What Games Are You Playing 2013?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

I'm reading all this crap about MP running out in XF and I'm sitting here baffled at what game did you play. I -never- had resource issues in that game.

[hinode]

Stop giving me more @#$%&^&@$% Goddess Staves, Infinite Regalia.

*shakes fist at RNG*

[Fenrir]

...
It really looked much too slow, even for FF9 standards. Well FF9 from the european PSP/Vita store is actually 50 hertz PAL FF9.
It is 17% slower FF9.
...
*deletes*
(As a reminder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7h9htbYDss&feature=player_embedded#! )


Snow: XF is overall generous with MP but it's not like you can just waste it entirely. It'd be the perfect amount of MP given to the player if not for hidden reinforcements.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

I'm still baffled. I used Turn Shift -a goddamn lot- and never had issues with resources. And fuck, I've only found out Magic Berries even -existed- this playthrough. >_>

[Tide]

I recall a couple of long maps (like 2-16) where MP is an issue. But I played through the game both times using mostly combo arts and lock-on to conserve resources. Having a few PCs with random smashing options helped since it let everyone else save up on MP. This just usually meant Levin would be out of MP nearing the end of the map.

[Hunter Sopko]

WKC: You know, some of the plot twists in this game would be pretty good if they were properly built up to. There's just not enough of anything to make it compelling. Kara continues to say everything I want to say to other characters and Caesar continues his running meta-commentary on the game that mirrors my own assessment. Other than that, just kinda goes along. Game isn't really as bad as advertised. It's just... unremarkable. Kinda like FFXII if it were better plotted but had a blander story.

Townbuilding being balanced around online play makes me annoyed. It's actually pretty fun, but since you can upload the town online for other people to use, they made it so you can only max ONE of the 6 aspects/stats of the town at a time rather than all of them eventually, forcing you to either constantly shuffle or go to other peoples' soon-to-be non-existant online towns. Oh well. I suppose it made sense at the time but I doubt it'll be fixed when the servers are shut down.

[Sierra]

ME3: Go away, ghost kid. I'm trying to play a game here! Goddamn.

Really not sure what they're going for with this. It is war and people die? No kidding, game, because suddenly everyone's dying, and since these are people I've known for a while it actually means something:

-Mordin, noooooo! At least he died doing what he loved: singing Gilbert & Sullivan. (Also SCIENCE.) I hate to think how much worse that scene could've turned out if I hadn't told everyone about the sabotage before he went up the tower.
-Yeoman Chambers, R.I.P. And I thought she was better off where she was than on the Normandy! Henceforth, my fish maintenance program shall be referred to as Kelly.
-Thane. Long time coming, but still.
-Udina. Oh wait I shot him the head. Well, it was still somewhat of a surprise when he came off as not an asshole for like the first time ever when I talked to him early in this game.

We are supposed to feel sad or just more sad because this time it was a kid that died? Sorry game but I am a heartless bastard and this is a narrative so I need a reason to care about someone. And shamelessly manipulative hack writing is the best way to ensure that I do not care about someone.

Questionable writing decision #2: "That assassin should feel ashamed of himself." No kidding, Thane. Look, guy, your job is just to murder one dude. The best way to murder that dude is doing it before he even knows you are there. The worst way is to jump down really loudly behind him and waste a minute menacing your target until armed support shows up and you are outnumbered three-to-one. Next time you have a chance to kill someone, don't hesitate! Mook feels really out of place in this context, all flashy weeaboo sword technique in a game that nearly fetishizes run 'n' gun marines.

I swear I've spent magnitudes more time killing Cerberus goons this game than I have Reapers. What a bunch of twits. Oh well, at least the Council actually thanked me this time.

In other news, I got to see a giant sandworm eat a giant space robot. It was neat. Genophage has been cured! Not without some reservations, mind--again, I would have zero hope of this ending well without these particular leaders in charge. I don't really trust any species to responsibly, voluntarily curb its own population growth. But at least they're not a race of nihilists anymore and that is really why I did it. I have no personal interest in having children myself, and tend to think it is a thing people do from an honestly kind of creepy compulsion of instinct and that the best thing the human race could do to mitigate the myriad environmental problems it's caused is to get control over just how many of us there are causing them...but the fact is that negative population growth just does awful things to the collective psyche. Look at any nation with a declining population and there's just this pervasive cultural malaise. What I'm saying is, Children of Krogan? Pretty spot-on and it had to end.

Random other stuff:

-So now I can chain-freeze dudes so that when they explode they freeze other dudes. It's pretty great.
-Encouraging Joker to mack on the computer is the best thing.
-Still no sign of Talis. They better not be doing what I think they're doing.
-Jamaican me crazy, Javik. It's actually kind of nice to see the Precursors weren't all they're cracked up to be.
-Why isn't Blasto a real movie franchise? I would totally pay to see a movie about a renegade jellyfish cop who plays by his own rules and the laconic elephant alien thing that has to put up with him even though he is three solar days from retirement. Henceforth, I consider "badassfully" a perfectly real and legitimate word. No, I don't care what you say, Firefox spellchecker. Is the criminal scum feeling fortunate?
-She just came over to use my shower. (The storyline is ludicrous.)

[AAA]

Do yourself a favor and youtube what happens if you side with the salarians, unless you have a problem feeling like The Worst Person In The World.

[Yoshiken]

Game isn't really as bad as advertised. [...] Kinda like FFXII

As for FF9 discussion, I enjoyed reading into stuff a while back and found out that the guy who pretty much designed everything in FF9 made all but one decision - he wanted the combat to be the fastest in the series, and Sakaguchi suggested changing it to the slowest so that people could enjoy their nostalgia trip at a slower pace.
Ito would have given me a remarkable amount of hope for the future of the FF series, if not for the huge role he played in FFXII.
(Also the same person responsible for AP, Materia, and Triple Triad, and hell, I've spent the last 9 years playing Triple Triad online.)

Edit: Also, as for comments of FF9 being entirely dull options but some are faster, I think you can cut the 9 from that. I mean, hell, FF8 and FFX are much worse for having a stupid amount of boring options than FF9 is. FF9 gives you less options but at least some of them (read: Quina) are mildly entertaining to play.

[Dark Holy Elf]

As for FF9 discussion, I enjoyed reading into stuff a while back and found out that the guy who pretty much designed everything in FF9 made all but one decision - he wanted the combat to be the fastest in the series, and Sakaguchi suggested changing it to the slowest so that people could enjoy their nostalgia trip at a slower pace.

Well that explains bloody Lost Odyssey, I guess.

And no other FF is nearly as slow as FF9. FF8 is the only one close and having just watched both again recently it's way faster. Its fighters are also insanely boring PCs as the Zidane discussion alludes to. So no, I won't be dropping the 9 from that sentence.


Fire Emblem 7 - At the last map.

Suikoden 2 - Just came back from the first visit to Matilda.

Paper Mario - Started this randomly, still early. No timed hits make the early battles extremely bland, but I presume it gets better.

[Meeplelard]

I dunno, I played FF10 Tidus SCC and that was quite fun (...and painful at times...) because Tidus has a full skillset and options to explore, not to mention Overdrives are handled so much better than FF9 Trance.  Auron and Wakka, the other two primary fighters, also have options you'll be using quite a bit to exploit, and FF10 also has better support abilities to speed the battle up on equipment, etc. 

FF9...the only fighter with a remotely interesting skill-set is Armarant and he joins with half of the game finished.  The other fighters are pretty much pointless fluff skill-sets that you'll just be using their basic physicals most of the time.  Sure, Freya and Steiner get MT damage eventually, but it's so late that you don't fight much in the way of big groups anymore.

[Yoshiken]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the speed of FF9. The options, though, are there, for all that character availability hinders it a little. Freya, Amarant and especially Quina have some really interesting options, and Vivi is, at worst, the same as every other Black Mage in the FF series.
Compare to FF8 which throws you a bunch of GF skills! ...where you're lucky if you ever use more than 1.
Or FFX! Loads of options! But, outside of some ridiculous challenge, none of them will ever be more than time-consuming ways to win.
I guess I rate FF9 combat highly on the grounds that, hey, at least it actually gave some challenging bosses, even if it was only for the first quarter of the game. That's still a quarter of a game more than any other FF.

[Meeplelard]

Difference between FF10 and a variety of other games is that FF10 strongly encourages consistent usage of them.  You don't often need them, but I found myself using stuff like Power Break or Darktouch/buster type moves way more than other games in the series and most other jRPGs in general.

It just strikes a very good balance of having variety and actually encouraging using it without being cumbersome.  Only time it really became annoying was when I was doing a playthrough of trying to get an overkill on everything ever (I will likely never do this; wasn't worth it) and I had to spend the first bunch of turns spamming Cheer or Focus to insure my damage was high enough.  That aside, FF10 gives you plenty of stuff to work with, and things are reliable too.

And mind you, I often waste turns in FF10 making sure everyone can act, even though I know I shouldn't, and FF10 never felt slow.

[Grefter]

Reminder that Yoshi is discussing from the point of view of PAL FFX.  PAL FFX is still slow.  Not nearly as slow as FF9 though.

I didn't realise PAL FF9 had the slowdown fix that FFX did as well.  That is horrible because when I replayed FF9 (No I don't know why either) I remember being astounded at how much slower it was than I remembered and I played an NTSC version the second time and PAL the first.

Sooooooo.  Fuck FF9.

[Fenrir]

AFAIK most console games up until 2002 or so were 50 hertz. NES, SNES, Genesis, PSX, N64 and early PS2 games were affected.
The PSX PAL emulation on the PS3 uses 50 hertz games. (Boycott it all)

PAL FFX had stretched resolution on top of the slowed down gameplay though, making it even more awful, so it's a prime example of PAL conversion fucking everything up. (Devil May Cry was worse though)



BTW FE only have three options most of the time: Moving, doing direct damage and healing. Worst games ever.



I really don't remember FF9 being all that challenging anywhere and it was one of my first RPGs. FFX was much more difficult (but I blazed through it and refused to do crappy minigames)
FF9 isn't about fighting in hindsight, it's about all the silly little charming things Yoshi loves. You spend like 10% of the time in battle, 20% listening to the story and 70% sending letters to mogs, playing card games and finding the perfect pair of trousers or something.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Don't forget the time-honored FF9 pastime of forcing your enslaved chocobo to peck the ground thousands of times for your amusement.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Praising FF9 as the only challenging FF is pretty weird. It gets even weirder when you say the quarter of the game that is challenging is the first (I guess Gizamaluke's okay?). But eh, challenge debates.

FF9 is better for minigames than it is for plot or gameplay certainly. Obviously not what I play games for (minigames are fine, stuff like Mognet can burn) but it's there.

Fenrir: I know the FE comment is tongue in cheek, but "deciding where you move" obviously creates a wealth of options not seen in FF9. (This is true for any SRPG.) RPGs can't be rated purely by your number of options but generally I'd say that pure, non-position-based RPGs which have a decent number of characters who will do nothing but attack (FF4, FF9) doesn't make for great game design.

[Meeplelard]

Well, FF9 TRIED to give everyone full skill-sets and all that, just a lot of those skill-sets are filled with large amounts of "who cares" that you forget they have moves, so a number of those character just end up being "use physical."

For a game that people tout as being awesome for having character differences, FF9 really doesn't succeed well at it.  As I said, you can divide the cast up into 4 groups:
Fighters
Healers
Vivi
Quina

True, you can do something similar with Valkyrie Profile, but then that had a Battle System that complimented classifications like that, and got creative with it's simplicity.  FF9 is just a typical menu based RPG when it comes down to it.

[Grefter]

I was going to make a comment about not being tricked into skillset = complexity variation and interesting choices.  If a command can be functionally replaced by putting it in place of the basic attack command because you use it every time then all you have succeeded in doing is adding more button presses to your menu based game.  Nothing remotely interesting to be had there.

Also <3 Fenrir for making the joke I was thinking of much more succinctly.

The PAL conversion thing stands out as me not realising it because there is 2 ways you can easily convert to 50 hz from 60 hz.  You can do the terrible thing that Square do or you can drop frames like the games that did't fucking suck to play tended to do.

[Tide]

I really don't remember FF9 being all that challenging anywhere and it was one of my first RPGs. FFX was much more difficult (but I blazed through it and refused to do crappy minigames)
FF9 isn't about fighting in hindsight, it's about all the silly little charming things Yoshi loves. You spend like 10% of the time in battle, 20% listening to the story and 70% sending letters to mogs, playing card games and finding the perfect pair of trousers or something.

There comes that moment in FF9 when you realize Auto-Regen was one of the better abilities in the game. Not because it Auto Regen has always been a good ability (check out FFX Regen and how many times you may use it), but because it was an ability you realized you could use against the game's slowness. Half the reason for even using Thievery was because the animation was longer so you could heal  more HP while that was going on. I distinctly remember when I first played FF9 and basically cheesed Trance Kuja that way. Flare Star counters; someone does something lengthy, heal all HP back.

Long story short - FF9 was slow and it was not good for it at all.

I can't really recall any real challenging fights in FF9. I mean, outside the optional bosses anyway. The game gives you a ton of options to cheese things out with equips so you never ever have to really tap into some of the more oddball things you could use to win fights. Also, status rates suck. Unlike FFX, if there was a choice to status or nuke, you're better off nuking because status has like 40% hit rates or something terrible. FFX at least actively urged you to try status and didn't shit all over their success rates.

[Sierra]

ME3: Oh, you idiots.

You better believe I punched Gerrel right in the bread basket.

[Shale]

Hey, XCOM people! Is the DLC worth buying?

[Grefter]

For how much?

[Shale]

Four bucks combined.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Four bucks, dude. You get a mini-campaign and new customizations. Just fuckin do it, the XCOM staff at Firaxis deserves it.