Its Giveaway Time!

Are you ready for some giveaways?  I sure as hell am!

The grand prize that I am offering at this moment in time is the above Final Fantasy 14 wristwatch!  I won it using my raw skill and willpower at a claw machine a while ago and I screwed the box a little bit when I removed the plastic ring the claw grabbed on to but the watch itself is unused!

So how do you go about winning this highly coveted collectors item?  Through watching my stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis! That's how!

I have set up a prize wheel that I will spin under certain conditions and if you are lucky enough then you can have a chance at winning this illustrious watch.  To play, all you have to do is make a 2GPB donation to the charity directly or cheer for 200 bits during the stream and we will spin the wheel!  You can also sub to my channel for 2! Yes 2! spins of the wheel.  Money made from the twitch channel will be funneled into either the charity directly or to improving the content.

"But Tau, I can't donate or cheer OR sub! What can I do?!"

Well fear not young one because there is one other way to play!  By watching the channel when I am live you will accumulate Twitch Points.  For the low-low price of 5000 points you can spin the wheel for absolutely free!  So potentially, just by watching the stream, you can have a chance at winning the grand prize!

But this isn't the only thing available on the wheel! Here is a list of things you can land on when you spin

1) The Grand Prize (will change as people win)
2) A Free Game Request: You can make a request for the Tuesday segment FOR FREE!
3) A charity donation in your name: I will donate 2GPB to the charity of my own money, win yourself that sweet good deed for the day
4) A free channel point reward: Want a song request? want me to speak Japanese? curb my potty mouth? well you can if you land on that space (excludes donation and game request)
5) Absolutely nothing: Better luck next time!

Follow the stream to play and follow me on twitter @Taurinensis to know when I'm going live!

Good luck!

Stream Update! Challenges Approaching

Right now, the current stream schedule rotation is as follows

Variety Day
NES 100 Game Challenge
Donation Request Day
Shmups and Speedruns

and now we're adding one more, a Challenge Day.  Recently I've been watching a lot of videos on YouTube of people doing 0 hit runs of the Dark Souls games.  That means going through the entire game without taking a single hit from a single enemy.  These guys are so good at what they do I've even seed a guy who goes by the name SquillaKilla on YouTube and Twitch beat Dark Souls 1,2 and 3 back to back without taking a single hit.

I've decided it would be cool if I could push myself to do this kind of thing so as a result I'm starting a challenge day segment on my stream.  Of course, I'm not daft enough to think I could do something like DS No Hit right out of the gate, I haven't played any of the Souls games for about a year now so instead we'll be kicking off with Final Fantasy 7 No Materia to ease us in.

I've made a little list of things I want to try and do that includes things such as Dark Souls no hit runs and single character runs of certain RPGs but I'm also open to suggestions, so if you know challenging ways in which to play a certain game, write a comment or hit me up on twitter and I may add your suggestions to the list.  There are some INSANE challenges that I've been made aware of such as Final Fantasy 7 solo character initial equipment which I will be incorporating as donation incentives so make sure you throw some money at the charity if you really want to make me suffer.

Don't forget to follow on Twitch so you don't miss anything
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Silly Gaming Habits

The great thing about gaming is that if a small group of people play a game then they'll usually play it in slightly different ways.  Weather it's going stealth or guns blazing in Deus Ex, genocide or pacifist in a game like Undertale or even something as simple as party selection in an RPG, everyone experiences a game in a slightly different way.

That said, there's a couple of weird habits that I have when playing games that I think are shared between quite a large number of players no matter what your play style is.  So because I'm feeling a bit lazy today here's a numbered list of weird habits I have while gaming 

1) Item Hoarding 

This is a bad gaming habit that I feel A LOT of people have.  Probably the most prevalent when playing a survival horror game but present in all genres.  Let's say your playing Resident Evil and you find a sick grenade launcher and a handful of grenade rounds.  That's going to come in handy for when you fight a boss or come across one of those Hunters right? Fuck no! What if you need it for later?! That constant worry that if you blow through all your cool shit now you'll make the next part an almost impossible struggle.  

What this results in is you getting to the end of the game with stacks full of all the best shit and the credits roll with all the cool stuff rotting in a box or at the bottom of your pockets.  This is disgustingly true for almost every RPG I've played.  I end up killing the big bad guy and he goes down in a ball of flame while my inventory spills over with max heals and other useful crap that I never used "just in case".  Even know as I play Dark Souls 3 I have so much ember I could probably use 3 in all the remaining boss fights and still have some left over but there's something in the back of my mind that just won't let me use them.  

2) Rounded Item Numbers 

This one is extra stupid because it doesn't affect ANYTHING but if I don't do it I get a deep feeling of disgust for myself.  

Let's say you're playing an RPG and you come across a town.  You go to the shop and they are selling  potions.  You look into your inventory, you're carrying like 63 of the things and you haven't needed to pop one in a LONG time.  Well that doesn't matter because now you HAVE to buy two more to make that 65 or you ain't ever leaving this town.  In extreme cases even 65 is no good, and you'll either have to buy 7 more to make it 70 

I knew one guy with such an extreme case of this that when playing Final Fantasy 1 together I tried to leave a town with 19 potions in my inventory and he violently wrestled the controller off me to backtrack into town to buy 1 more because "it's just not right".  Never fuck with a man and his supply numbers 

3) Multiple Saving
I feel that this habit comes from the same part of the brain that's responsible for making you horde items.  You've finished a session in whatever you're playing and you go to save.  You hit save and you watch it until the "save complete" sign comes up.  Then you reach for the power button but you stop dead right before you push it....."did I just save?"  So you sit back down and do it again and this process can repeat a number of times before you're fully convinced that your progress has been properly recorded.

This creates an extra layer of mental torture when you play a game that doesn't have traditional saving and just auto saves everywhere.  You see the little icon for the save and you turn off the system but you just can't trust it.  You spend the whole day wondering if it really did save and it eats at your sanity until you get home only to realise that everything was totally fine.  I've had situations where I've turned off a game like that, only to return to the console about 5 minutes later and powered it back on again JUST to make sure.

4) 100%ism
Now if you're the kind of person who buys only one game, completes it fully and then trades it in then congratulations you're some kind of mutant that needs to be captured and tested upon by the government and also this point doesn't apply to you.

Many however suffer from the dreaded backlog.  Games sitting on a shelf or in an online library just waiting to be played but you can't yet because you've not finished the X amount of other games that came before it.  A backlog is made worse if you're the kind of person who's obsessed with seeing a little 100% marker or getting the platinum achievement or whatever for whatever game you buy.

Personally, my backlog is so huge that I can't bring myself to even consider buying certain games because I know that if I start playing it my backlog will never progress or, even worse, I'll never get around to playing it.  Breath of the Wild is a great example of this since I really want to own my own copy of it but I know that I'll chase that 100% so obsessively that the hundreds of games in my steam library alone will continue to sit, unplayed, for god knows how long.

---

These are the ones that plague my life but if you have any other weird ticks or habits when it comes to your gaming let me know in a comment! 

Final Fantasy XR Ride at Universal Studios Japan

There's quite a few posts dotted around this blog now about stuff at Universal Studios Japan.  I'm not affiliated I swear, they just keep doing video game related stuff and therefore I'm compelled to go and check it out.

Usually I go to USJ for the Halloween events but this time I went out of season to go and check out a limited time Final Fantasy themed roller coaster they had.

The ride has, for now, replaced the Space Fantasy ride and the whole area has been COMPLETELY changed for the event.  As you come into the vicinity of the ride you can hear the series main theme played on the park speakers which does a pretty good job of hyping one up for the upcoming excitement. 

If you had never heard of Space Fantasy before there's almost no way you'd know it even existed in this space before they changed it for this ride, EVERYTHING has been made over. 

For example this used to be a big talking space face that would move around and all sorts of crazy shit and it's been COMPLETELY gutted to make space for this table with Moogles on it decorated with various iconic Final Fantasy weaponry. 

Once inside the ride itself its the usual Space Fantasy coaster but you are given a pair of "Crystal Goggles" so that you can navigate your way to Midgar and get back to an airship that's waiting for you.  Inside the VR you approach a crystal that has a little picture of Midgar on it and straight away some twat punches it and sends you to the Thunder Plains from FFX.  This happens a whole bunch of times and you fly through a bunch of areas from other Final Fantasy games until you land in Midgar and watch Cloud and Sephiroth have an Advent Children fight for a bit.  The ride ends with a bunch of Moogles telling you that you did a great job despite the fact that all you did was sit in a chair and get flung around a steel track.

All in all it was a pretty good experience.  Nothing out of this world but not bad for a bit of fanwank at a theme park.  I actually wanted to ride it a second time but the wait time became pretty massive in the afternoon so I had to skip it.  Also there was merchandise, I bought a water bottle with a chocobo on it that was pretty cool but they were expecting people to pay about £25 for a fucking ball pen which is just retarded.  Unfortunately it's not a permanent thing and Space Fantasy will make its return before too long but I'm sure once the ride is gone you'll be able to find some footage of it on YouTube or something.

Dark Yojimbo and Dark Anima Fights

I Hate Blitzball

If you've been watching the stream you'll know what I'm about to say already.  I'm in the final part of my FFX playthrough but this involves some HEAVY grinding to get the stats and gear needed to kill the Dark Aeons and ultimately the games hardest boss, Penance.

In order to make life a lot easier for yourself you get acquire the best weapons in the game known as Celestial Weapons.  The only drawback to these weapons is that when you first get them they are useless with the only skill on them being "No AP" which basically means no experience.  Once you do power them up though using a crest and a sigil they do crazy stuff like break the damage limit or charge your overdrive meter at triple speed and shit like that.

Now for the Dark Aeon stuff Wakka is a very important character because his limit Attack Reels is basically one of the best moves in the game.  With Wakka fully powered up and geared out he's doing 12x99,999 damage which is a hell of a lot of hurt.  Getting him to this point is the annoying part though.

Getting his crest is easy, you just go to a locker in Lucca and press X and you have it.  The sigil on the other hand requires you to play an absolute shit ton of blitzball, which might be the single most boring mini game in Final Fantasy history.  You need to play it 10 times in a league to get Attack Reels, then play games until a tournament with Status Reels pops up THEN finish the league you were in to start a new one with Auroch reels AND THEN play 10 more league games for the sigil.  This doesn't sound so bad but Blitzball is just eye gougingly dull and shouldn't be forced upon anybody like it is here.

I think for me, the main reason it's so disappointing is that in that opening cut scene Blitz looks like this sick, crazy underwater rugby with people being flung out of the arena and people smashing each other in the face every which way.  When you actually get into proper blitz though it's a boring turn based affair where you just pass to Tidus and Jecht Shot every few moments to win matches against incompetent AI.

What's weird is that I know people who actually LIKE Blitzball.  I don't get how one possibly could because it's already an easy mode snoozefest if you put no effort into it but if you actually research how to get and use the best players then the whole thing becomes a joke.  I guess it must just be relaxing or something but as far as I'm concerned Blitz can just fuck off forever.

RPG Difficulty Spikes

Before anyone asks where the top picture is, I'm currently on a road trip with my in laws so I'm posting from my phone.  The blogger app crashes so I'm stuck using fucking Safari and this thing just hates the idea of pulling images from from my photo roll.

Anyway, difficulty spikes aren't exactly a new concept to anyone that's been gaming a while.  There are plenty of games in all genres that have but I feel like it's the most annoying in RPGs because of the greater sense of security before the spike.

Now the main reason people have trouble with RPGs is because they are either underlevelled from running away from enemies.  Of course RPGs can pose all sorts of challenges but when people are complain that's usually the reason. However there are times where everything will seem completely fine but then you reach a boss and you just get your shit kicked in.

For example I was just playing pervy vita dungeon crawl Dungeon Travellers and the dungeon I was currently in was a complete breeze.  Enemies aren't really doing shit to me of any concern and and I'm killing enemies with ease.  Hell, my magic user was one shotting stuff for fucks sake.  So I get to the end of the dungeon and BAM the boss just shits all over my face.  Eventually I won but it required some extra grinding for skill points to get it done.  Other examples of this could be the wall boss in FF7 or Matador in SMT: Nocturne

It's annoying because the game makes you believe that everything is fine with easy as fuck trash mobs and then slams the breaks on your progress with a bullshit boss battle that makes you fuck off and rethink everything.  In other genres it's either easier to deal with or faster to change up what you gotta do to progress.  In RPGs all the management and preparation you have to do means that dealing with a spike could potentially take hours of tedium just to get on with the game.

Being challenged is good and all but any developer who puts these sudden spikes in their games need something sharp through their cheeks.  Fair challenge please guys

Picross

The last few weeks I've been depressingly busy with stuff and finding time for any real meaningful gaming sessions has been tough.  With what time I can squeeze in I've been playing Persona 5 which I can't share with you guys so I've had to horde that experience all to myself.  However, if I didn't find time to game at least a little bit in a 24 hour period I might go insane and that's when Picross came to the rescue.

I discovered Picross a few weeks ago in my local bar on a weekend.  That seems like a weird place to discover a video game but it's a video game bar where there are systems on the counter and games for days, it's a great place I'll do a post on it one day soon.  Anyway, I'm just sat having a drink but the dude next to me is playing Picross and usually I'm not drawn to puzzle games but for some reason I couldn't stop watching him play it.  Eventually I ask him to explain to me what's going on and after the evening was done I got curious and gave it a try myself the next day.  Well I was fucking hooked since it's incredibly easy to understand and yet still manages to be quite challenging.

The idea is simple, you get rows and columns of numbers and those numbers tell you how many filled in squares there are on that line.  If there are multiple numbers in the column it means that there is a space between the filled in areas and using nothing but these numbers you must uncover a picture on the grid.  The game on Gameboy and SNES has you trying to figure out these puzzles within 30 minutes and hitting an incorrect space causes you to lose time.  As you go on the grids get bigger and bigger which of course means the puzzles get harder and harder.

It's just an incredibly relaxing game to play and the challenge never really feels stressful.  Despite the timer going in the background as long as you take your time to work it out it's never really an issue but in the instances where mistakes are made and you really do end up battling the clock you get quite an intense experience. 


There are a pretty large number of Picross games.  There's the original game boy game and the sequel to that on the Super Nintendo.  There's also Picross 3D on the DS and a sequel to that on the 3DS which I'm told are very good and the extra dimension adds a good amount of extra challenge.  There's also a number of free Picross games on mobile too so if you wanted to give it a try then these might be a good place to start too.  There's even a fucking Final Fantasy Picross RPG for mobile called Pictologica where you solve small Picross puzzles in order to make your party of heroes attack stuff.

There's probably a bunch of other games I don't know about too but that should be enough to get you started.  Give it a try, it's fun, addictive and can be played in very small and quick bursts which means that even if your schedule is fucked you can squeeze in a quick puzzle here and there.

Gaming Log March 14 2017

Well shit I fell asleep after streaming so I'm awkwardly posting this log from my phone

Whenever I have to work early my days are quite uneventful so I spent most of it playing Dungeon Travelers again.  I managed to kill that boss though pretty easily after I discovered that my characters could be class changed.  You would think it would take an idiot not to notice that but character levels aren't displayed on the main screen and you have to go into individual status screens to find out.  Since I don't check that shit too often I had no idea that class changes were even an option.

Once I got home I streamed Megaman 4 speedruns which went well for the robot masters and then I fucked basically every end game stage.  I finished the night with Final Fantasy 9 where I watched a bunch of cutscenes and then played Chocobo Hot and Cold which may be the only mini game worse than Blitzball

Not Dead

If you've been paying attention then you may have realized there hasn't actually been all that much content recently.  This is due to a mix of a number of things for example my work is currently in it's busiest season of the year and due to this I come home every evening as a worn out husk in no condition to even be standing up let alone writing articles.  Also Pokemon Go came out in Japan which has eaten up a quite frankly embarrassing amount of my time but that's something we'll talk about later.  These were the two big reasons but other things have prevented me from really doing anything more than the occasional stream.

I thought I'd touch base with this short article because a lack of content is a sure fire way for the Alzheimer's Society to get no money and we don't want that.  Luckily, the lack of posting DOESN'T mean that things haven't been going through my head in regards for stuff to do once I find time and energy.

For example, the Ozma donation incentive for the Final Fantasy 9 stream was met so you can be sure that I'll be suffering my way through hours of chocobo hot and cold in order to bring you that epic battle.  Also the Resident Evil marathon where I play the first 4 games in the series back to back has also been met and as mentioned in a previous post the stretch goals to extend that to 5, 6 and 0 have been now added to the donation page too!

The other piece of good news is that in Japan there's a holiday known as Obon coming up, which means that I essentially have a week of bugger all to do outside of gaming and the occasional bit of cooking for the missus.  This means I'll be able to catch up with my shit and HOPEFULLY have a daily stream of content to you guys once more!

Thanks for the understanding and continued support! 

PS4 Blocked Scenes

You may be aware that the PS4 has an in built streaming feature.  By pressing the "Share" button on the controller you can immediately.  For people like me who are too broke to buy a capture card and too lazy to set it up properly even if I did, this feature is really cool.  As you may also be aware, I've been slowly working my way through the entire Final Fantasy series on my stream.

So one viewer has very kindly been donating to charity for the No Yojimbo donation incentive, which would force me to kill all the secret bosses legit instead of just paying for a Zanmato and this of course sparked a conversation about which version of Final Fantasy X I'm going to run.  The original Japanese release is out of the question because that version didn't have the dark aeon stuff so its either International on PS2 or FFX/X-2 HD for PS4 and I'm leaning towards the latter.

Except there's a problem and that's blocked cut scenes.  The only game I've streamed from my PS4 ever is Bloodborne so I've not encountered this issue but apparently some games have blocked scenes in them.  So when you reach that scene, the PS4 cuts the video feed to your stream and only you can see it.  I think the idea is to prevent spoilers or to get around copyright problems with music or some shit but either way this whole thing is complete bullshit.

Let's take it from the spoilers angle first because this makes no fucking sense.  I get that companies don't want people spoiling a new game because it may ruin the experience or may even lose them a sale if the person who got spoiled decides not to buy the game after hearing them.  But then again, why the fuck would anyone watch a stream for a game that they don't want spoiled?  Are they fucking stupid?  Not only that but it doesn't even come close to solving the spoiler issues because the player still saw those spoilers and there isn't anything stopping him from going on one of the many social media outlets and writing them all over the place for the world to see.

Then there's the issue of copyright which is a little more serious but ultimately still complete bullshit.  Check out my Silent Hill speed run from a while back

 Notice something about this video?  NO FUCKING AUDIO.  That's because there's apparently some kind of copyright issue with the song in the opening which caused Twitch to MUTE THE WHOLE FUCKING THING, yes I'm upset.  Anyway the point is that Twitch does this on an automated system so there isn't any need to block the video footage and disrupt the whole scene because of copyrights on the sound.  If they KNOW there's an issue with copyrighting within a given scene and can block the scene, why can't they just mute the audio.  Tell the PS4 to mute the mic and mute the game sound or something, sure but at least keep the video footage up because subjecting people to a few minutes of black screen for no real reason is complete shit.

Anyway, with that in mind I'm leaning towards playing X-X2 HD on PC instead but I'm a little worried about that because my computer is a great honking piece of shit  and if that version doesn't run properly that means I'm gonna have to buy it AGAIN on PS4 and just have to deal with black screen blocked bullshit during certain scenes.  Nothing is ever fucking easy is it?

Arcade Quickie: Dissidia Game 3

Wednesday means video upload day!  Have another Final Fantasy Dissidia match and yet another win!

Arcade Quickie: Dissidia Game 2 (Win)

Final Fantasy Record Keeper First Impressions

So usually I'm the kind of person who will immediately dismiss a game released on the phone as casual garbage that isn't worth playing.  I don't know what came over me last weekend though but in a fit of extreme boredom at home I decided to download and try out Final Fantasy Record Keeper. 

What I got was actually a pleasant surprise.  Final Fantasy Record Keeper is sort of like a Final Fantasy all stars game where you collect the characters from the various games and then have them fight in strings of battles in order to progress through the games history mode.  Game play wise that's about it, all you do is fight, but for something that I'm fiddling with on train rides and things like that it works pretty well. 

That said, there are a TON of levels and a TON of characters.  Aside from unlocking characters you also have to collect equipment which also have a level and can be made stronger by using items or other equipment.  Each level also has a hard mode which is known as a "force dungeon" but at time of writing I've yet to try that feature out yet.  The game also hosts a number of events which will allow you to get high level items or unlock characters.

While it plays like a sort of typical mobile RPG, there is that sort of Final Fantasy polish to it and it all ends up being rather compelling and hard to put down.  So far my only criticism of the game is that the energy that you need to do dungeons is far too limited and it forces me to stop playing.  Generally speaking I run out of energy before the end of my 20 minute train ride between my house and work place, which would be annoying if I didn't constantly carry a portable system with me.

The game is free so instead of me harping on about it you should just go play it for yourself.  There is a lot to it, a lot more than you'd expect from such a basic idea and exclusive to mobile.  It seems that the Final Fantasy mobile games do actually have some degree of quality (apart from that All the Bravest thing) because my friend tells me that Final Fantasy G Bike is also pretty good so maybe that's worth checking out too!
 

Arcade Quickie: Final Fantasy Dissidia Arcade Game 1 (Loss)

Today I played some Dissidia Arcade and unfortunately lost the game.  Still having trouble wrapping my head around everything that's going on.  Didn't help that I walked into a brave attack like an idiot then followed it up with mass panic slamming of the summon button which just left me open.  Oh well, lessons learned!

Bravely Default

So I've not quite finished this game yet, I'm on the final battle but it's giving me some issues and I could be a while before I get the ending so I'm going to write a little bit about this game now.

Bravely Default is one of those games that I heard people talking a lot about back when it was first released but because of the 3DS region locking I was never able to actually play it.  Eventually, I got my mother to bring a EU copy with her when she came to visit me in Japan and I jumped right in.

The game follows the adventures of 4 characters who have to go around the world of Luxendarc and revive 4 elemental crystals.  On their adventures they have to fight an evil empire and as you defeat the generals you gain asterisks which allow you to change into their job.  That's the general plot of the game but each area for each crystal has its own arc that plays out so you aren't just jumping from dungeon to dungeon.

It's very easy to sum up Bravely Default's game play because it's just classic Final Fantasy.  It's SO classic Final Fantasy that it would have made more sense to call this game Final Fantasy 15 and call that game something like Men's Fashion Model Adventure or something.  Your party of 4 never change but as I mentioned before you have a job system with a pretty wide selection of things to choose from once you do the side quest to unlock it.

The combat is also pretty much classic Final Fantasy but the BP system does manage to go a good job of making things a little more interesting.  Each turn you are allowed to "Default" which is the games way of saying defend and doing this will raise your BP count by 1 and you can stock a max of 3.  Then on your next turn you can "Brave" which is where you expend a BP in order to make another action that turn.  So if you brave for one turn then the next turn you can make 2 attacks or you can use a skill that requires BP without having to wait for the count to go up back to zero from whatever minus figure you end up at.  Going negative BP means that the character can't act until his counter returns to 0 and you get 1 BP at the start of every turn.

The game also makes use of something called Sleep Points which build up as you close the lid on your 3DS.  Every 8 hours you are granted 1 sleep point for a max of 3 and these allow you to make a free attack at any point during combat.  Hitting start will freeze time and you can just do whatever the fuck you like.  If you have more than 1 SP you can even brave during the time freeze and really ruin someones day. 

There are also features using street pass where you can send people moves from your party for them to summon and use in combat.  Living it Japan is awesome for this because walking round town for a while means that I'm pretty likely of passing someone with the game and being sent some insane full power special attack for me to use at any time.  The game also has a feature where you build a town which grants you special items and the like to buy at save points.  Putting multiple villagers on a building project lowers the time it takes to build and you gain more villagers by street passing.  The town can also come under attack from optional bosses called Nemesis but they don't do any damage they just kind of fly there until you decide to take them on.  Not taking them on doesn't mess you up in any way.

*SPOILERS HERE*

As much as I love the game and find it hard to mention any real stand out problems with it, the method for getting the true ending is complete and utter bullshit. 

After you revive the 4 crystals things get fucked up and you end up in an alternate world where the crystals aren't revived.  So you have to revive them all over again but this time you can break them and breaking a crystals puts you on the path of the normal ending.  To get the true ending you have to revive them all like 4 or 5 fucking times and the whole thing gets pretty fucking tedious because nothing really changes except the bosses get ever so slightly stronger.

It's fucking bullshit busy work and I swear to god this true ending better be worth all that goddamn hassle.  It's a huge tarnish on an otherwise really good game.

*End Spoilers*

For RPG fans, Bravely Default is one of those must have games for your 3DS collection.  It's well polished, has a good length and apart from some dodgy English voice work there isn't a hell of a lot wrong with it.  Go play it, now, it's awesome.

Final Fantasy 7 on iPhone: What's the Fucking Point?

So recently I was killing some time and decided to browse around the app store on my shitty iPhone.  Before downloading some anime game about girls running races with each other I noticed that Final Fantasy 7 had been made available for download.  As I was swiping through the screen shots I found this.

Since I live in Japan the information came up in Japanese but I'll tell you what it says.  It says that on this version of the game you can turn off the encounters and raise your stats to maximum in order to make it easy to "play".  Now I'm also pretty sure this feature is available on the Steam PC version too and I may have ranted about it then but I don't remember so I'm going to go off on one again just to make sure.

Why is this even a feature?  What the fuck is even the point of playing a game if you are going to strive to take out all the "game" aspect of it.  Part of the reason FF7 is so good was because combat was fun and levelling up your characters and materia was a satisfying experience.  Sure, the story was cool as well but it wasn't JUST the story that made it a PS1 classic, it was the whole damn package.  If you're just going to cut a huge part of the games content just because you're lazy/shit then what's the fucking point?

See, we are playing fucking video GAMES here.  That means that there is some element of skill involved weather its platforming, solving puzzles, precise movements or accuracy or in this case, managing a team of adventurers so that they are able to cope with the challenges that the story presents them. 

Imagine if I was playing Mario and I could opt to turn off all the pits and enemies and just run to the end of the game for the "experience" of playing it?  It would be the most boring, retarded bullshit and anyone who actually cares about games would laugh you out of the fucking room.  If you are so stubbornly unwilling to get good at the GAME aspect of the video GAME then maybe you should just fuck off.

But wait, I hear an idiot somewhere on the internet cry "what if I just want to experience the story! I should be allowed to!"  To which I say go and fuck yourself up the ass with a spiky baseball bat.  These are games and if you aren't willing to put in the time or effort to gather enough skill in order to play it through then you shouldn't be playing at all.  If you want to experience a story go and read a book or watch a fucking movie, you aren't entitled to see the ending to FF7 just because it's a popular game that you haven't beaten due to being shit.

If a game wants to include an easy mode so that the less skilled members of the gaming community can play through their game and feel good about it, that's cool.  Even on an easy setting there is still the fact that you have to play the fucking game and get at least somewhat good in order to make progress but this is just retarded.  Doing shit like this just dumbs down the medium but that is another post for another time.

If you want to play Final Fantasy 7, play fucking Final Fantasy 7 and spend the 10 minutes required to learn how materia works in order to beat the game.  It's a fucking easy game, even someone COMPLETELY new to gaming could see the ending.  If you want to experience a story in a game, go and google some good visual novels I'm sure picking from a list of A, B or C choices won't be too taxing for you.  Then again, if you're the kind of person who needs to max stats and turn off combat then I'm not even sure that you could find the button to progress the text.

Final Fantasy 6

Well, my apologies for being slow as fuck but last night I finally beat Final Fantasy 6 on Stream so it's about that time where I come here to say a few words about it.  This won't be a particularly long post since it's FF6 and basically everyone ever has played it but I'll take some time to share a few thoughts.

As far as classic 16-bit RPGs go, Final Fantasy 6 is up there as one of the best and for damn good reason.  Everything about this game is awesome from the story to the game play and the reason it took so long to beat wasn't because of a lack of enjoyment but I just got heavily distracted by speed running other things.

Your adventure starts out with a group of rebels battling an empire but this part of the game really only serves as a sort of lengthy tutorial for what's to come.  Eventually you hit a point where shit hits the fan really hard and after following a plot rail for a short time you are eventually just given a big giant world to explore and it's entirely up to you where to go.  The open nature of this game is quite a stark difference to a great deal of the series that has you on a plot rail for 99% of the game and then a few side quests near the end.  This game is more like, plot rail for about 50% of the game and then everything else is side quests and that's awesome.

Maybe it's because I'm a huge dumbass but I needed quite a lot of help to find various things hidden within the game.  There are characters in the various towns and cities to give you hints but some things I don't see how you could work out without some dumb luck.  I'm sure there are some really hardcore players that could tell me how I'm wrong on this point but as a casual player I found the entry to a few of the side quests really weird.

Once you are done with a few of the quests you end up being pretty much unstoppable however that doesn't make the final area of the game a walk in the park.  The game makes you split up your team into 3 groups so if, like me, you were only really focusing on 4 members in your main party the final dungeon ends up being a real pain in the butt.  However I'm going to label this as a good thing because it forced me to put my thinking cap on and really plan out how I was going to progress rather than just gear up and stomp the final dungeon with no effort at all.

Aside from the story, great game play and fun flow and pacing the game also sports some excellent music and great visuals.  You can tell whoever put the sprites and tile sets together for this game really wanted to get the most of that SNES cart and I guarantee you that almost every gamer worth their salt knows at least 1 or 2 tracks from the OST just from off the top of their head.

So, onward to Final Fantasy 7 and while you're waiting for my marathon to start why not go give FF6 a whirl yourself?  If you've not played it already then you absolutely NEED to go do it, right now.

Regarding The Disc Praise Incentive

So a few days ago the donation incentive for "FF8 Disc Praise" was met so I thought I'd take a moment to clarify what this meant and inform you all about a new donation incentive.

As you may know, for a long time now I've been slowly playing through all the main series Final Fantasy games.  At the time of writing I have reached Final Fantasy 6 and I'm making some steady progress through that. 

Now, I absolutely detest FF8.  I think the story is stupid, the characters are annoying, the game systems are crap and a bunch of other stuff so the entire play through was just going to be 4 discs of me bitching about how shitty the game is.  That is until this incentive appeared to have me play through a whole disc only being able to say nice things about.  I can't moan or say anything negative, I just have to grit my teeth and find the positives about my most loathed Final Fantasy (Not including 13 of course, because fuck that game)

So here's the deal, I'm going to let you, the readers, decide which disc I have to be nice to via a charity donation war.  Just send in a charity donation with the disc number as the comment, the disc number with the most money wins.  If I don't get any money I'm just going to assume Disc 1 is OK and roll with that.  The donation links can be found at the side of this page, none of the money goes anywhere near me, it all goes to the charity.

Happy donating!

Final Fantasy Levelling Is Stupid

With Final Fantasy 15 sort of round the corner I wanted to take a moment about my frustration with the level systems of basically every Final Fantasy from 10 onwards.

This post was first inspired by a news article that my friend link me a long time ago that I have long since lost, if I find it again I'll update the post.  The post outlined some things about how characters would level up and it compared the system to Dark Souls.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this and it's hard to make judgement without knowing all the other systems that the game will have but it still made me think how dumb levels have gotten in Final Fantasy.

All the way up to Final Fantasy 9 each character was kind of locked into a class.  The exception to this rule was Final Fantasy 3 and 5 which had a job system but if you picked a Fighter you better damn well play that character like a Fighter.  Final Fantasy 7 and 8 had ambiguous classes but it was clear who was better at things like sword fighting and who was better at casting spells.

Then Final Fantasy X came along with what seemed like an interesting level up system.  It introduced the Sphere Grid, a giant collection of circles where each one represented a certain statistical boost or ability.  A lot of people disliked the sphere grid but I thought it was OK.  I still have a lot of questions regarding how it works in the context of the game world but I didn't mind it so much.

My problem with the sphere grid is that the idea of a characters class went completely out of the window in the end game.  Every character could just do everything by the end of the game and you didn't even have to work that hard to get to that point.  You could argue the same thing about Final Fantasy 7 but the work you have to put in to achieve that is STUPID high while in FFX in requires very little effort.

FFX-2 was a bit more job based but jobs could be changed on the fly in combat which kind of ruined the whole point of the job system.  FF12 had that stupid license board bullshit and 13 just knocked the turd right out of the bowl with the fucking Crystarium. 

I'm hoping that the class and level system in FF15 will be back on point.  Where a fighter is a fighter, a mage is a mage and a thief is a thief.  The ability to make your characters more versatile is welcome but don't just abandon their entire role in combat so that everyone can do everything.