Elfboy's 2011 Game Retrospectives

[Dark Holy Elf]

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.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

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.

[Fenrir]

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.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

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.

[Grefter]

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).

[Dark Holy Elf]

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.

[SnowFire]

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.

[Dark Holy Elf]

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.

[Cmdr_King]

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.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

"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.

[Cmdr_King]

Hey, at least the entire development team had a shared ideal!

[SnowFire]

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.
-or-
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.)

[Grefter]

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.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

The idea that it would cause despair would have worked a lot better if the Cavalry characters had even the slightest iota of development.

[Dark Holy Elf]

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.

[DjinnAndTonic]

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...).

[Meeplelard]

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.

[SnowFire]

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.

[Dark Holy Elf]

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.

[Grefter]

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.

[Meeplelard]

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.)

[Cmdr_King]

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.

[Grefter]

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.

[superaielman]

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.

[DjinnAndTonic]

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?