Final Fantasy Playthrough Part II

Episode II
In which Captain Gaypants joins the cult volleyball team

Our adventure today starts with The-Girl-Formerly-Known-As-Nipples-Who-Is-Apparently-Underage-So-We-Should-Call-Her-Something-Else explaining the sphere system of character advancement to me. This explanation comes in the form of one of those tutorials where you watch the game do part of it, read the explanation and then hit the button and watch the game do something else and give more explanation. And the tutorial is over 60 steps long. I counted.

Note to game designers: If you create a game system that requires a 60+ step tutorial, scrap it and try again. I can explain how to play chess in less than 60 steps.

The end result of this is that Gaypants gains a new skill called 'Cheer'. Disappointingly (and rather surprisingly), no pom-poms manifest when he does this.

Inappropriately-Dressed-High-School-Student and I jump off of the spaceboat and swim down to an underwater ruin. She thinks it might still have "some power". Apparently, we want this power. Gaypants manages to reactivate the place by banging on a control panel over and over. Fortunately this is done in a cutscene as this technique of reactivating the power of a millenia-old ruin simply would not have occurred to me. It also wakes ups a squid which we have to fight. Sometimes the squid swims away from us giving us the opportunity to do a flanking maneuver. The combat apparently plans to grow gradually more complex over time.

Back to the boat and I'm-Not-Naked-This-Really-Is-A-Flesh-Colored-Skin-Tight-Outfit decided to give Gaypants some food (presumably some of the squid) so that he'll stop whining about it. He eats it by frantically grabbing handfuls of it and shoving them into his face with lots of grunting noises and almost chokes to death in the process. On such a person the fate of the universe rests.

The laser bolt shooting tidal wave shows up again only now it seems to prefer manifesting as a giant, non laser shooting globe of water. It performs its evil purpose just as well, however, which seems to be destroying everything in a chapter so that Gaypants will wake up in a new chapter without anyone having to write anything resembling a segue. Aquaglobius-ex-machina.

This time Gaypants wakes up in the water near a tropical beach on which some surfer dudes are playing volleyball. This excites him enormously, as he is the greatest volleyball player in the universe. They accidentally knock the ball out to him whereupon he jumps 50 feet straight up in the air and kicks the ball off into the jungle somewhere. The surfer dudes are quite impressed and immediately recruit him for their volleyball team. Seems they are about to compete for a championship despite having not won a single game in the 15 years of the team's existence. Considering that most of the team looks to be about 18 years old I can at least surmise why the first decade or so was a rough go. The fact that this record seems to qualify them for the championship tells me that there's only one other team in existence.

Gaypants also learns that this is the future and that his city was asploded by the water ball 1000 years ago. The head of the surfer dude volleyball team, hereafter referred to as Dude, takes Gaypants up to his village and then basically abandons him. Seems the designers felt that the player should actually have to do something for a minute or two. The gameplay intrusion consists of walking around a 6 hut town and talking to everyone. If they have a conversation you know they are not important. If they have a cutscene then they are. Dude's in-game name, incidentally, is 'Wakka'. I can only hope that there is an upcoming scene where he and Gaypants are separated, leaving Gaypants to wander around calling his name over and over. Three times quickly should do it, I'd imagine. Dude has a hairstyle reminiscent of Cameron Diaz in that Ben Stiller movie that I can't remember the name of. Presumably he achieves this hairstyle in precisely the same way which may explain his instant liking for Captain Gaypants.

There is also a temple where the priest gives Gaypants a vague bunch of gobbledygook about founders and summoners and guardians and adepts. He also tells him that the inner chamber of the temple is forbidden to everyone but summoners and guardians, of which Gaypants is neither. He's worried, though, because the summoner in there is late coming back and it's dangerous in there.

Gaypants reaction to this, naturally, is to charge into the forbidden temple chamber of the island cult. He spends a few minutes sticking marbles into walls to get them to open (I believe this was intended to be some sort of puzzle?) and then finds the summoner who turns out to be a hot chick, presumably of age and with nipples though she is a bit more demurely dressed.

Gaypants proceeds to awkwardly attempt to flirt with her in every subsequent conversation. Fortunately she seems absurdly insecure with rock bottom self esteem so he may actually have a chance. She hasn't asked him about his pants, though, so an unpleasant doom could still befall his courtship.

Rather than winding his intestines on a stick and roasting him in a banana leaf lined coal pit as a sacrificial feast to the island gods to appease their anger for his violation of their holiest of holies, the island cult chooses to let the transgression pass because Dude says s'all cool.

I've been unable to force myself back to this, so this is likely the end of my Final Fantasy X experience

Part 1 here

Final Fantasy X Playthrough Part I

I referenced this is my last post so I figured I might as well stick it in here, as non-timely as it may be...

I've always been an RPG fan, be it old school pen and paper gaming to massive Bioware epics. When talking to other RPG fans the topic of the Final Fantasy series occasionally comes up whereupon I am forced to confess to having never played a single entry in the series. This is generally met with shock and amazement. How could I have missed this fabled cornerstone of the genre?

But then the stars realigned. Our neighbor bought himself a new PS3 and sent over his PS2 and a stack of games for us to babysit until he gets around to getting it to his assorted relatives in South America. And there, atop the stack, Final Fantasy X. A quick glance at the IGN review announced that X was, perhaps, the greatest of the series. At last I would get to experience what all of the fuss was about.

And so begins...

The Adventures of Captain Gaypants

Session 1

The game starts with a slow pan across what appears to possibly be a new incarnation of The Village People. One of them gets ups, pats a girl on the shoulder and then wanders up a hill to gaze dramatically over a foreboding landscape. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that the character is wearing possibly the stupidest possible version of pants that I've ever come across. They are shorts. One leg is Lara Croft length, the other leg is knee length and appears to be hemmed with a fringe of lace. They do seem to go well with the lemon yellow top, however. That plus the glittery diamond earring and the Meg Ryan hairdo make me uncertain as to the character's gender as it otherwise seems vaguely male. The character starts an internal monologue in a male voice so, apparently, that's the sex that their id has chosen to identify with. I also start to come to the disconcerting realization that this is to be my representative in the game world.

Apparently this is the near future, however, as we then drop back to an earlier time. What is apparently a sci-fi disco of some sort, based on the cheesy synth music and an assorted crowd in odd clothing. Someone steps into the foreground and everyone screams and runs away. An attack? An action packed intro to the combat system? The game drops out of the cut scene and I run forward, ready to defend the screaming people. Ah, I see. There's no attack, they were apparently screaming in joy at seeing me. It seems I am sort sort of celebrity. Lead singer of a boy band, perhaps. That would at least slightly explain the pants.

But no, some of them are carrying volleyballs that they want me to sign. So, apparently I'm a volleyball player of the sort that has screaming fans. I have a few awkward conversations with them and then try to leave with no luck. I must, instead, have awkward and completely non-interactive conversations with the rest of them before we can move into another cut scene. Some of them want me to sign their volleyballs at which point I take the opportunity to name myself Gaypants. This is the maximum name length allowed. In my heart, however, I am Captain Gaypants.

The cut scene ends and I move towards the stadium, anticipating that I will now get to fulfill my role as a mega sports star...which I do, in another cut-scene. Seems that I am not a volleyball player. The game appears to be some sort of zero gravity rugby played while wearing David Bowie costumes. At this point I'm wondering why the game is called "Final Fantasy" rather than "Final SciFi".

We cut to a man who looks like Elvis in a Liberace costume. He waves his arms around and a giant tsunami appears on the horizon, bearing down on the city! As if that's not enough, the tsunami shoots laserbolts! Destruction! Chaos! The villain is introduced! Oh, wait. Now I'm talking to Elvis. Apparently we're friends, somehow. Big Starcraft looking insects are dropping around us. I'm not sure what they have to do with the laser shooting tsunami. I flail at them in precisely the way a six year old girl would if you threw a spider at her. This makes Elvis see fit to hand me a sword the size of a small canoe. I flail ineffectually with it also until it glows and suddenly I am able to use it. Damned useful feature in a sword. The cut-scene finally ends and we drop into turn-based combat with the bugs accompanied by the sort of battle music that might be inspiring to someone who wears the sort of pants that I do..

"Great," I think. "I love turn based combat! The careful maneuvering, hordeing of precious action points, careful flanking maneuvers..." Or, combat could consist of pressing the X button two times.

More bugs attack and Elvis comes up with the strategy of breaking a techno thingamajiggy so that it falls down and destroys the bugs. As well as what appears to be a major freeway interchange. Somewhere in here we fight a really big bug and I get the option of 'overpower' attacks. These consist of mega attacks which I apparently must play a minigame in order to use. Elvis's minigame consists of hitting a long series of buttons in under three minutes. Captain Gaypants is simpler-he just has to hit a sweetspot on a moving bar like in a golf game. He has two minutes to accomplish this Herculean feat.

Rather than making me actually do something that might resemble playing the game, the escape from the destruction of the freeway is another cut-scene. This is a pattern that repeats itself often. Cut-scene, gameplay consisting of walking five feet in the direction of the arrow on the minimap, next cut-scene.

Somehow we get from the exploding freeway to me floating in the air above the city. I swim through the air for a few feet and land on a platform in order to activate a cut-scene dream sequence. I wake up from this to find myself washed up on a rock in some fantasy looking ruins. Aha, I think. The Fantasy part seems to be kicking in. I swim through the ruins, get out of the water, find a chest and then another cut-scene which knocks me back into the water. Fight some fish...X,X...X,X...X,X. Then a giant fish with tasteful light bulbs attacks! X,X...X,X...cut-scene. The giant fish chases me and I escape into the ruins. Not a lot of suspense to this sequence as it's done in a cut-scene. Killing off Captain Gaypants in a cut-scene would be a pretty cheesy thing to do.

I find myself in the ruins of a big round room. I find some dead flowers which, the game informs me, are too rotten to burn. Good to know. I find the remains of a fire pit and whine about how cold I am, causing my precognitive lament about the non burnable flowers to make more sense. Perhaps if I were wearing longer pants...

I inform myself that I need flint and tinder. Conveniently, these are located mere feet away. The search for them constitutes the most gameplay I've yet encountered. I get the fire lit and start whining about being hungry. Rather than looking for a sandwich we drop to a cut-scene where a bunch of people burst into the room. I am not sure who they are but they have a vaguely space pirate feel to them. They gabble at me in space pirate language. One of them is female. She is, as best as I can tell, stark ass naked save for a couple of belts-one around her waist and one worn vertically to hide her lady bits. Except her boobs which thrust out, gloriously free...AAAAH, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOUR NIPPLES?

Either she is actually wearing a full body skin colored leotard or space pirate women are nipple free. Perhaps she keeps them in the goggles she has atop her head. I am tempted to call her Nipless, for the slur pun, or Nippless, for the simplicity and elegance of a single 's' changing the the entire meaning of the word. Neither of these, however, quite have the ring of simply calling her 'Nipples'. A word with a true and magnificent ring to it. Try it now. Yell out "YO! NIPPLES!". See how great that sounds? Especially if you're at work? Come to think of it, it really is an underused nickname. Try adopting it for your significant other or for a coworker. Let me know how it goes.

Nipples helps Gaypants fight off some creature thingy while the other space pirates stand around and watch. Then they take me to their spaceship which actually turns out to be a boat that just looks like a spaceship. I am apparently to function as some sort of cabinboy. I look at a crane and get yelled at. Then I find a book that explains to me that in space pirate language Y=A. This is the extent of my cabinboy duties.

I am informed that there's some watchamacallit in the water beneath the boat and that Nipples and I are going to swim down to it and watch some cut-scenes together. We fight a couple of fish on the way. X,X...X,X...

At this point our power mercifully went out, bringing us to the end of Session 1

Part 2 here

Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta Impressions

Messed around with open beta for this today so here's impressions from a non-Final Fantasy guy.

I'll clarify that with a quick summary of my JRPG background. The first one I ever tried to play was a PC port of one of the Metal Gear Solid games; don't recall which one. My fuzzy memory of it was that 90% of the gameplay consisted of hitting the space bar over and over to advance through interminably long dialogue cutscenes. Recently, having never played a Final Fantasy game and having a friend's old PS2 camped at the house I gave Final Fantasy X a whirl to try and see what all of the fuss was about. I lasted about four hours and rank it as one of my worst ever game experiences. Gameplay again seemed to consist mainly of walking from cutscene to cutscene amongst one of the most irritating collections of characters ever assembled into one license.

My only other knowledge of square enix is that theirs is one of the names attached to Deus Ex 2, another train wreck of a game.

Suffice to say, I came into Final Fantasy XIV with pretty low expectations. These were not raised in the slightest by the game patcher which is done torrent style and which, accompanied by the sort of music you'd hear in a crystal and candle shop, announced that it was going to take around 27 hours to download the updates. A few minutes on google and I found a direct download for the 4.4 gigs of patches and saved myself about 25 hours.

Character creation was ok. The character art was good if of questionable design. We have the generic humans, the elves whose males dress in lowrider pants the better to display their rippling abs and manscaping skills, the FF version of a hobbit which seemed the bastard offspring of the Pillsbury Doughboy and a muppet and which I immediately wanted to stick knives into, a catgirl for the furry crowd and a big burly guy who I expect gets flocks of male elves fluttering around him wherever he goes. There are limited options for each customizable aspect but there are decent number of customizable aspects. Since they're all choices between presets it's pretty easy to make a decent looking character, provided you're not playing a male elf or a muppet. Sadly, turning music off in options does not kill the music that plays during character creation.

Really?

Once in game I had to hand it to 'em. The graphics are gorgeous. The main quest lines, it seems, are chock full of cutscenes as I might have expected from previous jrpg experiences. However, be it the novelty of character centric cutscenes in an MMO or the quality of writing and animation, I quite enjoyed all of the cutscenes in this one. Mostly. The long load times at the beginning and end of each cut scene were a bit of a turn-off. There are three different starting areas, each with its own questline. I've done one of these questlines and dabbled in the other two. The eyebrow raiser is one that features, I shit you not, a flying musical kitten band that chases a big tree monster away. Points for originality, I guess. More points if they'd let me ragekill them and hadn't given them some absurd cutesy name. Moogies? Moogles? Something like that.

Ummm...

The way the quests are conducted, however, is a throwback to ol' school EQ. Wanna get a quest from an NPC? Good luck. There are no indicators whatsoever of which NPCs might have quests to offer as opposed to flavor dialogue. During quests you'll get objectives along the lines of 'go talk to pullers at the fisherman's guild'. You arrive at the fisherman's guild to find fifteen NPCs lazing about and you get to run around and talk to all of them until you find the one that updates the quest and starts the next cutscene. An additional big part of the starter quests is running around the starter city. I was in some piratey city that consisted mostly of three hundred yard long bridges and ramps that you continually had to run along to get anywhere. Nice scenery couldn't prevent this from getting old pretty fast.

Creating another character in the same city and, consequently, skipping through the cutscenes that you've seen already reveals that, at the low levels at least, the majority of your playtime simply consists of running from one place to another to find the next cutscene.

Character animation is both good and bad. Good in that it's smooth and lifelike. Bad in that most characters seem to be possessed by twelve year old Japanese girls. Once you've done the wave emote once you will quietly vow to yourself to never, ever make your character do anything of that sort ever again. This is one of the cultural oddities of Japan that I've always found the strangest-how everything seems targeted towards young girls. Here we have the squeaky voices, the animations, the flying kittens, the muppets, the androgynous males with fabulous hair. In any case, if that's an important part of the Asian RPG experience for you then you will be able to find it here though, so far at least, it hasn't been as overbearing as it was in Final Fantasy X.

The UI is absolutely, hideously awful. Really, really bad. Chat is limited to 80 character messages. Most info like inventory, character, etc. is buried 2 or 3 layers deep in a menu system that is slow and must be interacted with with a software driven mickey mouse hand cursor that just kind of vaguely drifts along in the direction that you're trying to move it. Your inventory is split across multiple tabs in multiple menus. Want to clickdrag something to equip it? Tough shit. That's not how muppets roll.

I finished the starting questline with my character and am now in a position where I have no real idea what to do. There might be another quest for my level, somewhere, or there might be a hundred. I'm faced with the prospect of running around randomly talking to likely looking NPCs in order to find out if there is anything or not. Or I could do the "guildleve" quests. "Guildleve" is apparently a Japanese word that means "generic". These are the cutscene free go kill 6 rat type quests and I have the sinking feeling that these comprise the bulk of the play experience. These are all handed out from behind a counter rather than from individual NPCs in the gameworld.  I did a couple of these, both of which sent me to an area just outside the city where I then had to click on a rock, select it from the menu, select to do a guildleve from the rockmenu, select which guildleve to do and then select my difficulty level. The game then did a complete 180 from its prior lack of quest direction. For the guildleves, it highlights the nearest appropriate mob on the map, surrounds it with a big glowy circle on the map as well as a directional arrow and then places sparkles over it on the landscape.  Chat in this area was useless (more so than its normal uselessness) due to a goldspammer sitting next to the rock running a spam macro. He was still there when I logged back in 8 hours later which is probably an indicator of something.

So...

PROS: Great graphics and sound effects, well done animation, well done cutscenes and interesting storylines for the main story quests.

MEDIOCRES: Clunky combat, obnoxious running distances to get around the cities, unlabeled merchants, generic rinse and repeat grind quests.

BAD: Horrific UI, miniscule loot, elevator fantasy music, software mouse, quest direction either nonexistent or over the top, very little content unless you like grinding (supposedly only true for beta), locked keys, periodic supernatural possession of game designers by spirits of pack of Japanese schoolgirls.

So What the Hell is Going on Here?

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