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Review – Final Fantasy X (PS2, PS3, PS4, PC)

PS2 – 1 Player

Don’t ask me why it says “X” instead of “10” up there. I guess its just to keep with the idea that all FF games can be abreviated with three letters. Maybe people are just too lazy to put the 0 on the end. Actually it’s probably because everyone knows any name with an “X” on the end is automatically cool. Think about it, we have Malcom X, Jason X, Samurai X, Xyxex, the list goes on. This is one game though that is slick even without the tag-on “Cool X”.

Before we get started with detail, I present some minor trivia. To save HTML coding time I pulled out my FF8 review and just changed all the text and image links. On a semi-related note, if there is a game FFX is more like it’s FF8. Both are the only two FF games so far to use realistic character designs all the way through. Both have a massive “cheat” through the use of limit breaks. Both don’t really have levels. FF8 does, but it’s the Junction system that makes the difference in the end. Until FFX came along, FF8 was the best in the series. Also they both have the same characters!

Ok, ok, stick with me here. Look at Rinoa and Yuna, side by side, same person right? How about Tidus and Squall? Hey hey, you can’t fool us by dying youtr hair blonde boy! Rikku could easily pass for Quist’s younger sister. Wakka and Zell? Hey didn’t we try the hair dye trick once allready? If Lulu isn’t Edea munis the mask and backback thing, I don’t know who is. What about Kimari then. Well uh, I suppose he’s sort of the love child of Red XIII and Yuffie, I mean FF7 isn’t too far off from FF8 right?

Now if FF8 was unbalanced by how strong you can get, FFX has flipped off the scale and is rolling away by now. It starts out a bit difficult at times, but once you fill the Sphere Board with everyone, well, even with your Weakest characters every battle is a simple matter of mashing the Fight Command. Also for the first time you can break the 9999 barrier on HP, and Damage. Not that you’ll need to to finish the game. In fact the end is allready probably the easiest end boss in any FF game to date. For one, the true end boss only has one form. The final battle afterwards is so easy you could beat it with your weakest character with none of the sphere board complete, given enough time. Honestly it’s a feature I could do without, though by that point I could kill everything in one hit anyway. I don’t think any of the final fights caused any damage before I kicked the shit out of them at 99999 a hit. Consider that isn’t just 99999 a round, that is 99999 from three people with Auto-Haste and a speed stat around 200. So for every one attack the enemy dishes out that’s like 10 or so hits of 99999 each. Or more.

Now there is some challenge here. You see there is this Battle Arena. That is where the REAL bosses are. Basically it’s chock full of hidden enemies with several million HP each. The problem here is that most of these bosses can be finished off with the same strategy of casting auto life then attacking. For the most part they all have some sort of gimmick weakspot to thier strategy. Honestly the hardest one, Nemesis, broke down to about an hour of attacking and wasn’t hard at all. I may be wrong on the names but Neslug and Thu’Bin were considerably more of a challenge than Nemesis was. I mean to kill Neslug you had to be able to deal over a million HP in one attack in order to kill is otherwise it would pull into it’s shell and regenerate completely (3 Mil HP total).

I mentioned this game doesn’t have Levels. That’s one of it’s big “new features”. Thing is, it DOES have levels. it just doesn’t keep track of them. After each battle you gain AP that go towards Sphere Board points. For each Sphere Point you can move one space on the Sphere Board to gain stats. These are all just fancy names for levels. In the end it breaks down to a lot of busy work for the same +2 Str and +3 Dex you would have gotten anyway for making it to level 5 (etc). The idea here is that you’ll be able to customize your characters. Anyone can learn Black Magic, you just need ot get to that point on the board. If you complete it, you’ll have a powerhouse specialty fighter that is faster than greased lightning and can cast all sorts of White and Black magic. The problem is that there are locks all over the board. Chances are you won’t be able to deviate from a characters preset path till about halfway through the game. Also after two plays through, I’ve found you won’t complete a characters initial path till around the end of the game. At this point you’ll be needing around 20,000 AP to gain an S-Level. Don’t worry though, there are multiple tricks to gain AP quickly and the enemies in the final dungeon are fairly easy for around 3-4 S-Levels per battle on even the strongest characters.

But where would a Final Fnatasy game be without mini-games. I can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of mini-games myself. They always come off as useless filler. It’s like the characters suddenly decide to take a day off from saving the world so they can play some sort of lame Chocobo/Moogle themed race/guessing game/shooter/whatever. Also the prizes are usually pretty useless. Not in FFX. Oh no, if you want to outfit all of the fully powered (read:useful) versions of the ultimate weapons you’ll have to complete every mini game in this baby. Not only that but in order to get materials for customizing perfect armor easily, you’ll have to complete the battle arena. But wait! There’s more! You see, FFX has the hardest, most excrutiating mini games in ANY game EVER. LEt’s start easy. The Cactaur Hot and Cold game is not that hard. Be sure to save between each cactaur and you’ll be able to catch them all without being caught pretty easily. But how about say, dodging 200 lightning bolts. Another one that in the end wasn’t that hard. You just NEED Enc-None and decent reflexes. It takes about 20 minutes to do this if you find a spot with consistant lighting strikes on the map. Now on to the worst couple. Butterfly Racing. Run along a tree and catch blue butterflies. Sounds easy right? You have a time limit though, and there are red butterflies that initiate combat. Not to mention that in this 3D world it’s pretty much impossible to tell where the butterflies actually are and if you hit even one red butterfly or deviate from the EXACT path you’ll come up .1 seconds short of winning (every time). After say, 20 or 30 runs you should have the path memorized enough to make it throught this thing.

Now for the final big offender before we get into the one fun mini-game. Chocobo Racing. Anyone who has played this game knows that Chocobo Racing is impossible. The chocobos steer like drunk blind cripples, the birds appear right on top of you all the time and unless you hit the exact pixel of the Balllon you won’t pick it up. Did I mention you have to complete this game with a time of 0 seconds? It takes about 36 seconds to run the race, if no birds hit you and you just run it. Each bird subtracts 6 seconds (3 at the end, 3 in actual run time) and each baloon adds 3 seconds (at the end). so you have to pick up at least 12 baloons without getting hit plus 2 for each bird you hit. Sound complicated? You bet! Difficult? Absolutely. This game requires no skill. You’ll play for 500 runs and get times varying from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. Eventually you’ll finally manage to get lucky and all the birds will be gone and the baloons will all be right in front of you and you’ll get the perfect time of 0 seconds. Thing is at this point this victory will feel empty and hollow as it came from no amount of skill on your part.

Now we are getting a bit long here, but there is one more point to touch on. Blitzball is the main mini-game of this game. FF8 had Triple Triad, FF9 had Tetra Master, FFX has Blitzball. Basically it’s underwater soccor (that’s Underwater Football for you Brits) and while it starts out a bit difficult, once you dump the entire original team and recruit a few good players you’ll be dominating the sport. The only problem with this game is that you have to win somewhere between 50 and 1 billion matches for all of Wakka’ Limits and Ultimate Weapon pieces to come up. I’m pretty sure the numbers are random so you could be playing a LOT of Blitz. As fun as it is for a while, it gets REALLY old after about 200 games.

Basically te point here is, that you should own three games for PS2. Metal Gear Solid 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Final Fantasy 10. Everything else is just garbage filler. Then for 2003, be sure to pick up Metal Gear Solid 2.2, Grant Theft Auto 3.2, and Final Fantasy 10.2 (Kingdom Hearts or I suppose Final Fantasy 10 International). man I see a trend here. Here’s hoping 2004 briungs MGS3, GTA4, and FF12. What, you say I missed FF11? No, Square just decided to skip making a good game for that one.

Review – Saints Row the Third (PC, Xbox360, PS3)

2011 – Volition – 1 Player (Campaign) Multiplayer (Online)
PC, PS3, Xbox360

The Good

  • Loads of fun Gameplay
  • Reminiscent of classic GTA
  • Amazing custom character creation with voices and interactions not just “faceless”

The Bad

  • The missions are kind of just a repetition of a handful of mini games
  • Kooky level may be too much for some people’s taste.

In Depth

Saints Row really has a comeback story behind it. The first game is apparently rather terrible. the second game is better but not great. It’s already saddled with being a “GTA knockoff” by default no matter what it does. Somewhere Volition has managed to get something really right because Saints Row the Third seems to be quite a hit among gamers. So much of a hit that THQ had decided to focus more on games like Saints Row over things like it’s failing Wii Tablet thing (U-Draw).

This thing is pretty long and image heavy, so you’ll have to click through to get the whole thing.

(more…)

Review – From Dust (PC, PS3, Xbox360)

2011 – Ubisoft – One Player

The Good

  • Interesting Gimmick where you manipulate the world using literal God Power
  • Eventually there is a sandbox mode, which is neat.

The Bad

  • The gimmick is way more limited than it is made out to be and the world tends to “right” itself
  • The above makes a lot of the levels frustrating since you try to do X but it just sort of fails…
  • By the time you unlock the Sandbox, you’ll hate the game play.

In Depth

Ok, I tried… I really tried. If possible, I try to complete a game before I do a review of it. This means being late to the game most of the time but it also means I get to experience all that the game has to offer, which is the way it should be. There are exceptions for various reasons, some games don’t have a real ending, some are repetitious enough that it’s clear nothing more is going to be gained by continuing onward.

Others become so frustrating and irritating I just can’t being myself to finish it no matter how hard I want to. From Dust is one of the latter set there. (more…)

Review – Beyond: Two Souls (PS3)

2013 – Quantic Dream – 1 Player (ish)

The Good

  • Interesting and ambition idea and gameplay.
  • Impressive graphics.
  • Lots of choices that shape the story a bit.

The Bad

  • Convoluted story that doesn’t leave a ton of questions but it’s super great.
  • Many Sequences are completely pointless and superfluous to the plot.
  • The game’s gimmick is neat but leaves a lot to be desired with it’s limitations.

tl;dr Sterilized Version

Beyond: Two Souls is an interesting narrative game from Quantic Dream and David Cage that is similar to their previous titles such as Heavy Rain and Farenheit. It’s much less a traditional game than it is an interactive movie, it reminds me a bit of the classic Dreamcast title Shenmue. The player controls Jodie and the entity attached to her, Aiden, across a variety of missions throughout Jodie’s life. Most of the game play involves traversing the scenes with the control sticks and interacting with the world either through a “Press X to proceed” and “old Square to complete an action” style of interface. The player can also switch to the spirit Aiden and push objects or control enemies (at times).

It’s honestly not worth a full game $60 purchase but it’s too bad at a $20-$25 level assuming you know what you’re getting into with it. It’s an interesting experience if you don’t mind the lack of “video gamey” elements.

Spoiler Filled Detailed Version

Willem Dafoe This game relies on two primary gimmicks. One, is the Aiden character, and the other is the fancy motion capture graphics, specifically, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, the game’s two main characters and Protagonist and Antagonist respectively. Dafoe is a pretty sympathetic antagonist, and isn’t particularly “evil” for most of the game but he is still the extremely sinister looking and sounding Willem Defoe, so you pretty much spend the entire time wondering “When is he going to turn evil?” Both of these elements have a lot of impact on the gameplay and plot.

I’ll start on the graphics. Quantic Dream went to a lot of work to capture the likeness of it’s two starring actors and present them in an incredible lifelike manner for this game. They did a great job of coming extremely close to the “uncanny valley” without landing right in it. There was even one scene where I was sure I was watching a video of Ellen Page and not a 3D render. Everything still looks like a game, it just looks really good while doing it. There seems to be a few tricks at work here though. Firstly, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe are both well known actors. This helps a lot in tricking the brain into filling in the normal “gaps” that create the Uncanny valley. I’d actually be kind of interested to see what someone who doesn’t know who these two are thought of things.

youngjodie Secondly, there seems to be some changes in the quality and density of the rendering (for lack of a better term). when there is a cut scene with just Jodie on screen, everything looks hyper detailed and realistic. When you’re just wandering around looking at Jodie’s back? It may as well be any other 3rd person title. You can break free of Jodie and fly around as Aiden but the view when controlling Aiden is hazed in blue further breaking the need for hyper detailed models. It’s not a bad way of handing things and I’m sure it helps cut down on processing power, but it’s there.

The lack of an uncanny valley also falls apart completely if you ignore the games’ action prompts. The story is fairly compelling when it comes to “make a choice right now” and each action has a bit of a leadout that fills in your reaction time with onscreen content and urgency. If you just ignore the action, this leadout action starts to repeat. Suddenly the super detailed characters and urgent action feels extremely gamey as everyone just sort of stares off into space looking creepy.

Beyond: Two Souls - Dinner Time Though ignoring some actions may not be advisable depending on how you want the story to proceed. Most actions have multiple outcomes for pass/fail. Others just demand you repeat them and try again. This is one aspect that almost hurts the game overall, specifically, there is literally no way to “die” or fail. The story always moves on.

Always.

During one sequence you are being chased down by the police. Manage to elude them, and you get a bonus PS3 Trophy, but getting caught just means you have to use Aiden to escape from the cop car they throw you in. Either way you end up chasing away from them on a motorcycle.

Beyond: Two Souls - Goat.se? During the more action filled sequences, failing to elude or subdue the guards generally results in a Quick Time Combat (QTC) sequence where you fight off the guard. Failing to succeed in the QTC forces you into Aiden Mode where you strangle the guard.

Basically, you can’t ever actually get caught or killed by these guards.

Which brings us to the most annoying hindrance of this title. Aiden’s abilities are great, except the only really work when the game wants you to use them. Just as an example, one of the few and most combat heavy levels involves Soldier Jodie sneaking through this Middle Eastern village to assassinate some nobody political stooge. There are a few different paths through the village, though not nearly as many as you might want. The logical path though would be to send Aiden out ahead and either possess guards to shoot the other guards, or to just start strangling all of the guards. Except you can only possess maybe two of the guards you encounter and you can only strangle a few of them.

Basically, ideally, you could handle the situation as you, the player, saw fit, except instead you end up limited to how the game wants you to handle it.

Beyond: Two Souls - Press Circle to Commit Suicide... As for taking out guards with Jodie, well, that effectively doesn’t happen unless it’s a QTC failure event or sneak attack. This is in no way a Metal Gear stealth mission where Jodie can shoot whomever she wants despite having an entire training episode where you learn to shoot and take down guards. Honestly I don’t remember ever shooting anyone herself in the entire game, in fact the only time I recall Jodie even holding a gun with any intention to shoot was when she tries to suicide herself in desperation (it’s in the trailer above, Press R1 to kill yourself, except you can’t because Aiden and no fail scenarios and reasons…).

Aiden has other limitations beyond what he can do to others. Occasionally you can use Aiden to push or break things, this seems to be his primary communication method. Except at one point he is somehow skilled enough to type a name into a computer, which goes beyond what we’ve been shown.

Beyond: Two SoulsAiden also has an arbitrary range limit. Sometimes Aiden can fly a long long way from Jodie, others he can’t go more then ten feet. This is somewhat explained in the plot as “Jodie gets really stressed the farther Aiden goes”. Except late in the game when Jodie is under extreme duress, Aiden flies farther than he ever has from Jodie. It’s inconsistencies like this that slowly start to grind on your enjoyment.

There are also a lot of inconsistencies in the missions and story. The game is told in chapters spaced throughout Jodie’s life. Some take place when she is a little girl in the lab learning how to control Aiden. Others take place when she is a teenager trying to find herself, later there are a few missions working for the CIA, you end up on the run from the law for a little while and eventually things wrap up and we get a little closure to Dafoe’s motivations and yes, there is eventually an answer to what Aiden is and what his connection to Jodie is.

Beyond: Two Souls These chapters do not occur in chronological order, which feels cheezy on it’s own and there isn’t really a good way to replay them in order. You can replay any chapter but in order to keep any new choices you’ve made you have to completely restart from that point onward.

The core story isn’t too bad, it has a few gaps but nothing awful. The real issue is that half the missions feel completely useless. Many of the missions essentially just fancy tutorials disguised as story. You learn how to control Aiden while controlling Young Jodie in a lab. You learn how to QTC and shoot while training with the CIA, you learn how to read these little flashback scenes during a crisis event. That sort of thing.

Then there are missions which further the plot along. Jodie’s bad childhood, her betrayal by the CIA, she is running from the cops, she has to save the world. These work all right as well and there is some overlap with the tutorial missions.

Beyond: Two Souls - Ellen Page Simulator Then there are the missions that feel completely tacked on. They are some of the more enjoyable game play missions but they ultimately just end up being noise. Jodie spends a lengthy mission running around the desert with some Native Americans; Jodie hangs out with some homeless bums and lives on the street for a while; Jodie tries to murder her classmates Carrie style. These events are not referred to again other than a passing choice in the epilogue, we learn no new abilities or skills, we learn no crucial or important plot points.

They just exist.

Which wouldn’t be a bad thing except this game is trying to be a narrative more than a game, and extraneous subplots are bad for a good narrative.

So I feel like I’ve been a little rough on Beyond: Two Souls, but i also know its a polarizing game. Overall, I did enjoy it. I wish there was more freedom of control and I wish there was a better mechanism to replay missions, but I still enjoyed it. It’s just not something that everyone will enjoy or be interested in.