Daily Review: Valkyria Chronicles

Daily Review

Valkyria Chronicles

System: PS3
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat it, finally!

So yeah, I love this game, its unabashed. I'm really regretting it took me so long to beat it, especially since there are sequels on the PSP, and I actually have one now. Not to say its perfect, but it is definately a great game. Its really surprising that lately Sega has been making awesome games (Yakuza series as well), as long as it isn't Sonic franchise.

The game is beautiful, it is drawn in this 'paintbrush' style that makes the entire game look like a painting (including whitened out sections at the top and bottom). The world is a stylized Europe, set in pretty much World War 2, barring certain technology (Its all land war). As a strategy RPG, it works well, you have to carefully consider your movements, jump from cover to cover, guard your approaches, lay down covering fire, hide behind tanks, etc. The missions are usually quite fun, tossing you into situations where you have to adapt and adjust your tactics, and at the same time try to rush to get a good grade for more experience and cash.

Any gripes I have are really nitpicks, and some of them were misconceptions on my part, I'll handle those first. First of all, I played this game like Fire Emblem, and that was wrong. At first I would restart a mission if I lost someone who wasn't important....except all but the character's who you can not let die during the particular mission, anyone who falls you can run up next to, call a medic...then call again in the same mission. Once I realized this, I abused it, in one mission I had a mechanic who would run up, repair the tank, and get nailed by crossfire. I would call the medic, then at the next base I captured, call her up again, and go again. I literally had her shot down four times, and called back into action four times. As long as the enemy doesn't get to that person, they don't die permanently (but will if an enemy touches them).

The other weird part was realizing I could save scum. You can save in the middle of missions...I put the game down at first because I would go through a 5-6 turn mission, and screw up near the end, having to start all over. Once I realized I could save mid mission, I would save at the beginning of a turn where nothing really went terrible, and be able to reload if I made a really bad move. This saved me from having to start all over, and at times wasting hours.

So, other than those two misunderstandings, my main gripes lay in some minor elements. The first, is that for most of the game, the game is played as a straight war stories. There are some 'land battleships' that are too big to be believed, but its kinda acceptable with the mysterious fuel source they use. However, at the later part, you have super-powered beings tearing up battlefields, and the final enemy general goes 'one wing angel' and takes on your entire squad by himself. It doesn't ruin it, but its rather weird since the game would have worked fine as a war story (an idealistic one, but still a good war story).

The other nitpick is on certain missions, you're going to have to go into it, fail, and reload entirely. This is because halfway through the mission, something happens, and then suddenly the team you brought is useless for what the 'real' objective of the mission is. This is in general a complaint for a lot of RPGs, where you have to trial and error a boss, going back through once you find out what they do. Its not really good in any game, you should be able to figure out the boss as you go. In a rather realistic war story, its kinda silly that you have to presciently position your troops to get enemies before they can screw you over. Again, its a nitpick, once you know the happening you can usually give it one more shot and make it.

The story is good, the game is great (albeit stressful at times), the whole thing is very solid. If you see it and you like strategy games or war games, pick it up, completely worth it.

I have it listed as beaten, as the game has in-game medals that you can acquire, and you need to A rank all the missions along with getting all the weapons, maxing troops, etc. I'll consider it completed when I get all of those.

Daily Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Daily Review

Dungeons of Dredmor

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Sigh, die and once more!

I've pretty much been only playing this game for the last few days. To its credit, it is low stress enough that you can do many other things and toss between it without getting lost. That is mostly the reason I am cutting it a lot of slack, it is a low stress game, but there are fundamental flaws...that at the same time don't stop it from being fun. Still why I'm rather torn about it, so I hate to do it, but: LIST FORMAT!

1) Ramping difficulty. To be fair, I'm playing it right now on 'small dungeons' where you have smaller floors but you get more experience per kill to even it out...because if you don't, you will literally spend hours on each floor. The game has about 20 floors from what I've gathered, and the furthest I've gotten is floor 10 or so. This was my most recent run, where I had maxed -every- skill tree of mine barring two (which were noncombat), and I had gear far and above what I was finding, sometimes double or triple enchanted. I had crafted nearly the best axe you could craft, and enchanted it, crafted nice plate mail, had it enchanted, etc. I got torn apart. You basically go from crushing monsters for several floors in a row, going even, then getting crushed...and I can't see that I was unprepared. I had much better gear than I would have had if I didn't pick blacksmithing, I was nearly max leveled, halfway down the dungeon, and getting near curbstomped?

2) Healing, utter lack of. This probably contributes to the above. The main methods of healing in the game are regeneration boosting and a rare healing potion. Be aware, you really can't craft potions unless you pick that as a skill tree, which forces you to not choose another tree. My selections end up being lots of survival based ones (armor, shields, blacksmithing, berserker) and attack boosting (axe, berserker, blacksmithing (whee double duty), and gear gaining/xp boosting (burglar, archeologist), so you can't be expected to always pick potioncrafting. I found maybe 2 actual healing potions over 10 levels, and they only healed 25 or so out of 120HP. The regen boostings come in either food (which only gives you 1 per round), or again, potions. So you can easily recover your full hp, but if you're in combat and you're getting whalloped on, you really don't have what we termed when I played WoW, an 'Oh shit button'. Admittedly, again that could be build, but when I switched it up, I still didn't have anything that could easily get me out of trouble that's not a very rare item.

3) Dullness. You open a door, its a monster zoo! 30 someodd monsters wanting to chomp on your arse! Which basically means....20 minutes of clicking on monsters. Either you're overprepared and you're going to smash them handily, it just takes forever, or you're going to die. There are spells, but most seem either preparatory, or attack oriented. Which when you're playing the mage, means the same thing except added annoyance of taking way more damage.

Basically, my main point is, if I'm a build that is built around heavy armor, heavy weapons, and lots of HP...and in the best gear you can expect to have for the floor...I shouldn't be handily smashed and have nothing I can do to stop it.

Or I could suck at the game, who knows.

Daily Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Daily Review

Dungeons of Dredmor

System: PC (Steam)

Status: Unfinished

Currently: Getting various achieves through the runs. 

Honestly, I am a big fan of rogue-likes in almost every incarnation. Western styled ones patterned after Nethack or Diablo pedigrees, Eastern styled ones ("Mysterious Dungeon" games), any of them tend to bring out a lot of love in me. The imposed difficulty of every death being permanent, and reaching the end being a true challenge instead of trial and error brings out a lot in me. Of course, the flip side of that is with permanent death, you can play for five hours...and make zero progress due to a stupid mistake. Which is very bad for my attempts to reduce my backlog.

Dungeons of Dredmor has some issues that at first put me off. The main of which is that when I started up the game, the first screen was difficulty (not a big deal), smaller dungeons (OK, that's fine), and permadeath (Wait, what?). That's right, Dungeons of Dredmor (for the rest of this labelled DoD), is a rogue-like that lets you save, and load if you die. Hence....not a true roguelike. That almost made me put it down right then and there.

When I got to playing it, the game itself was very solid. Select class trees at the start (wide variety and you get to pick several), and off you go. There is significant crafting if you select one of the trees, which does quite a bit to nix some of the randomness that also goes with roguelikes, but its within acceptable bounds. The limited inventory keeps you from keeping everything in hopes of crafting it later. The game does have a severe lack of healing items. Most of it is garnered from food, which only heals 1 HP per round, for as many rounds as the food gives you. Healing potions are very rare, which means you have to be ready for each encounter or they will kill you because you can't just chug potions. Some of the classes do more to help with the randomness, for example, archeologist lets you sacrifice useless artifacts for free xp, and so I select it nearly every time.

The game play is solid, I do highly recommend picking smaller dungeons....otherwise they are just mind numbingly huge and painful to crawl around on each floor. The small dungeons feel more 'right', and you don't have to stare at the same enemies and tiles for a good hour (and yes, one large dungeon floor did take me nearly an hour to explore by itself). I personally have been playing with permadeath on....it is a rogue-like after all. That and winning with that will feel more solid, and net me two separate achievements. Some of the achievements are silly, like dying to the weakest enemies, or random silly enemies. Mini-quests do vary things a bit, as well as random events like zoos. Overall, it was worth the purchase, and is a slower less stressful alternative to Binding of Isaac.

Daily Review: Avadon: The Black Fortress

Avadon: The Black Fortress

Daily Review

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: 3rd major story quest.


So, I never really got a chance to be a huge fan of old school PC RPGs. Mostly because I usually had a PC that lagged way behind what the current games were up to at the time, and if I was going to spend what limited funds I had on a new game, I would rather it be on one I knew would work (aka a console game). Still, loved the Baldur's Gate and similar series.

This game will definately not win awards for graphic design. You can see from the little image I grabbed for its label that the 3d graphics are about on par with...well, an old school PC RPG. Still, its fitting, and the game overall holds together really well so far. The writing and story is nice, it really doesn't dumb down the combat for you, although class advancement is pretty linear. You get one stat point, a specialization after a while which is just skill points, and 2 skill points per level. You have a skill 'tree', but they connect to each other and require each other so much you're pretty much going to use the whole tree anyway. Also, while the writing for the NPCs so far gives them fairly interesting personalities, since they have the exact same build type as you would have if you were playing that class, there is no difference between playing a main character fighter with the NPC mage...or a main character mage with the NPC fighter. I will be replaying the game at least once on higher difficulties and to nail a few acheivements, but not 4 times, especially since there's not enough difference to warrant playing every class.

As a note, I am playing this in a sort of self-imposed challenge. I'm on normal difficulty, but one of the achievements is to get through the entire game, and only bring along one companion on each journey. Notably after your first adventure or so, you can bring two, so I'm limiting my own party noticeably. Still, it hasn't adversely affected me too bad, and has actually kept normal mode challenging. It is nice to see everyone gets experience even when you don't use them, so if I did want to swap out the mage for someone else, I'm not screwed. The only major gripe I have is that any enemy with stun abilities will tear your face off if you regularly fail to resist them, since they manage to recharge them fast enough to keep you perma-stunlocked. This is actually how I died for the first, second, third, and fourth times, due to a side quest involving basilisks. Little ones were OK, got to the mother, combat starts, boom, entire party stunned with cone of effect, by the time stun wears off, stunned again. Insert facerape, game over screen, and thankfulness for auto saves, even if it was last map switch (and not sub-map switch).

New Games: Damn you summer sale

So yeah, the summer sale again tempted me, and I picked up two of the Indie Bundles they had for sale on steam. Dabbled in a few so far, so those that I've touched will get a short blurb as a partial review (or first impressions, rather).

 Looks like a space fighter sim, heard it was meh from a friend but will see for myself when I load it up

 Actually been playing this for a few hours, so far a fairly good old-school style PC fantasy RPG. Makes me wonder why more people haven't just worked out a low budget game with a focus on game play and story as opposed to graphics. We don't need them all to be Dragon Age.

 Haven't touched, will review when I do.

 Played one of the tutorials and a quick solo level. Since its multiplayer focused and I can never -find- people to play with, I'll take this one single player map at a time. (Counted as beaten for winning one map, will mark complete when all of them are gold medal'd)

 This was amazing fun at the start with how fast and tight the controls were, just need to sit down and blaze through it.

 No touchy, no idea.

 I used to play Red Baron back on my ancient PC, I dunno if my current PC can even run this.

 Zombies are getting a little played out, so this might be on the backburner for a while.

 Seems interesting, haven't touched yet.

 At first blush, this looks far better than Chantelise, but there are some control issues that are irking me so far, mostly where you keep swinging because of having to stop swinging, wait a second, then turn about to face the other way. Cute game though, has some personality.

 No touchy yet.

I bought these yesterday, gimme a break, can't possibly have touched them all.

Daily Review: Chantelise

Daily Review

Chantelise: A tale of two sisters

 

 

 

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Frustrated, 3rd Temple.

So, to start this off, I love Carpe Fulgur for one reason, the game Reccettear. It was an amazing little combination of dungeon crawler and shop...management...thing. The localization was great, the game had a lot of style and personality, and was a joy to play.

I know this one was made prior to Reccettear, and the company overall is a Doujin game maker (usually small group making games and selling them at conventions or over the internet, kind of like Indie game designers in the West, except with usually way less budget). Given the obviously low budget, I keep having this feeling I shouldn't be too harsh on it...but...

Yeah, the game is fundamentally flawed. Now, do note that I only paid 4.99 for it on Steam due to the summer sale, and I do realize that its maybe a 5 hour game including all the extra stuff. That doesn't bother me. The areas where you would think a low budget game would fail (graphics, voice acting, writing, being glitchy) don't bother me, the voice acting (while japanese) is good, the graphics have their own appeal, and the game runs fine on my system.

All the same, it was not worth the 5 dollars I paid for it. A solid 5 hour game would be worth more than five hours if done right of course, but the game design of it falls apart rather quickly. The magic system looks like it has depth. Pick up gems, channel one or many into different spells, lob them, mixes well with the fighting. However, since you can't control which gems you use, always last grabbed first used basis, the spells you actually get are entirely random, and at times useless. Need a ranged spell to use against that bomb? Too bad, you just picked up two earth gems and there are none left in the entire stage. You get to eat 40 damage. Need a heal? Oh well, the water gems you picked up weren't one after the other, so no heal for you.

I am a completionist, my end goal is to fully complete every game I own. This game doesn't have a lot to complete, there are hidden treasures on every stage, that you have to complete some strange requirement to get to pop up. Get them all, and you get access to a hidden stage. Once I knew this, I decided to just read the spoilers to find them, no sense going through the game twice. Too bad the game declaring them 'cleared' is buggy. It is entirely likely to go through an entire stage, having to kill every enemy and clear the requirement, getting the treasure, popping back out, and...not cleared. This has happened to me twice on a bonus stage, which easily takes 14 minutes or so to clear each try, I still don't have it cleared. You get the treasure again if the game bugs and doesn't credit you with it, so its free cash or HP, but the fact that I'm accidentally abusing this bug, getting way more HP and cash than I should, and still heavily struggling with imbalanced monsters is not good. (As a side note, the items you find are at the same level as the dungeon you get them in, so you are balanced to get these first play through...just not 5 of them)/

Once you get to the second temple, you realize the rhythm of the game, which is: Go through the dungeon floors, get as far as you can, die, start over, skip all the floors you completed by running as fast as you can and avoiding enemies, complete another floor, die again. Rinse and repeat till you get to the boss, which becomes dash through the entire stage, try the boss, die, repeat until you actually kill the boss. Yes, you keep all the cash and items you find...but since there is no experience or level up system, and the only way to permanently raise your stats is gear or the HP items, there is no incentive to waste HP killing enemies for their piddly cash drops. The only good source of cash is sellable items, which for some reason they made depreciate in value for each one you sell. So that random treasure that pops out of the monster starts out valuable...and two dungeons in, now is selling for 500 when items are 20-40k or so. The only appreciable way to get cash is the above stated...abusing the treasures that don't show as cleared, selling them for 50k or so to buy 20 more HP.

In game, you get so many gear slots, based on where you are in the game, maxing out at 5. These can be used for anything from stat boosters (plus attack, plus magic, plus defense), to new abilities (auto-gem pickup, air-dash). However, given this is the -only- way to increase your stats other than HP and to acquire those needed abilities, the limited slots soon become a major annoyance. Do note, in one room of a dungeon (containing upwards of 30 monsters), you can easily have monsters who are resistant to magic, resistant to physical, and deal magic and physical damage. If you don't have a shield, you have practically -no- physical defense. If you don't have a charm, you have practically -no- magical defense. There is no way to have everything you need and the abilities, so either you constantly switch gear (which you can't do on time attack retries), or eat 40 damage from each attack that you're not defensive against. Add in a rather floaty control system, enemies who have purely annoying abilities, and a camera that while controlled, is sticking way too close to your heroine to dodge anything coming from behind, and you get frustrated fast.

Still, I plan to finish and complete this game, the writing does have a lot of personality, but I really wouldn't recommend paying more than a dollar or so for it. Also as of note, though this seems normal for the developers games: You need a USB controller. Full stop.

Musings

I started this blog as a way to more thoroughly document my quest to finish my backlog. The Backloggery is a wonderful tool to use to help me keep everything catalogued, but while I'm playing the games I have far more thoughts on them and their quality than can be shared in the little Twitter-like messages, and yet I can never force myself to sit down and write a comprehensive review.

The problem of course, comes with days like yesterday and Sunday. I have gotten rather heavily into Binding of Isaac, and probably will be for a while, but at the same time its more circular progress, so I don't really have any new thoughts on it other than a few new acheivements and unlocks.. At the same time, I dabbled in Chantelise, but its such a short game that I'm just going to wait till I finish it to write any sort of full on blog post on it.

Still, hopefully I'll get the urge to wrap up Final Fantasy IV soon so that I can do a full on retrospective, I've gotten a bit further since the last time I posted, but not enough to really write more...again, the next post will probably be my last on it since I'm so close to finishing.

Ah well, game on.

Daily Review: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Daily Review

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Beaten
Currently: Beat Zeromus, completed Rydia's Trial

Well, that was kind of ruined by the fact that I had to do some more grinding and look up hints online to beat the boss since he was trouncing me rather soundly. Turns out, the major thing I was doing wrong was...I had my battle speed set too high. What? Really? Yes, the boss goes so fast that if you don't have your battle speed set to snail's crawl, the little time it takes you to choose your actions is the difference between him getting two huge attacks off before you can heal or only one. Rather huge difference. I did finally beat him though, but I'll need to go back down with the other characters, but in the meantime I'm in the Lunar Ruins (the post-game dungeon) to do the trials of the characters I unlocked it for. Already finished Rydia's Trial, which was more of a fair challenge than the final boss. I know there's some uber-boss down here, though I've heard two different ways to meet it, so there might be two (random floor spawn and finding all 10 tomes from the trials).

Daily Review: The Binding of Isaac

Daily Review

The Binding of Isaac

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Beat the game for the first time with Isaac, know I still have way more to go.

So my friend recommended this to me a while back, but I didn't pick it up till the summer sale had it and the DLC for cheap. Picked it up today, and it was refreshing to play a rogue-like again. That is basically what this is after all, sort of a Legend of Zelda / Twin Stick Shooter / Rogue-like hybrid. Very fun, and at the same time difficult, but never unfairly so, which is a good balance to strike. The unlockables keep coming at a steady pace, so you're getting new items or characters for the dungeon consistently, and each time you beat it you unlock something new.

The gameplay is solid, though it takes a bit to get used to 'nudging' your bullets off center with movement. There's also little description for the items, so you either have to hit up the wikia or figure out what they do through trial and error (and some you really can't). Still, it is based on rogue-likes, so that is to happen, the trial and error gameplay and finding a style that fits you is part of the genre.

The main thing that might (and will in the case of Nintendo considering it for the DS and turning it down) turn people off is the visuals and the story. Piles of feces, tortured children, gushing blood, bosses that are taken from rather unsanitary body parts, the whole thing feels very juvenile even if most of the story and characters are biblical references. You can see the fact that the designers were doing flash on Newgrounds before this, it shows through easily in the game. The game itself is still coded in flash, so I had some slowdown issues for an otherwise pretty mundane game, and I know others have issues with making it look pretty and not have slowdown, even on high end PCs. I still recommend playing it full screen with as high of a resolution as you can, it makes the game play easier when you can see the bullets.

Daily Review: Half-Life

Daily Review

Half-Life

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Silo area

I suppose it is only natural when you go back to a much older PC FPS that you run into things that will just irk you, especially if you've played the later ones. To be honest, I've always heard great things about Half-Life, but never being a bit PC gamer nor an FPS player, I never really picked it up. The summer sale on Steam was a great opportunity to do so.

Admittedly, I'm probably not even halfway through it, but it has aged...eh, fairly well. The controls are floaty, which is very bad in a game where they put so much emphasis on proper movement, jumping, landing, and not getting electrocuted or falling to your death. The environment has killed me far more times than the enemies. The use of 'cat scares' is so overdone at this point, but I suppose it was fair for its day, and the graphics still do a passable job of communicating what needs to be communicated.

My main issue is at times you can't tell where you're supposed to be going to progress, or if you're currently on a branch with extra ammo...or completely lost. Several times so far, I've gone down a branch that made every indication of being a main route (dialogue from enemies and a new area you hadn't been to yet that you could see), but had to backtrack for a minute or so and take another branch to actually continue. I'm currently in the Silo, which apparently you are supposed to test fire the rocket engine. I spent a few minutes around the fuel area, wondering why I couldn't go anywhere, till I finally took another path and turned on the power...and now am rather stuck trying to find the oxygen area since I still can't go to the fuel area. Each time I leave one of those areas of course, the big baddie with the grasping claws kills me several times trying to go through the middle, and I waste more ammo knocking it down for a few seconds to get clear. Putting it down for now to take a little break.

Backlog Update: New Games

Ah, the problem with summer every year is that steam does those little summer sales...and I, as I'm sure most gamers do, snatch up all the games I've been wanting to buy but was too cheap to do so earlier. This of course, adds a whopping list of new games to my backlog, and only exacerbates the issue.

Here is the list of games I have added to my backlog:

Chantelise: Played Recettear, loved it, I know this is the game made before it (albeit translated later) and not as polished, but probably will love this too (still need to fully complete Recettear, but lost all the data when my PC crashed)

Half-Life: Was never much of a PC gamer, due to always having an old PC that couldn't support most games, so I actually played Half-Life 2 before I even bought this. Still, playing it right now, seems to be holding up. The AI is outsmarting me at least.

Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2: We'll see how these turn out, I know everyone is constantly clamoring for Half-Life 3, but I've never been a big FPS gamer.

Mini Ninjas: My wife actually nudged me to purchase this a while back, I just forgot to add it to my list.

 Portal 2: Original is a classic of course, so I'm sure I'll enjoy this one too.

The Binding of Isaac: A good friend is always raving about how good this game is, and it does seem up my alley.

Daily Review: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Daily Review

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: I hate grinding.

So, either I'm doing something terribly wrong, or they fiddled with the balance of the final boss. Did all the original optional dungeons (for the various eidolans), plus the new ones on the Mount of Ordeals to get the best weapons for the cast members they now let you switch between. Go to the final dungeon, collect all the best armor and weapons. Go to fight the final boss, and he proceeds to obliterate me rather handily. Check a FAQ, ok, he counterattacks, and you can slow him. Do nothing to provoke counter attack other than the slow, still get obliterated.

I hate grinding, if you have to grind in a game to beat the storyline provided, someone did not do a good enough job balancing the difficulty out. Admittedly, many games I love you -have- to grind in, numerous times, but they usually outweigh that with other measures. Still, it completely breaks the rhythm of the game, you get all geared up to face the final boss, expect a few deaths, and have to spend hours walking back and forth with auto-attack on to get enough HP/Stats to even survive.

While I was looking up how terrible of a gamer I am, I also found out that the game has additional content I didn't realize was there, which is only accessible post-final boss...and only for the characters you beat the final boss with. So in essence, at minimum I have to beat the final boss twice, and the other characters are nowhere near the same level as my current team which means, you guessed it...more grinding!

Hopefully the extra dungeon will be interesting, though doubtlessly will require more grinding to beat the ultimate boss down there. Still, its all for completion.

(Personal style note, stopped listing dates in the blog's title, was looking weird on the RSS feed, instead started titling either as a daily review or 'quickie')

July 13, 2012: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Finished all pre-final boss sidequests. Going to wipe out Zeromus

Just a quickie before work, finished all the side quests. I can see why people might have wanted to use the other characters instead of the final team you're forced to use in the original, but really, did anyone want to use Edward? He is unequivically useless, he can do nothing that someone else can not do in a much better, more efficient fashion.

July 12, 2012: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Working through sidequests before the final dungeon.

I suppose its always going to be odd, going back to a game that is so old, and then revisiting a story you've already experienced. To be fair, I've been skimming most of the story. I've seen this before after all, I know where to go, but once I started paying attention again...well...it really doesn't hold up anymore. Weirdly enough, the main characters themselves, the ones who pass through your party, are probably the part that holds up the best...albeit rather one dimensional still. Kain lives up to his biblical namesake and does so many half-explained betrayals it gets rather silly, Rosa loves Cecil end of story, Rydia hates Cecil and Kain, then helps him after one effort to protect her despite him murdering her entire village...ok, even the characters aren't even that well detailed. Hell, some of them seem so eager to remove themselves from your party so you can get a new one in a few moments that they do rather stupid things, ergo "We need to close this gap, lemme jump from the airship with this bomb!" "Oh, I'm alive again later, no explanation!". Practically every character death is reversed at least once (except for the big one which I won't spoil for the five people who haven't played that far), and yet no one seems to react beyond "Personname! You're alive! Let's never mention this again."

The story itself is so bare bones...there's no lead up to anything that happens. Go fight new threat, go here, fight this threat, oh there's other crystals, go get them, sudden large monstrous doomsday weapon, stop it! In such a short game, with the actual final villain not mentioned till about 2 hours till the game is over, its really hard to get any emotion invested in it. Hell, most villains just show up, get killed, and are never mentioned or explained. Elemental archfiends introduce themselves, get offed, get revived later, offed again, with out a single motivation or explanation as to where they came from or why they worked for the current big bad.

This is all probably looking in hindsight, after all, the game previous to this in the Final Fantasy series was...really bare bones, though 2 had a comparatively Star Wars story...too bad the system was trash. I am rather glad we didn't pay a lot for this, and that it comes with two other side games, otherwise I'd have felt a little irked at paying for a game little more than 20 hours long with no real replay value. Will have to see how the other two games in the collection go before any final judgement though.

July 11, 2012: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Just got Edge, here I come Rubicant!

I'm always a bit wary when I play a remake of a game I've already finished, though Square always seems to do a good job about it...to a degree. I had only played IV back in the old SNES days, and never actually owned it, just rented it from a local store. This of course led to me trying frantically to beat it over the course of a single weekend, getting near the end of it, and due to having rushed (and ran from encounters for a good chunk of the game), I was never powerful enough to finish the game. Still, it always struck me as a well balanced game, no grinding needed to finish out classes, no uber-powerful bosses that you have to spend forever trying to beat (that all came later). If you played through it and fought every random battle, you would be at the perfect level for the final boss to be a challenge, and the few side quests ended you on a still even note.

Memories are always a nice thing though, and playing the remake on the PSP has left me with mixed feelings. For one, the sprite art for both the characters, the world, and the monsters is out and out -beautiful-. It makes me glad I never spent the money on the DS remake, because the chibified 3d images always looked so...blegh. I would rather have well done sprite art than poorly rendered 3d graphics any day. The game still feels very old school, beyond some ease of use changes, though some of those leave me wondering why they didn't do a few more tweaks.

My memory of the old game isn't perfect, so I can't say with 100% certainty...but did the old games really have such a hugely annoying encounter rate? There have been numerous times I've gotten out of one random encounter...and walked right into another, then another, then another. Many times I've had 4 random encounters in a single small room, walking to and from the chest inside. I know random encounters are a fact of life in pretty much any JRPG, but good lord people....put a limiter on these things. Even if the original game didn't, you can make tweaks! It's ok! Up the experience and gold gained from each encounter a bit, make them a tad less frequent, and it will be fine. Being a portable game makes it a bit more forgivable, after all, you can just flick the power button and put it down, so no need to truly rush for a save before work.

The random encounters themselves are....meh. When I found the auto-battle feature, I've pretty much left it on all the time except for the locations where I know it'll get my character killed if I'm not paying attention to who they attack (life drain with undead enemies, etc). Otherwise, I'll take the massive hit to HP from just wailing on enemies automatically, and watch TV for a bit while I wait for it to finish. The battles run a bit faster then anyway, I can turn it off with one button, and using magic and summons really doesn't speed it up that much.

Otherwise, the boss battles are still well done, though when you already know all the tricks and how to beat them and have played so many Final Fantasy games...well...they're rather simple. So far, no one has given me a remote challenge other than having to revive once or twice. Again, I can't state it enough, the sprites are beautiful and well detailed, and the music is typical Final Fantasy fare. I'm chewing through this at a pretty rapid rate, and expect to finish it rather shortly, then I can move on to the two other games on the disc.