What Games are you playing 2015?

[Dark Holy Elf]

"It's not like I had any epic boss battle anyway": Yeah, you didn't play long enough.  Sorry, but it's true, what non-MMO FF game has had an "epic boss battle" in the first quarter of the game?  I typically associate "epicness" in boss battles with boss competence, and while single-player FF isn't known for boss competence in general, it's CERTAINLY not known for *early game* boss competence.

Big Rat. Liquid Flame. Ultros 1. Sinspawn Gui. Manasvin Warmech. Challenge is a super-subjective thing but all of these bosses strike me as pretty competent and I've definitely seen them wreck/wall various people (I certainly died to all but one of them myself). And I'd definitely say FF2's "hardest" boss is its first, but that says more about how shit FF2's design is (hahaha a boss who nulls physicals in a dungeon where you'll probably have 5-10 MP at most if you go in without grinding, and use most of that up on flans).

Also I'm not sure what the "first quarter" of an MMO means but if it's a large enough number of hours this comparison becomes meaningless, since the raw amount of time is what matters here. e.g. if two games have opening 10% of each game be really boring, that's waay worse for a 100 hour game than it is for a 5 hour game.

Idly, FF5 is really light on backtracking by RPG standards. If the worst you can say is "you have to walk through Kuza multiple times" (optionally!) then your game doesn't have much backtracking. And the only time you return to the Catapult you have a freaking airship.


(I have no investment in either FF12 or FF14; FF14 is in a genre I don't care for and FF12 is a bad game in a genre I do care for.)

[Reiska]

Hmm, I'll definitely give you Liquid Flame at least.  I'd give you Sinspawn Gui but frankly it's further in the game enough that it doesn't feel misplaced I think? I dunno.  Anyway.

The game length thing is a valid point.  I do think in general that MMO design is somewhat held back by the need to make early gameplay relatively simple so as not to overwhelm new players, who cannot be assumed to be familiar with the genre.  It results in the low-level experience (which in FF14 I'd call about the first 24 levels or so, generally speaking - it varies a BIT by class) fairly uninteresting, at least compared to what comes after it.  City of Heroes was actually, IMO, one of the best games in the genre at avoiding this problem; the designers had a core design goal of making you feel awesome very quickly and keeping the feeling of awesomeness steadily escalating as you went.

I miss that damn game.  It was a particularly odd MMO gateway drug for me, considering I have no attachment to comic books whatsoever - it had to hook me entirely on its gameplay.

[Grefter]

That all being said, I will happily concede that if you're a person who strongly dislikes MMOs in general, FF14 is exceedingly unlikely to win you over or anything.

What was the purpose of the 800 word point by point response then?
Could we like not call someone's personal experience out as factually incorrect?

[Cotigo]

That all being said, I will happily concede that if you're a person who strongly dislikes MMOs in general, FF14 is exceedingly unlikely to win you over or anything.

What was the purpose of the 800 word point by point response then?
Could we like not call someone's personal experience out as factually incorrect?

what forum are we on again

[Grefter]

That all being said, I will happily concede that if you're a person who strongly dislikes MMOs in general, FF14 is exceedingly unlikely to win you over or anything.

What was the purpose of the 800 word point by point response then?
Could we like not call someone's personal experience out as factually incorrect?

what forum are we on again

The one where you blow me <3

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

FF5 - Past Regole, where I bought myriad Wizard Hats and Gaia Gear and now randoms eat 1.3-6k MT damage before they get a turn and die. Sometimes, Faris is out of MP and Dances for some draining, which is fine too. Then, either Bartz or Lenna cast Titan in that case. I walked into Kuzar Castle and got surprised by one of those Shield Dragons, but surprise surprise, Control completely wrecks them. Then, I went to the Forest of Moogles - entirely unnotable save for having -yet another boss who eats it to Death Claw-. The spell is silly in the first half of the game. I'm probably sticking with Dancer Faris until she learns Dance, then I'll stick it on Lenna (Galuf could be a point, since he's the only one who knows Control in my party, but maybe I should stick Bartz in Beastmaster instead, I have no idea what the hell BeMa grants at the 300 AP level). Finding out where the Kornago Gourd is would be nice too.

Final Fantasy Cherry-Coloured Autobattle - Honed Thundaga to R4, life is kinda good (well, it was already kinda good due to Curaga R5, Retaliate R3 and Boost R4). Currently doing Nibelheim Elite for that 60th Mythril.

[Cotigo]

FF6 - Not a lot of time to play today but made some progress. Got Shadow, a second Minerva, and Gogo. That only leaves Cyan and Locke left then actual side quests. Probably will get Locke first since I have enough characters to fill every slot for his dungeon, and then send in a scrub brigade plus maybe Strago for someone competent to get Cyan.

Not much to say. Celes got -Aga spells now she hits the damage cap on a weakness. So that's nice.

[DjinnAndTonic]

FF Type-0:
So the cool political plot eventually gave way to full-on Evangelion-style Japanese craziness. I say this lovingly. It certainly got intense really fast all of sudden.

SPOILERS for anyone who cares

So despite the fact that the game has been waving around the prophecy about the end of the world being nigh for the past 20 hours, it actually happens so suddenly and so intensely that it still came as a shock when the characters did exactly what the prophecy said and then the end of the world happened.

Too bad the main part of it happened off screen, I would have liked to see a little more of the apocalypse. Instead we got the Xenogears cliff's notes version of it, which sounded REALLY AWESOME. Sigh.

Still, this issue and the issue of the too-large-cast aside, the plot is surprisingly self-consistent unlike everything else to come out of FNC, and it's intriguing in that anime navel-gazing way. The huge tonal shift and the various plot twists in the game's last few hours are just a fun joyride of narrative -payoff- after all the political backstabbing and buildup.

I won't say it's a masterpiece or anything, but this game's director is the director of FF15 and now I'm actually looking forward to that instead of dreading it, so there's that.


Re: FF14
Like I said, I am not actually -playing- the game because MMOs are not at all something I want to play. But I was sufficiently engaged by the world-building from watching it despite that, so I think it's at least not the most worthless story FF has come up with (poke the easy targets like FF13, 1-5~)

[DjinnAndTonic]

Holy Crap, Pokken Tournament is out tomorrow in Japanese Arcades. This is going to be epic.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I do think in general that MMO design is somewhat held back by the need to make early gameplay relatively simple so as not to overwhelm new players, who cannot be assumed to be familiar with the genre.

That's Final Fantasy design at work.  You spend the first hour or so of FFV with four characters who just fight and use items.  FFVI doesn't let you crack the system open and dig into character customization until act 2.  FF10 doesn't let you customize items until you recruit Rikku.  There's a lot more examples, probably.

[Tide]

That's one of the most absurdly situational pieces of gear I've ever encountered in a game. No wonder it only cost 150 crystals to return.

Sealstone cost is really weird in VP2. Sword Blessing, (which is one of the best sealstones impart due to its cost) is only 150 Crystals as well. Sharp Sword Law is only 1500 Crystals. Both are excellent yet have low price tags. Flipside, the "Turn to X" Sealstones all cost 20000 crystals are all mostly awful. They have defensive uses, but from what I read, are not good offensively. And VP2 is a game that's about pumping up your offense more than anything. So it hardly made sense to attach a 20k price tag on them in the first place. Even though Transvestial law is quite obscure in use, I would still take it over something like Sheathed Power Wrath and Secluded Valley Law. If you're crazy like me, you have access to both, but still.

That seems to be the general rule in VP2 though. Defensive stuff is way overpriced on top of being not effective the more you play the game. Even things like Toughness just isn't that good late because you realize the skills/damage you trade off just becomes less and less worthwhile. If you're trying to build defense in VP2, you work with elements and not really any raw stats.

Also irrelevant! Because my party is Brahms + team valk and staying that way even though Freya would be a straight upgrade over Silmeria (are there even any new bows in the SG? I think she's still using junk from Lezard's tower).

Ull in Highsocks has the Soothsayer Bow which is a 620, 3 Atk Weapon with SC enabled. Incidentally, Archers function more as mages than mages themselves (due to the elemental multipliers on many of their attacks). As such, attack power is less important than elemental modifiers, which Soothsayer, IIRC does not have. You want the Supreme Crossbow for its hidden 0.5 Holy modifier. I think the Arbalest has an Earth modifier too but its less preferred due to it either clashing or de-focusing.

And Hrist has Gungnir now so it's not like it even fucking matters who else is in the party anymore. Gungnir is so broke you guys. Holy shit. I mean, I remembered that, but it's still amazing instantly switching from "basically competent" to "literally tears every enemy in half in one swing" just from one weapon upgrade.

Hrist actually can get a couple of other upgrades before Gungnir in the form of Dinosaur Spear and the Lunar Bardiche IIRC. Gungnir is just the SG's way of giving you broken tier items. Tyfring still beats it if you're trying to capitalize on pure damage, but those set ups are less practical for crawling. Comparatively, the only other characters who have comparable weapons are Brahms (Bloody Murder) and Freya (Ether Laser). The Light Swords (Levantine tries) and bows don't catch up and mage staffs were lol to begin with.

[Meeplelard]

I do think in general that MMO design is somewhat held back by the need to make early gameplay relatively simple so as not to overwhelm new players, who cannot be assumed to be familiar with the genre.

That's Final Fantasy design at work.  You spend the first hour or so of FFV with four characters who just fight and use items.  FFVI doesn't let you crack the system open and dig into character customization until act 2.  FF10 doesn't let you customize items until you recruit Rikku.  There's a lot more examples, probably.

I honestly wouldn't compare FF10 Customization to FF5's Job System or FF6's magicite; it's a feature, but not the core development system.  It'd be more comparable if you couldn't use the Sphere Grid system until you got Auron, for example.

A better example I think is how FF13 doesn't let you use the Crystarium until Chapter 3, making every fight through Chap 1/2 functionally meaningless (unless you got items from it which I honestly can't remember.)

[Reiska]

I do think in general that MMO design is somewhat held back by the need to make early gameplay relatively simple so as not to overwhelm new players, who cannot be assumed to be familiar with the genre.

That's Final Fantasy design at work.  You spend the first hour or so of FFV with four characters who just fight and use items.  FFVI doesn't let you crack the system open and dig into character customization until act 2.  FF10 doesn't let you customize items until you recruit Rikku.  There's a lot more examples, probably.

Oh, definitely.  Just it's long been a staple of MMOs in particular, and "early gameplay" lasts a lot longer in pure hourage in an MMO.  Like, it can reasonably take you 3-4 hours or so to get to your first group content in FF14 (the early guildhests which are basically tutorials of MMO teamwork - they're basically single-room instances which walk you through basic MMO tactics like pulling enemies without getting multiple groups, properly managing threat (both on the tanking end and on the DPS end), healing, proper use of crowd control, etc.).  The two original tank classes don't have their full standard combat attack rotation until level 24, and are still unlocking important parts of their kit as late as the 40s, as the game progressively introduces more and more nuance, more complexity to the gameplay, one step at a time, until you get to the level cap and encounters start expecting you to know how all the little pieces fit together and how to use your long-cooldown abilities most effectively.  And these are things the game doesn't feed to you; these you have to figure out intuitively, or learn from someone else.

[Dark Holy Elf]

That seems to be the general rule in VP2 though. Defensive stuff is way overpriced on top of being not effective the more you play the game. Even things like Toughness just isn't that good late because you realize the skills/damage you trade off just becomes less and less worthwhile. If you're trying to build defense in VP2, you work with elements and not really any raw stats.

I definitely don't agree with Toughness antihype, a lot of bosses lategame and in the SG have damage which can OHKO/be very scary without Toughness and far easier to deal with if you do. It's much better than most offensive skills, you can pretty much predict who finds bosses like Odin competent or not based on whether they have Toughness yet, not based on any other skills.

That said Toughness being great (2x durability lol) has no bearing on your general point as most other defensive sealstones/skills are far worse, and certainly things like, say, boosting RDM/RES, are a total waste of time.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Final Fantasy John, I'm Only Autobattling - Still doing Elite maingame dungeons with their obscene stamina requirements. Will also probably have to grind white power (oh dear lord) tomorrow, since I'll want a reasonable amount of orbs to hone the upgraded Dia-line spell from Yuna's event. At least, Yuna herself sounds pretty amazing: pretty much Garnet+ (5 White Magic/5 Summon/3 Support off pretty much the same durability and only marginally lower offense stats. Garnet has 4 WM and 2 Support) aside from Soul Breaks, and Garnet herself is currently a high-tier healer unit. If they release the new dungeon update this week or the next, to boot, Summons will suddenly become a trash-sweeping staple, and that's likely to be awesome.

[Fenrir]

Oh you didn't finish the elites? K then
Yuna looks pretty nice but she has an awful SB, unlike Garnet. When WM5 becomes useful, Yuna'll be the best, but for now my default healer will stay Garnet.


Re: FF14:
Okay I'll elaborate.
I was comparing FF14 to other FFs, not MMOs, which is why I complained about endless grinding (Other Final Fantasies having literally 0 grinding, save for the other MMORPG in the series, and FF10 during the postgame)

I feel that I could probably like a MMO one day, just like I finally started to enjoy roguelikes thanks to Spelunky. But MMOs have not had such paradigm change yet, and FF14 certainly didn't try to be different and ambitious. (This is actually the only one thing that makes it stand out compared to every other Final Fantasy)

Redundant jobs: How, exactly, are they redundant in 1) a way other FF job systems are not, and 2) a way that isn't necessitated by the realities of MMO design?  (There is certainly some redundancy inherent there.  Some of it is a necessary evil in MMOs due to role stratification; MMOs explicitly don't permit the inclusion of gimmick classes, because every class has to contribute something meaningful to group play, and in a well-designed MMO, no one class' contribution should clearly outweigh that of any other class in the same role.)  If the classes were truly redundant, then optimal group composition for raid content would involve identifying the single highest DPS class and bringing 4 of that class and only that class for the 4 DPS slots in raid groups.  Being roughly in contact with three different raid groups that are decently competent at this game, I can assure you that this doesn't happen and that FF14 raid compositions tend to be quite varied within the guideline of 2 tanks, 2 healers and 4 DPS; the community pretty much universally agrees that doubling up on any class ever is generally to your raid's detriment, from what I can tell.

In other Final Fantasy games, jobs heavily change your playstyle. Here you're auto attacking and waiting for countdowns to... count down, with every job. Playing solo, you'll always do this all the time no matter what your class is.
There isn't much you can do against stronger enemies than you except Get Higher Numbers, unlike other FFs which are typically very LLG friendly.

With other players, classes seemed to mostly fit into the MMO trinity (Tank / DPS / heal) and you seem to get very few variations in playstyle between each. Tell me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's the crazy shit like Mix, Math Skill, Throw, Terraint, or even Steal. And, again, there's not a lot of variation in your playstyle. As an individual player, you don't have much of an option to be creative.

Class composition choices could be interesting but it's not like you have much of a choice unless you've been levelling every job (lol)
In other FF games the earlygame is relatively simple and gradually eases you into new mechanics, but the base gameplay stays engaging. Which isn't the case with FF14.

Endless grinding: I wouldn't characterize it as "endless" but I will concede that FF14 is slightly more grindy than is my preference (for reference, I consider WoW's leveling grind to be about "just right", and FF14's is notably protracted by comparison in some ranges).  Grinding in MMOs in general, of course, is another consequence of the medium; no doubt it originally existed to ensure that monthly subscriptions continued to get renewed month to month, and even now in this era when more and more MMOs are coming out in a freemium format, it exists to partly alleviate the fact that no development team in the world can create new content for the game world at a rate that keeps up with players' consumption of content.  And when players run out of content, they quit, and they often don't come back.

The problem is that the grinding is purely mindless, while Destiny grinding for example is at least involved.

Endless backtracking: Return to the Waking Sands.  Sure, there's a lot of backtracking in FF14.  There's also a lot of backtracking in basically any offline RPG that ever has any kind of a central hub location for anything.  FF5 sticks out to me as a game with a lot of it (mostly around the Catapult, Ancient Library, and Sealed Castle Kuza).  So I mean, sure, this is accurate enough, but I don't see how it's a unique criticism at all... and in the specific context of FF14, anyway, it kind of makes narrative sense for what is, at first, presented as a quasi-secret society to, you know, want to stick around in their quasi-secret base, not gallavant around in public all the time.

Also wait if you hate endless backtracking how the heck did you like FF12 because holy crap it has probably the most backtracking in the entire damn series.  Hell, 14 itself has more convenient travel.

Each time you do a quest you have to backtrack to the city to go back to whoever gave you a quest, then look at the minimap to find other quests. Quests is all you do unless you're grinding instead, and they're 2% talking, 80% walking to/from the destination, 18% fighting. The backtracking is immense, it's more than half the game from what I've played. You can pay to make it slightly more painless. Amazing.
 
FF12 had a moderate amount of backtracking during the main story but nothing this crazy. Optional monster hunts required backtracking, but each led to overall really good boss fights. (which led me to start some unfinished stat topic. I'll go back to it if the game gets an HD remake, promise)

No thinking required during gameplay: Yeah, uh, no.  Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but this is 100% horse shit, unless you want to be a really bad player in any content past about level 30, which is about when the game starts taking the training wheels off its group content and expects you to actually deal with enemies having specialized mechanics.  Roughly speaking, you can say that the first three dungeons are more or less tutorials on how to play in groups.  (On that note, organically teaching you how to actually perform in group content is an area in which MMOs are typically very weak, and an area in which FF14 relatively excels by the genre standards.  Compare WoW, which pretty much just throws you in on the deep end and doesn't ever teach you the fundamentals of "how to tank".)

"It gets good 50 hours in"

I think I have played FF14 for about 20-30 hours, and you know, games should get good at least after one hour, two hours tops. I pretty much dropped Okami immediately because of the beginning and am not willing to go back.
I actually felt particularly generous to FF14 because I know MMOs are a slow burn (and I found the mindless grind moderately addictive while watching something else). But, in the end, fuck all was happening, and I knew things would not really get better.

Worthless story: Respectfully disagree here.  FF14 probably has the best story presentation in the MMO industry, which is to say that it exists at all.  (I will accept that it is limited somewhat by the nature of the medium, e.g. silent protagonist problems.)  Also it actually largely makes sense and is internally consistent, which is more than I can say for, say, FF13.

Cutscenes have no rhytm whatsoever, character models are extremely stiff and the entire story is generic. Click to any random part of this and be immensely bored:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvWnCYolcQI&list=PLlMscAdJiuKpO2v6B6fImPqmIU1fQmGQZ&index=3
Compare to the beginning of FF10 for example.

Let met set the bar IMMENSELY LOW and compare it to Arc the Lad 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQT5p0AUgI4
FF14 is not even that much better than Arc 4 man

Can't comment on FF13 as I skipped every cutscene

The world is a FF-themed theme park instead of an actual FF world: I'm not honestly sure what you even mean by this, elaborate?

No NPC is telling you an interesting story about their first love or, I dunno, trains.
There's supposed to be a war that went on, or is still going on, I think. It's hard to notice.
Areas don't have an atmosphere beyond the same "Kinda pleasant" feel that applies to everything.
Nothing changes and people are forever glued in one place.

There's lots of boring flavor text, lots of insipid dialogue that exists to justify asking you to fetch 5 evil feathers from 5 evil bunnies two areas from here. Any random page from the FF12 bestiary is more interesting than any flavor text I've read in FF14.

Everything is sterile, artifical, and static, so it feels more like a theme park than a real breathing world.
You could also say this about early FF like FF5. But 1) At least FF5's world at least is constantly changing. 2) World building is far more important in a MMO than a regular RPG 3) FF5 has awesome gameplay 4) FF5 is more than 20 years old

"It's not like I had any epic boss battle anyway": Yeah, you didn't play long enough.  Sorry, but it's true, what non-MMO FF game has had an "epic boss battle" in the first quarter of the game?  I typically associate "epicness" in boss battles with boss competence, and while single-player FF isn't known for boss competence in general, it's CERTAINLY not known for *early game* boss competence.

Yeah I wasn't particularly talking about difficulty here.
5 minutes into FF3 and you get this battle against LNDTRTL, nothing would be half as memorable in FF14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZnoIwvABPE
Also, sorry for using the word epic, I hate it too


I also forgot to mention FF14 maybe having the worsts UI of literally any game I've ever played. (on PS4)

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Oh you didn't finish the elites? K then
Yuna looks pretty nice but she has an awful SB unlike Garnet. When 5 becomes useful Yuna'll be the best but right now my default healer will stay Garnet I think.

Well, I'm five elite dungeons and a half from clearing them all, but that's neither here nor there.

Regarding Yuna vs. Garnet: that's pretty accurate an assessment. I'm actually willing to use both Yuna and Garnet, though, depending on whether I get a second 5-rarity staff or not in the short term, since I already have WM's Concentration II and I'm bound to have enough eggs for raising Summoner to L50 once the new dungeons roll in. Of course, I'm also a Yuna fangirl and I'm dumping a crapton of Growth Eggs on her both for the event and for long-term, since Garnet already hit the level cap along with Vivi. This -also- means I may be willing to bother with Quistis once her event with Selphie rolls in. But, as usual, depends on what I get from the gatcha die rolls.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I feel that I could probably like a MMO one day, just like I finally started to enjoy roguelikes thanks to Spelunky. But MMOs have not had such paradigm change yet, and FF14 certainly didn't try to be different and ambitious

There's certainly games that are doing different things.  I'd say The Secret World was a pretty ambitious game in that it did away with classes and levels and most other traditional mechanics, and also had some really interesting quest design ideas that you don't normally see in MMOs.  Solving mysteries and shit.  The problem is that a game like that hasn't become a huge hit and so new big budget releases are sticking to the WoW theme park formula because they think they can somehow replicate the effects even though it never works.

An interesting thing in what seems to be the new MMO life cycle of "come out for release, get box money + sub money, wait for that to dry up, go to a F2P model" is that once it hits the F2P part, games start to get more experimental in what they're doing and go off the beaten path more.  I attribute that to them deciding to pander to the base instead of trying for mass market penetration, but I'm not on any of these company's boards so I can't say for sure.

[Sierra]

That seems to be the general rule in VP2 though. Defensive stuff is way overpriced on top of being not effective the more you play the game. Even things like Toughness just isn't that good late because you realize the skills/damage you trade off just becomes less and less worthwhile. If you're trying to build defense in VP2, you work with elements and not really any raw stats.

I definitely don't agree with Toughness antihype, a lot of bosses lategame and in the SG have damage which can OHKO/be very scary without Toughness and far easier to deal with if you do. It's much better than most offensive skills, you can pretty much predict who finds bosses like Odin competent or not based on whether they have Toughness yet, not based on any other skills.

That said Toughness being great (2x durability lol) has no bearing on your general point as most other defensive sealstones/skills are far worse, and certainly things like, say, boosting RDM/RES, are a total waste of time.

I do switch Toughness in for the SG bosses*, but otherwise have been finding it preferable to do without it. I left it off of Silmeria vs. Odin because I needed Heat Up in place just to have a full-party SC chain (this is the real problem with sticking with her instead of Freya), and wound up having to devote an inordinate amount of AP to keeping her specifically alive. For randoms I use those five skill points for Heroism + Break Up instead. Heroism bonuses get nuts when there's like half a dozen enemies, and you know I love breaking everyone's shit. Break mode is the best. Remaining skills tend to be assigned to Fists of Iron/Mental Boost/Psychosoma for non-Brahms people, Brahms skipping the latter two and just subbing in whatever random shit I feel like playing with at the moment (and then inevitably forgetting about). I think he had Observation in place last time I played the game. I haven't noticed it doing much of anything. I never ever use defensive skills other than Toughness, outside of the very early game when Fortify Physique is all you've got because your accessory options are shit.

(*maingame, only final Lezard really felt like he made it necessary. AE Lezard deals too much fucking damage.)

Sealstones are always always Sharp Sword Law first, was Poison Pin second in the maingame but poison's pretty worthless in the SG, and then usually Paper Tiger third because free damage bonus since I'm obsessive about being at full health anyway. For SG times the latter two are replaced by Yggdrasil and Six Elements Blessing, which is probably the only defensive sealstone I have ever bothered using. Even knowing offense >>> defense in VP2, I tend not to use the ATK 150% RDM 50% sealstone unless I know I'm about to fight something magic-focused. Not real comfortable nuking my defenses to that degree.

EDIT: I could maybe assume it's obvious I took the time to teach the entire main party every single skill even knowing I would never use 90% of that shit.

[Crystalgate]

Finding Teddy 2: Beat the first book. The environments are really pretty and the game has a rather cute feel, other than when you're fighting a boss whereupon things look rather brutal. For example, the first boss is a mermaid who once defeated will slump down wounded instead of dying immediately. As far as I know, there is no other way to proceed than to make the girl execute her.

Due to the controls and collision detection not being that great, fighting generally is more a contest of simple knowing which moves you should use than being a test of reflexes and maneuverability. Usually it's not complicated. Sometimes you're best of running at the enemy and attack with the girl's double damage dash attack, sometimes you're best of walking up to the enemy and block one attack before you stab it, sometimes you're best of jumping and down-stabbing it and so on. It does happen though that the easiest way gets rather weird. For example, one enemy is easiest to beat by first ducking and stabbing at it barely out of range. The enemy will crouch down to block the attack even though it doesn't hit. Then you walk slightly forward and stab it while it crouching and has its shield down. However, you need to be quick about it else the enemy will stab you in the legs. This usually means you stab before it look like the sword actually reaches the enemy, but it still does, the air seemingly being between the sword and the monster be damned. Either the sword has a longer reach than the visuals let on or the enemies has a bigger hit box than they seem to.

One another note, the game is now making good of it's title. Once you beat the first book, the big bad evil magician spirits away the girl's teddy bear including the giant spider soul it hosts. Last time someone took her teddy bear, she got it back by mostly being nice. This time though:



She's probably going to try a different approach.

I also almost got enough money for a sword upgrade. I can buy an armor (cloth) upgrade right now, but killing faster seems more fun than surviving more blows so I'll hold off.

[Reiska]

Re: FF14:
Okay I'll elaborate.
I was comparing FF14 to other FFs, not MMOs, which is why I complained about endless grinding (Other Final Fantasies having literally 0 grinding, save for the other MMORPG in the series, and FF10 during the postgame)

I feel that I could probably like a MMO one day, just like I finally started to enjoy roguelikes thanks to Spelunky. But MMOs have not had such paradigm change yet, and FF14 certainly didn't try to be different and ambitious. (This is actually the only one thing that makes it stand out compared to every other Final Fantasy)

Okay, this is an extremely fair point (and yeah, frankly, there are some things they could have stood to innovate over WoW and didn't).

In other Final Fantasy games, jobs heavily change your playstyle. Here you're auto attacking and waiting for countdowns to... count down, with every job. Playing solo, you'll always do this all the time no matter what your class is.
There isn't much you can do against stronger enemies than you except Get Higher Numbers, unlike other FFs which are typically very LLG friendly.

With other players, classes seemed to mostly fit into the MMO trinity (Tank / DPS / heal) and you seem to get very few variations in playstyle between each. Tell me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's the crazy shit like Mix, Math Skill, Throw, Terraint, or even Steal. And, again, there's not a lot of variation in your playstyle. As an individual player, you don't have much of an option to be creative.

Class composition choices could be interesting but it's not like you have much of a choice unless you've been levelling every job (lol)
In other FF games the earlygame is relatively simple and gradually eases you into new mechanics, but the base gameplay stays engaging. Which isn't the case with FF14.

Yeah, all true here too.  It falls under those "necessary evils of conventional MMO design".  There's absolutely a fair argument that they should have tried something a lot more unconventional, and... well... they did, it was FF14 1.0, and it it was terrible.  (That's not to say unconventional can't be done well, just that FF14 1.0 was a lot more ambitious in overall design in a number of ways, and almost all of them turned out to be really bad design.)

This is likely to hold true so long as MMO game design continues to stick to the "holy trinity" paradigm, I think; so long as that paradigm of design is in place, there's a certain minimum baseline of things that every class in a given role must be able to do, and only room for relatively minor variation between them.  I absolutely do think this is a core flaw in MMO design, but I have yet to see a game which really steps away from it extremely well; the majority of attempts I'm familiar with either ended up horribly unbalanced in some way for it, like City of Heroes and Champions Online, or aren't really comparable for other reasons (Guild Wars, which is IIRC largely PvP-oriented and holy trinity design has never really held up or existed in the PvP space). 

I loved City of Heroes, but balance was never one of its strengths.  CoH bucked the trinity design by making every class capable of powerful healing through cheap, easily replenishable consumables (when I say cheap, I mean trivial, as in you could buy a full inventory of them for the amount of currency you got from killing a single mob and have money left over) which had no drawbacks or cooldowns, so you could eat them like candy (in fact, the playerbase usually *did* call them candy).  The upshot of this is that CoH was truly a game where you could literally pick any 8 random players on the server, throw them in a team together, and they'd be able to clear anything and everything the game could throw at them so long as the people behind the keyboard were reasonably competent.

The downshot, of course, was that there was often just no incentive at all *to* group up for content.  CoH innovatively had a very robust mission difficulty slider (similar to the difficulty slider for FF14 levequests, for those familiar); you could set the level of enemies in your instanced missions to be anywhere from -1 to +4 levels relative to you, and you could also tell it to populate missions for a given team size regardless of your actual team size (like Diablo 2's /players command).

At the time of the game's shutdown, the main character I played was able to solo missions set on +4 levels and tuned for a full 8-player team without much difficulty.

The problem is that the grinding is purely mindless, while Destiny grinding for example is at least involved.

No experience with Destiny, but I'll take your word for it.  You're not wrong about the grinding here.

Each time you do a quest you have to backtrack to the city to go back to whoever gave you a quest, then look at the minimap to find other quests. Quests is all you do unless you're grinding instead, and they're 2% talking, 80% walking to/from the destination, 18% fighting. The backtracking is immense, it's more than half the game from what I've played. You can pay to make it slightly more painless. Amazing.

That's (modern) MMOs in general.  I hate to bring it up again but City of Heroes is literally the only MMO I ever played that _wasn't_ like this, and only because being set in the modern day instead of being in a medieval-ish fantasy world gave them the narrative "out" of your questgivers having a cell phone, so the extent of your traveling was super-jumping or whatever from mission door to mission door.

Perhaps ironically, the older generation of MMOs (EverQuest, FF11, etc.) had much less backtracking.  In its place was ... more mindless grinding, though, so...

"It gets good 50 hours in"

I think I have played FF14 for about 20-30 hours, and you know, games should get good at least after one hour, two hours tops. I pretty much dropped Okami immediately because of the beginning and am not willing to go back.
I actually felt particularly generous to FF14 because I know MMOs are a slow burn (and I found the mindless grind moderately addictive while watching something else). But, in the end, fuck all was happening, and I knew things would not really get better.

Fair complaint, it's an intrinsic MMO problem.  The unfortunate reality, from the perspective of a MMO designer, is that most of your customers are retarded.  The leveling process in any MMO is absolutely a glorified tutorial sequence, and I mean the entire leveling sequence all the way to the cap.  It's a necessary evil because of the multiplayer aspect; we need only look at League of Legends for clear examples of what happens when you throw players in on the deep end in a forced multiplayer game.

(tl;dr: the 1% of the players who AREN'T retarded and "get" the game mechanics immediately are largely utterly toxic to the other 99%, causing moderation problems at best and actively driving your customers away at worst)

MMOs that frontload the difficulty have historically performed really poorly in the market, I want to say Wildstar is a recent example?

It's absolutely a valid complaint that the game should get mechanically interesting sooner, but I can't see how you can actually doing it without running into the "most players are retarded" problem and ultimately MMOs have to make money.

Cutscenes have no rhytm whatsoever and the entire story is generic. Click to any random part of this and be immensely bored:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvWnCYolcQI&list=PLlMscAdJiuKpO2v6B6fImPqmIU1fQmGQZ&index=3
Compare to the beginning of FF10 for example.

Let met set the bar IMMENSELY LOW and compare it to Arc the Lad 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQT5p0AUgI4
FF14 is not even that much better than Arc 4 man

Can't comment on FF13 as I skipped every cutscene

Can't comment on AtL4 as I never played it.  I still respectfully disagree though, flatly, I found FF14 quite engaging by MMO standards.  It's certainly miles ahead of WoW in that aspect (WoW is pretty terrible at storytelling though for the most part, very low bar to clear).

No NPC is telling you an interesting story about their first love or, I dunno, trains.
There's supposed to be a war that went on, or is still going on, I think. It's hard to notice.
Areas don't have an atmosphere beyond the same "Kinda pleasant" feel that applies to everything.
Nothing changes and people are forever glued in one place.

Fair enough.  (Things do change.  But these are mostly backloaded so it's fair you didn't see it)

Yeah I wasn't particularly talking about difficulty here.
5 minutes into FF3 and you get this battle against LNDTRTL, nothing would be half as memorable in FF14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZnoIwvABPE
Also, sorry for using the word epic, I hate it too

I also forgot to mention FF14 maybe having the worsts UI of literally any game I've ever played. (on PS4)

It's a pretty typical MMO UI.  Worse than WoW's, for what it's worth, IMO.

That said, while it takes a while to get there (see above about standard MMO problems), I thought FF14's introduction of Ifrit was pretty memorable.

[Dark Holy Elf]

That seems to be the general rule in VP2 though. Defensive stuff is way overpriced on top of being not effective the more you play the game. Even things like Toughness just isn't that good late because you realize the skills/damage you trade off just becomes less and less worthwhile. If you're trying to build defense in VP2, you work with elements and not really any raw stats.

I definitely don't agree with Toughness antihype, a lot of bosses lategame and in the SG have damage which can OHKO/be very scary without Toughness and far easier to deal with if you do. It's much better than most offensive skills, you can pretty much predict who finds bosses like Odin competent or not based on whether they have Toughness yet, not based on any other skills.

That said Toughness being great (2x durability lol) has no bearing on your general point as most other defensive sealstones/skills are far worse, and certainly things like, say, boosting RDM/RES, are a total waste of time.

I do switch Toughness in for the SG bosses*, but otherwise have been finding it preferable to do without it. I left it off of Silmeria vs. Odin because I needed Heat Up in place just to have a full-party SC chain (this is the real problem with sticking with her instead of Freya), and wound up having to devote an inordinate amount of AP to keeping her specifically alive. For randoms I use those five skill points for Heroism + Break Up instead. Heroism bonuses get nuts when there's like half a dozen enemies, and you know I love breaking everyone's shit. Break mode is the best. Remaining skills tend to be assigned to Fists of Iron/Mental Boost/Psychosoma for non-Brahms people, Brahms skipping the latter two and just subbing in whatever random shit I feel like playing with at the moment (and then inevitably forgetting about). I think he had Observation in place last time I played the game. I haven't noticed it doing much of anything. I never ever use defensive skills other than Toughness, outside of the very early game when Fortify Physique is all you've got because your accessory options are shit.

(*maingame, only final Lezard really felt like he made it necessary. AE Lezard deals too much fucking damage.)

Sealstones are always always Sharp Sword Law first, was Poison Pin second in the maingame but poison's pretty worthless in the SG, and then usually Paper Tiger third because free damage bonus since I'm obsessive about being at full health anyway. For SG times the latter two are replaced by Yggdrasil and Six Elements Blessing, which is probably the only defensive sealstone I have ever bothered using. Even knowing offense >>> defense in VP2, I tend not to use the ATK 150% RDM 50% sealstone unless I know I'm about to fight something magic-focused. Not real comfortable nuking my defenses to that degree.

EDIT: I could maybe assume it's obvious I took the time to teach the entire main party every single skill even knowing I would never use 90% of that shit.

RDM-50% sounds bad but... it adds like 5% to Lezard's (physical) damage, for instance, and IIRC that's fairly normal for its effect. Really not worth caring about, when you consider how big the offensive boost is. You can make up the defensive drop in all sorts of ways (Six Elements Blessing is a good one, since almost every boss after Hrist uses elemental damage, even for its physicals).

I agree that Toughness isn't always necessary by any means because going all in for offence works and works well, but if there's any fight which is actually a threat to kill you, Toughness will surely make the difference. I don't think it has much competition for the mantle of "best skill in the game", nothing else is as universally applicable for making your party better able to deal with things. (Psychosoma puts up a fight though.) You can get around its value by blitzing whatever you are up against, of course, as well as various advanced tactics used to defeat NG++++ runs which I'm sure Tide could tell us about, but generally speaking it's really great, particularly since most VP healing is %-based.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

That's (modern) MMOs in general.  I hate to bring it up again but City of Heroes is literally the only MMO I ever played that _wasn't_ like this, and only because being set in the modern day instead of being in a medieval-ish fantasy world gave them the narrative "out" of your questgivers having a cell phone, so the extent of your traveling was super-jumping or whatever from mission door to mission door.

Most of the games I'm familiar with only have you returning to the last hub for repeatable quests, if they do so at all.  Even WoW has a fair number of objectives that auto-complete and give rewards out on the last kill now, or barring that, you turn in at the next questing hub.  What is your frame of reference, in terms of things you've played?

[Sierra]

Oh, there definitely isn't a skill in VP2 more game-breaking than Toughness. I've just played the game enough that this time piling everything into killing faster has proven a fair exchange in circumstances other than bosses having overkill damage.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Oh yeah, no question there.


Star Fox - I randomly decided to replay this, first time in like a decade probably. I've played a bunch of space shooters before but this is definitely the only one which has ever truly grabbed me and made me want to master it. Part of that is that several of my friends in late elementary school were really into this, and part of it is something that became pretty obvious upon replaying this again: its bosses are very memorable and feel kinda like MMX boss design thrown into a different genre, is the best way I can put it. One or two of them are frustrating (fuck you Great Commander 1 and your tiny, tiny weak points) but overall they're very enjoyable.

Generally speaking I was able to get through most stages with little problems but every route has 2-3 bosses towards the end of the game who are nasty bastards and generally killed me multiple times (Phantron, Plasma Hydra, Metal Smasher, Spinning Core, Great Commander). Andross is always easy by comparison, beaten on the first try every time.

Played it on an emulator which could lag a bit at certain points (the base game already lags at some points IIRC, but the emulator definitely made it worse). Nintendo needs to release this for the Virtual Console, the SFX chip can't be that hard to emulate...


Super Mario Bros. - I have no idea why, randomly replayed this too. It is short! Took me just over an hour despite game overing on worlds 1, 6, 7, and 8. Yeah I have no idea about 1 either, I kept trying to get the mushroom in 1-4 and dying, I make bad decisions sometimes. 8-1 is still nasty as hell. Also given how limited the game is the final room (hammer brother, podobo, fire + hammers Bowser) remains pretty golden for what it is if you don't have a mushroom/flower. Which of course I didn't because I lost it to something stupid earlier in 8-4.


One thing I noticed about both games (and indeed many others of their time) is how dying once is a good way to ensure you die again because in both games you get powerups (mushroom, twin blaster) which you frequently need to pick up over the course of several stages to get to the highest power, and/or if you die you'll be without it and there may not even be one to get in the stage (or half stage if you're past the checkpoint). Which of course makes everything that much harder. This isn't a judgement call on the design choice, on the one hand it's kinda punitive for one death to potentially lead to others, but on the other hand, it really makes you want to cherish that fire flower/twin blaster/various Contra guns/etc. It's interesting how this design feels like it has mostly died out from games, so I guess on average people didn't like it much. <.<


Final Fantasy Dimensions - Paladin chapter now. Definitely enjoying this, it is a job system game which could give you more options but those you have are fun and it makes up for it with the battle design being quite good. Grefter observed that they do kinda go to the same well a few times but still each major boss gets its own spin and it's pretty fun. Just lost to Styx a couple times, because as Edgar proved two decades ago, MT confuse is really rude.

I wish the game were a bit shorter / faster-paced because it would have extremely high replay potential then, as it stands it will probably just be okay.