Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

[Thad]

A little bit. After a while you'll find the board is a little too stacked with low-level missions starting a quest chain that doesn't yield particularly fantastic rewards, so it makes more sense to just do the ones closest to your level unless you really WANT to do every quest in the game. In which case just do the closest one, or you'll spend your life either in the car or the loading screen.

Not every quest. I have some suggestions for Japan regarding fishing minigames. And the "hunt for n glowies inside a circle on the map" quests are wearing pretty goddamn thin, too.

Travel isn't nearly as fun as in Spider-Man (though that's the high-water mark for traversal in open-world games), but I haven't gotten tired of driving around while listening to Final Fantasy soundtracks yet, in games or in life. My approach to open-world games is perhaps best described as "guided fucking around", so quests give me someplace to go while I studiously ignore the main quest. I'm not in a hurry. (On the other hand, open-world games I haven't finished yet include BotW, RotTR, Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor, and Xenoblade Chronicles, so it's not as if I'm going to run out of open-world games if I speed through this one, for whatever a Final Fantasy game value of "speed through" is.)

As far as rewards, I'm twenty hours in and still finding I don't usually have enough money to buy all the equipment I'd like to. Of course, part of that's because I haven't been selling my old shit. Final Fantasy games have turned me into a packrat; I'm always thinking "I guess I should hang onto that old sword in case I want to throw it at something later."

Hunts are...well, I think the only game I've ever played where hunts were really satisfying was The Witcher 2; it actually made each hunt unique, with some kind of strategy required for each hunt (bomb the hives and then fight the bugs as they come out, set traps, stuff like that, instead of just the usual hack-at-it-until-it-dies approach). FF15's combat is okay and I don't mind fighting, but actually keeping track of which hunts I've done and which are still available requires me to keep a goddamn spreadsheet or something and I am not amused by that.

(Suikoden really had the right idea, 25 years ago, with its shopping system: if you find something for sale in one town, anywhere, at any point in the game, then it shows up in the shop at your castle, and you do not have to go back to the town where you first saw it. Fuck verisimilitude; I shouldn't have to keep track of what things are for sale/what hunts are available/whatever on a town-by-town basis. It's different in PC-style RPGs where store inventories are usually randomized, but if a store always has the same items in stock, man, just let me buy them from the car without having to drive back there. Consider that another suggestion for Japan.)

[Thad]

I don't know why it took me so long to realize that the rest stop music is a honky-tonk version of Johnny C Bad.

Story/world-building complaint: okay, this is a world where photographs and newspapers exist. The party knows the Imperial Chancellor's name but doesn't recognize him when they see him? Even though he dresses like the fucking Fourth Doctor? It'd be one thing if he was just a generic-looking guy, but even in a world populated by Nomura characters, the dude stands out.

I'm beginning to lose patience with the day-night cycle. It doesn't appear to have any purpose except for interrupting me when I'm trying to do something. Shops don't close, people don't move, the only difference between daytime and nighttime is that at night it's harder to see and sometimes an Iron Giant will show up to get in your damn way when you're trying to drive somewhere or find something. Why no, I'm not always right next to a campground when the sun sets, and town designs like Lestallum (no cheap lodging options, only a 300-gil inn that's prohibitively expensive when you first get there) and...whatever the rest stop next to the lighthouse is called (no lodgings, no restaurant to point out nearby campgrounds; I expect there's probably one nearby but I looked around and couldn't find any) don't help.

[beatbandito]

Thad's commentary convinced me to finally get back in and finish the downward slope of story missions I had been sitting on. And, once I finished off the last rain frog hunt, fishing missions, and a few easier repeats of the same evolving sidequests from the mainland on other maps, it really was just one plot quest after another with a loooooot of cutscenes I gave absolutely no fucks about, and really didn't even know what was happening or why for most of it.

End of the day, I guess I had fun doing sidequests on the main map. The combat was fun enough to get overpowered with and not worry too much about, but I wouldn't do a challenge run. The story I feel like was overall not great and not really well acted. Save for the mid-credits scene which was actually well done and really good and only a little whiplashed by Stand By Me actually being the credits music. Also the end credit scene was nice, but still corny enough that it wasn't whiplashed by my obvious photo choice of cup noodle with egg. If it's not scrambled you're doing it wrong.

[Thad]

...I don't know if making it 45 hours in before noticing none of my Royal Edition DLC was installed means I'm slow, or that the base game has so much to offer that the DLC really is peripheral.

Of course I'd heard of games that "include DLC" where they actually just include the base game and a redemption code to download the DLC, but this is the first time I've ever actually encountered one. Last gen, when you'd buy Arkham City GotY, you'd get all the DLC on the damn disc, none of this download code nonsense.

Always with the new and innovative ways to make sure you don't actually own the things you "buy". Ah well. At least I got it on sale, and it's not as if I've ever sold or given away a game when I was done with it anyway*. And I'm acutely aware that games on physical media are a novelty** that won't be around much longer, so I may as well enjoy the remaining vestiges of ownership while they last.

* okay so earlier when I said "Final Fantasy games have turned me into a packrat," I guess it probably wasn't Final Fantasy games that did that.

** definition 3, of course, as in "novelty song" or "novelty store"; obviously physically owning things is not new. Indeed, it seems downright archaic at this point.

[Brantly B.]

The base game DLC is very peripheral. It's mostly items that show up in your inventory and make the game way too easy (not that it wasn't already). It's actually somewhat better to play the main story without the DLC installed.

Most of the actual content is separate episodes and one optional dungeon, though, so you haven't missed out on anything yet.

[Smiler]

[Thad]

the worst part is that even though you realize after altissia that the rest of the game's just going to be a complete mess, they get your hopes up with a brilliantly excruciating chapter 10

I'm only a little ways into chapter 10 but man you ain't kidding. I think this makes it into my top 3 for storytelling by way of gameplay (alongside the part in Arkham Asylum where you're dosed with Scarecrow toxin and the ending of the first season of The Walking Dead).

[Thad]

so is this the place where i can talk about how unbelievably incompetent the storytelling is in this game

a main character's backstory, which would have been a huge revelation with serious implications throughout the game, is revealed offhand in the eleventh hour literally for no better reason than to explain how he opens a (one) door, then everybody is like OH WELL YOU CANT HELP YOUR ROOTS LETS KEEP GOING

Chapter 13 is a goddamn mess. (The DLC that shows what happened from Gladio and Ignis's perspective is fine, though very clumsily integrated.) It reminds me of Xenogears -- like, we ran out of time and money, here are a bunch of infodumps. (My first thought was Grant Morrison's last arc on New X-Men where he was leaving and just kinda threw out all the extended plans he'd had for the next couple years of the series in a single story arc, but...no, that was a mess, but it was never boring like FF15 Chapter 13 is.)

And I'm not even going to spoilertag this because it feels like...the opposite of a spoiler? There was the big reveal that the Magitek soldiers are humans and my reaction was...wait, was I ever supposed to think they weren't humans? They look like humans -- in fact, they're damn near the only things in the game that you fight that look like humans. They behave like human military. They have names like "Axeman", "Swordsman," and "Rifleman". And they're called Magitek Soldiers in a direct reference to characters from a previous game who were very definitely humans. I wasn't supposed to know they were humans? What even is that? It's like...an anti-reveal. There's probably a name for that on TV Tropes. I mean, besides Idiot Plot, which also covers it.

It's like...the ending of Soylent Green wouldn't have been very impressive if the mystery food had been called Dave.

[Thad]

Went back to optional quests to escape tedium of Chapter 13; replaced it with tedium of fucking around in a fucking sewer maze for an hour. Gave up, found YouTube guide, noted that guy clearly did not know where the fuck he was going either.

Thought "Why the fuck am I doing this anyway?" Saw that the reward was headlights that prevent demons from interrupting your night driving. Oh hey, that would have been really useful fifty hours ago!

And here we have one of the most infuriating things about JRPGs in general and Final Fantasy in particular: late-game slogs where the "reward" at the end is something that you cannot possibly have any use for anymore by the time it's possible to get it.

One hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

[pacobird]

This is the part where I remind everyone that 1) 11 is still the best main series final fantasy and 2) it's on sale right now!

[Rico]

[Lyrai]

This is the part where I remind everyone that 1) 11 is still the best main series final fantasy and 2) it's on sale right now!

11 gave us the worst possible content addition to FF14 so no, FF11 is still the worst main series Final Fantasy, and 2) remains the only final fantasy to cause credit card fraud

[beatbandito]

But there was Tetra Master so we haven't torn down the monuments yet.

[Thad]

This is the part where I remind everyone that 1) 11 is still the best main series final fantasy and 2) it's on sale right now!

Man if I had time for an MMO I'd have installed City of Heroes by now.

[Mazian]

<beatbandito> that's why they can never remake it
<beatbandito> they can never get another actor to do that

[Thad]

Thoughts:

* And here I thought "It's 2019; they're going to have to make Barret less racist, right?"

* Pointing out how repetitive your combat is in dialogue is...certainly a choice.

* It gives me a little better bead on combat, but...watching a demo video only takes you so far. You could go into detail about FF15's combat system, but let's be honest, it's mostly "hold Circle." It at least seems like they've given some consideration to making menu-based combat work; hopefully it's less kludgey than 15's Wait Mode.

* The boss music is just about the only track in the game that I think should have stayed electric and is not improved by an orchestra.

[Brantly B.]

It ain't FFXV's auto-combat; you can see a lot of the demo players (probably QA - hi guys!) mashing their selection on the bottom left. I've been predicting that the game will play a lot like Crisis Core since it was announced as an action game, and yeah, that's Crisis Core: You auto-target, you mash attack for slow-moving combos, you abuse dodge rolls. The FFXV influence is more clearly felt with the ATB stuff and that's a lot better than Crisis Core's realtime menu spam, so, hey.

[Thad]

Right, I get how it's supposed to work, I'm just skeptical about how much all this shit will actually matter in the real game. FF15's got all these systems grafted on top of combat like entire Limit Break trees and Armiger and apparently characters are supposed to pull each other out of Danger but take their sweet goddamn time about it so you're way better off just using an item, and...well, broadly it's like most Final Fantasy games in that most of the strategy is in how you set up your party prior to combat, and combat itself mostly consists of "Spam Attack, unless it's a boss." FF7 was no exception, and I'm not really expecting the remake to be one either, no matter how much the tutorial emphasizes spellcasting and cover and correctly translates the part about how you're not supposed to attack while it's tail's up.

[Brantly B.]

The first boss's job in any FF game is to make you think the battles are going to get more complicated when they don't actually.

It's gonna be mash attack, spam dodgerolls, use your big penis move when the meter is fully turgid. It's fine, it's not complicated, but it works.

[Friday]

I would say FFX is a notable exception to that because they gave every enemy a specific weakness and you had to get the right guy in to hit em.

Of course, that system annoyed me because I had to constantly switch in Wakka to hit high evade mobs, Auron to hit armored mobs, Lulu to spell physical immune mobs, Yuna to heal and summon for bosses, Rikku to switch off mechs, and Tidus just had the highest raw dps with his high speed and damage against mobs that don't resist physical or dodge.

And Kimarhi languished in the back row forever because he had no use.