What games are you playing 2014?

[hinode]

I tried out the FFD demo on my iPhone and quickly determined that I would never spend money on any game that relies on a virtual d-pad/buttons for controls.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I don't see how being available on the two widest-adopted mobile devices is Square invalidating the game for most consumers? If anything, it's being much more inclusive for being a major developer actually releasing a game on the mobile market AND localizing it. (And it's probably the best JRPG available on mobile, which says more about the trash that gets shoveled out on mobile and then poorly organized so no one can separate the crap from the decent stuff, honestly.)

In regards to the controls, I personally feel it takes a little getting used to, but the control scheme itself isn't inherently bad. FFD could possibly have done it more intuitively, but it doesn't take that long to adjust, like any new control scheme.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying "FFD is perfect, you must all worship it," but it gets a strange amount of backlash every time it gets brought up.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Having not played FFD I'm... inclined to mostly agree with Djinn here? It's not as if iOS+Android is equivalent to the N-Gage (or even, dare I say it, the Vita); lots of gamers have one. Not everyone, of course (I don't, myself!), but that's kinda the way it goes with games and systems: unless you religiously buy every system there's always going to be some games for systems you don't own.

The control concerns I'll leave to people who have actually tried them, but at base I don't see a reason why one a touchscreen D-pad would be innately bad.

[Fenrir]

Three things:
- The lack of tactile feedback is pretty terrible when you're used to gaming with a controller.
- The lines between, say, "Down" and "right" blur when there's no tactile feedback + Your hand is in the corner of the screen, blocking the d-pad from view. This could work if the game had omnidirectional controls but IIRC you can just go up down left right.
- Keeping a finger on a touchscreen for extended periods (which happens when you're walking) is pretty uncomfortable too. Mobile games usually get around that by just having you "click" or drag for short periods instead of relying on D-pads.

It just feels bad.
Games can do touch control well even in an action game(Super Hexagon) but I think a touch d-pad just doesn't work at all as a concept.


FFD isn't anything special anyway

[Luther Lansfeld]

I found it more comfortable than the keyboard controls of games when I have to play on PC, and as someone with some pretty bad hand/lower arm muscle inflammation issues, I notice such things. Anyway...

Super Mario 3D World - Threw the mighty Bowser into lava, but he got better. Lava must be really wussy in this world. And then he kidnapped the fairies, revealing his ultimate plan to... build a magical amusement park with his face in the center? Okay, Bowser. So did his absurdly difficult levels, particularly one where you ride a block into lava, and then kicked the shit out of him again. Yay, game over. But now I have aftergame... in space! Just got Rosalina for that.

[hinode]

FFD put the virtual A-button equivalent in-between the d-pad, which significantly increases the odds of misclicking when you're trying to do something basic like, say, talk to an npc wandering around a town. Maybe it works out better with a larger screen, but on a 3.5 inch iphone it was just needlessly frustrating. I suppose it makes one-handed play easier except that the menu button is on the top-right so you need a second hand for that anyways.

I've played other android/ios games with larger, easier to use virtual buttons and while they're significantly better than FFD I still find myself making misclicks at a much higher rate than I would on anything with a d-pad or keyboard; the lack of tactile feedback really hurts. I can live when messing around with free games but paid ones are another matter.

[Shale]

The control scheme was not especially friendly but it never screwed me over in a fight. I can't complain much given that tap-to-move in a 16-bit RPG would be equally unpleasant if not more so.

[Grefter]

It isn't anything special, but it is also not that bad either.  Noting that the entry point for this conversation was "They haven't made games like this in years" so the pickings are pretty thin.  In that stock "Not special" is still of note.

The touch screen controls honestly are just a thing to get used to and screen size really matters.  Playing these on a tablet vs a phone is a pretty massive difference from my experience.  Having 8 way movement even over just the 4 cardinal directions also helps them immensely yes (compare FFD to FF5 which did more free movement or FF6 which I think is just 8 way back on a more restricted grid).  A lot of it is teething problems to moving the genre to a new interface.

When the interface works though?  Man JRPGs work really well on tablets and I am confident you could scale down to phones easily with some shifts in interfacing (which never is done, one version is king).  I hear really good things about the Dragon Quest ports on iOS just for controls and GUI, but am tentative to try them out because well, DQ games and I have an unhealthy relationship.

For perspective, we are only really looking at a few years of working on interfacing with touch screens in this market.  There is a ton of theory behind it, but not a bunch of practice in implementation.  Remember how great things interfaced back in the day on NES?  How many games used Select and made you want to break things.  PC games were even worse (from the other end of the spectrum, too many inputs instead of too few).

Touch screens still need some time and experimentation to check out, so I understand not being an early adopter, but I would really recommend not being dismissive of them as a platform.  There is actually a pretty healthy looking cottage industry for (cheap) JRPGs that you can clearly see on the iTunes app store that I am confident mirrors at least to Google Play store.

All this talk of lack of tactile feedback, it is something you really get used to honestly.  At this point I can touch type on my tablet at relatively accurately without the annoying as fuck key press sounds (it isn't as good as a real keypad, but it is pretty okay).  Phones are a bit harder though.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Yeah, I did play the game on the iPad, not a phone, so that probably helps.

[Fenrir]

And I played on a tiny phone so this didn't.


I haven't seen any good RPG on mobile (yet) but I think they could work with a point and click interface. Touch where you want your character to move. Touch the NPC you want to talk to.
Battles are menu driven so obviously very touch friendly too.

Just straight up putting Final Fantasy on a phone and having a touch D-pad is like putting Farmville on the Xbox One with the joystick acting like a mouse, it ignores the system's strengths. I guess the game was originally made for phones with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 buttons where 4 = left?

BTW I've heard that the DQ8 IOs port is like the worst thing ever.

[hinode]

RPGs are one of the few major console genres that aren't fatally compromised by touchscreen controls, but a virtual d-pad is really the laziest UI possible for them. I'll accept them for free games because they're free and emulators because they don't really have any better options but that's it.

Note that the battle UI in FFD is infinitely better than the map because it has a real touchscreen interface, even if not a fully optimized one for small screens. Imagine how bad fights would be if you had to use a virtual d-pad + buttons for those as well.

[Luther Lansfeld]

What do you think would be a better way of doing a map, then?

[Grefter]

A rhythm minigame would be pretty good start.

[Cmdr_King]

I imagine the gripe is that it's not point and click movement.  Except point and click movement is also fail on a touchscreen I find.  Without being able to mouseover stuff and have highlighting to see where shit is you just trade of slightly finicky touchpad for flailing around hoping you click where you need to be.

[Cotigo]

Solution seems pretty simple to me. Make it kinda like Diablo handles movement: your character heads in the direction you're clicking/pressing. Hell they did it for the DS remakes of FF3 and FF4 and it worked well. It would be less bad than both finnicky click-on-location-to-move-there and having a Dpad you can't see or feel because your fingers are blocking it.

[DjinnAndTonic]

It's notable that FFD at least gave a few different control schemes options that somewhat address the lack of intuitive feel and the 'UI covering the screen' issues. I switched between two of them from towns full of NPCs I had to talk to and dungeons where I just wanted to run through quickly. It worked out fairly well for me. But maybe FFD's control scheme just suits my preferences more than others here?

FFD in general just does a lot of things I like with a Job-based RPG, though. It has blank characters, but they all have at least a -little- personality and starting skills to differentiate them. It has not one, but two, separate 5-member parties that go through their own stories, so it mixes up the dynamics and perspectives often enough that it doesn't get stale too quickly. Also, large parties are a favorite of mine. Four of each party are permanent members and the fifth slot is a rotating set of temps with fixed Jobs to give players an idea of the new Jobs they'll be getting soon with no risk of wasting precious JP on them. The best part is that by the end you have a merged party where you can pick your five favorites and the two separate parties have some unique options only available to one party or another so it actually encourages mixing and matching builds.

tl;dr: FFD is flawed, but it has a decent unique setup in how it approaches Job system balance between two eventually-merging parties, which is a damn good selling point to me.

[Lady Door]

Diablo III because Andrew bought us the expansion during Blizzard's Black Friday sale.

We are playing seasonal heroes (because why not) on a laughably easy "Hard" mode wherein we can't even take damage from epic enemies or bosses. We did hit Whimsydale, though, which was nice. Slightly off-tone kids' music, delightful chubby purple unicorns exploding in gore, happy dancing clouds and rainbows...

[SnowFire]

LadyDoor: You hit on what killed D3 for me, at least.  Early D3 was actually *too* punishing about this, especially on Inferno, but in general enemies did tons of damage to you if you didn't use the various defensive tricks each class had (invincibility frames, abilities, etc.), but they also died reasonably quickly.  Over various patches, they've nerfed enemy damage, but not enemy durability.  So take your choice between easy stomps, or crank up the difficulty so that you can die...  but enemies now take eons to dispatch.  I'd really love it if the higher difficulty levels buffed only enemy offense yet enemy health stayed somewhat constant between difficulties.  Oh, well.

[Fenrir]

I played D3 at the very beginning and the difficulty was pretty tight.
Disappointing to hear that they did this.


FFX Solo: Raised some numbers up for way longer than I am willing to admit. I knew it was pointless all the way through at least.  don't care, filling the entire grid was cool.
Then I got brutally murdered by Dark Aeons anyway.

Well.

Omega Ruins was a pretty decent shortish aftergame dungeon. Lots of death but after a while it became formulaic: ID protection against Coeurls and Satan, Stone protection against the cool skeleton dinosaur things, Reraise against Tonberries, Confuse protection against a few enemies, First strike weapon equipped at all times just to survive a Marlboro + encounter.

Monster Arena was incredibly lazy design. They took normal enemies and gave them super stats. They didn't even gave them new colors. Yes this is actually lazier than palette swapping. Go grind spheres for 20 hours to beat regular not even palette swapped enemies with super stats. There's not even a new "Arena" battle background, you fight them on the regular Calm Land background. Jesus.


Here are the colors of each character on the sphere grid, they are used to differenciate each character from each other:
Rikku: Green
Auron: Red
Wakka: Yellow-Orange
Lulu: Purple
Tidus: Slightly light blue
Kimahri: Slightly dark blue
Yuna: Blue-ish blue
I think they ran out of colors after finding 5 of them guys

[NotMiki]

LadyDoor: You hit on what killed D3 for me, at least.  Early D3 was actually *too* punishing about this, especially on Inferno, but in general enemies did tons of damage to you if you didn't use the various defensive tricks each class had (invincibility frames, abilities, etc.), but they also died reasonably quickly.  Over various patches, they've nerfed enemy damage, but not enemy durability.  So take your choice between easy stomps, or crank up the difficulty so that you can die...  but enemies now take eons to dispatch.  I'd really love it if the higher difficulty levels buffed only enemy offense yet enemy health stayed somewhat constant between difficulties.  Oh, well.

Playing high-level D3 these days, the balance between damage and durability is about right, in my opinion.  Keep in mind that it is more difficult to build gear for damage than for durability, so a newcomer to lvl 70 is going to think everything is a meat tank.  Greater Rifts are timed, so if you want to progress to higher-ranked rifts, you need the damage, end of story.  Choice between living and always losing and dying and sometimes winning.  So I pretty much completely disagree with your assessment.

[SnowFire]

Yeah, we chatted on that before.  It's nice that Greater Rifts are closer to the right balance, but I stand by the "too much durability, not enough damage" for below-L70 play post RoS (which is what LD is doing now).  I'd love to be  wrong though!  Blizzard does keep the patches rolling, so maybe it's changed since...

...more generally, though, I'd be shocked if Greater Rifts were anything like D3 1.00 - 1.03 Inferno, which was brutal and unforgiving.

[NotMiki]

Greater Rifts are brutal and unforgiving.  Really!  Let's just say I'm happy repairs don't cost much anymore because I've lost all the durability in my gear in a GR a number of times now.  And I play monk ferchrissakes.  As for lvl 1-70, as far as I can tell Blizzard just kinda ignores it, not unlike WoW.  My advice is play til the end of the story once, then solicit someone to powerlevel you the rest of the way.

EDIT: I legit beat a GR (which are timed for 15 minutes) with 0 seconds to spare once.  They're pretty great.

[Tide]

Yuna: Blue-ish blue

Yuna's colour is actually White. Doesn't excuse that they didn't use separate colours for Tidus and Kimahri though.

Also, Jim, when will you start Marvel 2015? You can beat up d00ps. Random boss affixes are the best. Nothing like playing Hawkeye and then getting a boss with Missile Protection.

Speedrunning FFT has taught me that Sluice Gate is impossible. That is all.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Earthbound: So I replayed this due to Smash 4 influence. I hadn't played the game since it was new, so I think that's like 15 years. It's a much different experience as an adult than it was as a kid in the nineties. Shit seems a lot more fucked up than I remembered. Also, Dr. Andonuts is a terrible father... like, he seriously says to his 13-year-old kid "Well, let's see eachother again in another 10 years!" I'm not sure how I reacted to that as a kid, but it seriously stood out to me as horrible as an adult. Flipside, all of the saccharine ending sequence stuff hits a lot more powerfully as an adult than as a kid, so it's not a bad trade.

Gameplay is of course a lot more antiquated now, but not horrible considering that Dragon Quest still uses the same damn battle system. *shrugs*

I got all the 1/128 chance drops because fast forward button and GameFAQs exists now, so that was pretty cool to finally know what all that hype was about. Gutsy Bat is a pretty satisfying weapon.

I counted no less than 3 drug trips on our adventure, so now I know what to do if I ever want to go on a real JRPG adventure in real life.


Tales of Graces f:
Speaking of drug trips! Damn, this game's battle system is just awesome. After playing some Xillia, I thought going back to Graces would be difficult, but it actually plays to my biases better than Xillia. Infinite resourceless cooldowns are just fun.

The plot was better than I expected after reading all of the comments people had here. So... thanks for the lowered expectations, guys? I got more enjoyment out of the game as a result. Malik is awesome. The cast is humorous when they want to be. Sophie makes a good catalyst for a lot of jokes, and also makes for a great emotional center for the character dynamics to evolve around. Asbel is really disappointing as a main, but I ended up liking him by the end of the game and the F arc, at least.

The big optional dungeon was the stand-out drug trip for the game. It really felt like a worthy successor to VP's Seraphic Gate. I wish it had more skits, though.  Overall, game is probably a 8.5 to 9 for my personal rating. More objectively, it's probably still a solid 7.5-8. Its battle system and balance/pacing are good enough to outweigh any issues that people might have with the story/characters/anime-ness.

[Fenrir]

Tide, Yuna's color is so blue that Yuna still sings Eiffel 65.
Here's a screen: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bFzwSW3_7mw/maxresdefault.jpg

It looks like they might have changed it for the HD version because there clearly wasn't enough blue.