Level Up! Seize the Experience!

Hey PC Gamers! Heard of Steam? It’s an online alternative to buying PC games from a video game retailer from Valve. You can purchase and download PC games for the same prices as retail, and then access your downloaded games from any PC! At last, you don’t have to have a laptop to experience portable PC gaming.

Square Enix has taken notice of this innovative idea and has decided to be a part of it. They will release a PC-version of The Last Remnant on April 9, 2009, around the same time as the PlayStation 3 release. Steam has a free online demo available for the game right now. If it goes well, we could see more games from Square Enix, and therefore, plenty more RPGs.

Steam already has a pretty impressive collection of RPGs, and it’s definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the account is free and so are any game trailers and demos for download.

I had planned to have the game finished by the end of March, but at the rate I’m going, I won’t have it done by April. I’m flying through Lost Odyssey, but FFVII is dragging along. As much as I love the story, love learning little nuances about the characters and the like, the gameplay makes me dread playing it at time.

I don’t mean the turn-based play. If that was true, I’d hate Lost Odyssey just as much.

It’s how archaic the game is. I’m having so much difficulty in manipulating Cloud without the analog stick. I hate having to press the X button to make him move faster than a snail. I get him stuck sometimes, because the graphics are so pixelated I can’t perceive textures or the depth of objects. And when I get him stuck, I’ll get attacked. Repeatedly. If I step back to try to take in my surroundings, I’ll get attacked at the first step Cloud makes. I find myself holding my breath to see if I can even walk across the hallway without stepping into a battle.

My experience last night frustrated me so much that I was cussing out Cloud and I wanted to chuck my controller into the TV for the first time since Super Mario Bros. 3. I’m at Shinra Manor, and I want to get the basement key to unlock Vincent. But I have to find all of the codes. That takes me about an hour thanks to Cloud not being able to walk down a hallway and running into several fights and I have to count paces after finding a creaky floorboard to find the third combination number. If I got attacked while counting paces, I had to start over. I have the code, but I feel like I should go save. Where’s a save point? Oh, there isn’t one. I have to leave the town to save in the open world. I leave, save, head back, and start the funhouse of battles again. Oh and opening the safe is a not-fun mini-game. I lost count of how many times I tried to open the safe. When I finally did it, a lovely boss pops out of the safe. Oh goody.

I thought I was doing well, but then he killed Aerith. Tifa followed close after. I couldn’t even flip through my inventory fast enough to find a Phoenix Down before Cloud was capped in one swing. I thought about trying again, but then I remember where I saved, so I’d have to run through the Manor again, get Cloud stuck on something again, and flip through that safe combination mini-game again. I didn’t have the energy. Game was turned off and herbal tea was brewed.

I really think that if I had played this game back when it came out, I would feel differently. The d-pad wouldn’t bother me, because that’s all we had back then. I would have thought the graphics were ahead of their time. The textures and pixelation wouldn’t make manipulation that tricky for me. I knew going into this game that it was archaic and I might have difficulty with it, but I didn’t count on the level of frustration.

I’m not going to quit, but I need to obtain a fresh new level of patience and understanding that this game will take me longer to complete than possibly any other game I’ve played.

I may burn a figure of Cloud in effigy when I’m finished, though.

I’ve been a collector most of my life. I collect one thing, slowly phase it out of my life and simultaneously phase another thing in, rinse and repeat. And I’m weird about how I collect things.

Take my video gaming collection.

I don’t really collect the games. To do so would mean that I wouldn’t have given my original Nintendo and all of those games to my sister and her husband. But there are some franchises of games where I have to have all the games. Case in point, The Legend of Zelda. I no longer have the original golden cartridge or the original Adventures of Link, but I have the games themselves in my Zelda Collection for the GameCube. I thought I had every single Zelda game and every strategy guide (except for the two games that came out on the Game Boy… I’ll have to mark those as a loss) until I started reading this book about The Legend of Zelda and philosophy (it’s an interesting read, I’ll give it that) and I learned that I’m missing one. I thought that the Four Swords game that came with the GBA port of A Link to the Past was the same game as the Four Swords Adventures game released on the GameCube. Apparently I was wrong. Well now I must go and find this game and guide to add to my collection. Oh and another thing? I’ve never beaten an LoZ game, but that’s a discussion for another blog post.

I’ve really gone nuts over Kingdom Hearts. I own Kingdom Hearts, the original GBA Chain of Memories, and Kingdom Hearts 2. I’ve even started to collect the Play Arts action figures, because apparently I’ve started a descent into madness. But it gets better. When Squenix announced that they were releasing Chain of Memories in 3D for the PS2, but not outside Japan, I couldn’t let that slide. I imported the game and purchased a Japanese PS2 because my husband wouldn’t let me send off our PS2 to get modded. I did play the game through Sora-side all in Japanese without too many problems. But you can imagine my frustration when Squenix announced this year that oh yeah, we’ll go on ahead and release CoM worldwide too. At least I can say I also have KH2’s Final Mix, as that came with the Japanese CoM. I doubt I’ll play that though, since KH2 drove me insane. As I mentioned in another blog, I’ve already preordered 358/2 days. If that’s not enough, I also have a Kingdom Hearts charm bracelet from Square Enix.

Since I’m getting into Final Fantasy, my husband expects me to follow down the same path and try to collect all the games. So far, I’m not really that interested. I have VII, X, XII, III, and Crisis Core, and I may get IV and I will get XIII, but I’m not sure about anything else. If VII interests me enough at the end, I’ll look into Dirge of Cerberus to complete the VII collection, but it really hasn’t sparked my collecting gene.

I realize none of it makes sense. But collectors rarely do.

Avalon Code intrigues me for one reason: I won’t be saving the world, I’ll be rewriting it. I’ve been saving the world too much lately. It’s time to just accept that it’s going to be destroyed in one form or another and rebuild.

January’s Nintendo Power originally turned me on to the game, but then I read Amazon.com’s description (which by far beats both NinPow’s and Nintendo.com’s):

• “Plot changes based on the player’s choice of either a male or female lead character, who can regardless make enemies, alienate friends, and even fall in love.
• Unique item creation and alteration system through the mysterious Book of Prophecy.
• Developed in conjunction with top teams associated with Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV and the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series.
• Highly detailed characters, landscapes and monsters fuel the addictive nature of capturing different monsters to complete your book’s collection.
• An immersive storyline in which players can lose themselves at a moments notice.”

From the first bullet point, I already have a reason to play the game more than once. It’s very rare (for me) to want to play an RPG more than once, no matter how much I liked it, because of the amount of time the typical RPG takes. Case in point, Kingdom Hearts. It’s one of my favorites, if not my absolute favorite, and I haven’t had the strength, time, or desire to play it again. It’s going to be the exact same story; the only reason I would have to play it again would be to try to defeat all of the extra bosses, even though they all made me chuck my controller at walls in rage. I think the only one I’ve tried to play more than once was Fable 2, and that’s because I played the first round as a goody-goody and I’m ready to be evil.

Your character is supposed to decide what will go in the next world by recording it in the Book of Prophecy, so I wonder if that’s another way to change how the plot goes. So are there a plethora of worlds I can possibly create? So intrigued!

I’m supposed to finish Phantom Hourglass first, as that is part of my New Year’s Resolutions, but I don’t know if I can resist buying a handheld RPG. I may be on a plane a lot this year, and the DS is a perfect companion.

These aren’t two different covers for the same soundtrack; they are two completely different soundtrack compilations for The World Ends with You video game. Both provide songs from the video game, but each presents them differently. Either way, you’re in for a musical compilation totally different from any other video game soundtrack out there. Its closest comparison: Katamari Damacy. Or I should say, the only soundtrack with possibly weirder and well, more different music is Katamari Damacy.

The black album was released before the game even was.  It contains 35 tracks of tunes directly taken from the video game, presented in the order the game presents them, no less. Want the hip hoppy tune heard while shopping for swag? This one has it.

So why even look at the silver album? Well if you’re a die hard fan. Duh. Or if you’re like me, a completionist with a collector’s mentality. Can’t do things in halves.

The silver album has 19 tracks of complete songs, a couple of them repeated for live versions. The game cuts up most of the songs and remixes them for a slight techno flair, and this collection has all of the songs in their original format.

Do I recommend one over the other? It depends what you’re looking for. If you want tracks directly from the game, buy the black album. If you like some of the songs from the black album enough to want to hear all versions of them, pick up the silver album. It’s hard to recommend buying just the silver album alone, unless you liked only a few of the songs from the game and can live without some of the random tracks, such as the tunes from the start up menu, phone menu, or shops.

But either soundtrack will fulfill your random desire for hip-hop/techno beats mixed in with a little J-pop. The game doesn’t have an orchestral score, so don’t expect to find one here either.

Thanks to obsessions with anime in the past, I’ve been a fan of artbooks. I was perusing one site for Crisis Core fandomania, and I came across this book which looked to me to be an artbook. The item description was all in Japanese, so I couldn’t confirm anything, but with the title “Ultimania,” it screamed artbook to me. Or a fan book of some type. I bought it off of eBay (because they had it cheaper), and the pretty thing came in today. As I sat down to flip through it, I quickly discovered that it really isn’t an artbook, it’s a strategy guide.

If anyone has bought Ultimania books in the past, they’re probably laughing at me because they knew it would be a guide. Ultimania just doesn’t say guide to me.

I was a little disappointed, mainly because I already have a guide and because I can’t read Japanese to see if it has other hints. However, after I had some time to really flip through it, I found that it has some fandom aspects, such as bios of the development staff and voice actors (not that I know what any of it says) and some original concept art for the characters, NPCs, and bosses. Apparently, it also has in-depth character analyses as well. According to Wikipedia, Ultimania confirms that Lazard is President Shinra’s illegitimate son and it goes into more detail about Angeal and Hollander’s relationship. I really wish I could Japanese to read these things for myself, but maybe one day I’ll be able to.

So while it wasn’t what I expected, at least I’m not totally disappointed in the product. I just hope the other Crisis Core book I bought on the bay isn’t another guide.

My very first experience with RPGs made me avoid them for um, about ten years. I was in college, and I went to a friend’s apartment to wait for my boyfriend (now husband) to get off work. He was playing Final Fantasy VIII (at least I think it was VIII… it was a Final Fantasy for the PSOne and it wasn’t VII) and driving me insane. I watched him summon Shiva over and over and over so I got to see the same huge elaborate cut-scene over and over and over. That wasn’t obviously boring enough, because he went after a boss fight he had NO business starting. It was against a dragon, and the dragon killed Shiva early on. That pleased me a little. But after that, every time the dragon fluttered its wings (I’m being serious about the attack), it killed one of the partymembers and mortally wounded the other. So then my friend had to use his best fighter’s turn ti revive the dead healer. The healer then healed the other one. The other one tickled the dragon. The dragon fluttered his wings. Rinse and repeat. I watched this for half an hour, cursing my boyfriend for taking his sweet ass time and leaving me with this torture. For those wondering, no, he didn’t defeat the dragon. The dragon finally administered another attack, wiping out the entire party in one breath.

This viewing of really bad play on my friend’s part really affected me, and it still does a little. When I started Final Fantasy VII, I told my husband that if I came across a dragon boss or if Shiva’s animation was similar in any way, I would turn off the game and put it up for sale on Amazon that very minute. (Thank God Shiva looks nothing like she did that night… the story is too good!)

Even though I’ve gotten over this revulsion and have started to really enjoy turn-based RPGs, it doesn’t mean that this downward cycle of death hasn’t frustrated me while playing them. It’s even more frustrating when you get to the point of realizing that you can’t stop it; you can only postpone the inevitable. When one partymember goes down, it isn’t that big of a deal. The other night while playing Final Fantasy VII, a boss kept killing Red XIII no matter what I did, so I left the poochie dead the rest of the fight. I got tired of wasting Phoenix Downs and a turn on a member that was going to die next turn anyway. Cloud and Aerith defeated the boss with no issues after I gave up on reviving him.

It’s when two members go down that things get hairy, even if your party can hold five members. Then you can only heal one at a time, but you don’t want to use two members’ turns at the same time to revive them. You still have enemies to fight, and they aren’t wasting their turns to resurrect one another.

So you resurrect one, continue fighting the enemies, and pray that that one member doesn’t get hit again because resurrecting them doesn’t give them much HP. You won’t use one of the others to heal them, because you can’t waste more attacks this turn. But of course, your recently revived friend is hit again and down for the count. But wait, since you used a turn to revive them instead of healing another member, that member in poor health gets hit and consequently killed. At this point, all you can do is laugh. You knew it was all over when one member you revived was killed instantly. The knife was twisted in further when you watched that same enemy launch that same devastating attack again at another member.

So you watch your last member go down in the next attack, because there’s no way he’s going to survive the enemy’s turn as he’s tried to save others instead of healing himself. As the enemy revs up the final blow, you start to recalculate where things went wrong, revise your strategy, figure out what accessories you need or don’t need, and then pray you saved rather recently.

But you know you didn’t.

Most of my Kombo colleagues are on Twitter, and I’ve gotten to know one in particular through our Final Fantasy obsessions. Okay, so mine is a mostly new obsession, but that’s not the point.  Today we had a rather interesting discussion on the evolution of turn-based combat, and I got a nice history and terminology lesson.

It started when I mentioned that I received Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy III (DS port) for Valentine’s Day, so I better really get cracking on finishing Final Fantasy VII and X. Nick said those were his top two favorite FF games. Even though FFVII is his favorite, FFX is the only FF game where he liked both the combat and the leveling up systems. FFX sports Conditional Turn-Based combat and a sphere system for leveling up and learning new abilities. I think he liked FFVII’s story better, and that’s why he ranks it higher, but he really doesn’t like the ATB system. I had to ask for a definition.

So he taught me that ATB stands for “Active Time Battle,” and it means that partymembers and enemies have to wait to take their turns when the ATB gauge is full. Players can issue commands to the party before the gauge is full, but no one will do anything until that moment. At least now I know what it’s called. So far I’ve been calling it a complete waste of time.

At the same time, it beats Lost Odyssey’s method of commanding all your partymembers at the very beginning of your party’s turn (although your partymembers’ turns may be interlaced with the enemy’s turns) before you can even see what your attacks will even do. When an enemy is about dead, I really dislike telling everybody to do some attack or defense before anyone can do anything when only one attack will do. It’s also a complete waste of time, but apparently it has a real name too: Traditional Turn-Based Battle.

So while learning about ATB, I learned that FFX was the first game to introduce CTB. Everyone actually takes a turn, so you can take as much or little time as you want ordering your partymember, and the choices you and the enemy makes in battle influences the order of future turns.  That explains why I felt so much more relaxed during FFX battles. FFVII makes me so antsy, especially when I’m scrolling through my item list for that damn Turbo Ether and the enemy’s gauge is full. He’s going to go again, because he doesn’t need to scroll through his item list. He has no items to scroll through. He just wants to kick my blonde, spikey-headed ass. At the same time, the battle bores me because more often than not, we’re all sitting around waiting for gauges to fill when I’ve already doled out commands.

So yay for me, I’ve learned something new so I can sound more like I know what I’m talking about. It helps with credentials a little.

While learning all of this terminology, guide writer Dan Birlew bursts in to say, “I HATE those kind of battle systems. Except in Final Fantasy I, where the system was balanced enough that it worked.” However, I’m not sure what system he was talking about. ATB? CTB? Traditional? All turn-based combat? He hasn’t written me back to clear it up. 

One thing that I’ve never been good at with RPGs is juggling partymembers when you have a limited party setting. I get attached to certain members of the party and use them more often than anyone else, which causes some partymembers to never level up. For the brief amount of time I played Final Fantasy X, I remember you could swap partymembers out during battle as long as the member was still alive. That would really fix my problem with FF7. So far, I keep Cloud and Aerith in my party constantly. I don’t think I’m allowed to swap out Cloud anyway, but I’ve gotten attached to Aerith because she’s such a great magic caster. I’m going to be so sad when she’s gone. (Oh God… what will I do without her Healing Wave Limit Break???)

But for the time being, I can’t decide who to keep in my third slot. Tifa is a good fighter, but for some reason she seems to draw in attacks. I feel like I’m healing her all the time. I don’t like Barrett because he’s too one-sided in combat for me. Red XIII was okay the one time I used him, and after one combat session with Cait Sith, he may be benched the rest of the game unless I risk using him again and find he’s a great magic caster. I’ve never used Yuffie once. I really want to try her out, but her HP is so low I’m afraid I’ll be healing her more often than I do Tifa. I know I should just play some risks to find out who will be best as a magic caster after Aerith and who will fill the third slot best. I just hate getting the GAME OVER music and wondering where I saved last.

Infinite Undiscovery had a unique way of compounding this problem. Instead of giving me five to seven people to juggle around, it threw fifteen people at me to sort into three parties of five. I gave up learning who anyone was. I sorted the parties to give each one a swordsman, a healer, and a range fighter. Everyone else was sorted into, um, okay fine you go here, you go here, and who are you again? I only played around twelve hours of the game before I quit and sold it, so I can’t imagine how many more people I would have had to sort by the end of the game. From what I’ve played of Last Remnant so far, there are also a ton of partymembers to sort into groups, but the game also as an RTS aspect to it, so that schematic works for it a little better.

So far, I haven’t had this issue with Lost Odyssey. I have five partymembers, and they all have a spot in combat. I’m supposed to go recruit a couple more immortals, so I’m rather curious if they will all fit in my party as well or if I have to make a Sophie’s choice. In that case, one of the little annoying kids is GONE.

For an overly serious RPG protagonist with emo tendencies, Cloud can be talked into doing crazy things. I personally love it. I was afraid that this game would be incredibly serious compared to Crisis Core, since it’s about Cloud’s revenge, AVALANCHE’s agenda, and Sephiroth’s insanity (I liked him so much more when he wasn’t a nutjob). Advent Children compounded my fears. I’ve never seen the CGI movie, but every screenshot I’ve seen of Cloud is so darn serious and sad. I was sure FF7 would be serious, depressing, and all-around downer. (Yes, I know Aerith dies, but that doesn’t mean the game has to be a downer.)

But the developers came through just for me and forced Cloud to do some zany things. The cross-dressing was a nice start, but I liked the Shinra parade at Junon Harbor better. When Cloud taught the infantrymen how to twirl the rifle behind their backs — to the tune of Victory Fanfare, no less — and the soldiers clapped and squealed, “Oooooh,” I was beside myself in laughter.  Seeing Red XIII in human garb, dancing on the upper boat deck was pretty hilarious too.

So what else can we make Cloud do? I can’t wait!