Tag: final fantasy

Or as I liked to call it: Bromance: the Road Trip

Story:

The Crowned Prince Noctis heads out on a road-trip with his personal guard/best friends to meet his fiance in order to get married. His car breaks down on the way and while it’s getting fixed they find out that his father has been murdered, his city occupied/destroyed and his fiance has gone into hiding. Noctis then goes on a cross countries road trip to get all of the artifact weapons, get the blessings of the world’s gods, and find the ring that will allow him to use a magic crystal to save the world from encroaching darkness and demons.

The story was interesting but not mind-blowing. At least it was better than the storyline in FFXII, which I basically don’t remember. However, I was sufficiently invested in the characters throughout the story. I even felt regret whenever I would go back to ‘present’ time to advance the storyline, so now that I’ve beaten the game I can just hang out in the past forever.

Who needs responsibility when you’re beautiful and sleeping on a chocobo?

Characters:

I liked all of the characters. I am a sucker for bromance, so I loved the main four, and there was a colorful cast of side characters throughout the story.

Clothing put me in a weird mood. Remembering back to X-II (That’s ten-2, not 12) I feel like whenever there are outfits and girls, the variations are sexy, plentiful, and etc. When I found out there were outfits in this game I thought there would be a little more than: you start with two outfits with two variations each and the only other one you get is storyline based. Sure, I loved ‘dressing up’ the car as well, but not quite the same thing. I would’ve liked a little less cleavage on Cindy and the Dragoon or a little more shirtless action for the boys. Equal opportunity nudity please.

Gamyplay:

The combat was a little too spectacle fighter, and not enough rpg for my immediate liking. I got the hang of it over time, but I never actually liked it. I also found the ascension grid …well not exactly complicated, but annoying? I had to play for quite a while before I figured out which spheres were beneficial to my play style.

I was also pretty astonished by the number of items I needed to get through fights. I think Ignis kinda sorta turned into a healer at some point, but not really? I kept waiting to get some sort of healing spell for myself, but no, I ended up chugging potions and elixirs at an alarming pace. Now I doubt I was playing the game as intended because there was some kind of “crouch” mechanic, but most of the time when I tried to crouch during a battle I would either jump forward instead of crouching, or the monster would come over and eat my face, so I gave up on it pretty quick. I probably also should’ve used the point warping more, but it’s hard to find a point warp while avoiding the baddies and you can’t move the camera in wait mode.

But the one thing that I think caused me more annoyance than anything else were simply the load times. I mean I’m not entirely surprised because of the complexity of the world, but when driving around doing different quests, the downtime really added up.

I would go take bathroom breaks and come back and still have to wait.

Graphics:

This game is gorgeous to look at. Not just the characters and mob models, but the world itself is so seamlessly put together and…well just real-looking. I found myself in awe over and over again. Once I finally learned to put up with the camera being annoying to control (and way too close) and my disappointment over having to wait for Prompto to take pictures instead of being able to take them myself, I settled well into this world.

Overall, I enjoyed this game the most out of the Final Fantasies I’ve played, though I am really into the whole bromance thing and pretty graphics. I could take or leave the fighting system (though when I managed to get a link strike, that was rather cool) and the Ascension grid. The world was just so huge and interactive. It might even be that it feeling like it was just a step outside the real world really did a lot for it. We’ll just have to see if this is an upward tick in the Final Fantasy genre, or a dying gasp.

The graceful Prince Noctis

Been putting off this game until I was able to get done with *something* in my backlog of games. It does contain spoilers, which I’m warning you of even though we’re technically past the time limit for such bans.

I actually was really into looking into this game at the very beginning. Then when I only knew of two party members (Lightning and Snow) I kinda let it fall by the wayside so that I only saw the rest of the party members when I got the game. Was basically right about all of the first impressions of seeing those other characters, except for Fang, who I assumed was a caster and turned out to be a dragoon (or as close to it as she can without the class title).

Graphics are gorgeous, but then that’s to be expected. Graphics are always going to be amazing in games that have the budget.

Story so far is very angst ridden. I’m not sure they properly portrayed the fear of l’cie before you find out Serah is one. However, the pace at which you, the player, finds out what the heck fal’cie and l’cie and cei’th are is pretty good.

After picking up the manual, like above I though Fang was a caster and was wrong about that, but I knew Hope would be a little whiny brat, and he was but luckily he got over it and is now turning out to be pretty strong considering he can’t be more than 12 or 13. My first guess was that Cocoon was some sort of prison, but being ‘pets’ does make a lot more sense considering all three cities I’ve been to are a huge mall, a seaside resort, and an amusement park. I am looking forward to more clarification on the ‘factory’ as it were.

I do, however, understand the comments about the ‘tutorial’ of Cocoon which consists of having your party picked for you and almost entirely being limited to two people which is just a real pain. But then don’t most FF games pick your party for you a lot of the time? I think X and XII were more the exception.

My only complaint now is that the game has a lot of fun throwing mobs with ridiculous hit point counts at you. A lot of the fights, it seems, are meant to last 8 minutes. They don’t nearly give enough ‘experience’ for that.

However ‘auto-battle’ is pretty cool. While a lot of people complain that it’s playing the game for you, just think about how much slower the fights would be if you were 1) Controlling all three party members and 2) Inputting every attack all the time. The auto-battle allows the battles to move fast, look visually stunning, and actually allows for the game to be *harder* since the computer picks the correct spells and abilities such that it’s *expected* for you to play at very near optimally. The part you have to play is getting into the right roles at the right time and occasionally tell the game to use more aoe attacks…

Also, whoever said you can only control Lightning must have complained before getting to the point where making your own party is no longer grayed out. Logically, why would they bother to give everyone in the party a summon if you were only going to be playing as Lightning?

It also seems just annoying that Snow is the first sentinel AND gets the first summon and then you don’t get to play him for more than a fifth of the time. However, linked experience is teh bomb.

My party right now is Lightning (COM, RAV), Fang (SEN, SAB), and Hope (RAV, MED). I haven’t gotten into fully buffing my party very often just because it takes so long. Maybe when Hope gets his summon and can buff a little faster.

And for now I’ve hit what I assume to be the ‘final’ boss before heading down to Gran Pulse and he’s really rough so I have to level up a bit on mobs that take way too long to kill. Yay.