Category: Final Fantasy

So, my complaining worked.

I spent a bunch of time putting off my slot machine duties in Final Fantasy XIII-2 last weekend, and then when I finally went back I hit it big in roughly ten minutes. It took a while to get my first triple-9 (250 coins) and Victory Mode, but I almost immediately hit another triple-9 (500 coins) for Super Victory Mode. Only a couple spins later did the microchus line up (see above) for a massive payout of 50,000 coins; far more than the required 7,777.

Turns out slot machines aren’t that bad after all!

If there’s one thing I hate about Final Fantasy XIII-2, it’s the compulsory gambling. Firstly, and easily the worst, is that you have to earn a total of 7,777 casino coins in the slot machines to earn a specific fragment (of which there are 160 in the game). This may not seem like a big deal,  but when your average winnings are generally 5 or 15 coins, it’s a task that’s going to take some time. If you’re really lucky, there are ways that the slots can pay out much larger sums, but it’s all down to stupid luck.

Padding a game with required grinding is one thing, but making you play the slots to earn your %100 is nigh unacceptable (*coughPorygoncough*). Both are tedious, but at least with grinding you can keep your nose down and get it done, and most games provide decent grinding spots for those with the drive to seek them out. With a slot machine, you could be at it for days before you get the stroke of luck you need to win. Of course, you could also hit the jackpot on your first spin, but that’s pretty unlikely. Such a quick lucky break is moot here anyway, because the most coins you can possibly win on your first spin is 500. It’s a nice start down a long road, but likely won’t make the journey that much shorter.

The slots do have a couple features that can tilt the odds in your favour. Most notably, they have “moods” that do quite literally give you better odds at a winning spin. This can be easily manipulated by leaving and entering the casino world until the machines are at their best mood. There are also two bonus modes called “Victory Mode” and “Super Victory Mode” that allow you to bet more coins each spin. You have to hit one of the two jackpot spins (triple 9’s or microchus, respectively) to enter either of these modes, so they’re rare enough to unlock in the first place, and odds are much better that they’ll time out before you can hit another jackpot.

Lastly, there is an auto-play feature that can be accessed by just holding down the left bumper, but using it actually decreases your odds of winning. So I’m kind of torn on whether it would be quicker to just manually play until I hit the 7,777 coin threshold, or to wedge LB against something, go do something else, and hope to earn 7,777 before my capital runs out. Either way, it’s a super annoying “feature” of the game, and one I do not look forward to seeing again on potential future playthroughs.

The second time the game forces you to gamble is a completely self-inflicted scenario. In fact, you have to pay for the luxury. I downloaded the Sazh quest because I thought it would be a fun adventure starring Sazh with an airship-flying minigame perhaps, and the DLC description promised me he’d join my party once I completed it. That last bit was accurate, but Sazh’s “adventure” was… less than fun.

The DLC quest plops you right back into the casino world as Sazh, and tells you in uncertain terms that you have to keep gambling until you earn a certain number of macguffins. It never elaborates on the conditions that will reward you with said macguffins, so you pretty much just have to keep gambling until the casino owner tells you you’re done. On the upside, the game does tell you that the slot machines will not earn you macguffins, so you can safely stay away from them and enjoy the better ways to gamble.

There are two table games that come with the Sazh DLC, and the first is Chronobind. It’s a game for four players, and it’s all about throwing down a card and hoping it’s the highest. It’s not an overly complex game, but the computer players are really awesome at cheating at it, so it’s really no fun at all. I must have played for an hour before I gave up. In that time, I only won two rounds, and left the table with less than half of my buy-in coins.

The other game, much to my chagrin, is poker. I don’t hate poker or anything, but after Dead Rising 2 I was pretty much ready to never play it again. As luck would have it, it’s also played by the same rules as the poker mini-game in DR2 (I have no idea what variation it is in real life), so I knew what I was doing. Another fortuitous twist is that the computer opponents I was playing against were very susceptible to bluffing, so I was able to dominate the table pretty easily. After a game and a half, I had earned enough collectible dealies to complete the quest, but I’ll never see those three hours again.

On the upside, Sazh is now in my party, and it looks like he’s going to be a pretty solid Synergist once I get him levelled up, which is something I was looking for. The real prize though, was that with my winnings from the hours of poker, I had so many casino coins that I was able to buy all the unique items from the casino and still have plenty left over. And even though it took a while to amass that much coin, it was still considerably less time than it would have taken to win it all through chocobo racing, which is the best DLC-less way to earn casino coins.

In the end, it was saving me from days of chocobo racing that made the package worth 400 Micosoft points, because I hate Chronobind and will probably never play the poker game again. I certainly would have preferred Sazh to have been a 150MSP Coliseum battle like Lightning, or better yet, free DLC. But we all know that free DLC is a very rare treat indeed, and Square-Enix is probably the last company who’ll be caught giving anything away.

Now it’s just a matter of finding a way to kick Noel out of the party so I can play the remainder of the game with Serah, Lightning and Sazh…

I’ve been rocking Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a while now, and I just bought the gigantic, overpriced, collector’s edition strategy guide. Yes, I’m terrible at both playing games and budgeting.

Before I started playing the game myself, I gave my youngest brother crap for playing it with the strategy guide spread open in front of hm, but now I understand why. There are a handful of new systems in the game that require careful planning to optimize, but the game doesn’t really tell you a lot about them. Chocobo racing, for instance, is better documented in-game than it is in Final Fantasy VII, but the game still leaves out the part about how to raise your chocobos to not suck out loud.

The game also tells you that if you infuse one of your monster buddies with monsters of other roles, that monster can learn special skills. The truth is that a monster must be fed other monsters of a single, specific role to learn one special ability. So here I was, feeding legions of commando monsters (developed monsters at that) to my one sentinel, when he can actually only learn Reprieve by being fed a wealth of medics. So that was a huge waste of monsters and monster growth items.

The most important thing I’ve learned from the guide, however, is that the game is structured in a way that there are no Lost Forevers. There are a handful of hidden monsters that can only be recruited once, but that’s nothing to worry about. It’s not that I feel like I’m going to need to 100% the game or anything, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to worry about never being able to get something cool. The best part is, that this ties into one of the things I like most about the game!

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is built not on one big world, but handfuls of little worlds. Like Kingdom Hearts. In fact, sometimes while playing FFXIII-2 I feel like I’m playing a Kingdom Hearts spinoff of some sort. I blame Noel. Anyway, each world represents a certain place at a certain time. There are different time periods for each location, and you can travel through them freely once you unlock each. The game even remembers where you were standing when you left a location. If you search hard enough, you can find special items that allow you to re-lock each world, and then you can play them again as if it were the first time you traveled there.

Of course, the game isn’t entirely clear about this function, but it’s not overly useful anyway. I can’t imagine any reason to restart a world other than to seek out alternate endings. But hopping between worlds is pretty cool, especially since each has it’s own B plot, and they’re usually more interesting than the main story.

I’ve kind of lost my train of thought at this point, but I think the point I was going to make when I begun typing this is that I’ve become a pitiable wreck who can’t play without the strategy guide splayed open in front of me, for fear of missing an item, even though I’ve been assured by the game and guide that nothing is permanently missable. I wish I could put the book down, because the game was more fun when I didn’t have all the answers in front of me. The completionist in me just can’t bear to cast it aside though. I would love to shut the guide, finish the game on my own, and then start a new game with the guide showing me the optimal paths and team builds. But alas, a grownup finds it hard to finish a 60+ hour game once, never mind twice.

In any case, I loves me some FFXIII-2. That’s kinda fitting, because only three people in the world like FFXIII and I’m two of them. I really don’t understand why I’m blogging about it when there is a ton of game left for me in there… Know what? I’mma go do that now.

I have one more thing to post about Fallout 3. It should have been done early last week. Alas, Skyrim.

Like millions before me, I have been sucked up entirely into the world of Skyrim and cannot break free of its unusually strong grip. It’s a miracle that my job and relationship aren’t suffering because of it. Just sleep. But that’s okay, I’d much rather play Skyrim than sleep. It’s amazing how the hours just slip away as you’re out slaying dragons and exploring the mountains.

That said, the whole “exploration is its own reward” thing I had going on with Fallout is definitely there in Skyrim, probably even more. There are like twice as many locations to find in Skyrim as there are in the Capital Wasteland, and it seems like a lot more of them are significant. For instance, there was one cabin with a bandit inside. Boring, right? No! In the cellar, I could hear wind coming from somewhere, and as luck would have it, I found a note that mentioned some hidden goods behind a bookcase. After a little searching, I found a button that moved the bookcase, and there was way more down there than a couple bottles of wine. There was a huge, snaking cavern full of bandits. At the end of that was a short ruins area that was full of booby-traps and led to a gigantic treasure trove, full of gold, gems, and rare ores.

Then one other time, I was exploring this cave full of Falmer (cave-people), and then I got to the bottom and a giant robot attacked me! Totally did not expect that!

The one sucky thing I’ve found is that characters who will join you really don’t mind dying permanently. Like this one guy, Faendal, who joined me almost right at the beginning of the game. He was cool, and was a pretty slick shot with a bow. He got the shit kicked out of him a few times, but never gave up. So when I found him laying on the ground after a battle with some particularly tough bandits and discovered that he wasn’t going to get up, I was sad. I also got a stray dog and some random dude killed by giants. Not my fault, really. They just didn’t understand that you don’t fuck with giants.

I suppose I wasn’t too fond of the character creator either. I wanted to play a lady wood elf. Am I so wrong? Well, Bethesda seems to think so, because I had to work very hard to make one that didn’t look manly or scary. I played with the face configurator for at least an hour before I finally managed to work out something I found acceptable. I didn’t need her to be the most beautiful character anyone’s ever seen or anything; I would have settled for cute. (Originally I wanted to make her resemble Stephanie, but there was no way in Hell that that was going to happen.)

In non-Skyrim news (enjoy this, it may be the last for a while), I downloaded the Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo last week. Being one of the three people who liked FFXIII, I’m very excited for it. The fact that it plays more like a regular JRPG (exploring, towns, sidequests, etc) but retains the bulk of XIII’s battle system makes me very happy indeed. I just wish Lightning were the main character again. Serah just seems so… cliche. I cannot relate to her at all. But the new Crystarium seems really cool! It’s kind of sad that I have this pre-ordered, but probably won’t play it for months. Stupid Skyrim, being so awesome and addictive. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim.

I picked up Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together a while back, because I love me some tactical strategy games. Two years ago I committed to finishing Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, and burned my way through it over the summer months. I figured I’d do the same for Tactics Ogre this year. So far, not looking so good.

It’s mostly just that I’m not setting aside any time to play it. I started playing maybe three weeks ago and generally just pick it up during my lunch hours at work. Yeah, that’s an optimal time for handheld games, but when each battle can take anywhere up to half an hour, it makes progress slow. Especially considering that I can spend just as much time between battles tweaking my army’s equipment and skills. Playing the random encounter battles only serves to slow story progression even more. It’s definitely a game that requires a big time commitment.

So far, I’m enjoying TO almost equally to FFT. The big difference is that FFT makes life a little easier for players in several ways. The most obvious one regards skills. In FFT, each class has a skill set, and once you earn enough JP (Job Points) to buy any of the skills within that set, they’re free to use. Permanently ingrained in your character. You walk into battle, and as long as your dude has the Black Magic skill set equipped, he can use any Black Magic he knows. Passive skills and reaction skills are a little more limited, but your abilities are all good to go.

Tactics Ogre is similar, but more complex. You still buy skills, but each unit has a certain allotment of skill slots in which they can be equipped. You can use your points to buy more slots, but they’re expensive. And all skills must be equipped. Passive abilities, stat boosts, counterattacks, usable skills, etc. all take up a valuable slot. It’s not a bad system by any means, but it means you have to grind twice as much so you can buy the skills and the skill slots to put them in.

The other little difference is in attack magic. So far in TO, all the healing and stat-/status-affecting spells I’ve seen just happen where they’re casted. All spells work this way in FFT. The target tiles are highlighted, and the fireball appears there. But attack spells in TO are projectiles, and therefore need a clear path to their target. I’ve fried the heads of many of my own allies because it took me a while to get accustomed to this rule and how to determine the trajectory of the spell (though there is an ability that makes said trajectory visible).

Fortunately, the game also includes a rewind feature called the Chariot Tarot, which can turn battles back by up to 50 turns. While FFT is easier overall (and can be broken much easier), the Chariot system makes life more bearable because you can rewind and basically try to get things right if a battle goes south. Mostly I just use it when I wang one of my own guys in the head with a spell.

None of this is to say that I’m against the game though! I like that it’s challenging but not brutally so. If you do FFT right, the challenge level goes out the window pretty quickly. There are one or two sticky fights, but really as soon as you get ninjas you’re golden. And then when Cid joins? It should just say “you win” at that point. TO doesn’t seem to have such luxuries. But of course, I’m still only a few fights into Chapter 2, so there’s plenty of room left for game-breaking. And that’s what I want, deep down inside. As much as I enjoy the feeling of winning a hard-fought battle by the skin of my teeth (more on that in a second), I truly love marching into battle with unstoppable, dual-wielding demigods. With the skill system here though… I don’t see it happening. At least not if there’s a slot cap. That would be tragic.

As far as winning a battle by a hair, I got into this one random fight yesterday against a bunch of zombified people and skeletons. Such units are all classified as undead, and undead units will come back to life (with full HP!) three turns after they’ve been killed. The only way (currently available) to stop this is with the Exorcism spell. I did not have this spell at the time. Now, felling seven or eight units within three “rounds” of combat isn’t exactly easy, but somehow I managed to make it through and you bet your ass the first thing I did afterward was pick up a few copies of the scroll that teaches Exorcism.

The one thing I really like about the game though, is that you level up classes instead of individual units. Which sucks if you change one of your dudes to a new class and he has to start at Lv1 again, but as long as you bring a good mix of classes to each battle, it should be more beneficial than anything. At least it seems that way for now. Changing classes is a bitch anyway, because unlike FTT where you get new classes by leveling other ones, here you need a special ticket (One for every job class! Collect them all!) every time you want to do a class change. So you can’t just go and change your main dude between black mage and knight every fight. I mean, you can, but it’ll cost you. Not that there’s any reason to do that anyway.

I still love the meat of the game, but there are a few freedoms taken away here that I miss. Not that they’re important of useful freedoms, but if I want to make a paladin that can chuck fireballs, I think I should be able to. Actually, I haven’t seen a paladin class yet, so maybe they can chuck fireballs. A knight that chucks fireballs then. No, spell fencers are not good enough for me!