Switch (2020)

Posted: 2024-04-28

Playing xenoblade has been an experience that shows being in the right mindset is important to enjoying a game. More on that later.

Xenoblade is right up my alley. It has a lot of what i like in an RPG. Good cast, a decent combat system, an earnest plot and some pretty good music to top it all off.

The voice acting is fantastic. i dunno what it is, but I seem to prefer American accents lately. I think they sound more like home and i like that. As much as I appreciated the voice acting in this game, I’m sooo happy there’s an option to disable voice chatter during the gameplay. "hup" "hup" "alioop"

My biggest draw to the game is the aesthetic. A co-worker has described the look of the game as “looks like battlefield in smash bros” and he’s not too far off. The game aesthetic is not shy about using deeply saturated colours for their environments. The grass is cartoonishly green but it works. For one, it makes the game easier to see, as the original release for the 3DS has small screens. It’s also an artistic choice as the game takes place in a lot of grand, high fantasy environments. The large sweeping landscapes in xenoblade are worth stopping and enjoying the scenery every now and then. The day/night cycle introduces alternate pallets with a lot of bioluminescent assets for many of the outdoor areas at night. In short, the game is gorgeous.

The aesthetic and cinematography was designed for the 3DS and its readily apparent on a television. Characters are proportioned with big heads, hands, and weapons. Cutscenes tend to have really tight closeups. It does look a lot better in handheld mode, but man is it goofy seeing Shulk’s face take up 2/3 of the screen on the TV.

The characters themselves tend to wear over-designed, goofy anime armour. This isnt a dig, I think its funny as hell

The combat has an auto-battle element, but this mostly takes a backseat to the real time combat the player engages with. Each character has up to 9 abilities they can use, and each one is on its own cooldown timer. By the time the midgame is in full swing, there aren’t a lot of moments when the player will be idly waiting for actions.

For whatever reason, i had some trouble getting a handle on the combat. I think a combination of the visually noisy particle effects and jumping into a 3D game after a long time made for a disorienting introduction. Combat is otherwise pretty trivial. There is the occasional plot moment where combat becomes nigh unbeatable until the player follows specific instructions. As long as you read and be patient these sections pass by with little trouble.

Once thing i did not like about the difficulty scaling is that there seems to be a level gap between a dungeon and the resident boss. This usually forced me to leave and go off questing to gain exp. I didn’t like that the game was scaled in a way that made side quests almost mandatory in this way. Side quests, imo, should always be opt-in. Eventually, I needed to be choosy with which quests i complete bc early game quests were not worth the time/effort by that point. Xenoblade had hundreds of quests overall, and dosens of quests on the list at any given point and it was a headache having to comb through them to figure out what ones will actually benefit me. (ᗒᗣᗕ)՞

I dont like Bionicles

Have you ever had a type of media ruined for you because you associate it with someone unpleasant? (I promise I’m going somewhere with this.) For me, this is bionicle. An ex roommate was so unpleasant and utterly obsessed with bionicles and lego. Ultimately my problem with her is that she was a true NEET. She never spoke to anyone socially aside from me, and then made me out to be the bad guy when i tried to teach her basic skills like respect my goddamn boundaries and maybe fucking shower more than once a week. she would also take advantage of my kindness and underpay her share of rent, cry crocodile tears anytime i criticized her lack of financial knowledge, and then spend literally thousands of dollars a yr on legos. Make it make sense (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ Needless to say, I don’t have an amazing impression of bionicles now.

The reason this is important is that xenoblade takes place on a giant, continent sized dormant organism standing in the middle of a vast, endless ocean called Bionis. There’s a parallel in bionicle lore, which also takes place on a continent sized dead bionicle. So, as cool as the idea is for a fantasy setting, it was hard to appreciate when all it would do is remind me of some of the most unpleasant living conditions I’ve ever had to endure in my adult life. That experience ended less than 6 months as of the time of this writing, so i really had to work hard to get past all that and be able to think of the Bionis as a genuinely cool setting.

It eventually became a lot easier to admire the expansive maps and beautiful atmosphere of the game. The problem with these grand settings is that. You have to walk across them. (@A@) Sprawling fields and massive caverns are nice and all until you have to trek the entire distance on foot. This is usually tempered by exploration bonuses and fast travel but those are few and far between. Revisiting areas to grind out a quest item or find a specific npc requires dedicating a lot of time to traversal.

Most monsters are aggro’d by either seeing or hearing you. That doesn’t stop them from being stupid as hell lmaoooo Their vision cones and hearing radiuses are tiny and laughably easy to dodge in most cases. Even the huge fuck off monsters are functionally blind. Although it is pretty funy to watch the huge ones amble by at a majestically slow pace and then turn on a dime. So there is a small risk when walking behind the big ones that they whip around unexpectedly and spot you.

The characters are pretty great

I liked most of the main cast. I must me mellowing out because a lot of these characters are archetypes that i often find annoying. Shulk’s motivating drive is revenge, but he’s honest about this motive and repeatedly demonstrates an ability to set this aside for more urgent and noble causes.

Reyn is a perfect himbo.

Riki sucks. Full stop. I have a suspicion he’s more tolerable in the original japanese and whatever localization efforts were in play turned Riki from what was probably a perfectly fine character to an irritating tag-along. I ended up benching him and then finally decided i may as well try him out deeeeep into the lategame. Turns out he’s great! Riki is a fun character to have in the party for gameplay, but remains an annoying extra anytime the plot kicks in. ¯\_(σ n σ)_/¯

I love melia! Shes the best! Top tier mage! I don’t know why i imprinted on her like a goddamn baby duck but i did and shes my favourite character. Genuinely, i struggled to keep playing when she was temporarily removed from the party. This was one of the factors that turned me off from playing xenoblade for a good two months. (This was also around the time is was stuck in the MapleLegends hole.) You don’t fully get her back until you’ve played through a long side plot with plenty of long cutscenes and a couple of small dungeons. Y’know, the normal thing to do when you hit a wall is to go around completing quests until you’re levelled enough to beat the next boss. I didnt have a problem w that up until that point, here i was grinding while desperately thinking how much id rather be playing as my missing mage. (TTATT)

Sharla basically never left my party being the dedicated healer of the game. She really comes in clutch. I’m not entirely sure how the logic of the AI works in this game, i think they’re under the same restrictions as the player. If that’s the case, the AI in this game is solid enough for me not to worry too much about healing if Sharla doesn’t manage to get to it in time. I also liked her chemistry with Reyn.

I’m surprised i didn’t like Dunban all that much. He’s a fine character, but I’m mostly ambivelant to a character who was otherwise my type.

ROBOT GIRL FIORA IS BEST GIRL. (ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ)

Ludonarrative dissonance strikes again

The UI gave away some of the plot. The plot leads the player to believe the climax of the game will occur at the top of the Bionis. Even when the plot makes out that you’ve met all the party members and in a way, you have it’s obvious the game is going to introduce a new party member late into the game. There’s also a conspicious area left blank on the affinity screen, meaning there is one more town to discover.

At a certain point, all of the Alcamoth quests are marked with a time limit symbol. This means these quests will no longer be completable after reaching a certain point in the plot. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots and realize the city will be destroyed.

Fiora suffers from this same problem. Nevermind all the death flags she carries all over the early plot. She only has maybe a handful of cosmetic outfits compared to Reyn and Shulk’s several dosen.

Other times the game straight up warns you when an area will no longer be accessible nice and all but man is it a bitch to farm for items after losing certain areas, and this is WITH some improved QOL in the definitive edition.

Big preesh that the end boss is a classic god with a fat hubris that gets defeated we the power of friendship :3 The ending had a lot of imagery of space and the solar system, as well as a bit of background on how the world came to be. I’d be interested to see how the sequels would expand on that.

Overall, this was a pretty good game. I didn’t like how padded the game felt with the difficulty jumps, but i came around to that if i was willing to play in handheld while watching/doing something else. Keep in mind it is an 80 hr game. There is an afterstory episode that i played for a few minutes. I might revisit for that bc Mel is in it

PlayStation 4

Posted: 2024-04-10

This is a banger. My problems with this game are nitpicky, which is a great sign. (ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ)

Ff7 remake has an incredible amount of polish. Not a surprise considering that ff7 has been the flagship ip of squeenix basically since its release. The music is fantastic and the visuals are stunning. This game has clearly received a lot of resources and attention during development. This has mostly paid off, but there are some details where this has been a detriment to the final product. I'll get to this later

The gameplay is pretty solid. Remake reintroduced the ATB, but re-imagined for a more modern AAA game. Regular attacks are unrestricted, but all other actions such as magic, special moves, and item use require the ATB to use. This is not a hinderance as the ATB fills continually, and fills faster using regular attacks. The limit break also makes a comeback.

The player can also switch characters on the fly. Compared to ffxv, switching is much better here. The controls are the same across all characters, and you’re free to command any character at any point. Even though the player is restricted to Cloud outside of combat (thus, automatically switching back if you were controlling another character) it does not feel as disorienting as it did in ffxv. They kept it simple and uniform, making for a better experience.

A modernized gameplay is nice and all, but the REAL crown jewel of the remake is the setting. Midgar is recreated with a loving eye. The plot points related to the class divide is preserved, and those themes are clearly well understood by the remake team. It would have been so easy for squeenix to try and soften the edge in a misguided attempt to make the game appeal to broader audiences or whatever, but that didn’t really happen. The OG ffvii plot/setting was a banger, and its still a banger in remake.

Remake did a great job depicting the scale of midar. When under the plate, the underside of the plate dominates the skybox. It looms like a threat. The underside, inside, and top of the plate seem to go on forever. It’s an engineering marvel, and so clearly a hostile to anyone unlucky enough to live under the plate.

Remake is not one-to-one to the original. This game expands on/changes several details. The AVALANCHE crew get expanded character arcs, for one. Jesse, Biggs, and Wedge each get their own mini character episodes. These are fantastic additions to the game. The settings are much more alive as well. The various sectors and areas are loaded with NPCs that help set the tone for the game. Basically, the ramake took what the og game already did, and went into greater detail.

The main cast were well executed. I can almost feel how much the staff loved these characters. Aerith in particular stuck out to me. The game paid special attention to Cloud and Aerith’s meeting and time together.

I have a lot of praises for this game, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

There was more than one boss fight that felt unnecessarily drawn out. It was like the only way the game increased difficulty was by increasing enemy HP bars. The stupid Hell House was irritating for this kind of thing. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ You don’t even have the luxury of a full party when you fight it. Aside from Cloud, you only get Aerith and she’s not exactly a heavy hitter. (=A=')

The final boss gauntlet was also a little unforgiving. I remember dying a few times and getting pretty tilted that there were no checkpoints between phases. I really felt the pressure toward the end bc i didn’t want to risk having to redo such a long segment eugh (‘=n=)

As much as I loved that a lot of the plot and setting retained its edge, there were some changes I was less enthusiastic about.

If you don’t know, ffvii remake is only a remake up to the end of disc one. In the og game, Sephiroth basically never shows up in disc one. There is a lot of mystery and intrigue surrounding him. I like that Sephiroth is treated like a boogeyman. It does a great job of increasing the tension of the plot.

Like, in the og game, the leadup to the climax has the party find a gruesome trail of blood in the upper floors of Shinra tower, only to find president Shinra freshly assassinated at his desk. Iirc you never encounter Sephiroth once in this segment. Part of what made Sephiroth an intriguing villain is that you only learned about him through the pieces you have to put together after the fact. You hardly ever encounter the guy in person, you only see the bloody and horrifying trail of destruction left in his wake. Dude is practically a ghost and that is one of the reasons his connection to Cloud is so threatening. You chase his down and fall for every trap he sets out.

In the remake, Sephiroth shows up in the first five minutes. Its like the game was self-conscious in its presentation. Almost as if it didn’t trust players would be interested in playing remake unless it said “Look, we have Sephiroth in this game! You like Sephiroth right???” It’s a very fanservice moment that completely undoes what made chasing down Sephiroth interesting and fun in the og game.

Also, it just occurred to me, why would Sephiroth try to kill Cloud at the end of remake? Did I miss something here? It’s like his only motive is to show up and go “heegh! Its me!” and then he fuckin shanks you!

The OTHER major plot change i disagree with is that the ending reveals Zack is alive. I LOVE (ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ) °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖° this character. He’s easily my favourite across the entire franchise, so I’m a little torn. I’m a total slut for more content of this character, and I’m happy to have a playable version of this guy in a game that doesn’t have completely batshit combat mechanics. On the other hand, making this guy playable in the remake series completely undermines a lot of big and important plot points. Like, Cloud’s entire character arc kinda hinges on what happens to this guy?

I dunno, man. I’ve mentioned it in a blog entry, but I really don’t see how the remake series could make it so that Zack is alive and also not completely change the plot for the worse. Like, a huge reason that remake worked so well is that the devs didn’t change what was already a banger of a plot.

I mean, fundamentally, the whole multiverse plot tends to be a fanfic trope for a reason. It’s used as a vehicle for wish fulfillment that will often set the plot aside for said wish fulfillment. This pretty acceptable in fanfic, but I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you why that might raise a few red flags in a big ticket, AAA video game, right???? (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

GameCube

Posted: 2024-04-09

I played Crystal Chronicles for nostalgia. I was able to get a lot further in the game than i did as a kid, but unfourtunately i've decided to drop this game for one reason:

This is a co-op game through and through.

Solo play eventually turns into a miserable slog. This is otherwise a great game, but there are almost no compensations for solo players. People willing to min/max their play will be able to get through the game fine, but its tough trying to do a more casual playthrough.

The controls arent an issue. Left bumper scrolls through action/spell selection which is the same as right bumper. According to my co-worker, spell selection is easier w a gba connection. I have no way to test this but im fascinated with how gba controls would differ from gamepad controls. But alas, I have no way to know playing solo.

Crystal Chronicles assumes you have at least one other person who will reliably play with you for every play session. The deliberately slow pace of combat is set so multiple people can co-ordinate their movements and attacks. The most egregious aspect is that casting spells happen at a snails pace. This is to help avoid misfiring spells when multiple people are involved in casting.

That's right! Multiple players can combine spells to make more powerful spells. If two players cast the same spell, they will cast ara level (mid level) spells. Solo players are allowed to link two spells to achieve the same effect. Unfoutunately, solo players will be locked out of casting aga (high level) spells. You need to play co-op to do that.

When I say CC assumes you will play co-op for every play session, that's not an exaggeration. If one person plays ahead, any inactive playable characters will not gain any levels/stats. If a player jumps back in after missing one session, the level gap between the returning player and the next dungeon is a setup for a frustrating time. CC locks cleared dungeons for a couple of in-game years, so its not like you can revisit old dungeons to help a other players catch up. Dungeons change as the game progresses, and levels are only gained after dungeon clears, so there are increasing barriers if players cannot reliably play together.

I remember playing CC with a neighbour as a kid, and this problem made itself known pretty early on. If my neighbour played ahead because i couldnt come over, then my character was too under powered to stay alive or attack effectively. It gets real disheartening real fast.

So, CC is really only suitable for people who already live together to play. So, siblings, roommates, partners and what have you. Don't get me wrong, I love couch play as much as anyone else, but CC is not a great game to return to for someone like me who prefers to live alone and game solo.

Its a real shame this game dissuades solo play, because behind this fundamental design choice, is a great game. The style, storytelling, visuals, music, and gameplay are all fantastic.

The 2.5D style for dungeon layouts with fixed camera positions was such a smart choice. Since there's no camera to worry about, players can focus on the gameplay while adventuring through a gorgeous and expertly laid out settings.

The world building and lore is intriguing and heartbreaking. If you're familiar with LotR, CC has a little bit of that End of the Third Age vibe. If you don't know what that means, CC is very obviously after the fall of a golden age in the world.

Each of the 4 fantasy races tell you their various histories. All 4 races either directly state or imply some sort of severe downfall in the recent past. The narrative has a very storybook feel, being told literally from a book presumably from the perspective of an older player character in the future. The narration varies from lighthearted stories to horrifying cautionary tales, depending on the dungeon. The music ties it all together to give the game a very folksy feel.

I may give the crystal chronicles series another chance, but im gonna need to do a bit or research to figure out which one. Some of the games are on consoles i dont own, and i get the impression other CC games have radically different play styles. Dont hold your breath, i have games i bought literally over 10 yrs ago that i gotta get to first lmao