Tag: western RPG

2081: Adventures in Sanctuary

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On a bit of a whim — well, after talking a bit about it with Andie the other day — I reinstalled Diablo III and thought I’d give it another go. I bought the expansion pack a while ago, anyway, and hadn’t really explored it all that much; my main stumbling block with it was that in order to access “Adventure Mode”, which was the thing I was really interested in, you had to complete the campaign storyline. I had completed the campaign storyline, but due to Diablo III’s online nature coupled with Blizzard’s region-locked servers, the fact I had done so on the North American servers back around the game’s time of release didn’t allow me to pick up where I’d left off in Europe.

Fortunately, I timed my return well: a new Season has just begun, and Seasonal characters can jump right in to Adventure Mode without having to complete campaign first. So that’s exactly what I did. (For the uninitiated, Seasonal characters in Diablo III are similar to Diablo II’s ladder characters; their progress is tracked separately from your regular characters, and you can’t twink them out with gear you’ve put in your Stash on previous characters. In other words, they effectively allow you to start the game “from scratch” and see how quickly you can accomplish things like getting to the level cap and suchlike.)

Adventure Mode, as it turns out, is exactly what I hoped it would be: in other words, exactly what the Diablo series should have been doing for a long time: providing a freeform, flexible, grinding-and-loot-whoring experience where even though there’s no real “finish” to it, there are plenty of short- and long-term goals to pursue as well as short mini-quests you can play around with for half an hour or so and still feel like you’ve achieved something.

Adventure Mode, when you start out, is basically split into two main components: Bounties and Rifts. Bounties are quests that are scattered around the game world; each of the game’s five Acts have five Bounties available at any given time, and completing all five rewards you with Stuff. One of the Acts has a Bonus Bounty attached to it, too, which means you get more Stuff when you complete all five Bounties. The Bounties are different each time you play; sometimes it will involve killing the big bosses of the game, others it will require you to complete special events and sidequests. There’s a nice amount of variety, and each session feels quite focused as a result.

Rifts, meanwhile, are self-contained dungeons that basically take everything in the game, put it all in a blender and then tell you to go have fun. You’ll face a random combination of enemies in a random combination of dungeons, and be tasked with defeating a specific amount of enemies to summon a boss, at which point you have to defeat the boss to clear the rift. Rifts differ slightly from normal dungeons in that they have some interesting “Pylons” around the place that imbue you with significant special effects that are more powerful than the regular shrines you find in the base game. One particularly enjoyable one, for example, sees you automatically spewing lightning that pretty much instantly kills most foes for about 30 seconds or so, allowing you to build up some impressive multi-kill combos.

Once you reach a particular level, you can start tackling Greater Rifts. I don’t know how these work yet, but I’m interested to find out.

What I particularly like about Adventure Mode is that it abandons all pretence of having a coherent story — something that the Diablo series has never really handled all that well, despite its lore being interesting and well-crafted — and instead fully embraces its “game-ness”, which is why most people keep playing Diablo, after all. Diablo III’s story was enjoyable enough the first time around but ultimately forgettable, and so I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the idea of running through the whole campaign again. And once you’ve beaten it once, you probably skip all the cutscenes and conversations anyway, so a dedicated mode that trims out all that fat and means that you’re not forced into following the campaign’s linear sequence of progression is wonderful. I just wish it was automatically unlocked for non-Seasonal characters, but it’s not the end of the world; when the current Season ends, Seasonal characters become regular characters, at which point I can take my geared and levelled Seasonal character through the Campaign on the lowest difficulty and curbstomp everything in a couple of hours to quickly unlock Adventure Mode, I guess.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying my return to Sanctuary, and it’s been a really pleasant surprise quite how much the game has changed since I last played it shortly after its initial release. It’s grown into a really solid, interesting, enjoyable game that will appeal greatly to those who enjoy grinding and seeing numbers go up into astronomical values; I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it this time around, but it’s proving to be an enjoyable distraction at the moment.

#oneaday, Day 5: The FF Gambit

In an attempt to batter the shit out of my Pile of Shame, I’m playing Final Fantasy XII, a game which I bought upon its initial release—just like every Final Fantasy—and have spectacularly failed to finish—just like every post-IX Final Fantasy. (I have since finished X and X-2 and maintain that X-2 is an excellent game despite being almost—but not quite—as gay as Space Channel 5)

The thing is, FFXII is good. Really good. Like, “it’s a Final Fantasy for people who hate JRPGs” good, in that it dispenses with all the usual bullshit (rigid linearity until the last hour, when saving the world can be inexplicably put on hold to go and raise some chickens, endless random battles) and provides an experience that is altogether more “Western” in its feel. We have a much more open world. We have enemies wandering around in the field. We have immensely satisfying combat which takes place in the field. We have sidequests with a bloody quest log and we have an interesting, if unconventional, character development system.

And we have Gambits. I was all set to dismiss Gambits as a means of getting the game to play itself. But having played it for about twelve hours now (coming up on the point that I originally got distracted by something else on my initial partial-playthrough, so we’re nearly into new territory) I’ve discovered something: Gambits are awesome.

If you passed on FFXII, let me enlighten you. A Gambit is a means of “programming” your party members to act in particular ways. You give them a particular condition, such as “Ally has less than 50% HP”, and then give them an action, like “Cure”. You can prioritise the actions, too, so certain things will take precedence when more than one of the conditions are true. And as such, you can plan out the way you’d like a battle to unfold before it starts.

In many senses, it’s like that “group huddle” you have in something like World of Warcraft before you take on a dungeon’s boss. Everyone has a role to play, and it’s important that people stick to that plan where possible, but be able to adapt to the situation if necessary. That’s why FFXII gives you the opportunity to immediately issue direct commands, too, which override any and all Gambits in play. In fact, it’s technically possible to play the entire game by micromanaging every action all your characters do, but it would probably take you approximately ten times longer to play the game if you chose to do that. Gambits aren’t letting you leave the game on autopilot—they’re letting you plan out a battle before it happens and then just focus on responding to situations as they arise. You’ll frequently have to switch them out to take advantage of particular enemies’ weaknesses, and I’ve noticed myself spending a lot more time in the menu in FFXII than I would do in earlier, more traditional entries in the series. Planning out the way the characters will respond is interesting and addictive, and immensely satisfying when it goes right.

In fact, the only thing which may be a bit off-putting to some people about FFXII these days is the graphics. In this HD age, FFXII looks pretty ugly, and ironically this is because it was a pretty good-looking PS2 game. There is a lot of detail in both the textures and the characters, but the low resolution which the game runs at gives the whole thing a very “muddy” and flickery look which some people may find a bit difficult to deal with. It’s certainly not unplayable, though, and spending a bit of time in the company of the PS2 serves as a reminder that games didn’t always need HD graphics and Achievements to be good.

(Interestingly, FFXII does actually feature a proto-Achievement system in the form of the Sky Pirate’s Den, which fills with trophies as you fulfil certain accomplishments in the game.)

So, if you’re hungering for a great almost-Western-style RPG with a JRPG aesthetic? Give ol’ FFXII a chance. If FFXIII didn’t push your buttons with its “here’s a straight line to the finish, apart from this bit” mentality, FFXII is what you need. Join me in my quest through my Pile of Shame!