them the advantage. How battle begins sets the opening initiative order, and from there the game follows a clear to understand turn order system, reflected by a graphical representation down the side of the screen.

Each party member has a number of actions per turn, increasing as they increase their overall proficiency with each of the game’s five weapon types — axe, gun, spear, fans and gauntlets. These actions can be used to attack, use a skill or use an item, and when all the actions have been chosen, the party member performs each of them in sequence before the turn order moves on to the next combatant. Of key consideration when choosing skills is the “wait time” — more powerful skills will push the party member’s next turn further down the turn order, potentially giving enemies the opportunity to attack several times before she can go again. Conversely, certain skills increase the enemies’ wait time when they successfully land, so you can manipulate the turn order yourself to a certain degree.

Attacks, skills and even items have an effective range, represented by coloured lines on the ground. Do something to someone in the green area and it will be most effective; then comes blue, yellow and finally red, which means you either can’t do the action at all, or it will be at severely reduced effectiveness. Certain attacks and skills also have a radius, either circular or a range of “tiles” horizontally, vertically or both, meaning you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. At the start of a party member’s turn, you can move them forward or backward in the formation, allowing you to manipulate the positioning to your advantage. There are also “knockback” skills, which are self-explanatory, and “reverse” skills, which… uh, I’m not entirely sure what they do.

Here’s one thing I have to nitpick slightly; there are certain aspects the game doesn’t explain very well or, indeed, at all in some cases. The stat names, for example, don’t take the usual Attack/Defense/Magic Attack/Magic Defense/Accuracy/Agility format from other Compile Heart games; instead we have Song Power/Stamina/Knowledge/Divinity/Technique/Vitality. You can work out what they are from a bit of experimentation, but it takes a bit of adjustment. Likewise, some of the status effects and added effects (such as the aforementioned “Reverse”) aren’t made very clear at all, though again, you can probably work these things out for yourself.

Personally, I’m actually all for games encouraging you to figure out some of their mechanics for yourself. You don’t need to understand these things to get a kick out of Omega Quintet, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to min-max your characters and have them fighting at maximum effectiveness, be aware that you’ll need to get your hands a little dirty — particularly as the characters in Omega Quintet are significantly more customisable than, say, the Neptunia girls, who don’t allow you to take any control over their development at all, though they do allow you to set up your own custom combos according to how you like to fight. In other words, Omega Quintet’s apparently deliberate obtuseness at times will be a turn-off to some people, but personally, I actually like not being spoon-fed absolutely everything.

Anyway. It’s good. Real good. And I can’t wait to play more. So I’m probably going to do just that right now; I’ve got a combo record to beat, after all.

1117: Another Game with a Barely-Pronounceable Title

If you had no idea what genre a game called Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia fell into, it’s highly likely that you’d guess that it was a JRPG. And you’d be absolutely correct. It’s a title that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you know nothing about the game, though to its credit, unlike many other barely-pronounceable game names, its relevance does become apparent almost immediately. However, it’s still pretty much the exact opposite of the rather literal naming conventions adopted by social and mobile games these days, which tend to be called things like “City Wars” and “Farm Town” and “Slots”.

Strange name aside… yes, I’ve been playing the PS2 game Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia, hereafter referred to as Ar Tonelico to save me typing out that whole title every time. I knew literally nothing about this game prior to firing it up for the first time, but had been urged to do so by a friend over at the Squadron of Shame who has been accompanying on my journey through the oddest and quirkiest undiscovered treasures that the Japanese role-playing game genre has to offer. I promised him that the next game I played after I completed the crap out of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 would be Ar Tonelico, so here I am.

So what’s it all about? Well, if you live in the UK, don’t count on any help from the box or manual — the game never saw an official release in the UK despite being fully-translated into English, and instead your best bet for a copy these days is Italy, of all places. It’s rather peculiar to think of Italians playing JRPGs, but there you go.

Anyway. Ar Tonelico initially appears to be a rather straightforward JRPG with a floppy-haired, youthful protagonist wandering around the world seeking adventure on a Grand Quest to Save the World. And on the one hand, it is. On the other hand, however, it does a lot of very, very interesting things that have really made me sit up and pay attention, even only about four hours into the whole experience.

For starters, there’s a deep crafting system to explore. This is a game from Gust, developers of the Atelier series (which I am yet to try but have all the PS3 incarnations of on my shelf), and their specialism is deep crafting systems. In Ar Tonelico’s case, it takes the form of the peculiarly-named “Grathmeld” system, in which you have to find recipe cards around the world and in shops, find ingredients inside chests, shops and monsters and then fuse them all together using crystals. When you craft, you get a fun little animated sequence of your character Lyner assembling whatever item it is, then if it’s a new item he has a fun little conversation with one of the other characters about it, and a discussion often ensues about what the new item should be called. You can’t freely rename items, which is a shame, but you do get to choose between a couple of different suggestions, and the game then tracks which character named which item, which is a nice touch.

Perhaps the most bewildering aspect of the game is its battle system. For the first hour or two, it’s a very conventional turn-based “attack, magic, item” affair. But as soon as you encounter the “Reyvateil” characters, also known as Song Maidens, things start to get interesting.

Reyvateils sit in the back row of your party and don’t follow the usual turn order. Instead, they act like a mage or priest in an MMO, sitting behind the front row of fighters charging up spells (or Songs, in this case) to have various effects, while at the same time the front row is knocking seven shades of shit out of the enemy and ensuring the Reyvateil doesn’t take damage. A strong focus is placed on the party’s “harmonics” with the Reyvateil, with this represented by a bifurcated horizontal meter at the bottom of the screen. The left half of the bar fills when the front row lands successful attacks and drops when they take damage. The right half of the bar fills as the Reyvateil chants to charge up a spell. Should the two halves meet, the whole party goes up a “Harmonic level”, which means the Reyvateil’s spellcasting speeds up and the front row gain access to stronger attacks. The Harmonic level at the end of the battle also determines what rewards you receive.

There’s another consideration in that system, which is the cap on the Harmonic level. At the start of each battle, you can only level the Harmonics up to 2; to increase the cap, you have to let the Reyvateil unleash her magic and deal enough damage for a separate bar to fill and open up the next level cap. The trouble is, at least early in the game, most enemies are absolutely obliterated by the Reyvateil’s Song Magic, so you’ll sometimes find yourself deliberately pulling your punches a little in an attempt to earn some higher Harmonic levels. It’s an interesting system that will doubtless come into its own in more difficult battles later.

By far my favorite part of the game so far, however, has been the “Dive” system, where the protagonist Lyner is able to enter the subconscious of a Reyvateil and learn more about her. A Reyvateil’s subconscious is split into ten distinct levels, each of which is made up of a number of different locations. Lyner must spend “Dive Points” earned through battle — which represent the trust the Reyvateil holds in him — to trigger various events, with revelations and strange happenings often unlocking new spells for the Reyvateil to cast in the real world. These vary from simple attack magic to “green magic” spells which can be cast outside of battle, usually to solve puzzles.

In gameplay terms, it’s an elaborate means of unlocking abilities. But in story terms, it’s a way of literally doing a deep dive into a character and discovering their innermost secrets. The scenes I’ve seen already have been heartfelt, interesting and help make me interested in the character. I’m very intrigued to see how they continue as the game progresses, as it’s clear that the whole point of the “Dive” system is to help the Reyvateil come to terms with repressed memories and emotions in a vaguely similar manner to Persona 4’s “Midnight Channel” — or perhaps just to peek in on some embarrassing things they’d rather forget about.

At four hours in, that’s about all I can say so far, but I’m enjoying it a great deal. It looks super-dated — it’s in 4:3 aspect ratio running on the PS2 and it pretty much looked like a PS1 game in the first place — but none of that matters to me. It is worth noting that it has an astonishingly good soundtrack, and that the English dub appears to be handled by the entire cast of Persona 3, which is fine by me — if a little odd to hear voices I recognise playing characters I’m less familiar with. (If you’re wondering why I’m not playing with the Japanese voices, which are also included on the disc, it’s because the FMV sequences in the game use the English voices, and it would be somewhat jarring to go back and forth between the two. The game also isn’t fully-voiced, either, so it doesn’t make as much difference as it would have in, say Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2.)

I’ll be sticking with this one, then — though I may well be splitting my time between it and the Gamecube version of Fire Emblem when that eventually arrives. (The new 3DS version isn’t out here until April, and I’m told I should play the Gamecube version before the Wii version that I scored for a song when Game was in trouble a while back.)