Final Fantasy XIII: You know you can’t keep letting it get you down and you can’t keep dragging that dead weight around

And it’s with a heavy heart, Square-Enix, that I feel we should reevaluate our longstanding relationship.  We’ve had so many good memories together since 1987 when we were both so young, filled with curiosity and wonder.   As one of the oldest and respected gaming companies I’ve enjoyed growing old with you, from the earliest days of FFI, to Secret of Mana, to Chrono Trigger, to FFTactics, to FFXI, to even those different times like Vagrant Story, Front Mission, and Parasite Eve.  But with your latest project, Final Fantasy XIII, I feel like you’ve slipped away from what’s made you so amazing.  I feel like we’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even exist anymore except to sit and watch you like I’m a ghost.  I’d hate to think all of the time we’ve spent together has now come to this but since our relationship now is on the edge of possibly ending for good, I think it’s best just to spend some time apart.

While I wish game company relationships were a little more straightforward like this, the complexities of what make a good customer/product provider relationship can depend on many things, and to keep that relationship strong over time, a company has to evolve to an ever changing world.  Final Fantasy XIII from Square-Enix, which is the longest running game series for consoles filled with its own self-titled irony, is in all respects an attempt to adapt into a new decade of possibilities.  It is another train stop from a quite triumphant and glorious game company.  It’s on the level with an almost decade of searching for the next big pop star, regardless of the country. 

With such a powerhouse company with many notches on its belt, it’s hard to imagine finding a game to dislike, especially one within their cash cow series.  Picking apart the previous 12 games, searching for identifiable aspects that make the Final Fantasy the series that has captivated gamers since its conception, one can easily find some of the best written stories games have to offer, character sets who have grown and developed as the age of games gets older, musical scores that are now performed by sponsored orchestras, and one of the most copied RPG battle systems since consoles were first born.  Yes, there are also a lot of Japanese culture-esque informalities from gigantic chicken/ostriches to white demons that have a very extensive vocabulary of one word, but all of these can be brushed to the side as you focus on the vital portions of Square-Enix’s games. 

In FFXIII, the story, characters, and entirety of the game is all separate from previous games once again.  In XIII there are six characters all unique with interlacing back stories.  The main story itself is quite involved, containing a boat load of cutscenes to move it along, probably giving XIII an unofficial award for amount of cutscenes ever in a single game (I’m still searching for a montage of the words focus and choice on youtube as they become the most overused words throughout all of XIII’s cutscenes).  The voice acting is beautifully done with the addition of Australian accents for a couple characters that are supposed to be from a separate planet.  Like much of the RPG genre, at least 50-60 hours have to be spent in order to finish this game.  This should not come as too much of a surprise though as the game is contained within three DVDs, an amount of memory the original FF could only dream of having in it’s time.  And while having dreams of ramming a Delorean to 88 to give NASA the processing power of today before we ever landed on the moon, FFXIII spits out a long story reveling within itself to the well over three hour mark of a total movie.  So make sure you bust out your entire box of Orville because there is a lot of sitting time. 

While you’re taking in all of the sights of the story, there is a lot of music to be had and all of it seems somewhat muted or swept beneath the rest of the game.  When the music does awaken, you realize it’s repetition has become rampant.  This is also expected as leveling within a Square-Enix RPG has previously taken people to the point of mental instability, the same place in your mind where you begin to argue with yourself over dye numbers used in Twinkies and names of actors from your favorite 80’s sitcoms. 

The idea of repetition is not the terrible notion in XIII unlike other RPGs or even older FFs, and this is due to its linearity.  Whilst you dungeon dive with your minimap is on, all crevices and hiding places are within short walks, enemies are all visible, some can be avoided, and enemies no longer drop currency.  Gone is the idea of off the beaten path for dungeons, the idea of towns to explore has faded, and leveling is done differently as exp is now awarded directly as points to purchase abilities and stats under a system with few choices.  Stats have been whittled down to strength, magic, and hp alone making the understanding of their correlations easier.  Gone are mana bars and item management (to keep health high) is negligible as health is reset after each battle.  Dropped items and treasure sold is almost the only way to make a living in XIII, fully immersing players in the old unused economic system of bartering.  And since most are out of touch with the going rate of sheep’s wool and tiger fangs, be prepared to be swindled and taken for all your worth; every piece of scrap metal and dead carcass feels like a rare drop.  Items dropped are used for weapon and accessory upgrades (no armor or equipment whatsoever) and require a large amount of farming and input to be worth the effort.  All of these tiny facets of XIII make for a simplified RPG compared to all of the predecessors appealing to a wider age group.

Everything described, small similarities or differences, are just offsets of something deeper.  It might be tough to figure out where all my earlier disdain comes from; in fact, with the barter economy, every gamer should have the same amount of excitement as a kid opening a Nintendo 64.  If you search anywhere on the big I you’ll find it quickly as it is the largest topic of discussion.  Skipping your Topeka searches, and right in time for Easter, Square-Enix has decided to put all its eggs in one place:  the battle system.  Map designs, storyline, simplification of stats and leveling, etc, are all based off their interactions with the system.  Everything else meshes well in regards to the system in FFXIII, but this is where I decided to take a step back and really wonder why I began to rush right to the end of the game to be done with it, rather than become engulfed within the enjoyment of playing it or bothering to scrounge up every treasure. 

The battle system is the core of any RPG as it puts the player in the driver seat, enveloping the gamer as a part of the story, deciding the destiny and outcome of its characters.  In XI and XII the battle systems were quite a step away from the turned based types of the previous ten.  For FFXI, the real time system made sense as the game was MMO in nature, and the idea of a turned based MMO combo is about as bad as kitty boxing without youtube.  For XII, the system mimicked XI being very difficult to handle at times in a single player way, but battles were fun and actually worked well, being closely relatable to Bioware’s systems.  So where does a company go from making ten turned based games and a couple of real-time?  Well if not improving either one, why not combine the two?

It sounds like an interesting idea, one that would spice up the series again and be different and unique enough to call it another milestone.  Well pay close attention and try to picture how this system works.  The system is first set in such a way that it takes the first twenty five hours to go through the entire tutorial for it and gain total control of your squad of six.  (The first twenty five hours you run a constant gauntlet of battles and cutscenes while heading in only a single direction.)  A party is set up of three members, each of which is made up of mix of three out of six classes: two offensive (commando/melee and ravager/magic), a buffer (synergist), debuffer (saboteur), a healer (medic), and a tank (sentinel).  During each battle you only actively control one character and passively control the other two.  What this means is you can only control the class your other two characters are using and their chosen abilities are automatic.  Not only are theirs chosen automatically but you can hit one button to automatically fill in abilities to be used by your active character.  As time passes, your action bar fills and abilities with differing amounts of your action bar can be chosen and executed but only for the previously chosen active character (you cannot switch while in battle).  This means that for almost all of your battle time you pound on one button on the controller to autofill the action bar and the other times you are just switching class sets back and forth (class sets are also prechosen and you can only choose six sets prior to battles), i.e., Commando/Ravager/Medic and Medic/Sentinel/Ravager, etc.  Trying to individually choose abilities of your active character is slower than autofill and leads to enemies feeling hastily aggressive since battles are still in real-time. 

To sum up everything about the battle system take a game series that contained twelve games each having the complexities of chess and throw in a thirteenth that feels much like checkers.  Ok maybe a slight step up like 3d checkers but very limited in its control of battles.  In turn that dreaded repetition found in every Final Fantasy game appears only this time it’s in the wrong place.  The game is still a challenge regardless of the system but the difficulty is unforgiving and more frustration than outthinking an opponent as damage predictions, life bar watching, and enemy action patterns run wild and are almost too fast to keep up with.  Blind luck at times seems to be cause of outcomes because a poor switch of classes can quickly lead to your party leader’s death (only one needed for) and game over and the same pattern of choices the next time will work even if everything is copied identically.  Battles now are timed and item rewards for successes are based on hitting goal times to attempt to keep your battles on the offensive side, dancing with luck in the pale moonlight.  Even with the drive to finish battles quickly, battles become quite lengthy and combinations of class sets utilizing the sentinel class draw out battles to the far side of madness.  A nicely implemented retry option allows for less save point reloading frustration after a game over, but the amount of retries I needed to finish the entire game was more deaths than I ever remember having in any of the previous FF games.  So add in all the lost battle time to bad luck, timing, or poor predictions, and you’ll find your two feet ever closer to the edge of the cliff.         

After unwrapping it all, starting with that little bow on top, the surprise you find in the box is a shiny movie.  The game portion of FFXIII feels like a boring and frustrating blockade preventing the player from the next cutscene.  And even though the cutscenes are all an amazing presentation of the story, the $60 pricetag for a game where the interactive portion is not fun makes for a very expensive movie.  Maybe it was the amount of love I had for Square-Enix before this release and the length of time between XIII and XII that makes the gaming relationship hurt so much.  No matter the causes, the consequences are hard to forgive.  So Square-Enix, I tried to understand some of the reasons for your latest changes, but jeopardizing the loyalty of an already long existing relationship can cause terrible effects for both sides for years to come.  Buy it used if you must, enjoy the movie, and maybe we’ll see something different in a few years. 

Rating = 3.0 {out of a –10 to 10 scale}

Ok Go – This Too Shall Pass

Just Cause 2 Demo: It was a holy shaking earthquake and you were stuck up the tree

Never getting to play the first and somewhat intrigued at screenshots for the second, Just Cause 2 from Eidos and published by, of all companies, Square-Enix is due out March 23rd.  Not as disappointing or typical as most other demos tend to be, JC2 is a 3rd person delight at times, and at others a frustration and copycat of another famous series. 

The first installment was released late 2006, a year after it’s direct predecessor, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction where the gameplay is sandbox style.  And ok, Mercs was just a mimic of GTA but the changes made it worthy to separate the two games.  Where GTA focused on driving and the city, Mercs focused on destruction and the country.  JC is very similar to Mercs.  Very.  And with this game the differences between Mercs and JC aren’t enough to separate the two.  Lots of explosions, vehicular manslaughter, and equipment air drops, not to be confused with log drops, are all quite fun the first, second or third time through or get old just as fast. 

If you’ve never played GTA, Mercs, or JC1, the concept is quite simple.  Take on some missions while the rest of the world is open to destroy or just breeze around in lusciously stolen vehicles and take in some various scenery.  In JC2, you are a black market merc aiding in an overthrown of an evil dictator on an island in Southeast Asia.  And the way in which any evil dictator is overthrown in the modern world is to create random chaos.  And why?  Just Cause.  Yep.  Tagline. 

What JC does really well, better than Mercs or GTA, is entrancing the player with beautiful graphics in the world you explore.  Where the console versions may be stuck at a set resolution, the PC version can be forced to FarCry or Crysis levels of beauty.  Exploring the world can be done at quick rates without vehicles with the addition of a grappling hook in JC2.  This allows you to grab trees, buildings, vehicles or even the ground and zoom quite quickly from here to there like Curious George on speed.  Base jumping is made easy with an unlimited amount of parachutes making falling out helicopters and Boeing 737s a breeze.  So the exploration and transportation is done well. 

What isn’t done as well is the aiming system.  Precision aiming can be a bit of a pain on the fly as well as the AI aiming that gets increasingly accurate as time progresses after initiating a battle.  When things are pulled off to your liking they do look amazing as the destruction system is somewhat a step up from most action games.  Vehicles lose parts and pieces, buildings crumble, and Bob working the fruit stand seems to not mind you running over his business time and time again.  Quest progression does seem a bit random and listless but might be overshadowed by the open world environment.  Control of some of the vehicles is sometimes difficult to grasp, ie the piper cub planes, but what is interesting is the responsiveness of the vehicle chosen and where you are using that vehicle does yield a nice change.  For example, riding on a sport bike on the streets is pretty easy to accomplish but once you take it offroad, the bike realistically feels sloppy and almost uncontrollable. 

Just Cause 2 was a very fun game to try, the demo allowing for anything available in the full game being at your fingertips within a 30 minute time period.  If you enjoyed GTA, Mercs, or JC1, Just Cause 2 deserves you to try at least the demo.  As for forking over the cash for the full game, you would have to really love the sandbox environment genre or not have spent money on any of the others before it as you can attain the joy of open world mercenary work by playing some of the older games for a cheaper price or waiting for one of those special Steam clearance weekends.  Sorry Rico.

 

 

The Middle East – The Darkest Side

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 + Alien vs. Predator Multiplayer Demos: Opinions were like kittens; I was giving them away.

After a quick couple of downloads and plenty of the internets to research the pieces, Alien versus Predator and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are just on the horizon for upcoming possible purchases.  So without further delay here’s a quick review of the multiplay demos for AvP and BBC2 (not to be confused with your friends over the pond).

There’s some expectations when making a sequel and BBC2 took time to listen to fans of the first making changes while including more of what worked in the first.  Comparisons to MW2 make for easier understanding so brace yourself.  From EA and DICE, BBC2 isn’t a carbon copy of FPSers.  There are some things that set it apart and each aspect holds some weight much like Michael Moore. 

Past Battlefield games were known for their multiplayer experience and I can easily see how this release will be another.  First, the map sizes are exceptionally big and designed a little bit differently than most other FPSers.  The graphics don’t skimp but are not the best out there.  They do however work well with the map sizes and large player caps even if it’s no where near MAG’s 256 number.  The designs are meant for the game types they are played on, namely conquer the territories.  Since the battles are aimed to be progressive, the maps therefore feel like a battlefield and not a random scattering of people running across the same ground in all directions. 

Vehicles are abound and a vital portion to what works well with the Battlefield series.  Controlling them is also easier than BC1 and makes for less issues of poor drivers or bugginess unlike Orkin commercials.  A copycat MW system for self progression is used allowing you to choose from 4 main classes and customizing each as experience points are gained.  I guess this is the new standard for all FPS multiplayer games now to keep people coming back for more; just be sure that if you are coming back for more you put in some more time on that treadmill too. 

The biggest piece of this digital pie is the destruction system used.  What that means is buildings, the environment, vehicles, and just about everything else are destructible by the side effects of warfare.  It is beautifully done and makes for an enjoyable ride while romping through the countrysides.  It is unlike any other FPSer around so take soak it in while it’s around.  The destruction system and vehicles separate BC2 from MW2 because the pacing and feel of each appeal to different playstyles which can exist simultaneously in a person but it may take that special kind of person to find a big place in that person’s heart for both MW2 and BC2.  That special someone with a big wallet. 

I am going to guess that the single player is quite similar to the first installment which was pretty much the Blue Collar Comedy tour meets Ernest joins the military: fart jokes galore.  This leads to a story that a bit difficult to stomach more than once and is probably completed quite quickly, but these are just guesses using past experiences with EA.  Does it all add up to a game worth purchasing now?  If you are very into multiplay, then I could imagine an easy purchase.  If you are going to bank on a worthy single player game too I’d save my cash for something a little darker?…

   

Working the opposite darker corner of the street of BBC is the retro release with an updated look: Aliens vs Predator.  Straight back an entire decade since AvP first knocked on your door, wet from the rain in 1999, you had an opportunity to accept AvP into your house to warm itself by the fire.   Requiring a PC at the time and two decades after the release of its original movie, AvP was quite unique in its single player game allowing you to choose a marine, alien or our blessed roommate predator.  Besides a minor flaw of a missing save feature in the single player game, AvP was a great release putting you in the shoes of a scared marine with the one and only motion sensor noise noise that can still stir up a nightmare or two when you hear it.     

Even after a decade has passed, I can still remember the original AvP and how difficult it was to transition easily between the 3 characters and their controls.  And this is the first difficulty in the latest release of AvP.  Porting to consoles as well as PC, jamming all the possible controls onto a controller is a bit difficult as well as being the person trying to remember them all.  More importantly is that the multiplayer portion has no pizzaz or more specifically any reason at all to want to play the multiplayer portion.  After sitting through a difficult system of joining a multiplayer game, most of the action requires a person to run around madly until an opposing player is found in which you attempt to close the distance or increase it depending on what character you have chosen.  The running gives the feel of the ice skating smoothness instead of actual running, but this is a difficulty with many multiplayer games.  Beyond that attacking seems a bit awkward and team play is just a random consequence of choosing the same race as others. 

What is hopeful is that the single player, updated and revamped, should still make for an enjoyable game.  The concept is pretty simple, emulate the movies as much as possible and let the fear ensue.  Where previous fear based games such as Doom, Resident Evil, or F.E.A.R. need you to get entranced with the game itself before the fear can result, AvP only requires you to have watched the movies alone at 3 am with the spooky sounds of a furnace to watch them with you.  The fear then comes naturally rushing back and welcomes you with bead projects, puppy dog eyes, and internet sites devoted to itself.  I can not reason with a full price tag to go along with a re-release game as well as a lacking multiplayer portion so bide some time and wait for Steam to chop the $$$$$$’s down but keep this release in your back pocket for a rainy day later this year.

 

Modest Mouse – Out of Gas