Kairosoft Simulations Part Deux (Iphone): I have a problem and need help, Why can't you people see that?!

So yeah, fuck Kairosoft. Months ago in the early stages of this blog, I wrote a review of a series of mobile simulation games, namely: Game Dev Story, Hot Springs Story, Pocket Academy, and Mega Mall Story. Those games were like 8-bit heroin to me an I couldn't stop it. Hours upon hours I would waste on these. But eventually was able to kick that habit and stop playing those games. But foolish, foolish me. I rcently checked the app store to find out that they released 4 more simulations titles and god damn it after an hour or two on one of the demo's, three of the four of these stupid games ended up on my phone... So here we go again...

GRAN PRIX STORY: (Iphone/Android)

Gran Prix Story is pretty much exactly like it sounds. You are the owner of a race team and you have to train and develop a driver and his team of mechanics to build yourself a car and research its parts to win races and earn more money to expand your facilities and team. This is the game that is most representative of the the original Kairosoft stimulation Game Dev Story.  There is no building simulation so all you need to focus on is the numbers that pop up for you. As you win races you earn prize money, and with that prize money it allows you to build new cars. As you build and race you can get research points to upgrade the gear you have to research to make new stuff. You also can get sponsors who pay you every year and will help you unlock more sponsors or new gear. As you win races you will get invited to a Gran Prix. Win a Gran Prix and it moves you up the next cycle. Its pretty simple and I really got hooked on this one.

Here is my pro tip for this one. The Protocar will be one of the fastest you can get early. Build car parts that best support handling. On long straights speed is good but on dirt or ice roads you are boned. I had a Protocar with Ice tread tires, a V12 Engine, and a Supercharger and that pretty much will carry you through most of the game. Its also is a good idea to higher mechanics with the best TECH score. It will help get more research points faster and when your racer gets an aura, use it for training or when you start building a car or installing parts for the best effects. Once you've maxed what you use, start leveling things to half to unlock new cars and parts.

POCKET LEAGUE: (Iphone/Android)

Pocket League is a soccer management simulation. You start off with a base team of scrubs and you train them at your facilities to booster up their stats. They can train on the practice field or use the facilities you build to earn more skill points. You can play in exhibition games to get some start up capital but you won't earn bigger bucks until you start winning some cup games. Defeat all the teams in the cup to win money and gather up high profile players in free agency. Try to max out their stats and crush your opponent. Its pretty cut and dry.  You can place new facilities as you expand which allow for different training or coaching options. I don't think I ever beat the world level of this game though. And music for this one was a bit more annoying than all the rest. It has smaller sprites too, perhaps to get the whole soccer field size right but eh, seemed less detailed to me.

My tips for this one is get yourself a Superstar player as soon as you can afford it. Probably some kind of Striker who can play FW and maybe a world class Goalie. Put your team in the 4-3-2-1 arrow formation and teams will find it difficult to reach your goal, and your striker will be able to outplay the opponent and score pretty much on a whim. Once you have that in place you can start fleshing out your team by working your way down the arrow hiring more superstars as you go and the cap will allow for it. Once you get three FW's just start training them to their max potential and you'll be winning games by double digits till the World League.

OH! EDO TOWNS: (Iphone/Android)

Oh! Edo Towns is true to its roots and is an actual civilization simulation game. You are the lord of a feudal domain and you are basically trying to raise a popular and prosperous city for your citizens. Starting off with simple farmers you make money and open up new plots for people to move in, as the economy grows you begin to build businesses for people to spend their money and earn skill points. As they attain more skills they can eventually change their professions to artisans, merchants, warriors, or eventually vassals. Like many of the other simulations they release placing certain buildings perform better when placed next to other compatible buildings. Your artisans can also create items that increase citizens or buildings yield, which ultimately brings more people to your village.

Unless you watch a lot of anime and have a pretty reasonable grasp of Japanese culture, you may not know what some of the building types are or what their use is, so it can be a little frustrating to figure out. This is the one I had the most trouble with getting grasp on. The one thing to remember is unlike some of the other sims, the people have limited move distances, so start off small. Build some homes together, build some shops nearby, and build some fields near by in the other direction. If you place shops or jobs too far away from citizens homes they wont work and won't earn you money. Eventually they will be able to get horses which let them travel farther, but build in blocks. Its the best way to go.

VENTURE TOWNS: (Iphone/Android)

Lastly, there is Ventue Towns. I haven't purchased this one yet because its boasting a rather steep 3.99 price tag in my opinion. From what I gather from the the reviews and app description, it appears to be a more westernized version of Oh! Edo Towns. I can tell myself that because it's nearly the same thing, I don't need to buy that one. But I give it about 10 days or so and I'll probably break down and play this one too.

Seriously people. Its an addiction and I can't stop. WHY is nobody helping me?! They should not be as addicting as they are. But for whatever reason, I continue to buy and waste time with these. And god damn it if I have to suffer, I want others to suffer with these too.... And want to know that I was responsible...

Final Fanatasy XIII-2 (PS3): They want us to take the hint, and we won't.

Aside from maybe the Silent Hill franchise, Final Fantasy games are pretty much the one game that my whole world comes to a screeching halt to play. Addicted since the first of the franchise I have faithfully followed along, and enjoyed pretty much all of them (yes even 8... Kind of). But even past some of their hiccups like their Gamecube releases, the MMO nonsense, or the excessive masturbation of their most overrated title in Final Fantasy 7, I have merrily played along like the good little lapdog I am. But as games continued to be released, I noticed a bit of a disappointing trend. In Final Fantasy X and X-2 I noticed that the games started to get a bit linear. In Final Fantasy XII the game started to take away control from the player, and then finally in Final Fantasy XIII the game was basically a series of straight lines, a fighting system that did all the work for you, and to top it off the story line and cast of characters were just terrible. As a longtime fine, I have to say I was heartbroken by this. So with a bit of trepidation, I picked up the their next attempt with.....

FINAL FANTASY XIII-2: (PS3/XB360)

So Squeenix has taken another crack at doing a direct sequel to a Final Fantasy game. Now say what you want about Final Fantasy X-2, while the story was a little lack luster and didn't have nearly the punch its prior did, it was still fun to play and did give me some nostalgia for the world of Spira and I was happy to see those characters again. And despite making some changes to the game play and trying to produce a more overall lighter (or downright goofy) tone, it didn't take away too much from the feel and it still felt like I was playing more Final Fantasy X (a less good one, but still.)

So Final Fantasy XIII-2 kicks off with previous games protagonist, Lightning, kneeling in prayer before a throne. She moves to the balcony of a what appears to be a very large castle to find a dark brooding man with a massive weapon holding some girl who dissipates into the lake they are standing in. The man then turns around and swings his obligatory over compensatory sword around and summons an army of monsters. Lighting calls upon Odin and summons monsters of her own and a large scale over the top battle commences. As big hunks of rock begin to fly around Lightning and this yet to me be named villain do battle, when suddenly this large portal opens above the castle and a brown haired young man begins to plummet through it. Lightning identifies him as Noel, who she has seen in her dreams, and gives him a quest to go find her sister Serah and bring her back to Lightning. Serah, meanwhile is adjusting with the survivors of Cocoon's fall and living on Gran Pulse. She seems to be the only who remembers Lightning giving her and Snow the blessing to get married, but everyone else believes she was trapped in the crystal pillar that keeps Cocoon from crashing down. She has a bizarre dream that shows her the battle Lightning was in and then their camp is attacked by monsters seeming ripping through air. Noel appears through one of the gates and helps fend off the monsters. After some confused explanation, he tells Serah that Lightning is alive, and if she wants to see her again, she has to come with him. And thus starts our adventure through time and space to right wrongs and find Lightning....

I'll give Squeenix this, Their cut scenes are top notch. 

So ok, right off the bat the story is already way better than FF13. One of my biggest problems with FF13 is that I don't think at any point in the game I had any friggen clue what the hell was going on. While I do like stories with the concepts of time travel, it does feel a little like its been done before. That might be why I feel I am able to follow along better with what is happening in the course of the game. The game also suffers from a problem in the previous game where every cut scene in the game sounds the same."It's a paradox! We need to save the future! CAIUS!!! I want to see Lightning again!" Alright I friggen get it, hopefully this doesn't continue through the whole game.. Luckily they don't fall into the pitfall of cramming all of the back story into text logs that you have to read to understand the exposition. They do however take every opportunity to cram more shit to read in the data log at any given opportunity, but for the most part you don't have to read it. It basically turns into how long can you stand seeing that blinking exclamation mark. Squeenix, your game is already pretty text heavy. Stop giving us more to read.

There is one flaw that I have with how the story progresses though. When you transport from time to time, it takes you to this big timeline menu that drops you off in different times and different places, and the further you get in the game more places you unlock. I suppose the best comparison I can give would be like Chrono Trigger's end of time. It basically functions as a hub where you would chose where in time you would want to go. But at least in that game you could roam around and talk to your party, in FF13-2 its just a menu where you get some blurbs about the time period and whats happening in it before jumping into a loading screen. It breaks the flow of the game a lot in my opinion and I feel the story would have streamlined better if at least for the first few jumps you wouldn't have to navigate the menu. Just a thought.

Graphically, there isn't much for me to comment on. They continue to step the level up with every game and the characters get more and more lifelike, even more so in the cut scenes. And they are doing a pretty good job of making CG to game play seamless. Pretty much like watching a movie.

The soundtrack is completely unmemorable. I sometimes catch samples of the theme from the last game, the battle music can be pretty upbeat in some fights, and the chocobo theme is still in there kinda, but otherwise its not important enough to mention.

I hold FF13's cast to be possibly one of the worst ones in franchise history. With the exception of Fang, most of them were completely unlikable or at the very least uninteresting, and that's a real big problem for a game that's story based. If you don't fall in the love with the characters all the hardships, twists, and triumphs are meaningless. Aeris' death in 7 or Yuna's goodbye message in 10 gives a strong emotional punch in the heart, because they have genuinely likable personalities and you grow with those characters because you can relate to them during their adventure. Some of FF13's biggest twists would leave me completely apathetic because I rarely understood what was going on, so I couldn't care what was happening to people. Thankfully in FF13-2, they realized the only person with a shred of likable personality was Serah. She is kind, sweet, caring, and almost innocent to a degree. When monsters start to attack, she is visibly scared and unsure when a fight starts. When a problem arises, she doesn't shoot it down with an icy glare and respond with angst. Within the first few cut scenes I saw her as a refreshing change and was easy to get behind. When Noel came into play, he comes off as a bit cavalier and easy going considering the situation he's in. Even when he's being grilled about his sad past, he gets angsty only for a few brief moments before laughing or shrugging it off. They two of them produce a nice dual act and they function as a good pair to carry the game. Unfortunately since this game is in the same universe as FF13, some of the older characters will show up in this one. Hope is still a whiny douche bag and Snow is still an retarded alpha male jackass. Luckily they don't seem to be in the game very long.

I guess I should probably discuss the actual game at some point huh. Battle in the game is functionally unchanged from the previous title. The team breaks into certain job classes on the fly and you have to use the right combos to stagger the enemy for big damage. Typically you will use 2 ravagers and a commando to stagger the enemy then start wailing on them until you need a medic. But I usually find this to turn into a trial and error system with boss fights. When if you lose to a boss more than once, then your paradigm set up isn't going to work and you have figure out what to change. It can get annoying and led me to an incredibly difficult first battle with Caius (the primary antagonist).  You can switch party leader mid battle, so when your controlling character goes down it just switches instead of game overs, so big plus there. And like last game, most of the time you will just be clicking auto-battle and wishing you could be a bigger part of the fun. I don't know why this system gets so much praise, its more of a Final Fantasy game taking away play from the player.

Instead of having 3 party members, you get ability to summon monsters you've beaten. You can level them individually and when they run out of use have another monster absorb their abilities. Allows you to fill in the holes for your paradigms. I have like 20 something monsters and there's really only three or four I level up until I find a new one with a base level higher than my leveled ones.  You level Serah, Noel, and the monsters along the crystarium, which is just one linear path and you just select what job class you want to put levels in. When you complete the grid it expands and gives you new ability, more attacks in a battle, or a boost the abilities you are currently leveling.  Its a bit simplistic and leaves me with the problem of never thinking I am leveling right. At least with 10's sphere grid I had a path to follow and knew what I was doing.

Maps have lost some of the linearity that plagued the previous title. Typically you are dropped in a town or village and a bit of open map to explore, which is big change of pace from the last game. Some of the dungeons are particularly huge with puzzles to unlock to proceed through all of it. In towns and populated areas some of the people will have some random comments as you walk past. Sometimes the people will give you side quests to do which usually involves finding an item in another timeline, or killing a certain set of monsters or whatever. There is no limit to accepting them so that makes it better than the prior of just having to do them one at a time (I believe, its been a while).

If this review feels like I've rambled on but didn't really say anything I'd say that's pretty indicative to my feelings toward this game. I really have no idea what else I can say about it. I haven't finished it yet but I am looking to do so, but a number of times I've played the game I have nodded off to sleep in mid play, the story is interesting but not so interesting that I had to keep playing. Since I've picked it up I've gone back to play other games I have already beaten. The longer I play these games the more I feel like Square has no interest in making video games anymore. They want to make CG movies like FF7: Advent Children. And with each passing release that seems to become more apparent. If you are like me, this game will probably be in your collection if you have followed this franchise for a long time. Its definitely better than its predecessor I feel but something about it just lacks punch. I really want to like it more, but given all the complaints people had about the last one, I can't help but feel disappointed they didn't bring more to the table here. Come on Square, give me that next gen remake of Final Fantasy 6 I've been begging for.