Tag: Square Enix

2412: Looking Back on Three Years, Off and (Mostly) On, in Eorzea

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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.

2411: Happy 3rd Birthday, FFXIV

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It’s 5am and I’m still up because I decided it would be a really smart thing to do to stay up and watch the beginning of the 14-hour livestream to celebrate Final Fantasy XIV’s third anniversary. It’s not as if I have to get up for anything in the morning, though, so it’s fine.

The reason why I wanted to watch at least the start of the livestream is because of the Live Letter from the development team, featuring a preview of the upcoming patch 3.4. These are always interesting and exciting, because they often reveal new game features and content, some of which ends up being a surprise to everyone.

I’m interested to see where 3.4 goes because the story begun in Heavensward is now essentially over — patch 3.3 saw adventurers defeating the dread wyrm Nidhogg and saving Ishgard from another thousand years of war with the dragons.

Previous patches did, however, tease the existence of dark counterparts to the player’s Warrior of Light, and it looks as if 3.4 and 3.5 will concern these individuals in the run-up to whatever the next full expansion will be. (We find that out in October.)

I’m watching a livestream with a concurrent live fan translation, so I’ll just write some thoughts as I watch, then post the whole shebang in one go when it’s done.

3.4 will be called Soul Surrender and concern the aforementioned Warriors of Darkness. It will also apparently feature a great deal of lore about the planet of Hydaelyn itself, where the game takes place. It will be out on Tuesday, September 27.

As usual, there will be new main scenario quests advancing the main storyline. It looks as if Alphinaud and Alisaie will finally be reunited after being apart for pretty much all of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. Alisaie was the main NPC for the excellent Binding Coil of Bahamut raids in A Realm Reborn, and apparently this patch’s story will make reference to Coil, even going so far as to change dialogue if you previously completed Coil. (Cue a rush on unsync’d Coil runs!)

There will also be new Scholasticate quests. These started a couple of patches ago and sort of tailed off without any resolution, but they had potential to be interesting.

And Hildibrand will be back. His content has been a little weak in Heavensward, lacking the custom boss fights of A Realm Reborn, but his quests have nonetheless remained amusing and well written.

There will be some tweaks to the battle system, including recast timers being reset when restarting battles — a godsend for raiders or people trying to clear new content for the first time. The changes will also include some changes to auto-attack — Yoshi-P mentioned he wanted to make some changes here in a recent interview with Famitsu, and it looks like we’re going to get the first stage of that with 3.4 — you’ll no longer have to worry about character facing, just be in range of your foe. In other words, this means you can keep moving around a target without worrying about losing auto-attack damage for those periods when you’re not directly facing it. Good news for bards and machinists in particular, who are perhaps more reliant on auto-attack damage than most.

Some Extreme Primal fights will be added to the recently added Raid Finder. These Trials aren’t quite full-on raids, but still have quite a lot of complexity, so it will be good to have a means to organise learning or clear parties other than Party Finder.

The UI will have a Countdown feature added. Exactly what this does remains to be seen, but it’s apparently intended to be a replacement for macros that some players used, perhaps to announce when certain abilities come off cooldowns.

The final chapter of the Alexander raid cycle is coming this time around: Alexander, The Creator and a Savage counterpart. Last chance for them to get this right after a somewhat lukewarm reception from much of the player base.

There’s a new trial that sounds as if it will be a second member of the Warring Triad, since it’s called Containment Bay P1T6, much like the previous Sephirot fight. Apparently the foe this time will be Sophia, the Goddess.

New dungeons include Xelphatol, the Ixali homeland, and a Hard mode variant of The Great Gubal Library. Still just two rather than the three ARR got with each patch, though this isn’t surprising any more.

PvP is getting a duel mode that can be done in the Wolves’ Den in a new part of the map. You’ll be able to queue for dungeons while dueling, which is nice, and there will be no time limit; matches only end when someone wins or leaves the duel area.

PvP will also get a Custom Match feature allowing two light parties to set up a clash against each other, and a Spectator mode. FFXIV’s PvP is actually pretty good, so it’s good to see it getting some love.

The roguelike-esque dungeon Palace of the Dead will get an update in patch 3.45, bringing it to 200 floors total. There will be a job-specific ranking system based on a score you build up as you play. Floors 51-100 will be about the same difficulty as the current floors and bring the dungeon’s story to a close. Above floor 100, things get much harder but they’ll be worth many more ranking points.

Grand Companies are getting an update after being dormant pretty much since 2.0. A new Grand Company rank will finally be available, Platoons will become available and have some sort of missions attached to them, and new gear will be available, presumably this time geared to level 60 characters.

The Platoon system looks to have something to do with raising NPCs, and you’ll be able to go into content with these NPCs from the sound of things — you can make a team of one player and three NPCs.

A new game feature is Wondrous Tails, which involves helping a young Mi’qote girl create something by completing objectives in a book. No other details were given.

Gold Saucer is getting an instanced Triple Triad battle hall for each data centre, allowing you to find opponents from other servers and thus expanding the minigame’s scope considerably.

RTS minigame Lord of Verminion will also be added to the Duty Finder, allowing you to queue up and find opponents that way.

Housing updates will include the introduction of the Apartment system, presumably functioning something along the lines of Final Fantasy XI’s Mog House system. It looks as if there will be a public lobby in each building as well as instanced rooms for players, and there will be 1536 apartments per server, assuming 3 buildings (one for each of the Eorzean cities) with 512 rooms each. They will cost 500,000 Gil, so much cheaper than current housing. Hopefully they won’t all get bought up to be resold!

A system called the Double Cross Hotbar will be introduced for controller players. It’s intended for people who don’t feel they have enough available buttons when playing with a controller and want to be quicker to get at certain abilities. You’ll be able to double-tap a trigger to access the extra buttons, and it can be used in conjunction with the existing Expanded Cross-Hotbar for even more available buttons. Essentially it adds an extra 16 button slots, and you’ll have the option to keep these visible on screen at all times, and adjust the transparency of the hotbar you’re not using at the time to make it clear what actions you have available.

The Double Cross Hotbar stuff looks like a great quality of life improvement for the game. Is it wrong that this is one of the things I’m most excited about? It will certainly make more complex jobs more straightforward to play with controller. Apparently Yoshi-P and his team are pretty excited about it too, as I think they spent more time showing it off than anything else in the Live Letter!

The exploratory missions to The Diadem are getting some minor updates, including the ability to queue as a gatherer rather than having to change once you get there. It will also start dropping item level 235 gear, making it potentially worthwhile again. A brand new exploratory mission — hopefully with lessons learned from the Diadem — will come in patch 3.5.

The new Allagan Tomestone endgame currency will be Tomestones of Scripture, and the gear they purchase is rather Sharlayan in its look, particularly the Dragoon’s rather fetching robe and hat combo.

An online status for role-players will be added. FFXIV doesn’t seem to have that many RPers in my experience, but that doesn’t mean they’re not thete, so having a means for them to find each other will be good. You’ll also be able to use hyphens in character names at last — no more errant apostrophes!

Finally, The Rising event starts today. Last year this was an awesomely meta event in the game where you could warp out of Eorzea and visit the writers’ room to meet the development staff. It was an extremely cool moment, and gave the feeling that the FFXIV team love and are grateful for their players.

Exciting times ahead for the game, then, and I’m well and truly back on board after my short break from it. Events like this remind me why I can never quite quit it.

2410: Sounds of Vana’Diel

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Talking to some of my Final Fantasy XIV friends today, I realised quite what an impact XIV’s predecessor Final Fantasy XI had on me, even though I never really got that far with it in the long term.

As with many other things throughout my life, the thing that has stayed with me for the longest ever since I played it for the first time is the music. (Incidentally, the music is, more than anything, the reason why I find I can’t stay away from Final Fantasy XIV for long, even when, as I did recently, I think I’m “over it”.)

Final Fantasy XI’s music is not as well known as many of the other soundtracks in the series, primarily because XI itself is not as well known as the other Final Fantasy games that have been released over the years. It’s not as technically accomplished as XIV’s diverse soundtrack, and it’s not the work of series veteran Nobuo Uematsu (who hasn’t been quite as involved with the series in more recent years) but it is nonetheless made up of a selection of rather lovely pieces of music.

Here are a few that make me feel suitably nostalgic every time I hear them.

This music, simply called Ronfaure after the area in which it plays, is one of my favourite pieces from Final Fantasy XIV, because it pretty much sums up the overall atmosphere of the game: vaguely melancholic and rather traditional.

Final Fantasy XI is — at least, from what I remember — one of the more traditionally-set Final Fantasy games, with an emphasis on good old swords, shields, magic, orcs and goblins. Its soundtrack reflects this, and is a contrast to XIV’s diverse track listing, which reflects the diversity of XIV’s world itself.

The first character I played in Final Fantasy XI — and the only one that ever got anywhere to date — hailed from the Federation of Windurst, and thus his starting area was Sarutabaruta, which featured this wonderfully calming piece of music to accompany your exploration.

Sarutabaruta was a land of grassy meadows and sunshine; a thoroughly pleasant place to have a stroll, were it not for the monsters wandering here and there, of course.

One of the things I liked most about Final Fantasy XI, even after I played World of Warcraft for the first time, was the fact that it had a battle theme. Well, actually it had several according to your progress and whether or not you were in a party, but this one was likely to be the first one you heard as you stepped out of the gates of your starting city for the first time and prepared to have the shit kicked out of you by a small bumblebee. (FFXI was an MMO designed in the EverQuest mould, in comparison to FFXIV’s rough adherence to the World of Warcraft formula, and consequently was brutally difficult, particularly at low levels.)

I always particularly liked that the battle theme for FFXI actually sounded like a Final Fantasy battle theme.

Final Fantasy XI’s character creator was simple compared to those that came in later years, but one of the things I always liked about it was that each of the several races you could play as in the game had their own “theme tune” and even had their own signature animations to show you what they were all about while you were deciding. The Mithra, FFXI’s take on the catgirl, were exactly how you would expect them to be from a game designed by Japanese people, and their music reflected that nicely.

Final Fantasy XI’s group content was structured rather differently to XIV. It wouldn’t be until about level 25 or so that you’d encounter your first real “boss”, marked by a “Burning Circle” that you had to enter with a party of companions you’d previously gathered — no Duty Finder for you here.

Confronting said boss was A Big Deal, in other words, which is why I can remember it vividly: battling a dragon and his Ahriman companion, accompanied by this stirring soundtrack.

I never got far enough into the story to get properly into the expansion packs for FFXI, but I did visit some of the areas, because they were good for level-grinding.

I think, for once, YouTube comments sum up what I feel on hearing this piece of music better than anything I could say here:

“And here I am, 8 or 9 years later laying in bed listening to this music, wondering what ever happened to the people I considered my closest friends. Time is cruel, and one by one we each took a break from the game and never returned. If youre in a guild/ls/free company now, these will be the days that you someday look back on 😀 Dont let your friendships disappear, get on Facebook/Discord/Guildwork and keep in touch with them.”

“Makes me tear up… I miss my old ls. r.i.p. Saints”

“comments like these make me wanna cry ;-; chemistry like this is so hard to find now. social life is so fast now”

Quite. For all their faults, for all the assholes who play them and all the whining that inevitably goes on around them, MMOs are, at heart, about people finding and connecting with one another, then sharing unforgettable experiences together.

2403: My First Dragon Quest

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I had my first Dragon Quest experience recently. As a big fan of RPGs, particularly those of the J-variety, Dragon Quest was a gaping hole in my knowledge that I’d never gotten around to filling. Until now!

I’ve been giving the DS remake of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen a go first of all. (Technically I’ve also played about half an hour of the Game Boy Colour version of the very first game.) So far my feelings are a little mixed, but overall leaning in a positive direction, though I will happily admit I am very early in the game so far and thus haven’t had an opportunity to see all its systems at work.

From what I understand about Dragon Quest from speaking to others, its main distinction from its longstanding rival Final Fantasy is that there’s less emphasis on characterisation and plot — at least as far as the main playable characters are concerned — and more in the way of mechanical and strategic depth. Thus far in my time with Chapters of the Chosen this would at least partially seem to be the case: the game features a number of different chapters focusing on an individual or small group of characters before the plot “proper” gets going in the final chapter, and these playable characters never speak a word. Nonetheless, you do get a decent sense of who they are through a combination of their character art and the way other people react to them.

The first real chapter of the game focuses on a soldier called Ragnar who is called in by the pseudo-Scottish king to find out what’s been happening to a number of children that have gone missing recently. The actual solution to this issue isn’t all that complicated, but Ragnar’s roughly hour-long quest acts as a good introduction to what Dragon Quest appears to be all about. There’s a bit of world map wandering, a bit of dungeoneering — and Dragon Quest dungeons aren’t at all linear, featuring numerous branching paths and secret areas filled with treasure — and lots and lots of fighting.

So far so RPG, though I did find Ragnar’s quest a little lacking in mechanical depth: as a straight fighter-type character, he didn’t have access to any interesting abilities whatsoever and his main role in the party appeared to be exclusively confined to hitting ATTACK every turn and dealing damage. Things got mildly more interesting when he recruited a friendly Healslime called Healie into the party, but there still wasn’t a lot to it.

I understand that the “chapters” of Dragon Quest IV are primarily intended to act as an introduction to the characters and their mechanics, but starting with the barebones simplicity of Ragnar isn’t the strongest of openings. Combat wasn’t interesting with just Ragnar and the entirely automated Healie in the party, and boy is it frequent in Dragon Quest; for many people I can see that being a turnoff. That said, it’s worth remembering that we’re essentially dealing with a remake of an NES game here, where the main overhaul the DS version received was with regard to its visuals rather than mechanics.

I’m also not one to write off a game after an hour of play, either, so I fully intend to continue my Dragon Quest adventure; I’m just hoping the characters that come after Ragnar are a bit more interesting to play, and I’m confident that once all the characters are together in one big party with the “real” protagonist, things will get a lot more interesting.

Mixed feelings aside, it’s been an interesting experience so far. It has a markedly different feel to Final Fantasies of the same era, giving it its own distinctive identity. There’s a pleasant air of whimsy about the whole thing, helped along by a humorous localisation featuring lots of regional accents and dialects. And the focus on the ongoing story — as compared to the focus on the main characters as in most Final Fantasies — is a noticeable shift in perspective.

I’m looking forward to getting to know the series a bit better. I feel it may have a slightly stronger barrier to entry than Final Fantasy, but I also know that people who love Dragon Quest really love Dragon Quest, so I’m intrigued to see what gets them so passionate about this long-running series.

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…

2389: Mobius Final Fantasy: Also Doing Mobile Free-to-Play Games Right

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Square Enix is on a roll with the mobile games at the moment; a few months after Final Fantasy Brave Exvius hit the market, we find ourselves faced with a brand new free-to-play Final Fantasy game for mobile devices in the form of Mobius Final Fantasy, a game that has been shrouded in a considerable amount of mystery for a while, but which is finally available to play for both iOS and Android devices.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this is a distinct experience to both Final Fantasy Record Keeper and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and has a very strong identity in its own right. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that despite it being based around the usual “gacha” core of drawing and upgrading cards to progress, it is one of the most distinctive, original mobile games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. And if you know how much I hate 98% of mobile games, you’ll know that’s high praise indeed from me.

Mobius Final Fantasy casts you in the role of (insert your name here), who finds himself drawn through time and space to the ruined world of Palamecia, which appears to have been laid waste to by the malevolent force that is Chaos. Alongside the other “Blanks” who appeared in Palamecia alongside you, you must begin a journey to determine your worthiness to become the Warrior of Light and defeat Chaos once and for all.

If all this sounds rather familiar, you’d be absolutely right; Mobius Final Fantasy draws heavily from the very first Final Fantasy game in terms of thematic ideas, even going so far as to include a number of characters with the same names — most notably Garland and Princess Sarah of Cornelia. It remains to be seen whether these individuals are actually the same people as in the original Final Fantasy — Palamecia was the name of the empire in Final Fantasy II, not the original, so it’s entirely possible their resemblance and nomenclature is pure fanservice — but it’s a nice touch if nothing else.

Gameplay-wise, however, Mobius Final Fantasy is entirely original, although its overall aesthetic is somewhat similar to Final Fantasy XIII in terms of character and interface design.

Playing Mobius Final Fantasy involves traversing a node-based world map, with each node housing a number of different battles and perhaps a stronger boss to fight. Most of the nodes represent your journey across the ruined world of Palamecia, but some are dungeons that have several floors to clear and sometimes even an area you can explore freely at the end. Unlike many free-to-play mobile games, after just a few short hours of gameplay, Mobius Final Fantasy opens up and starts to give you a considerable amount of freedom in where to go and what to do. There’s always an obvious place you should be going next to advance the story, but in some instances you’ll be presented with a path that won’t open until you clear a particular quest — and you’ll have to find the target for that quest yourself by exploring.

You don’t freely explore the areas (thankfully, since controlling free movement in mobile games using just a touchscreen is horrid) but rather advance from battle to battle, defeating enemies and earning rewards along the way. The emphasis, in other words, is very much on fighting.

So it’s fortunate that Mobius Final Fantasy has such a fun, interesting and original battle system. Rather than reskinning Brave Frontier as Brave Exvius did, or taking the retro approach of Record Keeper, Mobius Final Fantasy has its own take on how you fight. You’re alone, for starters; no party members to back you up here, but you are able to take a number of different “cards” into battle, each of which has an ability attached and an elemental affinity.

The flow of combat is relatively straightforward, though takes a little explaining. Normal attacks deal damage and also draw out elemental orbs of four out of five possible types: fire, water, earth, wind and life. Each Job can only draw three of the elemental types plus life orbs, which are drawn at a much lower chance than the others. These elemental orbs are primarily used to trigger the abilities on your cards, each of which have a requisite number of a particular element before you can unleash them.

The card abilities have two main functions: to exploit elemental weaknesses of enemies, and to make their “Break” gauge vulnerable. This latter feature is somewhat akin to Final Fantasy XIII’s “Stagger” system, whereby if you empty an enemy’s gauge, they will become significantly weaker against your attacks along with being unable to hit you for a short period. If you can Break an enemy, in most cases you’ll be able to press the advantage right up to victory before they’re able to get back on their feet.

But what if you don’t draw the right elemental orbs to use your abilities? Well, here’s the other use for them: you can absorb them, which removes them from your stock and gives you temporarily increased resistance against that element (or, in the case of life orbs, heals you). That’s not the only effect, though; absorbing elemental orbs in this way shifts the balance of elements, making you less likely to draw that type from enemies for a short period and consequently more likely to draw the others. In this way, you can absorb an element an enemy is strong against, which in most cases will make you strong against the enemy’s attacks, and increase the likelihood that you draw orbs suitable for unleashing abilities that will damage the enemy to a greater degree.

I don’t feel like I’ve explained that all that well. Let’s give a practical example.

Battle begins. You’re faced with an enemy that has a wind affinity. You’re playing a Ranger job, so your normal attacks will draw water, wind, earth or life orbs — no fire for Rangers.

You attack three times, the standard amount you are able to do in a single turn. In doing so, you draw a bunch of wind orbs and a couple of earth, though not enough to use an earth ability. A wind-element enemy would be weak against earth abilities, so it’s in your interest to get one up and running as soon as possible.

The enemy attacks. You take a bit of damage, though nothing to worry about.

For your first action, you absorb the wind orbs you drew last turn. This gives you temporarily increased resistance against wind attacks — i.e. any attacks the enemy will throw at you. It also makes you less likely to draw wind orbs for a few turns.

For your second action, you attack. This draws enough earth orbs to attack an earth ability, which requires four orbs to use.

For your third action, you unleash your earth ability, which causes the enemy’s Break bar to turn red and become vulnerable. Your turn is over.

The enemy attacks. You take a bit of damage again, though a bit less this time thanks to your increased wind resistance.

Next turn, you throw out three normal attacks, which are enough to empty the vulnerable Break bar of your opponent. It enters Break status, and you get another turn as it topples to the ground. You throw out three more normal attacks, which are now significantly more effective against your downed foe, and defeat it. You win! One step closer to Warrior of Light-hood.

What all this means for Mobius Final Fantasy is that it’s by no means a glorified clicker game with boring, automated combat like so many other “card battle” games on mobile. There’s depth and strategy here, but it’s presented with such glorious visual panache that you can’t help but be drawn in to this strange ruined world, particularly as the exciting battles are punctuated with fully voiced cutscenes (with dual audio, for those who prefer Japanese speech) and some beautiful sights.

I’m relatively early in the game so far, and the game as it stands only features two “chapters” of the main story so far (plus a special region for grinding XP and other resources against the clock) but it’s already clear that Mobius Final Fantasy is something quite special. And that’s the last thing I ever expected to say about a mobile game in 2016.

I’m very interested to see where the game goes next and how it expands on its already solid mechanics over time — and I’m invested in the story, too; I want to know whether or not this actually is Final Fantasy I’s world — which is plausible, given that part of Final Fantasy I’s plot dealt with Chaos creating a time loops, and “Mobius” can be used to describe the characteristic “infinite loop” symbol — and, if not, what on Earth happened to allow Chaos to ruin it as comprehensively as he did.

Find out more about Mobius Final Fantasy at the official site; there are links to download it for iOS and Android devices there, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition

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I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m skipping mobs,” replied our friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2357: Life is Strange

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I’ve played the first two episodes of Dontnod’s adventure game Life is Strange, and I’m enjoying it so far. It remains to be seen whether the whole thing is the life-changing masterpiece some people I know have made it out to be, but it’s certainly solid and interesting so far.

It didn’t start brilliantly, though this was partly my own fault for deciding to read through all of protagonist Max’s diary before actually doing anything. Max’s blathering on about how amazing it was to be in a “diverse” school and other such witterings made me recoil at the prospect of an obnoxiously self-righteous heroine, but thankfully the game nipped that in the bud pretty quickly, and Max actually comes across as a likeable individual — a little shy and withdrawn as well as more than a bit nerdy, so eminently relatable to me. Whew. Bullet dodged.

I’m less enamoured with her friend Chloe, who is built up in Max’s diary to be some sort of amazing super-friend, and comes across as a spoiled, unnecessarily rebellious jerk when we finally meet her. It’s been years since Max and Chloe have seen each other, and Chloe has been through some changes that are perhaps best exemplified by the fact her hair is now blue. Her rebelliousness is at least a little understandable, though; she’s dealt with the death of her father and her mother marrying someone else, who so far has been depicted as a bit of a twat — and an abusive, angry twat at that. Unfortunately, Chloe’s way of dealing with things just makes her, too, come across as a twat, and I find myself questioning why Max fawns over her at every opportunity, since they are so very different. Still, I guess we’ll find out more about Chloe as the series progresses, so I will reserve final judgement on her until we see where this all ends up.

Outside of the Chloe-Max interactions, which are clearly intended to be a centrepiece of the narrative, Life is Strange is solid and enjoyable, being effectively an interactive high school drama, with all the usual frictions and cliquiness that signifies. There are the bitchy cool girls, who Max takes great pleasure in successfully humiliating in the first episode. There’s the hot teacher that all the girls fawn over. There’s the weird janitor. There’s the overly religious, abstinence-preaching girl who stands up for what she believes in even as she gets relentlessly abused by those around her. And like in most good high school drama movies, Max is a relatively inoffensive, pleasant sort of individual who manages to get along with most people if she tries.

Where things get interesting is in Life is Strange’s main twist: Max’s discovery that she has time-shifting powers. In other words, she is able to rewind time and make use of this fact to her advantage: perhaps she can learn some information, then rewind back before a conversation and use that information when talking to someone. Perhaps she can see the consequences of an action, then rewind and reconsider. Perhaps she can use her powers to save people’s lives. The mechanic itself is simple and well executed, and it’s used creatively in a variety of places, both to allow you to reconsider your actions, and to resolve various situations.

Being an adventure game of the Telltale-esque mould, Life is Strange is riddled with decision points, some of which are more important than others. Particularly significant decisions tend to be binary in nature, and Max always has something to ponder after making one of these choices. Interestingly, the game’s script always manages to make it seem as if the other choice was the “right” one, so there’s no real sense that there’s a path down which the writers feel like you “should” continue; often, there are no real good choices in particularly difficult situations, so it’s a case of deciding how to handle it in the moment.

Life is Strange’s setting is presented really nicely. Deliberately eschewing photorealism in favour of a somewhat watercolour-esque aesthetic, there’s a lovely vignetting effect on the screen that blurs the edges, and scenery and set dressing is heavily stylised rather than realistic. The characters have a touch of “plastic doll” about them, but this is in keeping with the rest of the aesthetic; a kind of slightly otherworldly appearance, like things just aren’t quite right, but where it’s hard to put your finger on what is actually wrong.

The writing is good, too. Conversations are believable, riddled with modern slang and authentic modern cultural references. Like Deadly Premonition, the last game I can remember that did this, Life is Strange isn’t afraid to namecheck real things — celebrities, movies, books, authors, artists — and does so without feeling like they’ve been included just to show off how cultured the writers are. Instead, it all feels very natural, and adds to the authentic feeling of the setting as a result.

I’m intrigued to see where the overarching narrative goes. There’s clearly something very odd going on with Max, whose power appears to take a physical toll on her, and she also keeps seeing visions of her town being destroyed by an enormous tornado, which presumably will show up (or not?) in the final episode. But alongside this, there are numerous other well-crafted subplots that intertwine with one another nicely, so it will be interesting to see how all these fit together by the end. Aside from a few hitches in the script here and there where you’ll figure really obvious things out long before Max does — a common problem in adventure games — the whole thing seems like a very well-crafted narrative experience, and I’m intrigued to see where it ends up, though I kind of hope it doesn’t involve Chloe quite as much as I feel like it’s probably going to.

2265: Final Fantasy XV’s Going to Be Something Special

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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