The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => Discussion => Topic started by: Dark Holy Elf on January 12, 2012, 04:17:01 AM
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Same deal as last year. I've been lazy about getting this one started, so let's do this! Again, I count down all the new games I played this year, taking a look at each one, from worst to best. Discussion is of course encouraged!
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14. Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (Nintendo DS, Square Enix, 2010)
The unfortunate thing about counting down to my favourite game of the year is that this list has to start out on a negative note. Last year I opened with Devil May Cry 2, a game which, while mediocre, I was able to play through and say some positive things about. This year I won't be so kind.
Dragon Quest IX is not completely without redeeming features. It does have some small improvements from its far superior predecessor: avoidable encounters are one, actually having some ability to know what your skills points are working towards in-game is another. These polish improvements are appreciated, since they're something the series as a whole badly needs.
Unfortunately, aside from that, this game is bafflingly bad. Gameplaywise it's a vanilla Dragon Quest effort, which is to say, the same tired gameplay they've been churning out for two decades (only without the challenge of some of the early games!). Skillsets are shallow and uninteresting, with battles dominated by doing damage and healing as usual. There's a job system, but since you can't carry most abilities between jobs and changing jobs resets your level to 1, it might as well be the job system from the original Final Fantasy.
Plot and writing concerns are even worse. Dragon Quest games are known for their silent mains (which I've complained about in the past), but this game goes a step further and gives you a silent party. So literally the entire writing centres around one of the worst aspects of Dragon Quest, which is completing unoriginal fetch quests, finding NPCs and items which can solve problems as you move from town to town. In a vacuum this is forgivable; I can enjoy games with bad plots. But this game forces me to sit through its bland NPC dialogue with no ability to skip scenes and no ability to even speed up the slow text. What year was this game made in, again?
Apparently the game was made to have a Pokemon-like attempt at being a multiplayer phenonemon (something I only observed in its annoying decision to have one save file), but it's still an RPG, and I have no respect for an RPG that can't deliver a single-player experience. For me, all I can see is a game that has almost all of the many things the Dragon Quest series does horribly wrong, with almost nothing that any previous games (particularly VIII, with its excellent voice acting and interesting writing ideas) do right.
This game makes me want to channel Rob and decry JRPGs as a whole, since if there was ever anything evident of the genre's ability to remain stagnant when it so chooses, it is Dragon Quest IX. It's an embarrassment, and I'm just glad I played some other really good JRPGs this year to offset it.
The good: Some minor polish improvements to a series that lacks it
The bad: Dull and uninnovative gameplay, writing that is both bad and unskippable,
The ugly: One save file, borrowing the worst feature of a far superior RPG series!
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Good gods dude.
You really only played enough games this year that DQ9 even makes your list?
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I assumed he's counting down from worst to best and therefore anything new makes the list.
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One can always hope that people play enough games to feel the need to talk only about the good ones.
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Given whose topic this is, he needs to start at the bottom of his list to have any chance of talking about good games. HEY-O~! Up top!
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Come on, don't leave me hangin'.
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Fine.
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Zenny = DQ9 fanboy. Got it.
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One can always hope that people play enough games to feel the need to talk only about the good ones.
The bad ones are more fun to talk about. After all, think about that game have you spoken the most about in the past year!
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You convinced me to send my copy of DQ9 to Super. Congrats.
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The difference is that I am a hateful vindictive arsehole where as the elves are actually good decent people who actually play games to have fun instead of out of some perverse attempt to understand why other people like them or out of some kind of self loathing.
Super will probably just enjoy it.
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As much as Super pathetically and futilely tries to inflict pain on me, I am sending it for his enjoyment!
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I'm more looking forward to getting FF4:CC back so I can replay that. Mmm, shiny.
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I rank everything new on these lists, yeah.
13. Mega Man X5 (PlayStation, Capcom, 2001)
I picked up the Mega Man X Collection a few years ago. It was a great purchase. Six mainline Mega Man X games, two of which are great, two of which are decent, and two of which... until the start of this year, I hadn't played. Now, maybe I wish I'd kept it that way.
Okay, Mega Man X5 is by almost all accounts, not the series' lowpoint, so it must do some things right. Just like its immediate predecessor, it lets you control one of two vastly different characters, and this time around they even took care to keep them somewhat balanced and let you switch between them between levels, which is good. Combine that with tried-and-true MMX gameplay and you should have something which is very fun to play. And indeed, there are times when it shows hints of this, such as the boss fights against Black Devil and the first stage of Sigma.
Unfortunately, it gets so much else of the gameplay horribly wrong that it's hard to forgive. Stage design is... generally forgettable. This isn't terribly unusual for the X games, but it's still not a reason to play the game. However, bosses are where the real goofs occur; most of the mavericks are so easy that I beat them on my first try learning almost nothing about how the boss actually worked. The design team implmemented a mechanic which makes bosses better the later you fight them (a reasonable idea given how MMX games are structured) but all it seems to have done is made most of the fights jokes. They're a bit better in the expected boss rush stage, but still not great, and that isn't where you want them to be better anyway! And it's not just a matter of ease; the core designs aren't exactly intriguing either. It's a real waste of a bunch of cute Guns'n'Roses references.
A MMX game having gameplay as disappointing as this one is already one worth skipping, but it's worth noting the missteps were not limited to gameplay. The dialogue is poorly written, poorly translated, and unskippable. The game tries to implement some bizarre, branching plotline involving stopping Sigma's plans (that can even result in four of the maverick stages being optional), but this is completely random gameplaywise and a mess writing-wise, so it certainly does the game no favours.
This was apparently supposed to be the game that ended the X series. I'm very glad it wasn't, because not only would we not have the amazing Mega Man X8, this would be one hell of a sour note to end a once-proud series on.
The good: Choice between two different PCs, some lategame boss fights
The bad: Weak stage design, weaker mavericks, a mess on the writing front
The ugly: The game giving you the damage-halving armour for free if you choose the "right" PC at the start
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Don't mainline the brown MMX5.
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Yeah that about sums up MMX 5 from the little I played of it. Wasn't there also some poorly implemented equipment system? Did that end up being less pointless or less tedious than I seem to remember it being?
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I... honestly don't remember.
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Searching for "MMX5" and "less tedious"....no matches.
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12. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (PlayStation Portable, Square Enix, 2009/2011)
And now onto games I will say mostly positive things about!
Final Fantasy IV is one of those games I'm pretty outspoken about, feeling that it, like many other of the old RPGs, isn't as good as the sheen of nostalgia makes many people think it is. I don't see a terrible amount it does especially well by modern standards in either writing or gameplay. Still, I eventually did end up playing its sequel (once it was packaged into a single portable game and not the overpriced mess that was its Wiiware release), and overall I was pleasantly surprised.
In a switch of usual way of doing things, I'm going to talk about some of the negative first, since the way The After Years is structured, it's inevitable. The first half of the game is divided into a gaggle of short quests starring various stars of the original Final Fantasy IV as well as some new characters, and these... vary significantly in quality. At their worst, some of them feature parties of pure, skillsetless fighters, mind-numbingly easy randoms beaten by holding down the A button, or both. This is completely unacceptable.
Some quests seem to do some things better (notably Rydia's), but even they serve mostly to whet one's appetite for the really good gameplay stuff, which happens almost exclusively in the last two quests (which is much better than it sounds, as the last quest is half the game). Once the game gets rolling there's a lot to like about its gameplay. It features probably the most polished version of classic Final Fantasy ATB, with the notable addition of a button which temporarily speeds up everything. The game allows you to choose any five of a cast of roughly twenty rather diverse characters (even if the balance could be better). The game throws something like forty different boss battles, many of which are effective homages to prior Final Fantasy appearances, and all of which as a collective pretty much play around with FF4 battle design as much as they possibly could.
As far as the game's writing goes, it's a mixed bag, but mostly negative. I will say that I like the idea of setting a game when the heroes of the previous game are all grown up... I'd really like to see more sequels set a generation later instead of either shortly later or centuries later, as seems the norm. And some of the game's character concepts, such as the adult Palom, are a lot of fun. But mostly, it reads too much like fanfiction, at times getting into the realm of really bad, such as most things related to Edward or Kain. It's actually quite a mercy when the plot mostly goes away in the second half.
It's a strange game, and not one of the stronger games I've played over the past year. Yet, it's one I could easily see replaying, just because you can so easily pick up and play the second half. If the whole game were nothing more than an experiment at perfecting classic ATB spliced with a fun dungeon romp, I could see it rising several places on this year's list. As is, though, it suffers a bit; it's a hard game to defend at its low points.
The good: Great implmentation of ATB, last two dungeons are terrific
The bad: Boring gameplay in certain quests, fanfic-like writing
The ugly: Edward's obsession with his 17-years dead girlfriend
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For a game that you say you like, there isn't much positive in this review!
<--- After Years fangirl, obv!
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That is because in his heart he knows it sucks and he likes things that suck.
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11. Blue Dragon (Xbox 360, Microsoft, 2007)
From a sequel to the fourth Final Fantasy, to a sequel to the fifth. Technically Blue Dragon may not be a sequel to Final Fantasy V, but with its class system, not to mention some of the staff that worked on the game, it can be hard to tell.
Of course, as far as I'm concerned, FF5 is a pretty good game to model yourself after, if you're an RPG. Blue Dragon is able to deliver just as its spiritual predecessor did, with a fun class system which encourages mixing and matching abilities from multiple classes. The system is also quite transparent, with the game's manual clearly outlying which skills are learned by which class at which class level, and what they do. (See? Manuals still have a use!) And it's not content to merely mimic FF5, instead throwing in a clear improvement: multiple skill slots for secondary abilities, and the ability to gain more as the game goes on by investing in a certain class. It all comes together for a particularly enjoyable character-building experience.
The game's battle system is also quite good. It's a CTB affair, which is a good place to start as far as I'm concerned, but the spice is added in the form of the game's system of charging up attacks, which allows them to gain power or area-of-effect radius (depending on the attack) in exchange for taking longer to resolve. This feature combines a timed hit-like mechanic with an interesting CTB quirk that gives the player plenty of choice and it's a lot of fun.
Musically the game is great, and serves as a reminder to why Nobuo Uematsu is regarded as one best in the business. Whatever your stance on the love/hate that surrounds the boss music, Eternity, (mine is love), there's a lot to like here, both in more pastoral background tracks that are mellow yet catchy, and in the high-strung, metal-inspired pieces that are used for mechanical dungeons and most of the game's (excellent) battle themes. For the rest of its aesthetics, the game has Toriyama character design
The game has two serious flaws that keep up from being the great game it should be, though. The first issue lies, somewhat predictably perhaps, with the writing. Shu is simply one of the worst talking main characters to grace an RPG, combining many of the worst tropes associated with that sort of character: annoying, incredibly stupid, yet nevertheless seems to exist in a world that proves him right. The supporting cast doesn't really recover from this, with a second (Marumaro) also managing to be annoying, and the rest being fairly bland. The only really bright spot is Nene, the trollish main villain whose zany schemes to make people suffer for no other reason than his amusement must at worst coax a smile out of the player. Yet, even he's nowhere near enough to offset the worst writing that surrounds the PCs, including one particular incident on disc 3.
Still, I could forgive the game, as I did Grandia 3, if the gameplay was consistently great. Unfortunately, it's not. While the final dungeon and endgame bosses are a joy, up until that point, there's a long stretch midgame which is just incredibly easy, putting to waste all the good things I said above about the gameplay. It's not even a game that manages to be fun while it's easy, because things like animations are a bit too slow for mindlessly destroying things with black magic to be enjoyable. It's a real shame because the game gets so good when it's even modestly challenging, but too often it isn't.
Overall, Blue Dragon is, simply, the most disappointing game I played this year. Not because it's bad... it isn't. But because I saw a game that truly had potential to be great... it could have had great gameplay, great aesthetics, and writing which was at least inoffensive. Unfortunately it fell short of that and instead is merely an above average RPG experience.
The good: Great class system, solid gameplay, music
The bad: Midgame challenge, Shu, much of the writing in general
The ugly: The suicide counseller Shu scene. Ugh.
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While I haven't played the game, I'm not sure I am 100% sold on the class system. It felt a little unbalanced to me; Black Mages skillset just seems to destroy most of the other classes and White Magic is clearly second. A lot of the gameplay seems to devolve into relatively degenerate strategy of "use black magic, heal MP, use black magic". Do you think that the end of the game forced more diversity in the class system?
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I dunno, this could just be hard mode talking here, but I'm finding that Black Mage does have a notable weakness. Namely, it's squishy as hell. You really do need the tankier folks in order to keep the back rank standing and blasting.
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Black magic is pretty great of course, but it's very obvious that other things did have a place... I was certainly using various buffs and special effects in the final dungeon (as well as physical skills, since there are magic/element spoilers), and at worst you don't want to just go pure Black/White Mage, as Excal notes, since their durability is ass. Midgame enemies (in Normal Mode) being bad makes the best pure offensive option (in this case, spamming black magic) look like the only thing worth doing, which is unshocking as it'd be pretty true of any game! As far as the actual system goes, though, it's pulled off very well.
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Wouldn't "Game has a hard mode...that requires DLC (if free)" be considered on your "The ugly" list cause its such an odd decision?
(Granted, its possible the devs realized the game was a little too easy, so tried to make up for this by tossing DLC Hard Mode for people who wanted more after the fact, but that's just overthinking the scenario.)
In an event, good reads like last year.
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Game has a patch that enables hardmode, only available online.
Sounds like most patches ever made.
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Yeah, I'm actually more inclined to view the availability of the DLC hard mode as a good thing. Most games don't have a hard mode, period (or they screw something up about it). While I'd rather it have been included in the game, free DLC is pretty clearly the next best thing, and you're probably right about why it was that way - the devs responding to a criticism about the game.
10. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GameBoy Advance, Konami, 2003)
So I played this game a few months ago and now I find that I don't remember that much about it.
This isn't the first time this has happened for me; in fact, it's an annoying phenomenon for me and games I don't consider RPGs (this isn't a stealth attempt to start an "is Castlevania an RPG" debate, I promise). In particular it has happened before, with Symphony of the Night, the game I am most inclined to compare this one to.
Much like Symphony, it's a sidescroller with a heavy emphasis on exploring a huge castle and picking up lots of new weapons and abilities. You wouldn't play this game for the raw action, platforming, and battles; there's certainly plenty better to be found in the genre. However, there's a huge variety that your PC can do, which is fun. In Aria, this variety manifests mainly in the various monsters you can absorb, giving you a host of action abilities and passives which are pretty fun to play around with and figure out what works for you. The weapon variety is less impressive, but I do appreciate that the weapons vary in quite a few ways, apart from just damage: swing rate and range are also significant factors. Usually the weapon to go with at any given time is obvious, but sometimes a few niche options are good enough to be worthy of attention, such as the fast, infinite-range, but very weak pistol.
While the action aspects of the game aren't precisely the envies of the genre, as mentioned, they are at least respectable, and in particular they mark the game's largest improvement over Symphony and are why, for a couple months at least, I declared this my favourite game of the series. One of my major gripes with Alucard's adventures on the PSX is the game feels almost brain-dead easy; Aria manages to be a sight more challenging, with bosses who increasingly try to challenge you in the second half. It makes the act of playing through the game much more rewarding, I find.
In other regards, the game acquits itself respectably. While music is a bit of a sour spot (not bad, just underwhelming), the game manages to improve on the polish (particularly in the organisation of the menu) of Symphony, and is generally pleasant enough to look at. On the writing front, amazingly, the game manages to actually accomplish something, with the main twist surrounding the main character Soma being actually pretty cool, even if I knew about it in advance.
While it's a solid game, it still left me expecting more from this series. The biggest thing is what I've already alluded to; while the game's action was an improvement, and respectable, it still wasn't good enough to really net this game a high score in my books. Most of the bosses from the first half of the game are extremely forgettable, and the game has a ridiculously large hitstun time whenever Soma takes damage, which is just inexcusable. The way the game gives you almost all your special abilities by random drops seems a bit questionable, although I don't feel it ultimately hurts the game too much.
It's a respectable game, certainly. The flaws are relatively few. But the peaks of the Aria of Sorrow experience aren't exactly staggeringly high either, which holds it back. Of course, I may just be being unfairly hard on the game, because, two months later, I would end up playing another Castlevania game which, I felt, surpassed this one in every way... but that's a story for later, isn't it?
The good: A solid Metroidvania experience which improves on the formula
The bad: Gameplay design that still needs work
The ugly: All women are useless. It's the law.
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9. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, Nintendo, 2010)
It would be a much better game if it made been made before the first Super Mario Galaxy.
I'm generally not one to turn backwards and talk about how earlier games do things better, because, I believe, as a general rule, that isn't true. Logically speaking, sequels, which have the benefit of addressing the flaws of their predecessors (not to mention the benefit of game design techniques just generally improving over the years), should outdo their predecessors. Yet Super Mario Galaxy 2 most decidedly does not, and I don't say this out of some sort of nostalgia for the first game, which a game I like a lot, but hardly at the level of the all-time favourites I really gush over.
Is Galaxy 2 still a good game? Absolutely. After all, almost everything the first game does right, it does right too! The game features level design as solid as any I've seen in a 3D platformer, using the game's trademark of variable-direction gravity to accomplish all sorts of fun little design quirks, and piling on lots of level-specific powerups to keep things fresh and interesting. In fact, the powerups are a particular highlight of the game, since there's a bunch which are all new and quite clever. The absolute best is Cloud Mario, which allows Mario to make up to three platforms before getting the power refreshed. I could play a whole game based around an expansion of this idea, it's great.
The game also does a pretty perfect job of challenge, outside one glaring exception which I'll touch on later. The game is pretty obviously aimed at people who have already played the first, and in this regard, Galaxy 2 embraces that fact and uses it to its advantage. Very few levels are total pushovers; most are satisfying to beat. A few optional stages which are intended to be very hard manage to be just that, and everything else is enough to keep you on your toes. Bosses are generally a bit tougher too.
Also the game has giant enemy hippos made out of lava. Yes, this is awesome enough to deserve its own paragraph.
So where does the game screw up, then? Simply put, it feels more like an expansion pack than a new game. New powerups (which are level-specific) aside, Mario controls identically to the previous game, with no new abilities. The levels are new, but most of the core design conceits which define levels (such as the gravity physics and prankster comets) are not. There's no new character to control (oh, how I wish the Mario series didn't resist this so!). And that's just not good enough for a sequel, to me. I can't think of a single Metroid or Castelvania that was this much like a previous game in the series, and even the most derivative of Mega Mans (a series rightly criticised for repetition at points) offers eight new weapons which significantly influence the way the controlled characters plays, first stage aside. Sorry, Nintendo, you just can't do this.
Otherwise, I can't shake the feeling that this game received just a bit less love than the first. Maybe it's that Rosalina and her charming little backstory are replaced by a forgettable purple blob. Maybe it's that the last stage is just another stage, instead of the unforgettable experience I praise the original's final level as being. Maybe it's just that Bowser is a laughable joke of a boss (and not the good type of joke like in the RPGs!), especially the final form, which placed one minor yet memorable damper on all the other good things I had to say about the game's design. All minor complaints, but they add up.
It's still a good game. It's still a game I enjoyed playing; there's a reason I got 120 stars. It is, without question, my second favourite 3D platformer (treating Devil May Cry and similar games as a separate genre for this). The game's a solid experience, and in a world where I hadn't played its predecessor, I could see myself raising it to something like #5 for this year. Yet this is, simply, not what a sequel should be. It feels weird to accuse Nintendo of all companies that they need to dare to dream a bit more, but so it goes.
The good: Solidly designed platformer with some fun new powerups, challenge balance
The bad: Wait, didn't I play a slightly better version of the same game three years ago?
The ugly: Is it even possible to take damage against final Bowser? In three fights I never saw it...
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Nintendo making a terribly safe sequel in a long running series 3 years after the last entry in said series.
I am shocked for words. Shocked again. Electric is their pimp slap. They have liquified my will.
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In fairness, on average Mario has mixed things up quite a bit all things considered. An expansion pack sequel like this would be the... second in the series really?
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Second after Lost Levels? I dunno, I honestly don't consider Sunshine some game changing step away from Mario 64. To be frank I don't consider Galaxy such a game changer over it either although it is pretty fucking awesome at what it does.
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I think Mario 64 is unimpressive; I think Galaxy is great. Suffice to say it's a bit more than an expansion pack. Otherwise, I haven't played Sunshine and think SMB2j sucks. So, I guess I don't think Mario does well with highly similar sequels (as I mentioned, even most other repetitive series tend to offer a few more things to shake up between titles than two highly similar Mario games).
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Mario as a series has been good at keeping things fresh, generally speaking. Ignoring SMB2 since that was originally a different game with a mario paint job shoved on it (which ended up being better than the original SMB2, go figure...)
SMB3 added in a ton of new conventions. Slew of whole new power ups, world map, inventory, etc. Its like the original game on major doses of crack.
SMW took a more horizontal approach. Removed a lot of what SMB3 had (though retained some), instead adding in new factors like Spin Jump, Yoshi, multiple means to finish a level, etc. This is ignoring the obvious "Its 16 bit therefor prettier!" thing (and SMB3 got a 16 bit version eventually anyway.) Oh, SMW also is the first Mario game with a save system, so that's kind of significant.
Yoshi's Island was...like a completely different game. Still a platformer, still had "Jump on enemies and they die", but everything else seemed new. It was just really well done game designed around "You are Yoshi" and expanded from there.
Mario 64, for better or worse, is the first 3D game and a completely different game in the transition than its predecessors. Don't have to go into details, and you can argue this isn't a good chance, I'm looking at it from a "It changed things up a lot!"
That's about the extent of my knowledge for games in the series. I can't really comment on new ones, though I know NSMBWii added in the whole 4 player simultaneous Co-op of Massive Politics factor, which if nothing else, adds a large amount of hilarious Friendship Breaking Fun the series didn't have before, so I'm guessing other entries in the series followed suit.
So yeah, Mario in general has been good at keeping things fresh, so saying "Nintendo making a sequel that's just like its predecessor? SHOCK!" may be true for a number of franchises they have *eyes Zelda*, Mario is one of the ones they've actually managed to avoid doing that with for the most part.
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It may do it badly, but it does do them given time in the main series is all I am saying. Like even going off into the spin offs. The Kart series hasn't changed fundamentals in like ever (64 had some strange maps?). It adds new features at a slow iterative pace though.
Paper Mario even does it. PM2 is great, we generally are quite positive about it right? 2 only really adds standard RPG things to it. It just does it well.
Zelda speaks for itself. Note that it is also Miyamotos other brainchild, so this isn't like it is out of synch with his normal process!
Metroid may shift things up a fair bit, but last I looked they were three games into their FPS series that they put out one every few years with small tweaks. They have those throwbacks on the portable systems as well (Metroid Zero?).
I am not saying that Nintendo make fucking terrible games. All I am saying is that, yes they do indeed make small progressive changes that are usually for the better. Never be stunned when the occasional one pops up that is not such a mover and shaker.
Also yes. If you pick games that are 10 years apart they seem to have a lot of advancement where they have a game or two's worth of ideas thrown in.
Just don't mix up their normal methodology not working at times to mean that it means there was something ground breakingly different in their approach. You can very obviously tell when it was different and that is when you got a total game changer like OoT, Mario 64 or SMW.
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8. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Nintendo DS, Capcom, 2011)
Much like in 2010, last year I played only one game that wasn't some shade of RPG, platformer, or action game. Last year it was an Ace Attorney game, and this year, it's Ghost Trick.
Fittingly, Ghost Trick is a spiritual (haha) successor to the Ace Attorney series, and it shows. It's a text adventure game about solving a mystery, filled with irreverent characters, zany humour, and a healthy dose of the supernatural. And just like the adventures of the spiky-haired objection-spouting attorney, I found a lot to enjoy about this game.
Writing-wise, there's little this game could have done better once it gets rolling. After finishing the game I declared that the game had a better-written mystery and serious plotline than anything Ace Attorney had managed, and I stand by that. There's some really excellent stuff in here. It's difficult to talk about without spoilers but anyone who has read a good mystery should know roughly what I am referring to here: the way the game goes in unexpected directions, the way it foreshadows and makes good on foreshadowing wonderfully, and the way it keeps you hooked, in a state of being unable to put down the game because you have -have- to know what happens next. Ghost Trick does this better than any game I can ever played, the one that comes closest to mimicking that "page-turner" effect that certain books have.
Not content to just be some sort of visual novel, Ghost Trick does a lot of little things well that help it tell its story. Its soundtrack, while not something I have ever found myself tempted to listen to regularly outside the game, certainly succeeds very well at setting the mood, and its animations lend a lot of personality to its cast of characters, none moreso than Inspector Cabanela and his ridiculous body movements.
It tells unquestionably the best story of any game I have played in the past year, so why isn't it higher? Well, simply, I expect more out of a game than story: I expect gameplay. And that is one area where Ghost Trick is woefully unable to deliver. The logical comparison is Ace Attorney, but make no mistake, it does a much poorer job of gameplay than Phoenix Wright. Where its predecessor's gameplay was tied directly to the act of unraveling the game's mysteries (i.e. the reason you're playing the game), Ghost Trick's gameplay is tied to a series of highly arbitrary puzzles where you have to figure out the often nonsensical physics of a scene and make things behave in the way the game designers want you to make them behave. The puzzles are not satisfying to solve, and only the fact that there is a relatively small number of possibilities to explore keeps them under control and from interfering with the game too much.
The game also makes some missteps on its writing. It's a little slow to get started, wasting a fair bit of time with some humour which is a little shaky, particularly surrounding two prison guards who aren't nearly as funny as the game seems to think they are. And when the main character has to save the same distressed damsel from her fourth and most ludicrous death yet (all in the first third of the game!), I will admit I had to stifle a groan. It ends up being five.
It's a shame that the writers of Ghost Trick couldn't have come up with some more satisfying gameplay for their game, because aside from that it's a game I have a lot of respect for: it spins a brilliant mystery, and despite my misgivings, I would love to play more games like that.
The good: A brilliant, cohesive, well-written, and well-presented mystery story.
The bad: Weak gameplay which connects poorly with the story to boot
The ugly: The proud tradition of Capcom adventure game physics
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7. Cthulhu Saves the World (PC, Zeboyd, 2010/2011)
Fun fact: the last time I completed a new computer game was in... 1999, I think. I'm not even sure Cthulhu Saves the World even counts as one, as far as breaking the shutout goes.
Regardless of what you class this game as, it's a good one. Generally speaking, I'm not too hard to please with RPGs that make gameplay their focus, and that's something Cthulhu unquestionably does. First and foremost, it makes a host of good gameplay decisions, so even while it looks like a game from two decades ago, it plays like anything but. The turn-based battle system that originated in Dragon Quest is polished up by reducing randomness, particularly in determining turn order (but also, notably, in damage). It has several modern and much-appreciated conventions such as healing after battle (no more wasting time going to the menu) and everyone getting equal exp. It has multiple difficulty modes, and I was able to find one (Hard) that had almost the perfect challenge balance I look for in games, so that I constantly felt like the decisions I was making mattered. You can save anywhere, which is great because the early parts of the game do throw the occasional bullshit random encounter at you.
But even past a bunch of good design decisions, it has its own, legitimately good, ideas. Skillsets grow at a decent clip, with a fair amount of input from the player in terms of what is learned, and make for interesting decisions both in party choice and in battle. The battle system revolves to a significant degree around turning enemies insane, which has the double-edged sword of significantly lowering their durability, but also raises their damage. But probably the game's most unique decision (shared with its predecessor which I haven't played) is that enemies get stronger every turn the battle goes by, which lends battles a certain intensity... even if you can manage enemies now, you won't if you can't find a way to kill them. I was worried this would make battles too much like rocket tag, but they really struck a decent balance with it so that defensive strategies (including the Defend command itself) still have uses. It's a game where you can tell a lot of love went into the battle design, which is extremely impressive considering how many people worked on the game.
The game's writing starts off on a promising note, with the best interactions coming from the narrator and the fourth-wall breaking Cthulhu. The game's situation is absurd and is played quite well, with plenty of RPG parody elements thrown in for good measure. Most unfortunately, though, it does not keep this up. Around midgame it feels like the writing ran out of ideas, and instead of being a parody it morphs into a largely bland experience which falls more intro the traps of pointless quests and bland NPC interaction than a parody of it. It's a shame, although it never takes up enough time to be remotely offensive at least.
On other fronts, the game fares less well, which is to be expected with its tiny budget. The music is nice enough for what it is, but certainly isn't winning any awards. The art direct isn't anything to write home about, though I do like how it is presented in Phantasy Star 4-style cutscenes (a game Cthulhu takes after surprisingly strongly). The game has a cumbersome interface for equipment and shops, and a few of the other menus. World maps that aren't graphically impressive have no reason to exist in modern RPGs, and dungeon design can be annoyingly maze-like at points. In general, these are areas where the game feels more like the age it first appears, rather than the age it actually is.
Still, it's a hard game to complain about; it's all but free, it's made by three people, and in general I'm overjoyed to see people outside Japan making games in my favourite genre. It's really far too tall an order to expect an indie game to beat out the bigger-budget efforts that make up my favourites; considering its situation, Cthulhu does (almost!) as good a job as it possibly could. There are games with better gameplay, but it's still very solid, and its other flaws don't keep you from enjoying it.
The good: Some great gameplay decisions, finely-crafted and fun gameplay design
The bad: Writing disintegrates after a promising start, some interface woes
The ugly: Cthulhu is an oddly unimpressive PC considering he's freaking Cthulhu
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The skill leveling system in Cthulhu pissed me off. There's all this stuff with future upgrades to the skills you pick that you don't see till the upgrades are offered, as well as the fact that you don't know if the skill you're being offered will be later rendered obsolete by something better. So it's one of those "player choice driven growth systems" that's all a bunch of bullshit guesswork.
I like a lot of the other aspects of the game that you described, but that kind of leveling system is a big black mark for me. You know how I feel about DDS, FF12, etc... cthulhu isn't as bad as those games but I can't honestly call it better than "mediocre"
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I'd hold that more against the game if an even slightly suboptimally built character would throw your progress against a wall and force you to grind. Even if you make the most conflicting decisions possible (say, emphasizing Hit Up+ abilities for your normal physical but favoring magic in stat ups), it's not like your characters will actually suck, and you can at least make up for it with picking the 'right' abilities for the last few levels. Now, this kind of screw-up is more punishing on Insane... but you shouldn't play through the game the first time on Insane, so you probably know the characters by then better, so whatever. (I'm 7/8 of the way through Cthulhu's Angels and apparently skipped Molly's best damage ability in the stat topic since I assumed she was more a mage at first, and it's hardly the end of the world - she just spams ITD Silver Bullet rather than Lunge or whatever for physical damage.)
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Monkey: Hmm, I can see that, although for the most part I felt the decisions were meant to be made for short-term reasons anyway (very few skills are useful for more than 5 hours after you get them), so I wasn't too worried about things like obsolescence. I do agree with you that it's even better if we know the whole system in advance or otherwise have it placed in a manual, but so considering how many games are notably worse about this (i.e. telling you nothing about what the new skills you are learning will do beyond such informative labels as "fire attack"), I find it weird that Cthulhu would attract your ire.
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You might not know this, but the choice you make at one point affect the choices you'll have later, so there's a good chance you won't get the best skill you want if you don't faq beforehand.
And you can't just get every skill later by getting, say, more skill points, to make up for not making the right choice. You're screwed permanently. So it's a lot worse than every other game about this and I don't know why MF complains less about it.
(That said I don't care that much since it doesn't change a lot in practice. Only annoying in theory)
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From the sounds of it, this emphasizes favouring short term decisions over long term considerations. ie. Don't worry about endgame, worry about right now. It's certainly showing in how conversation as to how good/bad this system is seems to align with short/long term priorities.
I haven't played the game, so I'm curious. Is it possible this was a conscious decision, or simply how things landed thanks to the other design decisions.
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Yeah, from the sounds of it that charge is more fairly leveled against Breath of Death VII, where a few characters learn skills within a few levels of joining that are their bread and butter all game. But there the upgrades rarely change anything fundamental about the skill in a way that makes you reconsider taking one over the other, so it works out fine.
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Well, you need to remember that this affects not only skills but stats.
You could somehow think Sharpe would make a good mage and give him more magic than strength. This would go nowhere, his magic sucks. He could maybe still have access to good physical skills lategame, but he would still have sub optimal stats.
I didn't try by myself to make Umi a good physical attacker out of fear something like that might happen!
I feel choices are less relevent in the long term in other games, because every battle later gives 100 times more SP/exp/money/whatever now.
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It felt like you could get something out of mage Sharpe if you wanted, actually. His magic stat is pretty low so buffing it often would actually help out those wind spells a fair bit, and they do get reasonable upgrades. Just, you're probably better off emphasising what he's already good at. My general feeling is there weren't any really rude surprises in the builds but I could be wrong. Certainly there was nothing that bugged me, maybe I was somewhat lucky with decisions though!
6. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PlayStation Portable, Square Enix, 2011)
As a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics, its predecessor is a game I had heard about for many years... usually with a disclaimer of "but it's much less polished, don't bother" attached. Still, it was a game I was always kinda interested in, and when it got an updated remake with actual polish, I was certainly interested... with good cause, as it turned out.
Where to start? Well, let's talk about that "actual polish". The game has one of the best interfaces I've seen for a strategy RPG, adding many things that its successor failed to. Making the turn gauge constantly visible is nice (though is of course something we've been seeing since Final Fantasy X), as is allowing the player to take back movements after investigating attack possibilities. But even bigger than these is something which, to my knowledge, is pretty much new to this game: the way it handles damage projections. No longer do you need to be in range to see them: choose attack, hover the cursor over anyone you want, and you'll see both how much damage you do and how much they do back on counters, even if you're not yet in range to make this attack. This is a wonderful feature and generally streamlines gathering information for your plan of attack, and I never even knew it was missing until this game showed me it. Great stuff.
Of course, this wouldn't matter if the game weren't fun to play with some good battles. Fortunately, it delivers on this. Battles are great fun, with plenty of unique enemy designs to overcome and some rather well-thought out maps. Battles are suitably challenging generally, with certain plot-important boss fights being among the hardest in the game and especially satisfying to beat. it handles death, revival, and permadeath are about the best I've seen, combining FFT's "death counter" with a CTB penalty for dying so that it avoids overpowered revival chains, and a "three strikes and you're out" system with permadeath which makes it less frustrating than in some games. This last bit becomes particularly necessary when you reach maps in which you can be instantly killed by being pushed off cliffs (those sound unpleasant in the original!).
The game's class system works both for and against it; I'll touch on the latter half of that statement later. While the class system doesn't offer the customisation of an FFT or Wild Arms XF, the classes nevertheless manage to play very different roles and are fun to toy around with, even if archers are almost certainly overpowered. Warriors, mages, clerics, knights, berserkers, ninjas and more... plenty of classes found uses, and most were very distinct from each other, which was nice.
The game has nice aesthetics, as well. I am quite fond of the artstyle of the game; it is rather like FFT's, only better-defined and the characters actually have noses. The game's sprites are pulled straight from the original SNES game and don't feel out of place one bit in a modern game, which speaks to their own quality. And the music is pretty great to listen to, with many tracks beautifully backing up the feel of the epic battles the game is going for. This is one game where an orchestral update to the soundtrack was completely approriate and works to the game's benefit.
It's a great update, but of course, it's not perfect. Its chief flaw is one that almost everyone who has played it is aware of, and it is a rather crippling weakness: a huge oversight in the class system. All classes start at level 1, and level is absolutely huge in this game as it governs not only stats, but legal equipment. This means that as you get new classes throughout the game, they are steadilly less useful, because they are increasingly underlevelled. It's an awful balance decision and means that you end up using the same classes all game, which really ruins some of the fun of the system. While I praised the options those classes offered, it would really have been nice to force the player to make decisions as new ones showed up. Additionally, there isn't too much you can carry over from class to class, so compared to FFT or XF there just isn't the same customisation possible, and it feels a bit limiting.
Additionally, the game's mechanics feel a bit intentionally confusing at points, something I don't approve of in a strategy RPG. There are aspects of the gameplay that I suspect are glitched (certain buffs and skills) but it's hard to tell! Whether they do work (and just suck) or they don't, it doesn't do the game any favours.
The game's story is a bit of a mixed bag, which isn't too surprising considering its age. There's some great political stuff in there, and navigating just who is and isn't on your side (as well as who is and isn't a good person... and the two questions are distinctly not the same!) in the first half of the game is a lot of fun. Unfortunately there's a shortage of truly compelling characters (like FFT if FFT lacked Delita), and the plot devolves into a complete mess once the aforementioned questions are answer, becoming first a boring war story and finally a completely nonsensical adventure to stop some dudes from summoning a demon for a reason that isn't ever given that I saw.
Still, the complaints aren't the type that hold a game back significantly. The story flaws are entirely forgivable (it's not even like it's a bad story game!) when you have that gameplay, and the good gameplay means I can look past one or two bad decisions. It's a shame that the flaws of the class system keep the game from being truly amazing, but it's still a game that I feel they did a wonderful job updating, to become, along with XF, the second worthy FFT successor on the PSP.
The good: Great gameplay backed up by some good design decisions, good challenge level, aesthetics
The bad: Some bad decisions with the class system, plot goes downhill
The ugly: Step 1: Betray superiors. Step 2: Sacrifice life to summon demon. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!
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I think the class system is also fundamentally weak. Many of the later classes (the later mage classes in particular) just feel kind of pointless. I actually did do a lot of levelling in this game to catch people up and aside from Ninja for generics they don't feel worth it. Where I think the game suffers is in its special classes, which you basically will never use most of due to them being harshly underlevelled.
About the final stuff: It's a bad sign when I FORGOT that there was a final dungeon when I played the remake. Except for my first playthrough of the original, I always just did up to Heim and then quit.
:) Glad you liked it.
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I'm slacking on these this year for some reason, dunno why. I'll try to finish them by the end of the month at least.
5. Bayonetta (Xbox 360, Sega/PlatinumGames, 2010)
And so we reach the climax of this year's list, the game you've all been begging on your knees to hear about, the game that... I'll just stop. It's Bayonetta; you can't talk about the game without going there, because the game certainly will at every opportunity it can get.
Fortunately there's much more to talk about with this game. For instance, the fact that its gameplay is pretty rockin'. The game is strongly in the tradition of Devil May Cry and God Hand, and succeeds very well at emulating their general good design while also providing its own spin on things. Bayonetta controls very well, and the array of enemies the game throws against her are a joy to overcome, with most being very distinct and memorable, requiring you learn how to fight them individually. Bosses are a more epic fare than genre norms, which has its ups and downs, but at the very worst they are memorable fights and at best they are oustanding tests of the player's skill. And Bayonetta's distinguishing ability, Witch Time, adds a lot of fun to the game, rewarding you for skillfully dodging by giving you an opening to attack. It's used brilliantly in-game, not only due to some enemies being designed such that the opening you get is incredibly valuable (as they are constantly on the attack otherwise), but due to the fact that there are rare occasions where some enemies are immune to the effect, and that really makes those fights nasty affairs.
The game nails its grand strokes well, but also does a bunch of smaller things I appreciate. Perhaps the best is its loading screen... while it'd be better still if the game didn't have one, of course, the game uses its loading screen to give you chance to practice, even showing which buttons link up into attacks and which don't. It really helps by making a normally otherwise unenjoyable part of games enjoyable! Another nice touch is that the game lets you demo new abilities (complete with a tutorial) before buying them.
Ultimately, though, probably the most memorable thing about the game, for better or worse, is its sense of style. The game is unafraid to offend, and certain to be remembered. Sometimes the style works very well. The design of the angelic enemies, and the way each new one is introduced, is something I found appealing. The game's humour, particularly its shameless referencing of past games the creators of the game have been involved in and the lovably inept rascal Luka, generally works. And sometimes it's just completely over the top in a way you have to applaud. DID MY HAIR JUST TURN INTO A GIANT DEMON AND EAT A BOSS? Yes, yes it did. I won't even go into how the game tops itself in the endgame; it's crazy.
Of course, the double-edged sword of this is mainly found in the way the game dials its fanservice level to the max, too. This is especially the case for me and my own biases: heck, I threw a comment about sexism in for relatively plain case like Aria of Sorrow, so you can probably imagine my reaction to the hyper-sexualised Bayonetta, whose every animation appears planned to pander to male gaze and whose ultimate attacks involve her removing all her clothes. Yeah. It's certainly not something I'm going to applaud, although marvelously it does end up less offensive than it easily could have been, for two reasons. One, the game is so ridiculously over the top in every other way that the fanservice just feels like part of a ridicuous package instead of existing for its own sake, at least somewhat. Two, the game avoids what to me are some of the most insidious examples of video game sexism: Bayonetta is very strong and independent, certainly not defined by men, and when she does eventually need saving by a badass supporting character, said character is also a woman. So there's that.
The game isn't flawless on other fronts, either all, good though it is. While I could mention the cluttered and crowded menus, they ultimately don't detract from the game too much. What does is a couple gimmick stages. Bayonetta is quick to switch to other genres briefly to keep things mixed up, much like some games have mini-games. While some of the shorter experiments in this regard work well as a little spice and change of pace, the two that dominate entire stages are pretty bad failures. Neither the racing game nor the rail shooter stage are impressive examples of their genre, and the latter in particular is quite disastrous, with such regrettable design decisions of having the screen spin in a disorienting fashion whenever you dodge an attack (and you want to do this often), and having disturbingly few checkpoints, forcing the player to redo large amounts of the boring stage, which is not at <i>all</i> the reason he or she is playing the game, should he or she die.
On the note of checkpoints, hilariously I think the game often errs and occasionally has too many. Checkpoints in the middle of boss battles, in particular, I feel are questionable. There's really only one egregious example, however, of a boss fight feeling ruined by it, and since you can't take advantage of this if you care about score, it's ultimately a very minor complaint.
Bayonetta's a great action game which makes one or two annoying mistakes and has a sense of style which... I can't come away in total praise for, but it is memorable. Definitely not a game I'm soon to forget, and I game I know I will always like a lot, but can never love.
The good: Great action gameplay, good polish, over-the-top style often works
The bad: The sexism present in said style, those damn genre stages
The ugly: The main villain, dialing the creepy up to eleven
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I am still at a loss on exactly how I feel about the pole dancing in the closing credits. Bayonetta in general was a strange experience.
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4. Radiant Historia (Nintendo DS, Atlus, 2011)
In an age where the RPG fandom has become fragmented, clamouring for vastly different things (cohesive story vs. roleplay, exploration vs. tight gameplay), it's become quite rare for any game in the genre to achieve near-universal praise. Radiant Historia manages it, so it's worth close examination to figure out why.
Let's start with the gameplay. Radiant Historia comes up with a relatively simple idea - place the enemies on a 3x3 grid, allow the player to push them around, and make enemies pushed into the same square vulnerable to simultaneous attack - and runs with it very well. Both the player skillsets and individual battle designs are very clearly developed with these mechanics in mind, and the result is battles that are both a lot of fun and which have a distinct feel from almost any other game. Other games have made enemy (and PC) position important, but few have made manipulating it so key.
Visually, Radiant Historia's sprites and artwork have a bit of a dated feel, but nevertheless are things I found appealing. However, they're not the highlight of the game aesthetically: that would be its wonderful soundtrack. Yoko Shimomura, one of my favourites since Legend of Mana, delivers a soundtrack in which almost every track is not only well-written in a vacuum, but also perfectly evokes the right emotions for its use in-game. The only real knock on the soundtrack is its brevity, so some tracks do eventually get repetitive, but when the quality is this good, that's an easily forgivable flaw.
The writing's quality is more mixed, but still something that does the game favours, unlike a number of games with this level of gameplay. It gets off to a quick start, introducing speical agent Stocke's position within the operations of his country, a fate of the world which he has to try to avert, and the game's pervasive and trademark time travel in rapid succession. From there on, it continues to spin an effective yarn involving a good mix of politics and fantasy. Stocke himself is a fun main, kind but heavilly introverted, and a few of the villains and supporting characters are quite memorable as well. As is often the case, it can be difficult to get into without spoilers, but I will mention that I thought the different leaderships of the two major warring countries made for some pretty nifty figures, particularly Alistel.
Unfortunately most of the other PCs are regrettably dull, with only one or two others having much worth at all. It's, unfortunately, not a game which bothers to develop its PC cast much, which is far from the end of the world but a bit unusual in a game that otherwise has clearly decided writing is worth paying attention to. The plot also tends to trip over itself a few points with the time travel (which isn't exactly surprising given the past track record of time travel plots). It gets difficult to remember what has happened on each timeline, and this is made even worse by the way that changing events in one timeline may cause an equivalent event in the other... sometimes!
On gameplay the most annoying misstep is probably the decision to so greatly limit party choice. Since Radiant Historia is a game where PC skillset is fixed by level and sidequests, and equipment isn't terribly exciting, party choice represents the main facet of customisation. Unfortunately, of the seven PCs, two have harshly limited availability, and furthermore, Stocke is always forced. And with only the main party getting full experience, there's a case against experimenting with the little customisation you're allowed on this front. This feels a bit limiting, and certainly diminishes the game's replay value, sadly.
Still, few of these complaints are that ultimately damning, and the game does so much well. In every important front the game manages to turn in at least a respectable effort. As such, it's pretty easy to see why it's a game most anyone who likes the genre will find something to play it for. Unfortunately, it also doesn't blow me away in any one area, or give me reason to think this will still be a memorable game for me a decade from now. This doesn't prevent it from being a very good game, and the second best game I played from my favourite genre this year.
The good: Solid core gameplay, Stocke, much of the writing
The bad: Much of the supporting PC cast, limited customisation in gameplay
The ugly: Being able to predict the entirety of both Gafka and his entire race within moments of meeting him
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3. Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo, 2011)
If I had done these writeups back in 1993, not only would Super Mario Kart have been #1, but it would have been the subject of more gushing than Niagara Falls. For nearly a decade I considered it my unquestioned favourite game of all time, and even today it remains a contender. I'm never certain if the game's special place in my esteem makes me more predisposed to like its sequels or be harsh to them, but they certainly have been games I've sought out... at least the ones on the console. The plainly-titled Mario Kart 7 is the first I've extensively played on a portable, and it's a good one... one of the few on this list I really feel I need to reach to list flaws for.
The game's immediate predecessor, Mario Kart Wii, was a game I perceived as a slide in quality for the series on a few fronts, so the first expectation I had for MK7 was that it correct this slide. By and large, it did so. The game was sped up again, the player no longer loses a large amount of momentum from relatively small bumps, and (possibly due to the reduction of racers from 12 to 8) one is no longer pelted so relentlessly by unavoidable lightning bolts, blue shells, and POW blocks (the last being gone from the game entirely). While the leader-killing blue shell unfortunately remains, two design decisions make it somewhat less egregious: it hits other racers en route to first place (making it more useful for the racer who actually gets it, especially if she takes the effort to aim), and first place can actually dodge it with a well-timed mushroom. This in turn creates an interesting dilemma for the leader: to carry a mushroom to defend against blue shells, or other items to defend against the more common but less dangerous red?
On track design, which was Wii's greatest strength, MK7 is a slight step down, but still good. Many of the new tracks serve to highlight two new mechanics the game has: driving underwater and gliding through the air. While they're mostly merely new, temporary physics sets, the gliding mechanic does provide a way past item defences, via firing shells from above. Even aside from these new racing environments, though, the new tracks are solid. Three maps consist only of one giant course rather than a set of laps, which gives them a more epic feel (predictably, they count Rainbow Road among their number). My personal favourite, however, is Neo Bowser City, which combines a good piece of music with a challenging, technical track demanding extensive use of power slides. The game also includes, as is becoming a welcome series tradition, sixteen retro tracks from past games, updated to make use of the modern mechanics.
The game has a few other new mechanics worth noting. Two are, in fact, old mechanics from previous Mario Kart games: the hop button, and coins found on the racetrack which slightly increase speed. Both serve to add some much-appreciated spice to the gameplay. A third new feature is a detailed radar which shows both the surrounding track and any threatening objects. While its existence has downsides (it further devalues the blinding blooper against human players, and neutralises the skill of tracking red shells by sound), on the whole having additional information available to the player works to the game's benefit, making it less and less a game of chance.
On aesthetics, there's a few things of note. The music is solid if unexceptional fare, channeling Mario Kart: Double Dash! as its primary influence (to my approval, of course). The aforementoined Neo Bowser City provides my favourite piece, a futuristic and barely sinister version of the game's lively main theme, perfect for the dark, urban setting it is used for. The graphics, meanwhile, are largely similar to those of the game's predecessor, outside of one big difference: they're 3D! While the 3D has downsides (it blurs if viewed at an angle, e.g. by a spectator, or if the player isn't quite still, e.g. on a bus), it can at worst be turned off, and at best lends the graphics a new level of realism, or at least as much realism as the highly cartoonish Mario allows.
The game's shortcomings, sadly, are awfully familiar charges against the series. It still insists on maintaining a bit more luck at the expense of skill than is optimum for a multiplayer game, with blue shells and dragged items continuing to overstay their welcomes. And while the new mechanics are nice, they don't change the fact that we've now gone nearly a decade since the last game-defining change, Double Dash's two racers per kart and the resulting effect on item management. Yes, a little conservatism from Nintendo's most successful franchise outside Mario and Pokemon is hardly surprising, and yes this game took steps in the right direction, but it's still something that weighs on me about the game and the series.
Also worth noting is that the game does contain a terrible glitch, which pretty much ruins one of its otherwise great tracks, at least for competitive play. It's possible, at one point, for the player to make an unintuitive 180 degree turn into a lake and be droped by Lakitu, inexplicably, about a third of the whole race ahead. It's not the end of the world but it feels pretty horribly unpolished, like something that decent playtesting should turn up.
Still, the complaints feel ultimately minor. They hold the game back from greatness, but they certainly don't hold the game back from being solid, and a worthy entrant to the franchise. The game even got me to try out some anonymous online play, and given my general apathy for such an activity, that's a pretty notable accomplishment.
The good: An all-around improvement to the Mario Kart formula in a lot of small ways, the new 3D
The bad: Some annoying traditions remain, the Maka Wuhu glitch
The ugly: They cut Dry Bowser and BABY DAISY from the roster ;_;
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The ugly: They cut Dry Bowser and BABY DAISY from the roster ;_;
BLASPHEMY I BLAME CIATO FOR THIS
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2. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Nintendo DS, Konami, 2008)
The second of the two Castlevania games I played this year was easily the better one, and indeed, seemed to address most of the concerns I had with the series and finally turn it into something I could legitimately fanboy over. Now if they just get rid of their annoying tendency to hide the endgame behind some FAQ-bait requirement...
Anyway, Order of Ecclesia is simply a legitimately great sidescroller. Making it from save point to save point (which also act as full-heals) in a dungeon can certainly be a challenge, as you can never really coast an overbloated HP supply like in some games in the series. The game expects you to learn how to fight its individual enemies, using the many different tools at your disposal, and if you don't, you'll die. Boss fights are even better, certainly the best the series has put together so far. They're generally patterned, hard-hitting creatures that would feel quite at home in a Mega Man game... often challenging, but never unfair, as every one of them can be reliably perfected once you learn how to fight them properly (and the game even rewards you for doing so).
It's not just about enemy design, though; much of Order of Ecclesia's success comes from how fun the PC side of things is, too. The game ditches the weapons of previous games, and instead combines them with the often so-so spell/ability sets into one single, cohesive glyph system which is a hell of a lot of fun. Glyphs make up all of Shanoa's attacks, with the game allowing her to set two attacks and one utility power. These attacks vary greatly both in element and damage type, but also in the type of weapon or projectile they create, with a variety you'd expect from multiple Mega Man games rolled into one. And just as it becomes very clear that constantly swapping glyphs in the menu is going to get annoying, the game hands you a glyph sleeve which lets you switch between three pre-made setups at the press of a button. It's a great system that would do a lot to keep combat fun even if the enemies weren't intereesting.
The challenge is up, but the game also lets you take more ownership of your losses than previously. Gone is the long hitstun for taking an attack that plagued Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow. Much less is tied to random drops than in previous games... most of the main glyphs are gained either in fixed locations in dungeons or are stolen from enemies as they try to use them. Random drops feel mostly used for completionist-oriented sidequests than anything truly important, now, although a couple high-level attack glyphs and a few gimmicky but not overly relevant utility poewrs.
The game has multiple difficulty modes. The game has a replay option with a second, rather distinct PC. The game has so many abilities and combinations you can set that even within the same mode you can play it in complete different ways. In short, the game has replay value. Order of Ecclesia is the only game on this list which I have already replayed (barring Mario Kart 7, where the idea of a "replay" is not easily quantified), and I'm closer to playing it a third time than all but one or two of the others a second. A nice bonus the game has, for certain.
Like Metriod Fusion, which topped my list last year, this game somewhat tones down some of the exploration aspects which had existed in its own series. Gone is, for the most part, the idea of exploring a single large dungeon. Though you do ultimately end up in Dracula's Castle and it's still decently large, and there's certainly some secret-hunting to be done in it and many of the other stages, the overall design of the game is definitely less focused that direction, and more on throwing challenging gameplay in your path and letting you respond with a powerful and varied arsenal of weapons. I'm quite fine with this, as it lets the game maintain its direction, and increasingly I find the appeal of large-scale exploration is lost on me. Still, it would be fair to say that this game is more Megamanvania than Metroidvania. (Wait, I think I just figured out why I like it so much.)
It's a great platformer and it does very little wrong. My main complaints about it, aside from the already alluded to hiding of the endgame behind a stupid FAQ-bait requirement, is that the platforming itself is a little uninspiring. It's nothing bad, but it's certainly not something I'd play the game simply for, which is too bad because I'd have loved to see Magnes in a more platforming-heavy game. I'm also not a particularly big fan of glyph unions and how using them causes you to get less money, but that's a pretty minor quibble. After all, it's hard to complain about a mechanic that you can at worst ignore! I suppose the storyline is kinda lame too (Shanoa's lack of personality borders on alarming and it's not like any of her castmates are anything to write home about) but I think I've already compared this game to Mega Man (not to mention past Castlevania titles) enough for you to guess how much I think this drawback hurts the game.
Order of Ecclesia is an outstanding game in a genre I enjoy a lot, a game that I feel took a solid but unamazing series and turned it into something I could really gush over. I could easily have taken it to be my #1 game this year if the mood had struck me. But hey, a second consecutive year of well-liked but somewhat niche platformer taking #1 on this list wouldn't be as discussion-prompting as... well. We'll get there soon enough!
The good: Great, challenging action-based sidescroller with terrific weapon options
The bad: FAQ-bait endgame, platforming could be better
The ugly: Screwing up the Dominus plot use twice and having to refight a tough boss each time!
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I am very proud of my Eligor medal. That was a bitch.
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Oh god your number one game is actually FF13. What the fuck. That's just terrible.
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Yo Dysley, Imma let you finish, but Order of Ecclesia was one of the best Elf games of the year. Just sayin' Dracula deserves it, here.
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Oh god your number one game is actually FF13. What the fuck. That's just terrible.
It is obviously the Hello Kitty MMO.
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Zenny, why do you even bother posting on this forum if you never have anything nice or productive to say? Instead of contributing to the conversation of the topic, you've decided to be an ass for no reason. If you have so little respect for your fellow posters that you never bring anything but petty insults to the table, why are you even here?
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Oh god your number one game is actually FF13. What the fuck. That's just terrible.
Correct me if I'm wrong but...haven't you like...not played FF13?
Cause if so...
I don't care if you hate it for everything it is conceptually, you have no standing in whether a game is good/bad until you play that, you know it, and much as you can try to argue otherwise, you'll just make a bigger idiot of yourself for pretending to know the quality of a game.
Hating a game and disagreeing is one thing. Hating a game you never played just because you say so is pretty much bottom tier of intelligence.
If you HAVE played FF13, then feel free to disregard this post, though my point stands for all other games.
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Can we just not do this shit? Like seriously? All three of you know better.
Why does Zenny come here? Because it is a community and he has friends here. Hard to believe I know, but look at the last page of his post history. Just to let you in on a secret? NEB is actually probably one of them or at least part of the community he likes conversing with or seeing the opinion of (note that he paid attention to what NEB played this year and this entire list) .
http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=26
What has he done? Talked about a movie he has seen, discussed politics, posted back and forth about politics, posted about his day, discussed games other people are playing (not like this, like talking about Fallout New Vegas specifically and one about MMX5). There have been jokes as well, but this was the only post in his last 25 that was aggressively negative.
And Meeple, how the hell can you say junk like that. People don't need to play entire fucking 40 hours games to make an informed decision about them. Especially not these days. I can throw out the token nod to the very extensive reviews that float around the entire internet from people's blogs, forum posts and professional reviews regardless of quality of those these days. There is tons of information out there about games, especially after they have been out over 12 months if you want to find out about things.
Not to mention we live in a day and age of Lets Plays being kind of this thing you might have heard of. You can search around and follow one to get a pretty decent idea of how a game plays out, the functions of the combat system and the core plot.
Shit I can give you a pretty lightweight opinion of FE10 hard mode right now if you wanted and I haven't touched FE10 let alone hard mode. I have enough peripheral information about it to make an informed decision about it such as "would I like this game" and express some shock and probably disapproval if say Dhyer rated it 10/10 and the only mode of the game you should really play.
And Zenny, you can make better jokes than that. I know you have lost control of your sphincter after all these years of abuse but lets just cut this shit out.
Edit - And fuck you clowns for making me make srs post.
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I haven't played (or watched) FF13 and I know it is ass.
Now come on NEB, where's that Hello Kitty review?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaKlLZlbQZo
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Zenny, why do you even bother posting on this forum if you never have anything nice or productive to say? Instead of contributing to the conversation of the topic, you've decided to be an ass for no reason. If you have so little respect for your fellow posters that you never bring anything but petty insults to the table, why are you even here?
Oh wow this is happening. Gee, notice how I've been keeping up with this topic and reading through the posts? Perhaps it's because, despite my irreverent attitude, I actually find Elfboy's opinions interesting? I wouldn't have clicked on a topic in this vein done by Meeple much less kept reading it.
Respecting people. Internet. Pick one.
To address Meeple's wank, whatever. I watched my friend play through a fair portion of the game (probably about 4 hours of the midgame split up?), I've read people's opinions (Grefter's aside, though as usual he had the BEST opinion), I've watched a handful of Youtube videos, read a plot synopsis... enough to get an idea that this game made several design decisions that would bore me to tears if I played the game, and didn't have an interesting enough plot for me to give a shit beside that. So, in my lightweight opinion, the game looks bad and I guess unlike some people I'd rather spend 40 hours of my life doing something other than playing a game I'd probably hate just so I can POST SRS BSNASS about it on the INTERNET.
That's enough treating Meeple like he's people. In any case, there are some games that I HAVE played a bit of closer to the top of his list (Order of Ecclasia, namely, and I'd put Mario Galaxy 2 leagues ahead of FF13 myself), and NEB putting this game at the top of the list is something that I disagree with and is not in line with my own opinions is terrible.
Now let's untwist those panties and get back on topic, OK? Ok!
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Yo Dysley, Imma let you finish, but Order of Ecclesia was one of the best Elf games of the year. Just sayin' Dracula deserves it, here.
Castlevania Dracula is a pretty good reason to not give a game from that series the #1 spot, yes.
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Can't we all be nice to each others friends? ;/ Please.
@ NEB - Been enjoying these. Really looking forward to the FFXIII review. I think you might like the game even more than I do! Which is quite a feat I think. I'm not sure if it'll ever top SO3 or LoD for me (or if Vanille tops Aeris!) Maybe LoD (but can Vanille top a fully fledged Meru as a PC!?)~
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If you only like two RPGs more than FF13 then you definitely like the game more than I do!
I'm just vocal about my likes and dislikes.
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I'm just waiting for the big reveal that Elfboy's #1 game is actually Tetris.
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Watching someone play FF13 is functionally the same as playing it, so I don't see why it's any leap to form an opinion on it based on that.
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And yes, finished this, and not even a week behind schedule!
1. Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360, Square Enix, 2010)
Much has been already written about Final Fantasy XIII. Chances are most people reading this have a fairly strong opinion on the game, whether or not they have even played it. You may think it's the best JRPG of the current generation, or the worst, or anything in between. Regardless, I'll submit that it's probably one of the most worth talking about. Almost nothing is conservative about FF13's game design; for better or worse, it strikes out to re-invent its own genre.
Right off the bat, and one of its most key traits that makes me like the game, is its decision to streamline the RPG experience. The game will never, ever make you spend half an hour exploring a town for plot triggers, or collecting items for some lame fetchquest, or forcing you to play mini-games, or figuring out where the game wants you to go. If you want to get on with the game, you'll always know what you have to do (follow that orange arrow) and I for one greatly appreciate this. The game has been concentrated, shedding all but the aspects of the RPG I actually play games for: telling a story, and having fun, enjoyable battles. It means that I can turn the game on, play for an hour, and expect to be entertained rather than to put up with some sort of bullshit.
In another effort to speed up the game experience, dying in battle now takes you to right before the battle began. Other games have done similar things (such as recent entries in the Wild Arms and Suikoden series), but with FF13, you don't just get to refight the battle, but tinker with your setup as well so you can find something that works better. Even better, if you think a battle has gone south but don't want to wait to actually lose it, you can restart the battle with from a menu option. As a result, you'll never have to redo large amounts of game due to a death.
This, of course, frees up the game to make battles much more challenging. No longer having to worry about annoying players by killing them, many of the battles in Final Fantasy XIII, regular fights as well as bosses, can be deadly. A few are deadly enough that the game is actively encouraging you to avoid them (such as a few memorable nasties when you first arrive in Pulse), but for the most part, they're just relatively challenging fights that the game expects you to use the system against. Especially from later in the game I find most individual enemies memorable, something almost unheard of for me after a single playthrough of an RPG. I consider this a great thing.
As for the actual system itself? Again, it's pretty terrific. It succeeds at what I feel many action RPGs fall short at, mixing the analysing and decision-making found in RPG battles with a fast tempo. Choices are still made via menus, but the decisions need to come fast. The game's interface strives to make this possible; you can queue actions as your ATB gauge fills up instead of waiting for it to be full and then scrambling at the last second. It's pretty much the best version of ATB the series has produced, rewarding quick thinking without sacrificing too much of the strategy side of things. Also serving to help this is the paradigm shift system, which allows you to control the way your party fights, with more difficult battles expecting you to make use of it extensively to react to what the enemies are doing and manage your party's strategies. Like a good action RPG, it's a game where I can forgive the fact that only one PC is controlled directly because with the speed of the game it simply would not be possible to control all three.
Several more decisions surrounding battle are good and need to be noted. First of all, MP is gone, so you can focus on just managing and surviving each battle instead of trying to horde it away for an unforseen rainy day, which generally makes things more fun I find, putting the emphasis further on individual memorable fights. There are plenty of choices to be made when assembling a party, as each PC varies not only by stats but their available roles and skillsets... and the PCs furthermore get full CP (Exp, essentially) when out of the party so the player is free to try out different parties without screwing herself over in the long term. The game adopts a scoring system which provides the player with incentive to play well (instead of just slowly turtling through fights), which means you always have something to shoot for in battles, even the ones which are easier. And if you're bad at the game, it will start throwing shrouds at you, which have a very powerful effect on battles. I personally disliked them because they felt cheap, but I can see why they're there, to help ensure the game is ultimately completable regardless of one's skill level.
So the gameplay is new, fresh, and generally a smashing success. The writing is less so, certainly, but it still does some decidedly good things. In particular, it manages to deliver a very strong cast, in which each character has clearly fleshed out, unique motivations and comes from a unique background before the story begins. Very often this leads to the characters clashing, and combined with the generally horrid situation they find themselves in, leads to a lot of dramatic tension and quite a few good scenes. It's great to see a game put this much effort into all of its characters; they're not all likable people by any means (something I find refeshing), but they are quite interesting and play off each other well.
There's also some good setting elements in the game, those they bothered to flesh out anyway. Cocoon society bears a frightening resemblance to some of the more unpleasant aspects of our own, with a government which takes a page from Orwell and induces fear and paranoia in its own citizens to gain their compliance. It made for an enjoyable antagonist for our heroes to go up against, though sadly is really only a factor in the first half of the game.
Unfortunately, writing is also where the game makes its biggest errors. In general, the whole second half of the game feels incomplete, with far fewer cutscenes than are needed to flesh out the story the writers were trying to tell, and a considerable underutilisation of the game's second setting, Pulse. And while the PC cast is excellent, the NPC cast is virtually non-existant. One NPC has some decent romantic scenes via flashbacks, and the main villain deserves points for being a deviously effective troll who masterfully manipulates the PC cast to do what he wants, but past that there's little to like, with Rosch, a villain who the writers can't seem to decide if he's dead or not, being a particular black mark. The game, in its effort to create strong, dramatic scenes, sometimes goes too far and falls into weak melodrama merely toying senselessly with the player's emotions, with one particularly egregious example being a sequence involving one of the PCs considering (and ostensibly committing) suicide.
Though these are certainly the game's biggest faults, it's not flawless on other fronts, either. While the AI control ends up perfectly acceptable, there's still no real excuse to not allow the player to switch leaders, and to tie a leader's death to game over; it feels inelegant. And of course, the game could really afford to grant the player more choice of party and roles earlier in the game. This latter concern isn't a huge one to me (after all, plenty of RPGs never offer party choice, or offer very little, including a couple already on this year's list!) but it does lead to the feeling of a lengthy forced tutorial. If it is a tutorial, it's still a very fun one to play, and does ease one into the game's various roles and strategies before expecting you to put it all together against the nasty fights in the second half, but a little less restriction on this front would still have been nice.
The game has a few other signature decisions which I do not consider weaknesses, but I would do the game's reputation a disservice not to discuss them. First and undoubtedly foremost is the game's linearity. Without question, it is a rather linear experience. Outside of lategame FF5 and FF6 (and FF5 is a bit of a stretch), the series always has been quite linear, so this really isn't anything new, but certainly FF13 is moreso than most; the plot makes it impossible for you to backtrack until late and the dungeons don't offer much branching (though of course, neither did those of FF9 or FFX, for instance). "FF13 is linear" is a true statement, but it's a linear genre and anyway I can't see this as much of a weakness anyway. I generally prefer linear games for their ability to have tighter narratives, better balanced gameplay, and not waste my time figuring out where to go, so, of course, I'd be more inclined to view this as a positive attribute of the game anyway!
Another contraversial aspect of FF13 is its decision to do away with towns. Given the story FF13 set out to tell, towns (outside the one town-like environment it does have, Nautilus) would feel very out of place, given the PCs are on the run from the government. But even setting that aside, I don't really feel as if there's much of a loss. After recently watching the first disc of FF9 again, in which the game expects the player to waste loads of time activating plot trigger after plot trigger in the town of Lindblum (all to tell a not-exactly-intriuguing story), I can't say I miss most of them. Towns are at worst a huge timesink into things which are uninteresting, and at best a good opportunity to develop setting, but as you can see from my earlier comments I don't think FF13 failed to do so anyway.
Similarly, the game mostly did away with sidequests. While on the one hand, sidequests have the potential to add to a game inoffensively (optional content which you do or don't do at your leisure), they again would have felt out of place in the story FF13 was trying to tell (fugitives don't really have the time or the desire to do fetch quests), and again, they aren't something I especially miss, because I'd rather not have them at all than put up with bad, forced ones which waste my time. The game does eventually open up enough to have them, and they're pretty much the best type of optional content in a game (tougher bonus fights, not "find this hidden item" type garbage), when the story no longer has the PCs so pressed for time. While it's a legitimate complaint that they aren't available earlier (one I'm more sympathetic to than complaints about linearity or towns, certainly), in practice I didn't find it personally bothersome at all.
That leaves one last shout-out to the games graphics and music. It is of course fantastically pretty, which at this level is in fact definitely worth something to me, and the soundtrack, while not perfect throughout, certainly delivers some very solid tracks, and in an RPG it's always a big bonus when one of those is the most common battle theme.
Final Fantasy has, with only occasional exceptions, always been a series that has preferred to lead rather than follow. Certainly, FF13 represents a bold step in a new direction, one which chooses to emphasise certain aspects of the genre. Fortunately for me, they're the aspects I care about. It's the polar opposite of Dragon Quest IX, for me; rather than a boring retread of the genre's failings, it tries instead to step away from those and pull the genre in an interesting new direction. It's not a game without its kinks, but it was nevertheless a unique and thoroughly enjoyable experience, and only my exceptionally high opinion of Final Fantasy X prevents it from entering consideration to be my favourite game in a series that I hold in quite high esteem. And ultimately, that's enough to reign over all the other games I played this year.
The good: Some great battle design decisions, solid gameplay executed well in many memorable fights, very strong PC cast
The bad: Storytelling goes seriously downhill late, limited party/leader choice early
The ugly: The eternal internet shit-slinging over this game
That's it for this year. Hope everyone enjoyed reading.
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Playing Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light now, and reading this review, all the "Side Quests" "Towns", "Get Item to continue plot for padding" etc. stuff that FF13 cut down is really emphasized further, and really shows how FF13 doing that was a good thing. Game is just so much faster paced and honestly, the two games basically display the same thing in different ways:
Both exemplify that the old style of jRPGs is NOT ideal, and in fact, rather cumbersome and annoying. 4HoL has pretty much all the archaic, classical traditions, and the game kind of suffers because of it, where as FF13 removes them and...felt better for it.
One thing I felt you should have noted regarding towns that you didn't was why towns USE to exist. They were breaks from gameplay, and often times to restock, upgrade weapons, use Inn to heal MP, etc. None of this is actually needed in FF13 of course; gameplay breaks are handled by Enemy-less areas in the game (which are blatant due to lack of Invisible Random encounters), as well as long cutscenes, Inns are obsolete when you fully heal (both HP and status) each battle, and Shops are handled by Save Points, which the game has plenty of scattered. With all these considered, Towns are now an obsolete feature that is just unnecessary for FF13, outside of "THEY'RE A TRADITIONAL ASPECT IN A jRPG!!!" complaints, which if Dragon Quest has shown us anything, staying to tradition is not always a good thing, and sometimes change is good.
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Plot/character stuff
Playing 13-2, I'm noticing that the game moves best plotwise it's only two characters. I don't think the decision to add monsters to the team was just for the gameplay value; it's because FF13's writing works best with a small number of characters. The game was ambitious in its' attempt at character work, so much so that it focused on the dyad dynamic to the exclusion of the game's actual plot. The fact that you have to read the datalog to really follow the plot just shows the inherent limitations of this format. That said, the plot's not remotely deep at all. It should have been better than what it was; the concept is pretty simple in concept and neat enough. Just the execution is hurt by the very premise of why you split up (Fugitives on the run!) and the game doesn't give you enough looks at the broader world to give you a real feeling for it. That said, I was bored out of my mind by chapter 8's stuff, so I don't know if it could have been worked into FF13 effectively. It's much quicker to read a cutscene than it is to wait for a fully animated and VA'ed scene to play out.
FF13 also feels like a game where they wrote the plot up to C9, realized that they didn't have enough gameplay, and tacked on extra chapters.
FF9 fails at life, RPG towns
This strikes me as more of a knock on PSX games than anything else. To rehash an example I used earlier in PM: Lufia 2 and FF9 have a similiar amount of gameplay, with the former having a lot of puzzle elements in it's dungeons. The latter is roughly double in length. It isn't because FF9 has tons more plot- it does have dialog and cutscenes, but a lot of that is just generic filler/sidequests and hardware limitations.
The entire PSX era is characterized by a lot of bloat and missed chances. The smashing success of FF7 did a lot for RPGs- it was ambitious on a scale that the console RPG genre hadn't seen before and was one of the first that strayed from the typical swords and spells setting. FF7 also had one of the best RPG towns of all time and one of the most celebrated scenes of all time (Midgar and Aeris getting Masamuned respectively). It's flaws are obvious in retrospect but it's still a good game.
It was also a generation too early- the playstation era did not have the hardware nor the translation, writing, budget and effective VA to make most games of FF7's scale work. Ask a SO2 fan about the Lacour tournament of arms and you are going to get profanity. Ask a XG fan about disk 2 and you get mutters about them running out of money. Ask anyone about Dragon Quest 7's intro of pain and you are going to get stabbed, ask a Suikoden 2 fan about the translation and get tears, etc.
It's amazing what developers took from FF7. No, it wasn't the cutscenes and forced minigames (Though FF7 had some fun ones and rewarded you for them); it was a cool gameplay system and a lot of good plot work. You can't recreate Midgar in every game, or hell more than once a game- FF7's worst arc hands down was the fucking Cosmo Canyon stuff, where it kept you way too long with characters you don't care about.
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Reading all this, it rather amuses me that I'd prolly give DQ9 and FF13 the same 7-8 range score.
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As I tried desperately to get to sleep last night I was stuck dwelling on this. Not because RARRGH FF13 BLOWS CHUNKS but because all the reason Elf likes FF13 are things I hate in it, but strikes me as them being the exact things I love in Mass Effect 2.
So yeah. Then I got stuck on the "I really want to see how Elf takes to that series" tangent, but I am tentative because I am pretty sure he won't like it. Most likely not the first one at least (which is rife with all the issues of piles of cruft), but jumping straight into the second one would not have the same comparison.
Now even I am not self indulgent enough to demand someone play two games that I don't think they will like just to see their response as a thought experiment (it would be a cheap one though! Hell I would shell out for both games if you were interested).
One thing I really got stuck on is, put in a world with tons of entirely optional content, how would NEB take to ME1 and just how does a completely minimal play through of ME1 play out.
Then with ME2 how would he handle the optional crew missions, that really are optional but the game beats it over your head that you should probs do these. Then there is the whole "well if he does them and enjoys them, would he do DLC missions".
So congratulations Elf. You have me running through the kind of thought experiment I normally dream about seeing results of mc interacting with things.
Edit - Also because I hate myself and can't keep any personal promises. Possible solution to FF13 pacing.
Save anywhere. Save points now function entirely just as shops. Turn these into Camp spots like BoF 4. Thoughts on that elves?
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Save anywhere. Save points now function entirely just as shops. Turn these into Camp spots like BoF 4. Thoughts on that elves?
FF13-2 has this. It's one of the better changes.
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The whole thing or just save anywhere? (Camp style short breaks seems odd for 2 person interaction, but cool, whatevs)
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Oh, I meant just saving anywhere. It also saves automatically, which I'm a little less fond of since there's monster recruiting but what can you do.
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As I tried desperately to get to sleep last night I was stuck dwelling on this. Not because RARRGH FF13 BLOWS CHUNKS but because all the reason Elf likes FF13 are things I hate in it, but strikes me as them being the exact things I love in Mass Effect 2.
Stripping out "filler" has different effects on different things. You interact more directly with ME, you know, move with the stick, act with buttons. Exploration in FF games is one of the times in jRPGs where you are getting this kind of gameplay, and FF13 really doesn't have much of that. When you cut down on the "filler" in ME, it's cutting down on menu navigation.
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I'm pretty neutral on save-everywhere vs. save points, provided that save points are provided relatively often. I think save-everywhere either requires some more careful design to make sure the player doesn't screw herself over (e.g. saving in a dungeon from which there is no escape) and with no save points you either need to give the player warning that a boss is coming, or allow players to restart battles should they lose to the boss. If games do all of this, then I'd call save-everywhere an advantage, since it gives the option to put the game down whenever.
Grefter: Mass Effect is currently the WRPG I have most interest in, for what it's worth! I may get around to it eventually but I am notoriously lazy.
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Reading all this, it rather amuses me that I'd prolly give DQ9 and FF13 the same 7-8 range score.
Replace 7-8 with 0-1 and I'm right there with you.
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Meeple: Not a good comparison because FF4Hol is awful all around and handled the oldsk00l elements extremely poorly (like the Dark Spire) That's like saying TRPGs are inferior to other RPGs because Hoshigami sucks and Hoshigami is a TRPG. I don't think you can just lump together "sidequests" and "having to talk to random people in town to progress"
FF5-6 and especially DQ8, among others, would have lost a LOT of flavour without any exploration / without any sidequests / with every sidequest stringed together linearly) More recently, Fallout New Vegas. Dark Souls, too kinda. RPGs shouldn't all meant to be about exploration, and they shouldn't all be about a perfectly lined string of fights either. I'm just glad there are both kind of RPGs around, both can be interesting (even though I usually like linearity more, nowadays)
Anyway, remember guys when people complained because Xenosaga and FFX were too linear? Hah.
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Particularly in a game with an entirely fictional world, exploration is an important part of cultivating a player's connection to the world that will presumably be changed in some way. FF6 is the best example I can think of; seeing first-hand how everything went to shit makes defeating Kefka much more rewarding than it would be to hear about how shitty it is in Albrook or read about conditions in Mobliz from a data log. Being able to wander around and find things you recall but are now shit helps invest the player somewhat.
As I had no fondness for FF13's world, it's fate doesn't really concern me any more than all those other countries that suddenly went to war in ToL did when I quit playing it.
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Less the save everywhere and more the Camp style optional minor interaction that is of interest to me. Removing the save functionality is mostly to expand on the point of them being optional "breather" sections in the plot. So they could be the five minutes the party has to stop off and utilize whatever the magic instant delivery black market Internet shopping they have access to as fugitives.
It was a stylistic choice rather than something that primarily was intended to be a game changer (although I do prefer it as it lets player dictate they play times and allows much more flexibility).
ME I think will hit some ideas that interest you, but as a gameplay guy the straight up clunkiness will be pretty game killing for it sadly. Not that I have ever particularly good at predicting your tastes historically >_> (DQ9) and to your credit you do put up with a lot of shit once you have started (DQ9).
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Anyway, remember guys when people complained because Xenosaga and FFX were too linear? Hah.
Yes and I thought they were morons then, too!
I don't think FF5 would have really changed dramatically if the the world 3 was strung together in linear fashion. FF6 definitely changes, yes. But regardless it's certainly just a matter of preference. Like you I'm glad there are both types of games so I can focus more on the ones I enjoy.
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FWIW, I jumped into Mass Effect 2 and skipped Mass Effect 1 just fine. Have somebody spoil the plot of ME for you first and you're good to go. On the other hand, I liked ME2 sufficiently to be interested in playing ME1 now, warts and all, so who knows.
and the main villain deserves points for being a deviously effective troll who masterfully manipulates the PC cast to do what he wants
Okay, you're right. I hereby award the villain 3 points. However he could have got far more if the PCs didn't suddenly become gullible idiots the game had written a twistier C10-C13 plot, or the PCs ever had conversations like they have at the beginning of chapter 10 rather than seemingly blundering forward.
Spoilers! C9->C10... okay, passable. But it's easy to 'manipulate' PCs with godlike powers. Sure, give them an escape vehicle on an exploding ship that takes them to the l'Cie training grounds so they'll be strong enough to kill you. Most importantly, the PCs figure out that something weird is going on, and that Bart *wanted* them to escape, but hey, they're stuck here, so guess it's time to battle it out. While this plot is weird, it's good from a writing perspective: the PCs remind you that they are competent, but the villain's scheme proceeds anyway. I award Bart 1 point, you get more for making the PCs *want* to do his plans than simply trapping them there with godlike powers.
C10->C11... okay I'm just going to forget about Cid and assume he was operating on his own to save Cocoon by killing you. However, I guess they still ride Bart's owl-airship to Pulse? Was this part of the plan too? I hope not, seems like lots of things can go wrong from Our Heros visiting Pulse, for all that they don't end up using the one useful scrap of information they find well. So... either negative points or 0 points. Let's assume 0 points. Also, as a writing thing, I would have limited Bart from visiting Pulse. It's a Big Deal when Pulse fal'Cie make it onto Cocoon in the vestiges; shouldn't be it be similarly difficult for Cocoon fal'Cie to visit Pulse? But whatever.
C11->C12... attacking the PCs to make them want to kill him? This makes sense in the end, so sure. But telling them the actual *truth* about what he's up to at home? And the basic truth about Orphan's Cradle? What. No this doesn't qualify as master manipulation, this is the PCs inexplicably following along for no damn good reason. The PCs are told that they can kill Orphan, that doing so will destroy Cocoon, and P.S. head here to kill Orphan. And they do so anyway! There's a number of ways this could be explained but since the PCs themselves don't really explain why they're doing it, the only thing getting any 'credit' are plot hammers, not Bart. Can you imagine if Kefka told the Returners "Hey, push the statues, it'll destroy the world, they're on the Floating Continent, see you there?" and they all went to the Floating Continent anyway then pushed the statues themselves?! Hypothetical Kefka gets no points for... I'm not sure what, since the PCs don't trust Bart, yet do what he asks anyway, 'cuz.
C13, the big reveal about why Bart has been antagonizing the party the whole time - that he was half of Orphan who needed to be slain to be born to die again - okay that was pretty cool. The rest of the ending isn't, but hey. I award him 2 points.
Meh. FF13 could have been a 9/10 game for me if the plot had gone to hell in the last quarter, and unfortunately for him, the villain is a fairly big feature in said part of the game.
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I'm not sure there's much point arguing with you since our opinions in what makes a good villain apparently clash pretty badly, plus I find you very hard to shake from your established interpretations of scenes (see also: XF, Lunar). But sure.
The key parts you're missing is how he *also* tells the PCs that he has tricked the cavalry into attacking Orphan, causing the PCs to rush to Orphan's Cradle to stop them. Once they arrive, he both traps them there and instantly turns all the Cavalry (which, recall, they had counted among their few friends during their ordeal) into Cieth, to remind them how powerless they are. In general he is very good at getting across that his own victory is inevitable. When the PCs spout about how they'll refuse to kill Orphan, he retorts that he'll just find someone else who will, inevitably, since he can at worst repeat this plan until it works. He operates from a position of great power so of course the manipulation is relatively easy but he does a darn good job of it, impressing the PCs and driving them to despair with the threat of his inevitable victory.
Ultimately I have a different interpretation of you than the PCs, I didn't feel they were gullible idiots at all; I think Dysley played his hand well and through a series of psychological assaults made them do what he wanted them to, and don't think many people would have fared much better. I don't like the second half of the plot much more than you do but unlike you I feel he was the one good part of it and generally speaking his time on screen and actions were the best scenes in C11-13.
Could he have been better if the writing during this part of the game was overall better? Absolutely, he could have been one of the best villains in RPGs ever and he's clearly not. But yeah, still solid.
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Adding to that the PCs were obviously under the impression that Bart was acting on his own, and consequently when it came down to it they were willing to kill him (assuming they could) while leaving Orphan alone. This turned out to be false. Now... you can take issue with the fact that they immediately fought back when Bart/Orphan attacked them, rather than retreating or otherwise trying to do anything except exactly what the villain wanted, but for some reason FFXIII held up "Just do what you can, and deal with the consequences as they come" as the ideal form of heroism. Probably one of the core choices that leads to the fucked up narrative in the first place, but I guess that's... one way to get across the "don't give in to despair" theme.
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"Do whatever and deal with consequences later" isn't just the game's ideal heroism, it's also a description of the development process. Yes, do spend years and millions of dollars making an engine for this one game, and have your art team design assets the entire time they do so.
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Hey, at least the entire development team had a shared ideal!
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Good point CK.
Dark Holy Elf: Hey, most of what you said I agree with! (Unlike XF.) The villain still gets 0 points for that because I like to pretend the Cavalry plotline doesn't exist, it opens more plotholes than it solves. Bart's entire convoluted plan hinges around the fact that only really, really powerful Pulse l'Cie have the magical moxie to actually destroy Orphan. If mortals & Cocoon l'Cie like the Cavalry could ever have been a significant threat to Bart, then there would have been a million easier and faster ways to commit suicide than the plot of FF13. So either
A) Yawning plothole of doom.
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B) Fine, Bart throws out a bluff, and the PCs don't scrutinize it *at all* and fall into the trap anyway without even acknowledging this. Fail. Bart doesn't lose points but he doesn't gain any either off something like this working. (Though sure, making the Cavalry monsters to demoralize Our Heroes, fine, decent villain despair-spreading.)
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Isn't the key theme about overcoming your defined role and your inability to bypass it other than death? That is kind of the whole issue with the Cieth and all that shit. The Fal'Cie also suffer that exact same problem. They are built to do a specific thing and even if they do not desire it they are unable to go against it.
Where the humans are unable to avoid it because otherwise they will die mindless monsters (or succeed and die as Crystal Jesus).
Fal'Cie on the other hand don't even have that choice, they are unable to go against the reason they are constructed. Douchey McDoucheDouche pushes the party to fulfill the destiny forced on to them by Pulse Fal'Cie all the while "Protecting Pulse" which is his prime directive. He just deliberately does a kind of bad job about it, but he does still do it. Same goes for the main one.
The Cavalry can't just kill the Cocoon Fal'Cie because they straight up can't be made to kill them. The Fal'Cie can't give that command because it goes against their prime directive. That is also why they attack you when you fight them even though they want to die, they have to continue to protect Cocoon even though they want it destroyed.
So just like humans, they can only break their destiny by getting someone to kill them.
FF13 has a ton of plot holes, but those aren't really ones that I see myself.
Sorry this doesn't make much sense, typing it up over work laptop while things load, so it is disjointed and not a single strand of thought.
Edit - To clarify this is directed at someone to agree with or maybe disagree with them.
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The idea that it would cause despair would have worked a lot better if the Cavalry characters had even the slightest iota of development.
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Snowfire:
Well, it's pretty obviously B. Yes, if the heroes stopped and scrutinised Dysley's bluff, they might have been able to figure out it's a bluff. However, it would have been at best an educated guess on their part. Could they afford to take that chance? Their dilemma pretty much was: Ignore his threats and maybe the cavalry does take down cocoon, chase after them and you at least have more options down the line. I don't think it's terribly realistic for the PCs to respond to that gambit with a "...whatever, let's just hang out on Pulse some more and smoke some weed; he's... well, probably bluffing, right?"
Things like this are why I like him; he makes the PCs pick a bad choice but it's the best one they have.
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Not going to get involved with the plot discussion, but I'm crying foul here because while all-in-all I enjoyed FF13 (about a 5.5-7.5 range game), the one thing that annoyed me to no end was the Arbitrary Level Caps on the Crystarium and that needs to be listed under the "Bad:", if not the "Ugly". FF13-2 drops this and suddenly I have a new favorite PS3 game (played NieR on 360, so...).
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Seeing as I found myself not hitting the cap (though I often got close) by the end of chapters in Crystarium often, and its always more than enough to deal with whatever you're fighting with, it struck me as an adequate way to prevent people from just using "GRIND MOAR TIL YOU WIN!!!" I dunno, feels weird for of all things to complain about, to home in on that one.
I mean, I can see not liking it, but acting like its such a big deal that Elfboy needs to specify it out strikes me as odd.
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Elf: Yeah, as noted, I sort of agree with you in that this particular scheme *could* have been a cool plot twist if the surrounding plot worked better. Unfortuantely, if I'd been writing the script, I'd have been highly tempted to have the PCs give the middle finger, call the bluff, and stay in Chapter 11 land and try to accomplish their original goal in C11. (Weed optional.) Not sure FF13 would have had a satisfying climactic conclusion, but hey, more villains left for FF13-2 then or something.
Djinn: For whatever it's worth, I would have made the same decision had I been a designer of FF13. The problem is that in many games with 2-3 "skill trees," the optimal choice is to just pick one and focus exclusively on it. Making a Diablo 2 Amazon who invests in both Bow & Spear skills is just plain suboptimal. In D&D type systems, knowing lvl. 5 Foo magic is far more powerful than knowing both lvl. 3 Foo and lvl. 3 Bar magic. Even in something like Xenosaga III, which has cheap costs early and expensive costs late, eventually picking a branch and sticking with it is rewarded by uber-broken ultimate skills. More generally, people often *like* to specialize.
The problem is that if you actually did this in FF13, combat would become incredibly lame. (For the haters, *far more* lame than you think it already is.) The main way you control the flow of battle is paradigm shifting. If someone has decided that Lightning will only level Commando, Vanille only Ravager, and Hope only Medic, then you basically would pick one paradigm set and let the AI auto-battle it out every time. It also wouldn't even be that good! Once you started doing this, you end up chained into this more; "Well Lightning's Medic is so far behind already on the good curing spells why even bother, it'd be a huge investment to catch Medic up to non-uselessness, I'm just going to up her Commando skillz more, I see a pretty handy ability on the next tier and I want it!"
The solution is obvious: don't let your players fall into a trap. If you know that exclusively focusing on one role leads to unfun gameplay (regardless of how effective or ineffective it is), then don't let players do that. The Crystarium caps are cues to go level your other roles and to make sure your characters are well-rounded and have options, rather than having only 1 or 2 roles which are at all useful.
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Elfboy, who doesn't grind, is not bothered by something which puts a cap on grinding, since it, uh, never affected him. C'mon Djinn, you know me better than to be shocked by this!
I hadn't actually thought about Snowfire's argument for why it's there but that makes sense to me. I'm not sure what I think about the cap objectively since obviously some people like to grind large amounts and this does stop them from doing so (hi Djinn) but there is a reason it is there and even if there weren't you can't really expect me, personally, to mark a game down for that.
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There is that and that the one place you could realistically grind to do more than just squashing the game it helps keep the player from skipping straight to after game content in chapter 10.
It isn't like there isn't a grind solution to difficulty problems anyway. Weapon levels kind of eliminates it as an attempt to completely remove it as an option. Crystarium just gives clear defines cues that you are done here, move on.
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Yeah, there are only 3 stats that upgrade directly via Crystarium which are HP, Strength and Magic. All of them can be boosted via weapon/armor upgrading (HP's a little harder of course, but still doable), so if for whatever reason you find your current Crystarium levels insufficient with the cap, there's still a way to improve your characters beyond their statistical level equivalents. And you can definitely grind to boost them since just about everything gives refinable materials, and if they give shitty ones, you sell those and buy better ones from various shops. The option of grinding still exists, yeah, just not in the "lol OVERLEVEL!" way.
And...that's a good point, Snowfire, hadn't thought of that! I'm not sure if that's the thought put into FF13's Crystarium as far as level caps go, but the Crystarium in general definitely promotes flexible set ups over specified ones. After all, there's a clear advantage to raising all 3 of the primary roles vs. one if only because stat gains are evenly divided that way (I know when I first started, I figured "ok, Ravager will raise Lightning's Magic, Strength through Commando! Became soon apparent that this is very much NOT true, as stats are just sort of shoved around all over the place, and you definitely want to raise all 3.)
The specializing aspect only really kicks in for skills (someone who rarely uses, say, Ravager will have no reason to branch off and waste CP on Ravager skills. This is actually a fair and legit decision. The stats of course are always useful, and generally skills are at the end of Paths, so skipping on skills rarely hurts your stats, thankfully) and when the full roles open up. Still, yeah, game definitely wants you to at least invest in the primary 3 roles.
(This isn't me challenging your point, more just reflecting on it. The only thing I "question" is if Specializing had anything to do with Crystarium Cap.)
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Though on that note, I have to say that FFXIII's upgrade system is pretty goddamned annoying. It seemed to me that you never really had enough cash to properly upgrade a full party, and even if you took the time to grind for money you'd just slam into a wall when you don't have the rank up items.
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It is really a terrible approach to power gaming in general yeah. There is no point in the game I believe cannot be beaten with level 1 weapons and capped Crystarium level and the weapon upgrade system rewards dumping large quantities into it at once (have I mentioned how terrible that system is lately and how smart it was to make it largely optional in the main game?). If someone wants to do it though it is there, just like grinding out levels is most of the time in games that aren't batshit stupid with Exp like Hoshigami.
Oddly also for power gaming, even if you could specialize without stat penalty you wouldn't want to pretty much as Snowfire notes. Inability to buff/heal/debuff is that much more effective than raw stats and skills in Sab/Rav. The one thing that you wouldn't be penalized for mechanically for specializing immensely would be be the turn bonus for Paradigm shifting. You can shift between two paradigms that are duplicates for the turn bonus. I know I was doing that for the majority of the game due to sheer limitations on party configuration (also is super boring FYI).
So while I am totally distracted from my point. I think the Crystarium in FF13 is actually well designed. It is restrictive, but directs the player and really informs them of the "correct" way to play and helps with game balance by setting a benchmark for them to balance against.
I can also understand disliking this of course. To counter point the Elven anti grind agenda.
Djinn, who loves his N1 grind, is bothered by something which puts a cap on grinding, since it restricts player choice and diversity of playstyles. C'mon Elfboy, you know him better than to be shocked by this!
Edit - For clarity and cut down phone posting ADD.
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Snowfire- I strongly disagree with that, since FF13 already autocurves growth. Specializing is not worth it when CP costs jump massively every time the grid expands. Putting the caps in there just feels like a pointless, silly decision when you already have it capped hardcore by in game CP gains.
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Super points out my main problem with the Arbitrary Level Cap. If the game wants to encourage me to use lots of different roles, that's fine. It just annoyed me when I would run into a WALL! all of a sudden. In a game where Party Composition is more important than direct actions, at least give me some room to Customize what my party does. Let me blow all my CP on one or two higher-leveled Ravager skills/upgrades and then catch up Sentinel when I feel like it.
Note: I didn't actually grind very much at all in FF13. But I never failed to hit the Arbitrary Level Caps in every single section. It's possible CP gains/costs were changed from FF13j to FF13a?
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Djinn, who loves his N1 grind, is bothered by something which puts a cap on grinding, since it restricts player choice and diversity of playstyles. C'mon Elfboy, you know him better than to be shocked by this!
I'm not shocked that he disliked it. I am, however, amused that he thinks I should dislike it!
CK: I think my main complaint with the upgrades is those rank-up items, yeah. There was no indication of which ones worked on which item so you just had to buy one and check if it worked (then reset if it didn't since those things are expensive), kinda lame. Otherwise it seemed inoffensive. I rarely am a fan of IC but FF13's didn't actively piss me off.
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Well I can't say more on that topic without grossly misrepresenting Djinn! Hope that wasn't too far off centre as is Djinn.
Calling the weapon upgrade system actual Item Creation is a bit generous. It doesn't exactly create any new distinct items such as upgrade existing items on a linear path. It is more like an alternate form of progression. Abstract it out and it functions similar to the Crystarium right?
You have distinct paths that you get points from beating enemies (item drops in this case being an extra step in the way and having the option to spend money on it, which you get largely from beating enemies also), the more points you put into it the more stats you get and you upgrade your unique skills that each item gives. It follows a lot of the same basic principles and serves the exact same purpose and has similar functions (but smaller scale for skills obviously). There is just this system of multipliers being ramped up for feeding shit Mechanical objects and organic objects giving high experience sort of kludging up the system with multiplier resetting the more experience you feed things (which is not reduced as you input items, but after you have fed it entire piles of an item). Then there is the not being able to know what will upgrade the weapon, branching upgrade paths that you can't see the impacts of and the intedeterminable experience caps when it is optimal to be feeding items pretty much all the experience they need to level cap at once (which can lead to wasted items).
I don't consider it suprising that it wouldn't actively piss you off, it is optional and the game in general is pretty much designed with weapon levels to honestly be gravy. If you had to use it? I think you would have a different reaction. It is a FAQbait system that punishes players for ineffective use of their experience items (or disproportionately rewards you for being abusive I suppose? Either is a good sign of a system I consider poorly designed). That it is optional shouldn't save it from observation though.
Applying the experience scaling back curve on an item by item basis instead of just in big exp piles would go a long way to flattening the benefit regardless of how the player interacts with it. Now i don't know if this is how it works currently or not, but if the Organic items scale back the multiplier based on experience given by the item rather than quantity of items being converted into experience that would make all organic items of roughly equivalent value. That goes a huuuuuuge way to fixing this system which as is has a huge pile of items for it that are pretty close to useless. It doesn't got towards fixing the Mechanical items which have all kinds of really expensive ones that give you like 5x multiplier straight away and are completely worthless because the cheapest one can be used to get a higher multiplier than that more easilly and be bought for far less than the money gained for selling those gives. So there is a whole class of item in this system that is effectively worthless. I have no idea how to fix this honestly.
Does the problems with that system sound familiar? It is kind of like that weird point that games like Suikoden get at end game with double Experience runes and low level characters getting way past the intended point in the experience curve because of the experience gain being multiplied for the starting level instead of tapering back as they level up. Except unlike that weird point that only really creeps up at end game if you want to totally game the system. Except here it is the entire system. All of the time.
As an aside just out of interest, what level weapons did the Elves and Ciatos end the game at roughly if you don't mind?