i remember one day i was driving home on 71 south after a shift working at the ebay store in columbus, mid-november about 6 or 7 years ago and the weather was horrendous, probably in the low teens, with the wind-chill even lower. i remember the brutal cold distinctly because i forgot my gloves that day, and had to clean the snow and ice off of my car with my bare hands.
the roads were snowy, traffic was slower, but not awful, and i was in the left-most passing lane when i came upon a semi-truck with an odd-looking trailer. it was all metal, but had a series of compartments, with holes running length-wise, exposed to the weather. it was the first time i had ever seen one like it.
as i passed the truck, i noticed that inside each tiny compartment, there were multiple, live turkeys jammed together, screeching.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Sunday, July 10, 2011
FINAL FANTASY XIII, A VERBOSE REVIEW
Whew! Last night I completed my arduous 140+ hour Final Fantasy XIII tour of duty on the Xbox 360, netting almost all of the achievements and having some fun in the process. This is far from a perfect game however, and one of the not-so-great installments of the Final Fantasy series. There is a noticeable chunk of Square-Enix quality to be found here but I have a hard time believing that any Final Fantasy fan would call FF13 their favorite of the entire series. Is it the most fun you've had with an RPG on a next-gen system? At times, yes. Is this game an exercise of excessive tedium? At times, also yes. Final Fantasy 13 lives in this dichotomous dead-zone where for every aspect that's "what a wonderful idea" great, there are equally as many "what were they thinking?" bad moments. I suppose most of this review will lament on how much better this game could have been... *sigh*.
Now I've played through my fair share of Final Fantasy games (and RPG games in general, I might add) and I don't know if that makes me any kind of authority on the matter, but the Final Fantasy series in particular holds special memories for me, as I'm sure it does with all the other fans who grew up with the series. Numerous grandiose discussions & debates exist regarding the best Final Fantasy, but I believe we as fans can all agree they are among the best that any RPG series has to offer.
Before I bought this game (and after waiting for the price to drop significantly, I mean, who can afford a SIXTY DOLLAR game these days?) I read a plethora of reviews with the intention of informing my decision on whether to purchase the game or not. I noticed there were key phrases that kept showing up... "too linear", "beautiful but boring", "not an RPG", "can be played by pushing one button", etc. So even after reading all these reviews, I decided to buy the game for a measly twenty bucks, knowing it was probably going to have some flaws.
While hyperbole born from frustration could explain away some of those negative review snippets, not all of them are unfounded. I admit the player is going to need some patience at the beginning because the first part of the game consists of cut scenes interspersed with a tutorial on how to play, which I agree takes too long. Once you get past the tutorial stages though, there IS a certain amount of depth and strategy (and yes, RPG elements) involved.
The cut scenes (beautiful though they are) also make the pacing seem laborious at times when all the player wants to do is explore and battle monsters. Granted, there is some truth to the "long hallway/boss, long hallway/boss" level design/linear-style game play, but what a lot of reviewers fail to consider is that the story doesn't really allow for the party to sit back and say "well, lets just visit this town or that town for days on end" like they might in another type of RPG. Since this particular Final Fantasy plays more like a movie than any other in the series (well, except for the actual Final Fantasy movies themselves) there is an immediacy to the story that makes it feel imperative that your party advance.
For as much as other reviewers seemed to hate it, I really didn't mind the linear progression that much, since it seems like this is what the Final Fantasy series has been building towards for years -- like, it's not some big surprise... I mean, when was the last time you played FF10? I think some people simply forget that the other games have some linear progression as well. I guess it boils down to this: FF13 is basically an RPG game with no side quests (aside from the L'Cie monster hunting), just the main quest. Some people hate this aspect, I thought it kind of worked for this particular story.
Sometimes though, during the full motion cut scenes I found that when there's lots of action and movement on the screen (I'm thinking specifically of the Eden race near the end of the game where the heroes show up on their eidolons) I could barely tell what was going on -- the images would pixelate and the movement would blur. I am running my Xbox 360 on 1080p with an HDMI cable to a brand new Samsung 1080p HDTV so that should NOT be a problem... I wonder if the PS3 version looks this bad during the action scenes?
Anyway, just as every great story has great characters, every great RPG has to have equally great characters with believable motives, desires, and goals. The player characters in FF13 have fairly believable motives, as far as the context of the game is concerned, and it makes sense when they band together to form an alliance. Missing though, is the interactive and engaging storytelling that is usually present in the Final Fantasy series that makes you feel like you connect with the characters directly, instead of just watching them do whatever through cut scenes (lavish though they are). This is probably my biggest complaint with the story, along with the confusing nomenclature and ill-described world that you find yourself in once the game starts. After completion, I'm still not entirely sure why I was fighting or why the villain was trying to destroy the world. There's just this vague, overlying sense of "this dude is evil, don't let him destroy the world". This confusion isn't helped any by the constant cavalcade of supporting characters that at first seem to be important, but whose stories ultimately turn out to go nowhere and feel tacked on just so the game can have more characters.
All those characters do look great though, and this is the main area the game truly shines. The graphics & art design are hands-down beautiful. They are most strikingly realized when the player first arrives on the Archlyte Steppe Plains in Gran Pulse, which is definitely a 'wow' moment. The landscapes are gorgeous in scope and color. Enemy character designs are good-to-great supplemented by a few old FF series favorites (Woo! Tonberry and Cactuar! But no Moogles, whaaaat?) However, the final boss design is a joke and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Player character designs are also good-to-great -- but seriously, do we really need multiple characters with pink hair?
Also, if they were striving for realism in the weapons department they missed the mark. One of your characters fights with... an oversized-boomerang? One with just his bare hands? I understand they can use magic and stuff, but I dunno, they're going up against giant war machines and legions of gun-toting soldiers who also use bazookas...
Luckily, there is one player character that seems well-equipped enough to handle the enemies, and he's also one of the coolest characters in the entire series, Sazh Katzroy. His duel-wielded pistols are totally satisfying, especially when you use Blitz. He is also one of the two complex characters in FF13 (Hope being the other) who go through rigorous changes throughout the game, while the other characters remain basically the same at the end of the game as they are when you first meet them.
Another area FF13 shines is the sound design. The music is subtle and gorgeous at times and for the most part doesn't get repetitive, which helps in such a long game. The sound effects are all top notch and make the impact of weapons & spells on the enemy that much sweeter (with the exception of the sound of the characters' feet hitting the ground, wayyyyy too pronounced and high in the sound mix; sometimes all you hear is TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP as you run through an area, you know? Shit man, I get it, my character is running around... do I really need their loud-ass reverberated footfalls every half-second?) Like all the other aspects of this game, there is something not-quite-right about the sound -- namely, the voice acting. I feel like the voice direction is to blame for most of the crappy acting, because I feel like the actors themselves are trying their damnedest to make the garbage dialog sound believable... except for the voice actor who plays Vanille... her voice is so awful and annoying I would rather hear baby seals clubbed to death by demons wielding wailing, aborted fetuses as bludgeons. There really should be an option in the menu to mute Vanille's voice. Unforgivable.
The production team did however, make the right decision by using non-random battle encounters similar to Chrono Trigger and the Tales series by placing monsters around the map, with the player choosing what to engage. It makes more sense than having a landscape devoid of monsters and it builds a real anticipation when you see these giant creatures roaming around knowing you will surely have to build your characters up to take on such a behemoth.
Another minor problem though, is the free-floating camera, which you use the right thumb stick to control. I always felt like I was fighting with the camera the entire time, like it didn't really want to let me adjust it to wherever I wanted to... this is most apparent when you finally get to ride the Chocobos. The camera never stays centered, it always floats either to the right or the left of your character. Again, minor, but it's a problem that simply should not exist in the first place. What were they thinking?
All the menus and the save/shop/upgrade kiosks are well designed, attractive, and easy to use. Once you are comfortable with them, you will be able to flip through the information, buy, sell, and cater your team equipment and calibrate paradigm sets with ease. The weapon upgrade system is difficult to understand at first but once you 'get it', will be quite simple. However, you almost never have enough items to make it seem worthwhile as there are very few grinding opportunities, especially early in the game.
Which leads me to one of the most frustrating flaws in the game: NO GIL FOR DEFEATING ENEMIES. The only way to get GIL in this game is to get "Items that can be sold for a premium", and the only way to get those is to GRIND and hope enemies drop them. There are items in the game that you can equip on your characters to up the chances of drop rates, but there is way too much focus on the randomness of enemy drops. Want to upgrade your weapons? Welp, you're gonna need GIL for that: to purchase component items, LOTS of component items. Jeez, the last time I had to grind this much in an RPG was Dragon Warrior for the original NES.
This is the reason I didn't pursue one of the achievements called "Treasure Hunter" -- you get this achievement for collecting every accessory and weapon in the game. That doesn't sound so bad though, right? Wrong. To get every weapon you have to upgrade those weapons (and each character has like, six weapons each) into upgraded and different forms, using items. There are organic component items, mechanical component items, and transformational catalyst items. Confused? (Yes.) Cool in concept, awful in execution. You never have enough items and they are too expensive to keep buying (read: you will never have any GIL). I was only able to upgrade one of my character's weapons into its ultimate form, and this was without Death-spamming Adamantortoises for five hours straight so I could build up my reserve of trapezohedrons. Bluntly tedious and bluntly time consuming.
Which finally brings us to arguably the MOST important factor in a Final Fantasy or RPG -- the battle system. And you guessed it, just like every other part of FF13, the battle system has the good, the bad, and the ugly. All of the action and spell animations are fantastic, especially high level spells; it's just so cool to see someone cast Thundaga and see five enemies get zapped to shit. Lightning moves across the battlefield like a ninja slashing and shooting with her gun-blade while Sazh blasts fools with pistols that link together and transform into a sniper rifle!
FF13 has the most frenzied battle system I have ever encountered. When you are fighting low-level monsters and analyzing their weaknesses, filling stagger gauges, shifting paradigms and reigning down hellfire, it certainly feels bad ass. But, as fun as it is at times, this is also the sole contributor to the game's downfall. Every negative thing I have to say about the battle system is based on the designers wanting to keep the battles in real time and failing to give the player the tools to successfully and entertainingly do so as the game progresses.
To help implement this fast paced, real-time battle system, Square introduced an all-new Auto-action system, based on your character's current job/class that works wonders for low level encounters and less-so for higher difficulty ones. This means that for a lot of battles, you can just hit the A button and the game will assign actions that your character will perform. This works really well on most of the low-level monsters that you have to grind through, but really hinders your effectiveness through some of the boss battles, when you need to be much more specific and tactical about the spells and abilities you use as well as what paradigms you need your players to be set up in (which you can assign before the battle and change on the fly).
However, when you are selecting specific actions/spells from the lists, the battle is still ongoing - that is, the enemy is still beating on you and your party. Also, switching paradigms (jobs) DOES NOT freeze the action the way changing Dress Spheres paused the game briefly in Final Fantasy X-2. So while the animation for changing jobs is going on, enemies are still taking down your HP! I died countless times trying to switch a Medic in to heal my party -- and if you accidentally select the wrong Paradigm, well you have to wait for ANOTHER animation to play, while the enemy still gets to take turns wailing on your defenseless characters. How tough would it be to design the game to pause the action while I select the spells, actions or paradigms I want? What were they thinking?
Furthermore, the game forces this paradigm switching animation to play -- for example, if I have a party consisting of 2 Commandos and 1 Ravager and I want to switch to a paradigm of 3 Commandos (meaning only 1 character has to switch: from Ravager to Commando) I have to sit and wait while the animation plays of ALL THREE changing to Commandos! Weren't two of my characters ALREADY Commandos? Why do they have to switch from Commando to Commando? Skip that fucking animation for those two characters! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!?
So basically what this tells me is that the designers are punishing you for playing any way OTHER than using the Auto-action feature... they've made sure that every other option is too slow to be effective. This was an awful oversight and another time when I am forced to ask, "what were they thinking?" The Tales series from Namco solved the problem of Real-Time action in their series more than a DECADE ago by just assigning certain button combinations for certain moves or spells, kind of like a fighting game. Is this the type of game the creators of FF13 wanted their game to be? Then they should have just let Namco design their battle system for them.
But wait! Eidolons are in this game too! Unfortunately they cost 3 TP points to summon, and you can only ever have 5 TP points total, which means you'll likely save them for a boss battle. But you don't really need them for the boss battles because just about all of the enemies in this game can be beaten without summoning your Eidolon. And even if you do, you only summon the Eidolon of whatever character happens to be your player character at the moment. So if you want to play the whole game controlling say... Lightning, then you will only get to summon Odin, her personal Eidolon. Once actually summoned, fighting alongside your Eidolon is totally killer and the summoning/transformation animation scenes are really cool. Unfortunately, the ease of the enemies combined with the steep summoning cost means you will hardly ever summon your Eidolon. Also, the Eidolons seem weak in this game -- unless the enemy is staggered, your Eidolon will only do normal damage when it seems like this bad ass summoned Godlike character should be dominating. The Eidolon gauge will run out and the enemies will still be standing there and you'll be like, "what? that's it?"
Finally, my last gripe with this game is that you only control one character during battles, which is a major departure and another moment where the designers sacrifice total player control for "fast pace" battles. You can choose from any of the player characters BUT, if the character you are playing runs out of HP (dies) - the game is over. Your two teammates can die a thousand times over in one battle (after which you can just revive them with Phoenix Downs and they return with like 75% health), but if you die just ONCE, the game is over. Totally awful.
If ANY of the enemies in this game were smart, they would just attack the first player character nonstop. It doesn't help that the other two A.I. controlled characters are incompetent for the most part. Saboteurs (debuffers) seem to randomly select debuffs when their first selection should always be SLOW (for enemies that are affected by slow). When the Medics heal the party, they should always heal the player character FIRST and they almost never do, unless your health is the lowest in the party.
I caution fans of Final Fantasy before they play the 13th installment: this game has plenty of flaws, the two main guilty parties being a lackluster script/story and the half-thought-through battle system. However, there are some good parts, and a few great parts that will blow your mind.
Am I glad I played Final Fantasy XIII? Even with all its flaws, yes. But please don't pay more than 20 bucks for this game.
Now I wonder if they'll fix any of these problems in Final Fantasy XIII-2?
 |
| Do you smell bacon? |
Now I've played through my fair share of Final Fantasy games (and RPG games in general, I might add) and I don't know if that makes me any kind of authority on the matter, but the Final Fantasy series in particular holds special memories for me, as I'm sure it does with all the other fans who grew up with the series. Numerous grandiose discussions & debates exist regarding the best Final Fantasy, but I believe we as fans can all agree they are among the best that any RPG series has to offer.
Before I bought this game (and after waiting for the price to drop significantly, I mean, who can afford a SIXTY DOLLAR game these days?) I read a plethora of reviews with the intention of informing my decision on whether to purchase the game or not. I noticed there were key phrases that kept showing up... "too linear", "beautiful but boring", "not an RPG", "can be played by pushing one button", etc. So even after reading all these reviews, I decided to buy the game for a measly twenty bucks, knowing it was probably going to have some flaws.
While hyperbole born from frustration could explain away some of those negative review snippets, not all of them are unfounded. I admit the player is going to need some patience at the beginning because the first part of the game consists of cut scenes interspersed with a tutorial on how to play, which I agree takes too long. Once you get past the tutorial stages though, there IS a certain amount of depth and strategy (and yes, RPG elements) involved.
The cut scenes (beautiful though they are) also make the pacing seem laborious at times when all the player wants to do is explore and battle monsters. Granted, there is some truth to the "long hallway/boss, long hallway/boss" level design/linear-style game play, but what a lot of reviewers fail to consider is that the story doesn't really allow for the party to sit back and say "well, lets just visit this town or that town for days on end" like they might in another type of RPG. Since this particular Final Fantasy plays more like a movie than any other in the series (well, except for the actual Final Fantasy movies themselves) there is an immediacy to the story that makes it feel imperative that your party advance.
For as much as other reviewers seemed to hate it, I really didn't mind the linear progression that much, since it seems like this is what the Final Fantasy series has been building towards for years -- like, it's not some big surprise... I mean, when was the last time you played FF10? I think some people simply forget that the other games have some linear progression as well. I guess it boils down to this: FF13 is basically an RPG game with no side quests (aside from the L'Cie monster hunting), just the main quest. Some people hate this aspect, I thought it kind of worked for this particular story.
Sometimes though, during the full motion cut scenes I found that when there's lots of action and movement on the screen (I'm thinking specifically of the Eden race near the end of the game where the heroes show up on their eidolons) I could barely tell what was going on -- the images would pixelate and the movement would blur. I am running my Xbox 360 on 1080p with an HDMI cable to a brand new Samsung 1080p HDTV so that should NOT be a problem... I wonder if the PS3 version looks this bad during the action scenes?
Anyway, just as every great story has great characters, every great RPG has to have equally great characters with believable motives, desires, and goals. The player characters in FF13 have fairly believable motives, as far as the context of the game is concerned, and it makes sense when they band together to form an alliance. Missing though, is the interactive and engaging storytelling that is usually present in the Final Fantasy series that makes you feel like you connect with the characters directly, instead of just watching them do whatever through cut scenes (lavish though they are). This is probably my biggest complaint with the story, along with the confusing nomenclature and ill-described world that you find yourself in once the game starts. After completion, I'm still not entirely sure why I was fighting or why the villain was trying to destroy the world. There's just this vague, overlying sense of "this dude is evil, don't let him destroy the world". This confusion isn't helped any by the constant cavalcade of supporting characters that at first seem to be important, but whose stories ultimately turn out to go nowhere and feel tacked on just so the game can have more characters.
All those characters do look great though, and this is the main area the game truly shines. The graphics & art design are hands-down beautiful. They are most strikingly realized when the player first arrives on the Archlyte Steppe Plains in Gran Pulse, which is definitely a 'wow' moment. The landscapes are gorgeous in scope and color. Enemy character designs are good-to-great supplemented by a few old FF series favorites (Woo! Tonberry and Cactuar! But no Moogles, whaaaat?) However, the final boss design is a joke and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Player character designs are also good-to-great -- but seriously, do we really need multiple characters with pink hair?
 |
| PINK HAIRRRRR! GAHHHH! |
Also, if they were striving for realism in the weapons department they missed the mark. One of your characters fights with... an oversized-boomerang? One with just his bare hands? I understand they can use magic and stuff, but I dunno, they're going up against giant war machines and legions of gun-toting soldiers who also use bazookas...
Luckily, there is one player character that seems well-equipped enough to handle the enemies, and he's also one of the coolest characters in the entire series, Sazh Katzroy. His duel-wielded pistols are totally satisfying, especially when you use Blitz. He is also one of the two complex characters in FF13 (Hope being the other) who go through rigorous changes throughout the game, while the other characters remain basically the same at the end of the game as they are when you first meet them.
Another area FF13 shines is the sound design. The music is subtle and gorgeous at times and for the most part doesn't get repetitive, which helps in such a long game. The sound effects are all top notch and make the impact of weapons & spells on the enemy that much sweeter (with the exception of the sound of the characters' feet hitting the ground, wayyyyy too pronounced and high in the sound mix; sometimes all you hear is TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP as you run through an area, you know? Shit man, I get it, my character is running around... do I really need their loud-ass reverberated footfalls every half-second?) Like all the other aspects of this game, there is something not-quite-right about the sound -- namely, the voice acting. I feel like the voice direction is to blame for most of the crappy acting, because I feel like the actors themselves are trying their damnedest to make the garbage dialog sound believable... except for the voice actor who plays Vanille... her voice is so awful and annoying I would rather hear baby seals clubbed to death by demons wielding wailing, aborted fetuses as bludgeons. There really should be an option in the menu to mute Vanille's voice. Unforgivable.
The production team did however, make the right decision by using non-random battle encounters similar to Chrono Trigger and the Tales series by placing monsters around the map, with the player choosing what to engage. It makes more sense than having a landscape devoid of monsters and it builds a real anticipation when you see these giant creatures roaming around knowing you will surely have to build your characters up to take on such a behemoth.
Another minor problem though, is the free-floating camera, which you use the right thumb stick to control. I always felt like I was fighting with the camera the entire time, like it didn't really want to let me adjust it to wherever I wanted to... this is most apparent when you finally get to ride the Chocobos. The camera never stays centered, it always floats either to the right or the left of your character. Again, minor, but it's a problem that simply should not exist in the first place. What were they thinking?
All the menus and the save/shop/upgrade kiosks are well designed, attractive, and easy to use. Once you are comfortable with them, you will be able to flip through the information, buy, sell, and cater your team equipment and calibrate paradigm sets with ease. The weapon upgrade system is difficult to understand at first but once you 'get it', will be quite simple. However, you almost never have enough items to make it seem worthwhile as there are very few grinding opportunities, especially early in the game.
Which leads me to one of the most frustrating flaws in the game: NO GIL FOR DEFEATING ENEMIES. The only way to get GIL in this game is to get "Items that can be sold for a premium", and the only way to get those is to GRIND and hope enemies drop them. There are items in the game that you can equip on your characters to up the chances of drop rates, but there is way too much focus on the randomness of enemy drops. Want to upgrade your weapons? Welp, you're gonna need GIL for that: to purchase component items, LOTS of component items. Jeez, the last time I had to grind this much in an RPG was Dragon Warrior for the original NES.
This is the reason I didn't pursue one of the achievements called "Treasure Hunter" -- you get this achievement for collecting every accessory and weapon in the game. That doesn't sound so bad though, right? Wrong. To get every weapon you have to upgrade those weapons (and each character has like, six weapons each) into upgraded and different forms, using items. There are organic component items, mechanical component items, and transformational catalyst items. Confused? (Yes.) Cool in concept, awful in execution. You never have enough items and they are too expensive to keep buying (read: you will never have any GIL). I was only able to upgrade one of my character's weapons into its ultimate form, and this was without Death-spamming Adamantortoises for five hours straight so I could build up my reserve of trapezohedrons. Bluntly tedious and bluntly time consuming.
Which finally brings us to arguably the MOST important factor in a Final Fantasy or RPG -- the battle system. And you guessed it, just like every other part of FF13, the battle system has the good, the bad, and the ugly. All of the action and spell animations are fantastic, especially high level spells; it's just so cool to see someone cast Thundaga and see five enemies get zapped to shit. Lightning moves across the battlefield like a ninja slashing and shooting with her gun-blade while Sazh blasts fools with pistols that link together and transform into a sniper rifle!
FF13 has the most frenzied battle system I have ever encountered. When you are fighting low-level monsters and analyzing their weaknesses, filling stagger gauges, shifting paradigms and reigning down hellfire, it certainly feels bad ass. But, as fun as it is at times, this is also the sole contributor to the game's downfall. Every negative thing I have to say about the battle system is based on the designers wanting to keep the battles in real time and failing to give the player the tools to successfully and entertainingly do so as the game progresses.
To help implement this fast paced, real-time battle system, Square introduced an all-new Auto-action system, based on your character's current job/class that works wonders for low level encounters and less-so for higher difficulty ones. This means that for a lot of battles, you can just hit the A button and the game will assign actions that your character will perform. This works really well on most of the low-level monsters that you have to grind through, but really hinders your effectiveness through some of the boss battles, when you need to be much more specific and tactical about the spells and abilities you use as well as what paradigms you need your players to be set up in (which you can assign before the battle and change on the fly).
However, when you are selecting specific actions/spells from the lists, the battle is still ongoing - that is, the enemy is still beating on you and your party. Also, switching paradigms (jobs) DOES NOT freeze the action the way changing Dress Spheres paused the game briefly in Final Fantasy X-2. So while the animation for changing jobs is going on, enemies are still taking down your HP! I died countless times trying to switch a Medic in to heal my party -- and if you accidentally select the wrong Paradigm, well you have to wait for ANOTHER animation to play, while the enemy still gets to take turns wailing on your defenseless characters. How tough would it be to design the game to pause the action while I select the spells, actions or paradigms I want? What were they thinking?
Furthermore, the game forces this paradigm switching animation to play -- for example, if I have a party consisting of 2 Commandos and 1 Ravager and I want to switch to a paradigm of 3 Commandos (meaning only 1 character has to switch: from Ravager to Commando) I have to sit and wait while the animation plays of ALL THREE changing to Commandos! Weren't two of my characters ALREADY Commandos? Why do they have to switch from Commando to Commando? Skip that fucking animation for those two characters! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!?
So basically what this tells me is that the designers are punishing you for playing any way OTHER than using the Auto-action feature... they've made sure that every other option is too slow to be effective. This was an awful oversight and another time when I am forced to ask, "what were they thinking?" The Tales series from Namco solved the problem of Real-Time action in their series more than a DECADE ago by just assigning certain button combinations for certain moves or spells, kind of like a fighting game. Is this the type of game the creators of FF13 wanted their game to be? Then they should have just let Namco design their battle system for them.
But wait! Eidolons are in this game too! Unfortunately they cost 3 TP points to summon, and you can only ever have 5 TP points total, which means you'll likely save them for a boss battle. But you don't really need them for the boss battles because just about all of the enemies in this game can be beaten without summoning your Eidolon. And even if you do, you only summon the Eidolon of whatever character happens to be your player character at the moment. So if you want to play the whole game controlling say... Lightning, then you will only get to summon Odin, her personal Eidolon. Once actually summoned, fighting alongside your Eidolon is totally killer and the summoning/transformation animation scenes are really cool. Unfortunately, the ease of the enemies combined with the steep summoning cost means you will hardly ever summon your Eidolon. Also, the Eidolons seem weak in this game -- unless the enemy is staggered, your Eidolon will only do normal damage when it seems like this bad ass summoned Godlike character should be dominating. The Eidolon gauge will run out and the enemies will still be standing there and you'll be like, "what? that's it?"
Finally, my last gripe with this game is that you only control one character during battles, which is a major departure and another moment where the designers sacrifice total player control for "fast pace" battles. You can choose from any of the player characters BUT, if the character you are playing runs out of HP (dies) - the game is over. Your two teammates can die a thousand times over in one battle (after which you can just revive them with Phoenix Downs and they return with like 75% health), but if you die just ONCE, the game is over. Totally awful.
If ANY of the enemies in this game were smart, they would just attack the first player character nonstop. It doesn't help that the other two A.I. controlled characters are incompetent for the most part. Saboteurs (debuffers) seem to randomly select debuffs when their first selection should always be SLOW (for enemies that are affected by slow). When the Medics heal the party, they should always heal the player character FIRST and they almost never do, unless your health is the lowest in the party.
I caution fans of Final Fantasy before they play the 13th installment: this game has plenty of flaws, the two main guilty parties being a lackluster script/story and the half-thought-through battle system. However, there are some good parts, and a few great parts that will blow your mind.
Am I glad I played Final Fantasy XIII? Even with all its flaws, yes. But please don't pay more than 20 bucks for this game.
Now I wonder if they'll fix any of these problems in Final Fantasy XIII-2?
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths
Just started reading "Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths" by the legendary SHIGERU MIZUKI -- he is huge in Japan; his hometown of Sakaiminato even has a street dedicated to his work where apparently "one hundred bronze statues of the story’s characters line both sides of the road".
The first part of the story introduces the troops arriving on the island and shows them preparing themselves and the surrounding area for war, vaguely reminiscent of the initial scenes in the film "Letters From Iwo Jima".
Mizuki's artistic style towards the environment is borderline photo-realistic, but he renders his characters in the more "cartooney" manga style. Perhaps this helps Mizuki distance himself from reliving or re-experiencing what had to be the gruesome realities that he and his friends/squad-mates faced during the war.
I don't think much of his work has been translated into English, as I've had a hard time finding anything other than the Kodansha GeGeGe-no-Kitaro volumes. From what I understand, Mizuki's WWII stories are considered his lesser-known works - his yokai (loosely: Japanese Folk/Fairy Tales) are what he is most well-known for.
Maybe Drawn + Quarterly decided to publish his WWII stories to test the American-graphic-novel-consumer waters, which I suppose makes sense, given the on-going American fascination with World War II, stemming from Saving Private Ryan, the Call of Duty games, Garth Ennis' various (all excellent) WWII comics, and the Band of Brothers/The Pacific HBO TV series, not to mention all the books and documentaries.
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| Mizuki served in the Japanese army during WWII |
The first part of the story introduces the troops arriving on the island and shows them preparing themselves and the surrounding area for war, vaguely reminiscent of the initial scenes in the film "Letters From Iwo Jima".
Mizuki's artistic style towards the environment is borderline photo-realistic, but he renders his characters in the more "cartooney" manga style. Perhaps this helps Mizuki distance himself from reliving or re-experiencing what had to be the gruesome realities that he and his friends/squad-mates faced during the war.
I don't think much of his work has been translated into English, as I've had a hard time finding anything other than the Kodansha GeGeGe-no-Kitaro volumes. From what I understand, Mizuki's WWII stories are considered his lesser-known works - his yokai (loosely: Japanese Folk/Fairy Tales) are what he is most well-known for.
Maybe Drawn + Quarterly decided to publish his WWII stories to test the American-graphic-novel-consumer waters, which I suppose makes sense, given the on-going American fascination with World War II, stemming from Saving Private Ryan, the Call of Duty games, Garth Ennis' various (all excellent) WWII comics, and the Band of Brothers/The Pacific HBO TV series, not to mention all the books and documentaries.
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