Final Fantasy XV(PS4): An enjoyable Bro'd trip.

Sighs.... OK Final Fantasy. We've been doing this dance for what feels like 20 something years at this point. You've been my favorite series once, it's been well established that I feel you were at your best with six and ten, and you certainly didn't do yourself any favors continually cramming Lightning down my throat. It took you 3 tries to get that right. So now I read that the whole company is putting everything into making this installment a success, everything I saw at first did not lead me positively. Four dudes driving around a car in what seems to be just a Final Fantasy version of the midwest? Eh....

But then something kinda clicked while I was fiddling with one of the two demos that got released. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to see a JRPG that kept the kinda of fantasy monsters and themes, but kept it in a contemporary setting. Well, this is as close to that as I've gotten so far that I can remember, so with renewed energy I sat down with....

FINAL FANTASY XV(PS4)

(played in 2016)

So I won't lie, Final Fantasy XV's story is a bit of a muddled mess. SquareEnix seems to be determined to make their story as confusing as possible. So much so that it is actually recommended to watch the Final Fantasy XV movie Kingsglaive prior to the playing the game. It gives a little more context to what it happening in the world of this game, but ultimately you will want to keep to some basic points to help move you along.

You play as Noctis, the heir to the throne of Lucis, a small kingdom in the world of Eos. Lucis is bustling empire which contains a magical artifact known as the Crystal, a gift bestowed by the deities of this world, and is controlled via a ring passed down through the royal family. Lucis has been at a constant war with the neighboring technological and militaristic empire of Niflheim which controls most of Eos, but they have called a armistice with the condition that Noctis marries his childhood friend and destined oracle Lunafreya.

However, as Noct and his crew travel to Accordo to reunite with Lunafreya for the wedding, it is shown (or known if you watched Kingsglave) that this was just the set up for a double cross. Lucis is attacked, the city is heavily damaged, Noct's father is killed, the crystal is stolen, and he and Lunafreya are presumed dead. With no other course of action other than the press on as the current last of the line of Lucis bloodline, Noct sets out to find Lunafreya, retrieve the weapons of the Ancient Lucian Kings and inherit the powers of the Lucian line, and retrieve the crystal back from the empire.

Ok, Prince goes to get revenge, take what is stolen, and get the girl. That's where our head needs to be because even for a Final Fantasy game they managed to weave an incredibly confusing plot. I will say that watching Kingsglaive helped with that, but there is really little reason that couldn't have just been in the game instead of as a stand alone movie. Perhaps because the film doesn't really even contain Noctis and therefore might be considered vestigial, but perhaps if you controlled Lunafreya in these segments it would have made more sense and fleshed the story about better. The demos could have probably been crammed in here too.

So while Final Fantasy has gone through a number of different iterations, but at its core it has always been a JRPG or a variant of it. Well, after numerous attempts to squash the JRPG out of the the game, Final Fantasy XV succeeds by more or less completely removing the menu based elements out of the game. Now we have almost and Auto-fight version action based of Kingdom Hearts, its designed to be both simple, skillful, and seamless all at once, and I'll be damned if it doesn't actually work pretty well.

There is no combat transitions like the Final Fantasy of old. As you wander near enemies and they become hostile the weapons pop out and you are immediately in the fray. Combat is primarily controlled by a number of button holds. If you hold your standard attack, Noctis will continue to wail on the baddie you are trained on for as long as you MP holds up, chipping a little away with each attack. If you use your Warp, you can fling your weapon for a heavier teleport strike as well as use this to leap to cover to restore you spent MP.

The combat feels fluid and fun, so despite simple controls it still feels skillful.

You also have a defense button, where if held Noct will shiftstep to avoid incoming attacks, and if held in the right moments can initiate a parry for Noct to counter and strike back for bigger damage. As you take damage, you lose HP, if you are brought down to critical, you can start to lose your maximum HP, which can really make the battles a slog to get through.

Then there are a handful of other fight mechanics to help make things easier as well. You have a pair of gauges that charge up as you deal damage. One of them is your team up gauge where you can expend 1 to 3 bars with your individual party members for a team attack, but once you learn Ignus's regroup you have little reason to use anything else because it warps everyone to him and restores everyone to near full health. You have a gauge around your weapons that when activated puts you in what I call a frenzy mode, where Noct just goes ham with the ancient weapons he's found while taking next to no damage, and can be finished with a 4 member team attack. Finally there are summons, where in this Final Fantasy they are fight enders. Almost nothing survives a cast summon. The problem is I've yet to figure out what things need to happen to actually activate a summon, so when the music changes and the prompt appears, just hit it and finish the fight.

So long as you can hold out in a fight, Ramuh will eventually finish it for you.

Items for the most part don't change in this Final Fantasy but some of their functions do differ. For example being at 0 HP doesn't mean you are out of the fight, you are just weakened and slow. If you use a potion you regain HP and can get back in the fight, but if you use an Elixir you gain your HP back and restore back you maximum HP amount. Phoenix Downs return to bring back completely wiped out fighters back in the fight, and if you are quick enough you can use them to spare you from getting a game over as well.

Experience is treated a bit differently in this Final Fantasy as well. When you are out and about the world map fighting baddies you earn experience that goes into a pool for your characters individually. This is earned by defeating monsters, completing quests, or using items if you do it properly. But it doesn't actually go to leveling up your characters until you "bank it" by resting. You can do this at various camp locations across the map, renting out trailers to stay in, or if you can swing the cash to do so stay in hotels. Why would you pay money for hotels if you can camp for free? Because the nicer location you stay in determines the bonus to the experience you get when you cash in, so you can boost your levels if you can afford to stay in nicer places.

"Camping is so comfortable thanks to this reliable and affordable COLEMAN camping equipment!"

One of the perks to camping however, is that one of party members (Ignus) will cook for the group. Cooking and eating meals can provide various party effects such as more stamina, better damage, bonus HP, or even experience boosting. You can also dine at restaurants without having to rest but obviously this costs money to do as well. Depending on the locations you've found or the quests you have done, This can be manipulated in a way that allows you to really cash in on the experience you earn to get the jump on the levels. 

Final Fantasy has finally taken that hard look at Skyrim and said "Huh, gamers really seem to like this open world thing. Maybe that's why they didn't like Final Fantasy 13's 20 hour linear corridor maps." It's about time. I don't know when Square thought less freedom was a good idea but they finally wised up and when full blown open world. Not complete freedom as some areas are locked off at the onset, and you can't drive anywhere that doesn't have a road, but it does allow for some multiple forms of travel and is pretty massive in scale.

So while you have your main story quests to complete, as you make pit stops around the map you will come across NPCs, shops, and eateries that will provide side quests for you to do. On top of the regular experience bonuses these provide they will also allow you to find new weapons and gear, hunt monsters to earn money (money is scarce in this game), unlock new recipes for bonus effects, and find more of the the Lucian weapons. I felt very reminded of Dragon Age: Inquisition or Skyrim that it was very easy to find myself moving from sidequest to sidequest and never actually getting to progressing with the story. I had to tell myself to move on at points.

Gear in this game is kept thankfully simple this time around. Noctis is the only character that can use everything, and the other 3 party members can only use specific gear so it shouldn't do much to complicate things. Get everyone the best available armor and weapons, and figure out what weapons you like to use for Noct. I personally stuck to the short sword, knives, one of the Lucian weapons, and a spell for my main slot set up.

Lucian weapons are tricky, by the way. While they are significantly more powerful than weapons you can buy along the way, but they come at a cost. Just by using them your health will immediately begin to deplete. But even if you don't use them in battle, they can have a significant affect on your base statistics. I was getting my ass kicked regularly at one point and I couldn't figure out why. Apparently, I later found out, that the Lucian axe I had equipped for my heavy weapon had reduced my defense to next to nothing for a massive attack boost, so you have to chose your gear carefully.

Magic is also a different beast. Its based around this Elemancy system they created. Essentially you have have 3 magic elementals of fire, ice, and lightning (a call back to FF1 perhaps?). You basically can collect elements along the world map, then harness them into a casting of a spell. The amount you use increases the potency which I assume correlates to how much damage they can do, and the right selection of abilities as you level allow you decrease the cost or increase the power as you make spells.

But there is a 4th option to elemancy as well where you can add a random item to the spell to give them bonus effects. Some of them use poison or stun, I used them make my spells quadra or quinta casts so using the spell once basically resulted in a massive nuclear strike for a huge area. This for some reason also hits your party as well but it doesn't appear to deal any damage to you. But the real kicker, and pretty much the only reason I used magic is you can use debased coins to make them cast with XP boost. So basically every time you cast a spell you get a free experience dump. Compounded with what you've learned about boosting experience from food and sleeping, you can really surge in levels if you do it properly.

Given everything I've said as you can clearly tell, this is not the cookie cutter JRPG that Bravely Default is for example. It's something I thought I wanted for Final Fantasy but if I am being completely honest, I actually really got into the changes to system. It felt seamless, there was still a degree of skill required to do it well, and the difficulty is skewed in a way that it really never feels easy. If something out levels you, you have to play things very carefully otherwise its going to be a constant scramble to keep using your items to keep you alive.

Much like how they started to in Final Fantasy X, there is a real sense of scale to all the baddies in this game as some monsters are teeny in size like the lovable cactaur, to brontosaurusly massive in scale to where you are only really hacking at a monsters ankles during a fight. And what I like about this is some of the lumbering monsters are generally passive in nature, so you can scoot right on by them without getting locked into a fight you don't want to be in.

As I have mentioned the game if fairly open world, so you will be doing a lot of back and forth exploring, the problem is it doesn't exactly allow you the freedom of travel like a Grand Theft Auto would provide. You are given this slick ride and given a massive map. You select a few sidequests to do and realize it would be much faster to cut across the field to get there. BZZZT. Nope, you have to stick to the roads. The car will literally not let you veer into the other lanes or off road unless there is a dirt trail to allow you to do so. So nine out of ten times you won't even bother driving yourself because there is no point. No freedom. Just let Ignis do it.

Or, just say fuck it and fast travel to the nearest point you can, and then ride a chocobo as close as you can. You rent them for dirt cheap for day spans so spend for the week and you can summon them at will. You will be covering a lot of ground so you should anyways because they get stronger and more effective as you do.

The music in this one is pretty good. I don't know if I would say that the music of Final Fantasy XV is notable, but that's because while you travel you can purchase CDs for your car of all the older Final Fantasy soundtracks, which I absolutely would rather be listening to. So most of the time I wasn't even hearing the XV soundtrack. The battle music is cool and does feel epic, and the music you hear during the weird pinball game at eateries are metal as fuck so that rocks. The game also opens up with a soft rendition of Stand by Me, which was a surprising change of pace to have an actual licensed song that wasn't from Nobuo Uematso.

I played this much longer than I probably should have.

So as I've mentioned you have your main story quests, you have your monster hunts (which seems to be the primary way to make money), and you have your side quests. The problem with this selection is that if you stick to the story quests, Final Fantasy XV is going to be an incredibly short game. I believe some Japanese gamers clocked it down to just under 14 hours. For a spectacle fighter or action adventure game that's pretty standard, but for a Final Fantasy it really isn't. So expect yourself to do some sidequests if you want to make the most of this game.

The problem with the sidequests is that the people who give them are just awful. Sure, it shows off some fairly impressive character design in the way that NPCs don't feel so generic when compared to the main cast. But a lot of them are just insufferable from a voice acting perspective. It's like they looked at the characters they were going to voice and just decided instead of finding a voice that seemed natural for the character, they would let a voice actor go nuts and try some new things they were fooling around with. They run this barrage of just awful character actor sounds: Dumb Hillbilly, Tough Lady, Italian Mobster, Annoying Bostonian. I tried to listen to quests, but some these characters were just awful.

While I'm on the subject of voice acting, let's talk about Eos as a whole shall we? I am very confused about the nature of this universe, Final Fantasy XV. You start me off meeting a widened old king and let me take control of an angsty hero, a British chef, and mullety toughguy, and wet diaper. Then literally right at the onset of the game, I feels like I'm driving in the midwest only everyone who lives there is a transplant from the deep south. With Cindy I don't mind it so much because I think she is adorable but the entire continent talking like the cast of Hee-Haw while wearing stylish future clothing is sending me a lot of mixed fucking messages.

The story in this game is a fucking mess, really. Honestly if you held a gun to my head and asked to me explain it I'd probably still be getting shot in the knee at best. I can mention some of the major aspects of it but honestly most of them main game is so unmemorable I vaguely remember what quests were actual story based missions and which were asides not based off the main narrative. Some of them I wonder why they are even in the game. It does the whole Evil Empire thing but then it will have you literally rubbing elbows with the games primary antagonist. There is a section where where you fight this hired gun out to stop you, and then literally the very next time you see her she joins your party. Consistency is not Final Fantasy XV's strong suit.

It's not a real likable main cast of characters either. Noctis is your prototypical spiky haired angsty machine. He's there to swing his sword and "pfft" or "tsch" his range of emotion during scenes. Ignis seems like he could be a cool character but honestly it seems like all the stuff that happens to him that develops him as a character happens without the player ever getting to see it. Prompto fucking sucks, he is a whiny ineffectual snot who I would leave locked in the trunk if I could. There is a particular story heavy mission where he casually drops this massive reveal about his character, that has about as jarring an effect as if you told me it was sunny out today. And Gladiolus could have been my favorite character but he's an inconsistent hypocrite, he straight up leaves the group to take care of some of his own shit and then when a major story event takes place he proceeds to be fucking shitty to a character for the remainder of the game for no fucking reason. This team sucks.

Which is a shame because there are some pretty great characters in this game. For a brief stint you get Gladiolus' sister Iris in your party and on top of fighting along side you, she's actually charming and fun. So of course she's gone before you get to enjoy it. The aforementioned hired gun, Areana Highwind, is a throwback to the Dragoon class who is a hardened mercenary and kind of bad ass, so naturally you get her for one mission and she's gone, which is a shame because as you talk to her you get a sense of where her loyalty actually is and its interesting. Hell I would have taken getting Cindy in the party just to hear her southern drawl as I traveled across the world map. In this game's defense though, I will admit I missed a lot of the individual character quests because I never made camp because there is no XP boost and camping is what makes most of them appear.

I would have swapped any of these characters to keep Iris on the team.

My hands down biggest problem with the game however, is the fucking product placement. There is one small one (a small American Express sign I didn't even notice) and 3 very egregious examples that I can cite: One, In the Kingsglaive film, in several rather prominent shots the film really drives home that they are driving around in a very stylish looking Audi (that they actually produced one of, that sold for like 350k). Two, In almost every scene where the team is at a campfire, the Coleman brand is prominently displayed on the camping equipment that is well centered in practically every single camping shot. And third, is sprinkled throughout billboards and shops are ads, and even the product of Cup Noodles.

Which would be fine by itself, but there is an actual fucking quest line about eating fucking Cup Noodles, and how you make Cup Noodles better to have the "ultimate flavor experience". Spoiler alert, it ends with the whole team realizing that after all the effort they put in Cup Noodles are just great as they are. FUCK. YOU. This was so ham-handledly crammed into the game I swear to god I almost stopped playing. Listening to Gladiolus sing the praises of the ambrosia of the gods that is fucking Cup Noodles was just product placement at sickening levels. Try to watch that mission and not get douchechills. Fuck you, Cup Noodles. Unless a particularly shitty game comes out this year, Cup Noodles is the 2017 worst of the year. Book It.

This is getting longwinded so I better wrap things up. Final Fantasy XV is not the last ditch hail mary masterpiece I think SquareEnix was hoping it would be, but it did end up being successful. They tried something different again and for the most part it does provide a pretty enjoyable experience. Is it the best Final Fantasy in the series? Not by a longshot. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth your time. If they had maybe dialed back on making everything epic in scale and fancy looking and spent a little more time formulating a more coherent storyline, and sold it all together instead of with movies and demos, Final Fantasy XV could have truly been something special.

Sadly, its not. But its still good. Definitely the one of the best showings of the game for any of the series after Final Fantasy X. They are still going to add a few more DLC chapters to the game to flesh out some of the things you can do and extend on the story a little bit but ultimately that comes as a too little too late for me. Final Fantasy XV is a pretty solid play and I would say I certainly got my monies worth out of it. Maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10.

I'd bump it to an 8 if it didn't have Promto. 

Battleblock Theater (XBLA): Blueprint to a Perfect Platformer.

It takes a lot to make me dabble in XBLA or PSN arcade. I hate the concept of paying for something, but not getting a tangible product to own. Because of that, I don't use a lot of the on demand services for games on the xbox, playstation, or even steam really. However, I will occasionally cave when I see a number of people playing or commenting on a hit title. Sometimes this leads me to games like love, like Braid.

After downloading the games trial and playing it through like 4 or 5 times, and having a extra 1600 points collecting dust on my live account, I decided to hell with it and unlocked the full version of....

 BATTLEBLOCK THEATER: (XBLA)

The story of Battleblock Theater begins with the player character of your creation joining a group of friends on a "friend-ship" owned by best friend to all, Hatty Hattington. Hatty and friends sail off to find adventure on the open seas and to have a good time singing, dancing, and enjoying each others company. But a horrible (and hilariously narrated) storm casts the ship to a mysterious island and shipwrecks them.

On the island, the player finds a mysterious theater that is inhabited by technologically advanced cats, who take Hatty and his friends captive. Hatty is given a glowing red top hat, and seems to become possessed by its powers and seemingly joins his captors. Forcing the player and fellow prisoners to perform in the theater in trials of survival for the cats amusement. The player must endure through all of them in order to save Hatty and the rest of his friends so they can escape the island. 

My initial play of this game gave me cause for hesitation, because when I first picked it up I was expecting the game to be more of a puzzler, but in reality it is actually a platformer. Not that I have any issue with platformers per say, I just really haven't been interested in them since Super Mario World on SNES. Since, there have been rare exceptions (Braid, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, etc.), but its not generally a genre I spend a lot of time on.

The general jist of each level is to collect at least 3 gems to unlock the exit. Levels can contain anywhere from 5 to 7 gems, and one ball of yarn. The more you collect, the better your rank. If you can collect all of them within a certain time limit, you can get a perfect A++ rank and earn some bonus gems. 

It starts off pretty straight forward with some fairly easy to navigate stages, a number of times I'd fly through so fast I'd get the perfect ranking on my first go. For the first two or so chapters, I thought this game was going to be a breeze. But as you play on, the game starts winging new curveballs at you, and the stages start to get even more puzzling as you play them.

But what really made the game for me was the time trial aspect of it. Adding the necessity for speed in this game really adds the need to keep up the intensity. Most of the levels are not exceptionally huge, so a lot of the time you are really flying around, and it allows the game to move at an almost breakneck pace. This does nothing but make the game more enjoyable and frenetic. Almost every level I played, I would immediately restart to do again faster, just to push my rank a little bit higher. 

As you progress, lots of new concepts are thrown at you and you need to learn how to use all of them properly to move throughout the level. The blocks change, so some explode after a second, some send you flying, some slow you down or allow you slide down walls, some cause you to build speed and slip. Then they start throwing items for you to use like wings to keep you afloat or jetpacks to fly you around for short bursts.

Precision is key in a lot of stages, and I fuckin' love it.

Some of the stages contain hidden areas for hidden gems, some of them have tricks that use pressure plates that cause blocks to disappear, or create light bridges to cross areas or protect you from lasers or spikes. Sometimes you need to use the environment to your advantage to trigger some switches and so on and so forth. Battleblock Theater really does throw a whole of intricacies into these very small levels which allow them to come up with some very imaginative tricks, and it makes it super satisfying when you figure out how to fly through it.

All of the gems you collect can be used to "free prisoners" (which is basically different heads for your character) and balls of string are used to unlock weapons. There is a massive number of things to unlock, so it will probably take a few playthroughs to get them all but I was able to all of one head type. There aren't as many weapons and if you try to perfect each level you should be able to get them all in no time. Once I got the fireball though, I didn't really feel like I needed anything else. (Side note though, on insane mode you have to do the whole level on a life with no checkpoints, so fireball is not great there since it can kill you too)

The two player mode changes up the levels to require co-op mechanics. Which means you cannot complete the level unless the two of your work together, which is a system a game like this should have I think. It worked well in Portal 2 and I think it would work here. I haven't gotten the opportunity to play the co-op mode yet but I look forward to doing so, (I'm lookin' at you, Liebe).

I love the music in this game because basically they revolve around heavy use of chiptunes. I'm just a huge fan of the retro gaming sound and honestly I wish it was bigger in the music industry to use. But I am happy to see it start to make a comeback in gaming. The BattleBlock Theater theme is easily  my favorite of the bunch, but the hidden bonus levels are also great because the narrator sings over them, and they are just ridiculous. It all comes to a wonderful head when you complete the game though, its a very "Still Alive"  level of awesome as far as I'm concerned. Honestly, I think it was the trailer for this game that pushed me to get it because the song was so damn catchy and funny. (see below)

But the REAL reason you play this game is the side splitting narration in the game. During each level the narrator throws out this hilarious comments. Some are encouraging, some are sarcastic, some are just flat our ridiculous. But after each chapter when complete its time trial, you are treated to this paper cut out puppet show and a monologue from the narrator. They are hilarious, and I'd expect nothing less from Behemoth studios. That style of humor is their bread and butter.

I suppose if I needed to complain about anything, it'd be the games overall length. While some of the levels took a bit of figuring out, it only really started to wrack my brain by the end of the game around chapters 7 and 8. That may seem like a good length but you really will shred through the first 4-6 with little issue. Its an arcade game though so I suppose that kind of depth is to be expected. 

This was one of those games where I really wanted to play the multiplayer, which I was able to do against the computer but it didn't have the same feel as it would if I had friends to banter with, (I'm so lonely). There are a bunch of different game types like capture the horse, king of the hill, beat em up, B-ball, and a handful of others. The Achievement Hunter guys did a video of it and its pretty easy to see how easily those matches can get out of hand.

Soccer Ball, Basketball hoop, Football scoring. They clearly did this on purpose.

The game also features a create a level editor which allows you to produce your own map and then throw them out there for all of xbox live to unappreciatively shit on and leave negative reviews for. But if you have a number of friends playing the game it seems like a good way to produce new challenges and really draw some life into the game. I didn't dabble with this much in Little Big Planet but the layouts in BattleBlock Theater seem much more simple to design. Although then again, I'm not that clever.

I ended up enjoying BattleBlock Theater way more than I thought I was going to. It had the right tweaks to the system to make this very enjoyable for me, and I feel lays down a great blueprint for what makes platformers fun. Small, tightly contained levels that require though, and a very fast pace throughout the game. Throw in some awesome chiptune music, hilarious narration, lots of unlockables, and fun group of multiplayer modes and you really can't ask for anything more. 

BattleBlock Theater was absolutely worth the 1200 points I paid for it and I would absolutely recommend you do so as well. Just goes to show you game industry, not every game needs two guns and cover mechanics to be fun to play. Buckle your pants, Bitches.

"Touch'n a butt".... Man I love this trailer.