CrossCode (PC): The MMO I always wanted.

Despite what people a number of people feel about them as a gaming news site, I read a fair bit of Kotaku in my day to day life. Mainly because of a few select writers who I enjoy the work of and have some pretty similar interests as far as games go. One of those writers is Mike Fahey, and in his write up at the end of last year he listed his top ten games of 2018.

One of them, I had never heard of before. Wasn't even remotely on my radar. Had nice looking pixel graphics, and boasted itself as an MMO that's really not. Strange, I thought, but ultimately clicked away. But then I started to see the title popping up in some other sites top 10 lists. Now that had my attention. How can a game that appears on so many people's best of lists get by me? Well, that merited a deeper look.

CROSSCODE (STEAM)

CrossCode opens with us in control of a dark haired woman racing through a dark foresty area. She is on the hunt for her brother, and shadowy voice implores her to stop. She vehemently denies, saying that she is trying to stop her brother from working to death. The voice spawns monsters to stop her which the girl quickly dispatches. After tearing through the enemies put before her, she does find her brother just to see him collapse from exhaustion.

We are woken up in a different location. Our hair and outfit are slightly different. An operator tells us that our name is Lea, and we are actually logged into an avatar of the futuristic MMO called CrossWorlds. In the vein of Sword Art Online, Crossworlds is a game where the players are actually implanted in the game to a heavy degree of the 5 senses. Unfortunately, we are told there has been an accident and that we are in a coma in the real world, and we are being placed into the game to try to find out what happened.

To make matters worse though, our speech unit is damaged. We can understand fine, and give minor visual responses but we are told that in order to solve this issue and hopefully find some answers, we need to play the game just as if we were any other player in the game. Lea remembers the basics of how to use her Spheromancer class in the game and after running into a friendly Pentafist named Emilie in the rookie island, she and her new friend jump into the game of Crossworlds to hopefully learn what's happened to her.

Loaded for bear

CrossCode is going to be an interesting game to try to review because the mechanics of this game borrow from so many different various elements that it doesn't really fall into just one genre of game. For example like I explained that the Lea is logged into an MMO, but you would incorrect to assume that's what this game actually is. The MMO aspect of the game is used as a framework for the story and the world.

What I mean be that is, yeah there is some questing that is done in the style of an MMO. You need to go talk to NPCs who give you quests to do, and you'll go into the world and fight mobs to collect items or kill a certain amount of enemies. As you wander around the world you'll see other players just running around, fighting their own things, or just hanging out. All of these are computer controlled. This is a fully single player experience, but it does a very good job of presenting the illusion that this is a living world with other players doing their own thing. 

When I describe the game, I describe along the lines of a 16-bit Zelda game such as A Link to the Past.  It's stylized in a way that it would look at home on the Super Nintendo with a top down view of the world, primarily a 2d play, but there is some degree of verticality to the maps which allows for some platforming and parkour when wandering around the world.

The combat is going to be the real meat and potatoes of this game. It's core is a hack and slasher with bit of Souls to it. You can run around and slash with a couple of swings with a single button press, you have a block that pulls up a shield and can parry if timed correctly, and you have a dodge move that has some invulnerability frames that lets Lea gracefully spin from harms way, which she can do up to the three times. 

But it she wouldn't be a Spheromancer without some spheres, and that's where her ranged attacks come in. When using the right analog (or I assume mouse on PC) the combat becomes almost a twin stick shooter. Holding a direction will bring a pair of lines for Lea's aim together, and once lined up you can unload a continue stream of projectiles at an enemy, which is handy for fast or flying foes. You can also charge up your first shot to ricochet off walls or break enemy guards.

As you play through the game and unlock your circuit board, you open your skill tree which allows you to learn multiple techniques for special moves for your Melee, Ranged, Dash and Shield. What is nice about this is as when you commit to an ability path, once you fill out the 3 spaces for it you can actually flip between your options so if you don't care for how one ability plays you can try the other option to see what works for you better. Even further in the game you start unlocking elemental grids which provide you with even more options to fight with, so you do have a bit of freedom to design your character.

Having familiarity with your Techs will let you set up the right attacks for them

Now while I've gone into the specifics of the combat and referred to it as the meat and potatoes of the game, it would actually be pretty foolish to assume the game is just battling. That's what I did and I was promptly set up for some gameplay whiplash. As you play through the "story" for Crossworlds you come onto these "instanced" dungeons where you have to go without your party. And while these do contain a significant number of fights usually capped off with a spectacular boss fight, you learn that CrossCode is in fact a serious puzzle game as well.

Actually, when thinking about it, this game might actually be more of a platform puzzler than it is an action adventure because depending on the size of your giant space brain, the puzzles can be a major stumbling block. I am more than man enough to admit that there were a number of that I had to look up a solution for because I just was not seeing it on my own.

I love Emilie. She is just the right level of earnestness and naivety to make her impossible to hate.
Might be one of my favorite iterations of the best friend character. 

Sometimes the puzzles are just a matter of following the right path, and parkouring off the right environment pieces to get you from A to B. Sometimes the solution will require you moving around bits of your environment so that you can fire a projectile in the proper path to hit all the necessary points before coming on a final switch. Sometimes you will have to use the temples element for an environmental variant to the puzzles.

All I can say is some these will TEST you. Which can be frustrating because the story frames solving these dungeons like races against your friends. Like I said, I got stuck a lot. It wasn't until a friendly fan of the game in my Twitch chat told me to use visual cues on the floors of the puzzles to get a better idea of how to solve some these. It really did help a bit, but sometimes you can forget early mechanics that if you didn't use, would make the puzzle unsolvable, like remembering you can hop on fences.

So close, yet so far away

Outside from the puzzles, the actual combat can be very challenging as well. A lot of the enemies that you come across have their own unique weaknesses and patterns, so very rarely is just running and slashing away going to be the best way to dispatch something. It can work, but not always well. Then you have to bear in mind unless you use limited items to recover health, it doesn't restore until you finish fighting your combo chain. The more you beat enemies, the more valuable drops they give you, so its beneficial to beat a long string of baddies, but you have to be careful to mind your health.

To the CrossCode's credit, the options provide a very significant amount of customization to the overall game. Right from the onset, you are warned by the developers that this game meant to be a challenge, but if it's proving so difficult that you are not having any fun, you have options to bring down the battle and puzzle difficulties. It's a nice gesture and it gives the "git gud" scrubs less of an opportunity to be so insufferably smug when someone is struggling.

In addition to learning attack patterns and elements, you have to be mindful of ledges too.

CrossCode was a very weird game for me, because it was a game that I kept putting down. It's not because of a lack of interest of will, it is just a game that constantly got caught up in a retail release schedule as I played my games through the year. But there is something so inherently charming about it's whole presentation that always kept it in my mind. When I was playing something major like Red Dead Redemption 2, I always kept thinking "Soon as I finish this, I can get back to CrossCode".

It's story is interesting because it deals with a lot of fronts. First we have Lea's primary story, which is about her trying to figure out what happened to her. This is expounded to her by a character who is developer to the game, basically speaking to her directly. Then we have the Crossworld's "story mode" which is what we learn as Lea plays through the game with the friends she meets, and her interactions with those characters. Then we also have the front of what Crossworld's actually is, which we had a glimpse of at the start of the game and is told in flashback sequences. There is a lot to take in, but it does eventually tie together, (mostly. I'll get into that).

The game also has a sense of humor about itself. Lea, despite being a generally mute character is a very expressive character. She responds with overblown physical comedy and it really goes a long way to accentuate her personality depending on the scene. It also works for scenes when Lea was visibly emotionally shaken. Radicalfish games did an excellent job of finding a way to make you empathize with a silent protagonist.

And man, CrossCode LOVES pop culture references. I basically freaked out when in the very beginning the game when one of the first npc quests parted me by saying Aziz Ansari's big line from the "Steak Night" episode of Scrubs. You find an "Umbrella corp." in one of the cities and you can't enter because of an outbreak they are having. For the Halloween event, you have to collect "Jack's flames" for a character that is CLEARLY Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas. I can see from the coming update that there are more character references to be made soon.

Soundtrack is pretty good and it was very fitting for it's overall theme. Described by it's composer of Deniz Akbulut, the CrossCode OST is heavily inspired by Japanese game music of the late 90s using electronic beats, melodic tunes and epic JRPG Scores. This is a fair way to explain it, because the best description I had for it was "Video Gamey" which again, is perfect for it in this case because of the visual styling, story delivery, and accompanying gameplay. There are handful of decent tracks, but I wouldn't consider too many of the 60 to be overly memorable.

Oh Look. Its Doogie Noogie from A Bad Dream Before Kwanzaa. 

There really isn't a lot I have to complain about on this one that isn't in some way addressed. Like for example, when I complain about this game, I would often comment that these puzzles really do make me feel dumb as hell. It was very rare occurrence that I ever jumped into a room, saw the puzzle, and figured it out at a pretty quick clip. Now you can argue that having a solution guide embedded into the floor design is technically good game design, but there was very little indicating that's what they were doing. There was too little visual cue because I pretty much never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.

I could complain about the combat challenge, but I can only think of one real instance where I actually had to turn the difficulty down on a mob fight just so I could actually complete the quest. there was a pretty significant amount of frustration and trial & error, but outside of the one instance there was no fight that I wasn't eventually able to overcome under my own skill level.

Because the game is framed like an MMO, I could complain that some of the questing is the same MMO grind that bores me when I try to play a game like that, but it didn't bother me in this one. This is probably because the game is not an MMO. There is a story at play here with a defined ending, and because I'm not just killing mobs to open the next mission, I am motivated to continue because I want to see how things unfold.

I loved lightning techs, I used them almost exclusively because I love rapid fire damage.

And without spoiling anything? The ending feels unfinished. I get that this was a kickstarter game and they were probably trying to make a deadline to appease their backers, but it was a mild let down. In my first playthough I got a bad, pretty unsatisfying ending. I come to find out that you have to find a very out of the way NPC to trigger a small quest line which slightly changes the ending, but allows you to open the path to good ending.

Thankfully I could reload my save, so I did so. The ending changed by a few lines and actions, and just as I got ready to proceed further and see where it was going?  Nothing. I was able to go back into my game and do missed quests, but the option to go "to the future" was locked off, because that content isn't there yet. Or at least, it's heavily implied that the content will be added later. So I don't get to see how the story actually ends, and the dangling plot threads are left untied. Ironically, the NPC players are suffering from the same fate, because when you get to Crossworld's final dungeon, they players are all lamenting that it hasn't been included in the game yet. Misery loves company I guess.

Smug Lea is best Lea.

But my biggest problem is the confusing and somewhat annoying equipment system. See, you an buy equipment in towns, and that is usually enough to keep your gear leveled with you and the area, and that's fine. But you are told that getting item drops to trade for equipment is usually better. This is where the fight combo chain thing I mentioned earlier comes in. But even if you get your combo chain to S-rank and hold it for a long while, it still takes quite a bit of time to get the drops you need for some items. Almost 90% of the time by the time I got the drops I needed for an item it was already outclassed by the new stuff I bought,.

Or, more frustratingly, when it wasn't? It didn't seem like the equipment is actually better. This is a game that has a friggen ton of various bonus effects to each item, so its incredibly hard to outfit your character. It feels like its giving you a lot of room for customization with items, but its so convoluted and confusing I never know if I'm making the right move. Like say I have a weapon that gives me decent stats, but has no effects. Then I find a "better" weapon, it has a brawler stat, and has a status effect, but then it gives me a massive ding to my HP and attack. I'm being told that this is the better weapon, but it never feels like it because they are unbalanced by what is taken away. It was frustrating because it made trying to grind for items feel like an arduous chore that wasn't worth the effort.

I can only wonder how much faster I could have beaten
 this game if I understood what most of this shit meant.

But its hard for me to complain that much because no matter how many times I put it down, it was a game I kept coming back to no matter what made me put it aside in the first place. Once I really started to understand how the puzzle mechanics work and story really got rolling, I found myself incredibly immersed in this one. I am looking froward to some DLC updates because I really do hope this story continues, because its the only dimmer on this overall solid experience, and even then it was a mild disappointment at best.

CrossCode came out to little fanfare, but its certainly starting to catch the right set of eyes. And now this once PC only experience is about to come to the Switch and the PS4, and that is only a good thing to help this game really get out there. More people should play this game. It's an incredibly solid experience that blends a lot of familiar game elements to make it feel truly unique. It's got a sense of humor about it that keeps it from taking itself too seriously, but also does a good job delivering it's emotional punches of the story. The puzzles are well thought out and clever, the combat is fun and challenging. Its only 20 bucks and is at least a 50-60 hour experience with updates on the way. I can't ask for an better entertainment dollar and give CrossCode a strong recommendation. 

Also, with a code, Lea will idle and do Caramelldansen.
Fucking. Sold. 

Lightning Returns- Final Fantasy XIII: Running In Place.

It took effort to get caught up with the Final Fantasy 13 series. Despite a pretty heartwarming ending, I had basically nothing but negative feelings to Final Fantasy 13. Square responded by making a number of changes to Final Fantasy 13-2 and yet for some reason, despite all the improvements, my feelings were still lukewarm. Hell, I kept falling asleep when I tried to play it. I actually had to give it a full week of my time long after its release to finally force my way through it. That's a massive red flag.

So Square was basically like "God screw you people! Lightning is awesome! WHY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!?!?" Square really, really wants us to think Lightning is cool and you have to appreciate their gusto for trying. As videos for this final installment came out, it had some pretty polarizing opinions to it. But then I played the demo... and fuck me sideways, it was actually fun! I was completely shocked, so much that I was actually looking forward to this. You managed to get my attention again Lightning, don't fuck it up.

LIGHTNING RETURNS: FINAL FANTASY XIII

We pick up several hundred years after the end of Final Fantasy 13-2. Lightning wakes up from her time sleeping in crystal to be privy to the end of time. After the finale of 13-2 where chaos flooded into the world, much of the planet was destroyed in the process. With it came a stoppage of time, people no longer aged, and no new life could be created. But it wasn't immortality, as people could still be killed, could still grow sick and die, can still be killed from misfortune. So as they seemingly can live forever, all they can do is watch humanity slowly dwindle in numbers as the chaos that destroyed much of the world will finish the job.

One of the three gods of the realm Bhunivelze awakens Lightning from her crystal sleep, and tells her the world will end soon. He will create a new world, but he will need souls to fill it. He offers that if Lightning will become his "Savior" and save as many of the remaining souls as she can, she will be rewarded by having Serah returned to life. Lightning agrees, and is granted power by the God to fight against the Chaos and save who she can.

Back on the surface, she finds that centuries have changed people greatly. Snow oversees the revelry that takes place as humanity has decided to just party till extinction. He is a tired and depressed Snow, completely grief stricken that not only could he not protect Serah, and that he can do nothing to stop the impending Chaos. So with Lightnings first act as "Savior" she vows to save his soul first.

Wow. So Stoic. Much Angst. Many Unwanted Sequels.

OK, so as we all know the tale of Final Fantasy 13 has not exactly been a smooth one. After a great deal of excitement for the first big PS3 and XB360 the collective fanbase got hammered with a 60 hour straight line with a combat system that did all the work for you and probably the hands down worst cast in the entire franchise. (I could give a fuck less that Sazh had a chocobo chick in his hair. Aside from Fang, the cast of 13 eats shit.)

But then we had Final Fantasy 13-2, which tried to continue on with the mess of 13 but instead we were treated to Noel and Serah, the only two characters in this entire universe who had any character and more importantly were likable. They made a number of changes to the game by trying to make it kind of episodic, opened up the world more, and added a monster capture element to the game. Unfortunately it was still in the universe with the previous cast, and was cluttered by excessive menus for traversing world maps. It was better, but still kind of lack luster as a whole.

Oh yeah, and for some reason Hope is a child again. Even though
he was an adult throughout the entirety of Final Fantasy XIII-2

Lightning Returns is actually probably the closest to a traditional Final Fantasy as its been in years. Instead of a massive world map like so many people are accustomed to, the game keeps contained in 4 major areas: two parts of a city (a glitzy wealthy area, and grungier poorer section), A vast nature filled Wildlands (which has plains, craggy areas, and a forest), and the Dead Dunes (which is a desert and a large underground ruins). You can see this for a positive or a negative, it may seem like the game has taken out the ability to explore, but on the other hand its tightly contained.

The game actually has a big MMO feel to it because instead of one long overarching story, its now broken up into questing. Each major area of the game has a main story quest featuring one of the other characters, and each area has various sidequests you can partake of the various residents you meet along the way. In addition to this there is a message board with additional quests do for each area. Because of its layout you are welcome to try to complete the quests in any order that strikes your fancy.

Get used to seeing where certain people are. Because sidequests will have
 you talking to almost everyone who has any dialog in this game

So why the need for questing? Well, this is one of the big determining factor for the realtime mechanic. This is a countdown to the end of the world, and the souls you collect push the clock back and boost Lightning's stats so you want to do as many of them as quickly as you can. Completing the main quests will buy you an extra day of time, and you have little abilities you can do halt the flow of time for a brief period. Time also doesn't move when you are in battle or in menus, so while you are still pressed to keep moving, not every decision is a 100% dire rush.

Although, it does lead to the issue of possibly completing the story quests too quickly. I pretty much managed to get through them all with relative ease, maxing out my time to the 13 possible days. Unfortunately with the main story quests out of the way, I have this dead zone where I am just wandering around trying to complete all the sidequests I can find. If you manipulate the fights right, you can use your chronostasis ability really pad out the length of time, which can really bring the pace to halt. I am trying to force myself not to stop time just so I can continue on with the story.

Your stage performance will never be as good as Celes' was, Lightning.
Stick to being a soldier. Oh wait, Celes was better at that too.

The other problem I have with it being told this way is it really seemed like there wasn't any grand story I was following along with, no longer narrative to drive my motivations or characters. Just a handful of "more important" side quests intermixed with the rest of them. The strength of the story suffers because of it. I think on top of the character quests, there should have been some kind of mandatory story mission for that day as well, that would at least give the story a better sense of weight.

Personally, I like how this maps were laid out. Yeah the map is smaller and more condensed and you lose a lot of realm to explore, but you know what? I have a lot more freedom to actually explore. I am not being forced to travel down a straight line of maps like the previous installments. With some of the quests requiring you to go from one end of the map to the other, it gives the world a sense of expanse that forces your to ration your time properly. I does fall victim to making have to go back and forth unnecessarily, but once you get a familiarity to the maps it probably won't bother you and it does make the game world have a sense of "bigness" to it.

Maps may seem smaller, but the over world manages to feel big.
A massive improvement over the first game. 

And something I liked that I can't recall most other games doing, is that you can accidentally complete quests without realizing you have done so. So if missions have quest specific items its entirely possible to find them along the way before you actually accepted the quest. Or if you get a quest of the old MMO standby of "kill x amount of monsters till they drop X amount of items." It doesn't pull the bullshit move of making the drop only happen after you accept the quest, so sometimes I'll enter a new area and go to the board to find out I've already got like 4 quests done. Rock on, free levels.

What I DON'T like about the quest board is I have to manually go through and accept every one. For the main quest that's fine, for the random citizens quests that's fine. But there is no incentive to declining quests. You aren't penalized for not doing them, so can we just assume that I want to try to do all the of quests? Maybe this is means to force me to read them, I don't know. But its a pointless hassle that keeps me in menus longer than I should need to be.

Now then, lets get to the meat of the game. They said they changed the combat system, which had been my long standing complaint with this series. The changed it in 13-2 but it pretty much felt like old system, just with monsters instead of party members. You still were basically smashing auto-battle until everything died and switching roles at the optimal moment. So whatever changes they planned I expected to be negligible. Oh how wrong I was. They changed it all right, and even using parts of the systems before it, the subtle changes made make it feel completely different, but more than anything I actually feel like I am the controlling the fight.

Some of the goofier outfits can take the seriousness out of a scene.

Here's how it works: Instead of 3 party members, you instead get 3 slots to choose various job classes (read outfits) each of them with their own unique abilities and statistics. Each class gets it own ATB bar for you complete combat actions, and each job has different parameters that effect it such as as a larger ATB bar for more actions, or a shorter bar for less but with a much faster recharge time. Each job will have one or two locked abilities to that job, and you are free to customize the rest how you feel you want to. Once you are outfitted with weapons and relics you are ready for battle.

During battle its one vs all. Typically the fights will be one on one but sometimes Light will have a hoard to deal with. Each of the 4 abilities you selected will be mapped to one of the for controller buttons. Holding them down will rapid fire that attack and each uses different amounts of ATB, as you use up your gauge you can use the L1/R1 buttons to flip between your other jobs, each with their own ATB gauge to use. While you are in a job the other two will be recharging.

The combat system is the best part of the game.... For once. 

So the goal of the battle is to keep up the offensive, if you play your cards right you can continuously push with a nonstop assault. With the right selection of attacks, the ferocity of your assault can knock an enemy into stagger, where you can unload big damage.  When this happens its wise to use your Overdrive feature which slows down time, increases your speed, and gives you a fresh bar to really pile on the damage. Plus when it ends the job bar is full again, giving you the possibility of three full rushes of attack when you stagger a foe.

The block feature is also a bit more interactive as timing becomes key in your defense. Should you add one of the guards into your lineup, you need to learn their intricacies (such as one that grows in defense the more you use it, or one that heals if you hold the guard longer) in addition to getting their timing right. When an enemy winds up their attack, if you can time it right your guard will negate any damage you can take from it. If its not properly timed, it will knock off a percentage of damage but keep you from getting knocked over. Otherwise you will get knocked off your feet or into the air which gives the enemy more time to wind up their next attack and brings yours to a halt.

Monsters aren't indefinite in this one. If you kill them in droves the last one will go into a more
 difficult final form. If you kill that one you get a powerful item, but that monster is extinct.

This combat is fun as hell. I can't explain it well because it sounds like they just condensed a party of 3 to a party of 1, but I think in giving me up to 4 to 12 different auto attacks that I have to decide on, I feel like I am playing a much bigger portion of the fight and pushing the pace, and timing my blocks properly definitely adds a strategic ripple to the combat. If I had one complaint about the combat of the game, I'd say it isn't even really an issue with the combat. It's the DLC bonuses.

This is the first game I've ever played where not only was the free DLC good, but its practically some of the best equipment in the game. Oh sure, you'll find better weapons but I've yet to find better outfits in the game that superior to the ones I got. The game comes with a Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 outfit that has a locked in Heavy Attack. But if you stagger an enemy, it becomes Slayer which is practically a one hit kill for the amount of damage it does.

Occasionally you will have help in battle. But don't get used to it because it doesn't last.

The other I got from an amazon preorder is the Summoner Yuna from Final Fantasy X, her shield gives 200+ magic, and she gets the attack Elementa which hits like 20 times, for all 4 elements, and does Magic x 9.60 (to give perspective most starting attacks offer .60 or .70 damage). It doesn't do much in the way of stunning enemies though, and that can be a real problem later on (especially with that final boss). Its a good crutch early but you will have to pick other spells to keep offensive balance.

You quite literally can tear through a very large portion of the game on these two outfits alone. Hell, In the 70+ hours of play and counting, I haven't had a reason to take off the Cloud and Yuna outfits. I have been bouncing around with Dark Samurai, Sphere hunter Yuna, and Velvet Bouncer (which doesn't look like a character from The Bouncer which seems like a missed opportunity,) for my 3rd but they have been fluff pretty much, just something else to keep the attack pace up with the other two. The DLC is practically game breaking. I suppose that's a complaint for some, but certainly not for me. At least in the summoner outfit I can pretend I'm using a more likeable protagonist.

Spira's Summoner: Super kawaii and deadly to boot. Also, when you win in
an older Final Fantasy costume, it plays the Fanfare from that game. Very cool.

Which really brings me to my biggest problem in the game: Lightning fucking blows. I'm sorry Square, but I just don't understand the collective boner you have for this character. She is easily the most angst ridden character in the entire franchise (a series that contains Squall, Cloud, and Edward no less), she goes through absolutely no development over the course of 3 games, she is constantly flat in emotion and delivery, and despite seeing you put her in every fantastical situation you guys can come up with, I remain completely unmotivated to root for her. Top this off with nearly every NPC and major character being equally dry and boring you again fail to hit on one of the most important aspects to Final Fantasy as whole, and that's a compelling narrative.

Actually, that's not wholly fair. In retrospect nearly every single character has gone through a good deal of change. Snow is actually a little bit relateable this time around, Vanille has gone through some drastic change and has become a deeply conflicted character, and one of the games primary antagonists in Lumina (a dead ringer for Serah) is probably the most interesting and charismatic character in the game. Yet right from the start they pretty much tell you Lightning has had her emotions removed by god, so practically every line of dialog is flat and uninspired. It sucks because it completely kills would could be a heartwarming or tense moment as you play.

There is a lot more to Lumina that meets the eye. And she's the only one with a shred of character 

Another big story problem I have is what I call "Hideo Kojiomaism" to the writing. Much like a Metal Gear game, someone like Hope or an NPC will say a line of dialog, and then Lightning will literally repeat the exact same sentence with a question mark at the end. This happens a number of times from beginning to end. To the point where I actually said at the screen: "OK I fucking get it already, get to the fucking game." Although, in its defense I will say this game has done a better job of actually weaving exposition into the narrative. It still has obnoxiously busy datalogs like the previous 2 games, but the game does a pretty good job of keeping you up to speed this time.

Although probably the biggest overall issue with the story is you pretty much can figure out who the final boss of the game is within maybe an hour or two, if that. "Oh, the main character is tasked by a deity to save the world and offering up her sister as a reward for doing what she's told? OH, and there is a religious sect that borders on fanatical and every line of dialog is followed by a sinister laugh and wringing of the hands?! I WONDER WHAT WILL HAPPEN???"

It's a shame Vanille's character growth is marred by the most predictable
plot twist in the entire game. Seriously Square, you should know better.

Look, I'm a not a super religious guy and I'm certainly not defending religious double standards or illicit practices. But can I have at least one game where people who have faith AREN'T vilified for once? It's a tired plot line, its predictable, and its been done to death. I know some people who have faith, and most of them aren't that bad. Just the ones that blatantly ignore proven science, or use their faith to persecute. But that's a post for a different blog entirely.

My problem with this trilogy is Square seems to really think everyone loves this character, and they want to keep pushing her. We don't. Nobody does. Kotaku put up a poll if fans want more Lightning in FF games and its getting voted NO in a landslide. Stop thrusting this character in front of us. She sucks and we don't want her.

I suppose one other nitpick I could make is that outside of Lightnings outfits, the game uses a lot of the same character and monster assets over again and it seems like aside from locations this game doesn't really bring a whole lot of new to the table. Even still, the visuals really are incredible and the CG cinematic are even more impressive. (Even more so now on my new bitch'n LED TV.)

The Earth Eater is easily the biggest pain in the ass in this game

To hop off the negativity train, let me go back to a positive here. I used to think that the Final Fantasy 13 series had a pretty generic soundtrack. But as I play through Lightning Returns I realize they sprinkled in musics from all three of the games in this saga. So when one would start I'd have this nostalgic start of "oh I remember this one, oh I liked this one too". So maybe I've been a little hard on this series' score. That major violin piece for the main theme is actually really good, it just took me a longer time to realize it.... And I mean come on, Crazy Chocobo.

So after this massive diatribe I guess the question is, did I like it? It's really strange for me to say. Despite the few complaints that I had, and the fact that this game continues to address nearly every complaint I have about it, it still somehow failed to wow me at the start. I just don't understand how a game manages to fix almost every complaint I have and still leave me with an incredibly lukewarm overall feeling.

Nearly every major character gets their story finally wrapped up. We get some Closure.

But on the same token, I was never at a point where I was bored playing it and that is a massive improvement. The combat has become fun and involving, and I feel like I get to explore like a classic Final Fantasy should let me. The characters have become more relateable and interesting, so why am I not loving this?

Does a handful of awful characters really tarnish what could be a good game that badly? Or does the series as a whole just leave me with that much of a sour taste? Its hard to say. But if I were to go from the merits of this installment alone, I would say that Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 is easily the best installment of the three. Despite using some old assets, the game is still visually stunning, its got a good soundtrack to it, the combat is fun to play finally, the timed mechanic keeps the games pace up, and it manages to capture some of the old magic of traditional Final Fantasy world map.

It has taken 3 tries to get Final Fantasy 13 right, and of them this was certainly the best attempt. The game might have been better if it continued to keep Serah as the protagonist instead of Lightning, but all in all I have to say that I am enjoying this one. It may not be yanking at my heartstrings like other FF games have in the past, but it certainly has done an excellent job of keeping entertained, focused, and looking to finish. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII isn't going to blow you away, but I'd play another Final Fantasy with this system. I would say it was worth the purchase.

If you swapped out this cast for the cast of 10, it becomes infinitely better. 

Rage Quitter Omniderp #2

PAX East: Gaming for the Masses

As we all know, Penny’s Arcade’s PAX and PAX East have respectively become some of the mechas for all things gaming, be them video, table top, board, card or other. Rooms and rooms of panels, discussions, performances, and of course people playing games. I have personally attended a local anime convention for the past twelve years now but going to that convention doesn’t seem to be scratching my con going itch anymore, and has an avid gamer it would be wrong of me to not going to not attend this convention at least once. So I saddled up from my hole in the ground in Cleveland and embarked on a magical journey to Boston MA to attend my first Penny Arcade Expo. Walking into the expo’s exhibition hall was nothing short of a mad house, just thousands of booths and big screen TVs and exhibits showing off what will be on its way soon. Here’s a small glimpse of what I could get my hands on or at the very least got to watch for a bit, so forgive me if I am lacking information.

SLEEPING DOGS: (XB360/PS3) -  Square Enix

As a unabashed fan of the Yakuza franchise, I naturally hit the breaks when I walked past a screen of Asian men beating the snot out of each other. From what I gathered from the demo I got to try, You play a detective in China who is very deep undercover. Not exactly the most original starting point but what do you want? The first thing I noticed about this game is there was no subtitles, and everything was spoken in English. Probably had the game set up that way for the expo but I think the game would look more natural if it was spoken in Mandarin with subtitles, but I digress. My character is at a table talking with his boss, finding out that some guy who has been paying them as gone to another gang for protection and I take to the streets of China to teach him a lesson. After a brief walk out of the restaurant I was in I was in the bright lights and busy streets of downtown china. Walking through what appeared to be a marketplace a chase began as I found my target.  Weaving in and out of pedestrians, hopping off vending machines and chasing him to the rooftops lead me into a trap. This is where combat started. The best way I can describe the controls is it plays a lot like the Batman: Arkham games. One attack button that you tap for light strikes and charge for a big finish, A counter button, a grab move to smash people into stuff. There are various weapon controls too but the demo never gets that far.  Game is fuckin violent as shit. Not like the Yakuza stomp you in the teeth kinda visceral. As I was punching and the crap out of baddies, I grabbed one of them and saw various parts of the environment glowing, since I appeared to be a near a vent I tried that, and watched the hero(?) smash his victims head right into an air condition van as chunks of his skull sprayed everywhere.  I followed this up by spiking another guys face off a lit grill and watch his light up a leaking gas pipe.  The combat was pretty fast and fluid and it was a lot of fun to play. The only problem is if you don’t hit the counter when the little counter icon shows up like in Batman, you stand there with your arms wide open for a few seconds and will probably take a hit. Perhaps its to discourage just mashing counter but I found it annoying. The game was pretty fun though and I Intend to seek this one out in the future.

THE SECRET WORLD (PC) – Funcom

This was one of the first things I tried simply because it was one of the first things to actually become available to play as we walked by. Now, me and PC games don’t often get along because I tend to be a console tard and they design to the controls to be as complicated as fuck so not to sully the game for the glorious PC gaming master race. That being said, the initial appearance seemed to be an MMO. I was playing some young woman brandishing a shotgun standing in what appeared to be a junkyard. As I learned the movement controls somewhat I wandered into a more open area of the junkyard and was approached by two Giant mecha’s that promptly set my dopey ass on fire. The remaining minutes was me scrambling around trying to figure out what to do and trying to pop off a shot with my shotgun. I was effectively wrecked in a matter of seconds. After looking popping to look at the 800 billion page Oxford English instructions for PC controls I decided to step back and just record someone else playing it.  The Strange World is and MMO set in current times, and it pertains to deal with kind of fantasy and myth lore. There are three factions of the Dragons, the Illuminati, and the Templars. Sadly I wasn’t around for one of the public demonstrations so I don’t know too much about the story other than its about regular people fighting all the urban myths we've come to learn. But the game seems to take place in a myriad of different locations so it was really hard to pick a theme. I am not a big MMO guy so I don’t know if I would end up getting it but it certainly caught my interest. I definitely leads into a concept that i have often through about for a game where people in a modern, current day lifestyle are forced into a fantasy situation. The Star Ocean series kind of touches on this but this appears to be one of the first games that actually depicts my vision. Should be interesting when its released.

PENNY ARCADE’S: ON THE RAIN-SLICKED PRECIPCE OF DARKNESS 3:

(PC, Mac, Xbox, iDevices, Android) – Zeboyd Games

I have never really been a fan of Penny Arcade’s comic. I never found it funny. I can totally respect what they do for the gaming community and support their causes such as their Child’s Play auctions, but I just don’t read the comic. So naturally, I didn’t play or even hear of the previous two chapters of this game. However, When we were walking by it almost looked like they had set up a booth for Final Fantasy 4 or 6.  The graphical style and play of the game seemed very familiar, and I don’t give a shit about what people think, I love JRPGS. I’ve grown up on them and some of the best games I have played are JRPGS. So I naturally gravitated to this game and lucky for our group one of them opened up. Its has some interesting mechanics that you recover your MP as the fight goes on rather than starting off with a lot of it. It looks like it plays just like the old Final Fantasy games did, I don’t know if I am going to have to go back and play the others, but this one has my interest.

WAKFU (PC) – Square Enix

I wish I had time to sit down with this one. I appears to be a Tactical JRPG that mixes the character design from Disgaea and the environment design of Bastion. From what I hear it seems to be a turn based MMO, which as far as I know might be the first of its kind on a major level, as I've never heard of another like that. Its also supposed to be free to play, so that is certainly a point in its favor. It overall looked very cool and interesting and seemed like something I would play. Sadly me and PC games don’t really get along as seen in the previous video, but I am seriously considering looking into this one further.  

ROCK BAND: BLITZ (PS3, XB360) – Harmonix

Honestly, rhythm gaming with large plastic instruments is dead as far as I concerned. Looking at the game play, it seriously looked like the only new addition was to add the PSP style of play to the current console versions. I really had no interest in checking this booth out, but then This happened.

These guys were seriously fucking everywhere, harassing everyone. It was hilarious.

CHARLIE MURDER (XB360, PS3?) - Ska Studios

I don’t really know my artists so comparing the art style is not something I feel I can do. The game has a dark grimy appearance that reminded me of some of the flash games on newgrounds like Alien Hominid . I don’t have any idea what the story is about other that it seems to be 4 fallen punk rock idols trying to get their band back off the ground. The two videos I managed a shoot seemed to be a mix of rhythm game and a side scrolling brawler a la Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim. My group really wanted to get our hands onto this one but we caught it early in the show and didn’t really want to wait around, (rookie mistake for PAX. The lines will NEVER be short. If you want to try something jump in line when you want to and don’t leave it.) The concept looked pretty cool and if I played more games online or had more friends it would be something I would look into. Although the company is Ska studios, and Ska music is terrible, so that does take away some my faith in it.

STEEL BATTALION: HEAVY ARMOR (XB360 Kinect) – Capcom

Yeah, This will save motion gaming. If you were dopey enough to buy the original Steel Battalion on Xbox you were treated to a massive control panel and a game so hard you would be gunned down in the first few seconds of play. They felt the best way to fix this was to completely remove what gave the game any sense of originality. I honestly couldn’t even pretend to care. Fuck Kinect, Fuck the Wii, Fuck Move. Quit trying to pander to a market of disloyal casual gamers and go back to making quality content for the people who fucking brought you to the mainstream to begin with, you assholes.

QUANTUM CONUNDRUM (XB360, PS3, PC) – Square Enix

This may have been one of the more difficult games to get to. When the founding members of Penny Arcade and Pax publicly take notice to a crowd of several thousand? There are going to be lines. This game appears to be a very cartoony looking first person puzzle game. This really strikes me as a game that is going to capitalize on the Portal  fan base because it definitely feels like it plays along that game. I remember a lot of the subtitles that popped up on the screen were very funny and the whole game had a very Saturday morning cartoon kind of charm about it. This game ended up winning one of the Indie Developer Best in Show award’s from the Convention Committed which seemed a bit odd to me because a game hardly seems indie in my book when you have a juggernaut like Square Enix backing you up. Still, the game looked very entertaining and is going to be one to keep your eyes on.

LOLLIEPOP CHAINSAW
(XB360, PS3) – Grasshopper Manufacture, WB Games, Kadowawa Games

I really wanted to get my hands on this one. I really did. Every trailer I see for the game looks hilarious and awesome. It’s a Suda 51 game so I know its going to do everything in its power to try to top the ridiculousness of his last game Shadows of the Damned. But I could not get anywhere near this fucking booth. It has a school bus set up and line formed behind it with like 5 or 6 consoles to try the game. But I jumped in that line and it didn’t move for like 30 minutes, and it was easily one of the longer lines at the convention. So sadly, I gave up on this one.

Interesting thing to note about this booth is they had a girl dressed like the game’s protagonist Juliette. She ended up being kicked out of the conventional hall on the first day. As it turns out, PAX has a pretty strict “No Booth Babe” policy. Basically for those who don’t know, companies hire models to come stand by their booths either in next to nothing or in the outfits of the characters in the game. But if you ask these women anything about the product, they can’t tell you a thing because they do not work for the company.  They did let her back in when she changed into a less provocative outfit (but not much less) but it was clear she was just picking up a check to look pretty. This to me is an interesting rule that I actually can respect because ultimately this is a convention like E3 or the CES that is for the fans. The fans want to play the games, and they want to learn about them.  Yeah, I’m not one to shy away from a hot cosplay (my facebook friends will probably hold a specific Chun-Li comment over my head for months) but I definitely can respect and agree with idea if they are going to be the to promote the product, then they should actually fucking know something it. I did a little more research and it turns out that the model in question is apparently known on the convention and cosplay circuit as Jessica Nigri, and to her credit she knew enough about the games premise and who is involved to hold up in some interviews so I am willing to cut her slack.  That being said, I didn’t to play the game so this might be one I have to take a leap of faith on and hope it pays off.  Guess you’ll find out in the review.

Ms Nigri posting her outfits to Twitter. It was the 2nd that got her in trouble

FINAL FANTASY: THEATERHYTHM (3DS) – Square Enix

As you can tell, I spent some time in the Square booth. This was another game the PAX heads (Mike, Specifically) really seemed to enjoy an made mention of. If there is anything that I enjoy about Final Fantasy games, it is the spectacular soundtrack that goes with them. The game seems fairly simple and I am curious to know if there is a story. The play is really easy. You just follow the dots as they approach and either tap, swipe or hold as they hit the main point. The game is broken up into a travel stage, fight stage, and a world map stage. So when It was my turn I formed my Final Fantasy dream team of Terra, Kain , Yuna, and Tidus and quickly moved right to the Final Fantasy 6 music, because 6 as we all know is the greatest one in the franchise. I was treated to Terra walking through a 2d countryside of notable FF6 locations and I found myself very easily tapping and following along. I easily A ranked the song  but probably could have got and S if I understood the controls from the go. I then went to the Fight sequence where I did the same thing only in much faster repetition. The chain breaks amongst the 4 characters so you have to follow it along but you have the whole bottom screen to tap so its not too bad This seems like something I would enjoy to play because its Final Fantasy characters, music, and a rhythm game. If I owned a 3DS I would strongly consider it. But the controls also seem like it would be a good fit for smart phones so maybe it will end up there. Fingers crossed.

I guess I will wrap it up here for now, I took videos of some other things but I didn’t want to go into some of the arcade stuff that has already been released. I would rather save that for reviews. PAX East was an incredible experience and I definitely look forward to trying to go again. Make me famous people and I’ll hold a Rage Quitter panel where I will just get angry at the first question and throw chairs. Or perhaps just famous enough to get a free press badge or something.  In any case, I will probably be going again next year. See ya next PAX East!

What a coincidence, I also have I wwebsite as on the internet

White Knight Chronicles II (PS3): Meh uhhh Knight....

When the PS3 first was introduced, I remembered seeing trailers and screenshots for an RPG called White Knight Chronicles. The graphics didn't seem like it was using the PS3's power but I chalked it up to being in the rough stages of the game. After a severely delayed release, and very lukewarm reviews at best, I still picked the game up. I found it to be fairly unimpressive and unimaginative, but enough happened in the story line to keep my interest to see it through, and the online aspect of the I did actually kinda like, so overall I enjoyed my experience with it. So with that I reserved and picked up the continuation of the story in.....

WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES II: (PS3)

Now, This game came out in September, Along with some other higher profile games so it's sat on my TV stand waiting to be opened, and I've finally caught up with everything I wanted to play so forgive me if this comes off as a bit of a dated review.

The story picks up about one year after the events of the first one, where the protagonist, Leonard, and his rag tag band of friends attained the powers of "Knights" to rescue princess Cisna and defend Balandor from the Yshreninan Empire, (I'll give you a minute to recover from the staggering originality). The 2nd opens up with a neighboring country of Faria breaking out into a civil war, and a blue clad knight who goes by Scardigne trying to escape with the country's heiress, Miu. Just as they get cornered and are about to be killed, Leonard and his friends swoop down to make the save. They join in the fight to save the girl and return her safely home, where they begin to start a quest to form alliances and learn the keys to the Knights to take the offensive and finish the Yshreninan Empire for good.

Cisna is a figurehead and driving force for the Protagonist, but is essentially useless.

As you no doubt have already noticed, this game is not exactly breaking the mold in terms of storyline. Even when I played the first game nothing about anything seemed overly original. It uses the pretty well tread evil empire/save the princess story line, and the 2nd one picks up just after that. Because so little time passes from the first to 2nd there doesn't appear to be much change in the universe and it doesn't even feel like its like the start of a new adventure. Final Fantasy X-2 while perhaps lacking in the story aspect compared to the first, at least showed some radical change in the game's world and the philosophies within it. WKC2 almost plays like a recap of what happened before, before making the jump to reach the eventual conclusion. Even the characters themselves seemed kinda bland and uninteresting. Nothing about the name "Leonard" screams savior of the land to me, but to be fair neither did "Tidus" and that was probably one of my top two or three favorite RPGs ever. All of the area locations and character names just scream young audience to me. The chief offender is the elderly party member who's name is Eldore. ELDORE. Seriously?! I would love to know the thought process that went into the creation of this character: "So we have a character here and he's some what older than the rest of the team.. He's their elder.. Elder.. Eldar... Eldore. Fuck it. Put it in." Every single time they say his name I get douche chills from it. The guy is never in my party. Every location and everyone with the exception of maybe Yulie, has a fairly common name that just spreads the blandness across the board.

The game plays like a mix of the standard JRPG, a bit of an MMO, and a sprinkle of action RPG. You have main control over your one character and the other support members follow you along. All of the enemies are clearly on the screen and unsheathing your weapon will take you into combat mode. Combat isn't exactly precise. So long as you are within a certain range your attacks will land as long as you were close enough when you first hit the attack button. There are 9 or 10 weapon classes available and some characters can't use some of them. But as you travel down the skill tree you get different variations of your attacks, that usually break into a Slash, Stab, or Smash variety and sometimes with elemental additions to them. You get three menus at the bottom of your screen where you can place your favorite attacks or spells so you can easily flip through the menus while attack or casting to set up your next move. In addition to this, you can also create combos to string together a number of attacks using action points. Your created combo only takes up one slot so you can make a few to help in different situations, (I usually would just make all slash, all stab, or all smash for enemies weak to one). The previously mentioned action points are used to use specific high level attack/spells, combos, or summon the specific character's Knights. The Knights are essentially giant Mech suits that can take a bit more of a beating and have bigger attacks. You can use them as long as you have MP to use the attacks or there are enemies to fight. I would say that combat is more exciting than a turn based counterpart, but I often found myself just running past battles after a while, as the rewards seemed kinda lacking and leveling took forever.

Graphically the game isn't all that impressive. It used pretty standard anime archetypes down to the oldest person with the squintest eyes being the villain. They don't even really go out of the way to improve the graphics from one to two. Enemies also seem to have the problem of only really being 6-9 different types of monsters with different color schemes, and even still the monster types aren't even that imaginative: wolves, bees, spiders. Yeah yeah I've seen it before.  I will concede that they did a pretty good job with all the CGI animations. Most of those are very sharp and fun to watch, usually in situations where there is a large monster or some epic war scale battle about to place. They move smoothly and cleanly but other than that nothing about this games presentation is anything to write home about.

When you start the game, you are taken to a character creation screen. When I first started the first game, this  had me incredibly worried that it was going to be one of those stories where people address a mute character, or make some joke about them not talking. Silent protagonists made sense in earlier days of gaming, but games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age 2 showed that you can create a character without having to make them a mute. So after designing my amazonian woman who would specialize with greatswords, I found out that the character plays more in the backdrop of the main story. She is occasionally addressed or noticed, but essentially she is just a silent helper for to use if you don't like some of the other characters (like Eldore). So you would ask if they have no functional point to the story, why include them?

The main reason for this is the online aspect of the game. As you go through towns or find new area's of the world map, you can buy or unlock online quests you can do for experience. You can play these when you enter the world map, each specific location has a set of quests you can do granted your "Guild level" is high enough. You can chose to play these online with other players for experience or item rewards, or you can play them offline with your current team. The difference there is you can only play your created character. So some of the boss fights can get tricky as you can't bounce to another character to use a specific ability or spell. If your created character drops, the mission for you ends unless its multiplayer or there are specific respawn rules. Its an interesting and entertaining mechanic, but its not something I did very much of. With one or two hour time limits, it gets draining going across the maps chasing a checkpoint sometimes. That being said I did do a little of and did a little commentary to show some of it. It probably sucks but here it is.

Something I was pretty happy with is that it gave me a fairly significant bonus for keeping my WKC1 save. In addition to letting me keep most of my stored items, money, and equipment, the game starts me off at level 35 and gives me all of skill points so I could re-allocate them wherever I wished which allowed me to hit the ground running. Most games that carry a save give you a fairly minimal bonus so getting this huge jump out the gate was nice.

Something I was not happy with, surprisingly, is saving my game. I know that sounds idiotic, but most games only take a few seconds to save, but White Knight? Well, just take a look....

I actually hit 80% at about five seconds and it more likely stopped at 32. But still, if saving my game took so long that I didn't want to do it, then thats a serious problem for my progression and willing to save often to be safe.

These games are pretty short too. I was able to beat both WKC1 and WKC2 in about 30 hours so as far as the standard RPG goes you could probably hammer one of them out in the course of a weekend. The biggest complaint that I have with WKC2 is that there is virtually no innovation or deviation from the 1st game. There is nothing really new that is immediately apparent to me. So I suppose my question here is, did we just get one full length game broken up over 2 releases, or did they just intend for them to be shorter because of the online features of the game? And if it is the latter, why did it take so long to release a sequel that was pretty much a carbon copy of the first game? There didn't even really seem to be very many new maps as you tread the game basically in reverse order from the first one.

Its hard to even hate on this game because it feels like picking on a 5 year old school project for "special" class when you are an adult. It is incredibly disappointing because I have come to expect so much better out of Level 5 games. The first game I played by them was on the PSP in Jeann D'arc which as far as tactical RPGs go, is one of my most underrated and wonderful surprises ever. They also produced the Professor Layton series so I know they know how to produce good, solid video games. So for them to produce an incredibly lack luster game, and then wait two more years to give me the same game again with a little furthering of the story, just leaves me feeling cheated and disappointed. Despite this tear I've been going on, I hesitate to call the game "bad". It's just so average on every aspect its not worth getting excited over, either with enjoyment or anger..

I would say this game could be good if you don't have a lot of time to invest in a deeper RPG like Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy or Disgaea, or if you are just looking to get the RPG bug out of your system. But other than that a recommendation for a game like this is about as lukewarm as its reviews. Wait for it to hit a bargain bin, because it most likely will. At least they have the courtesy to provide both games on the Blu-Ray for WKC2 so you only have to buy it once.

Hopefully I'll have something after holiday with a bit more meat on it, so hang tight.