Tag: jrpg

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Game Ramblings #27 – Final Fantasy XV

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: ARPG/JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

This is a very special game.  It may not be the kind of Final Fantasy a lot of people would have wanted, but as usual Square Enix has put in all the effort typical of their top effort titles.  While some performance and balance issues show the scars of its long development cycle, the game they have created is easily one of, if not the best RPG I’ve played this year.

It’s been a long time since I universally liked the story and characters of a Final Fantasy game.  There have been high points in most of the recent games, but the last few sets of FF characters have always had at least a couple people that just annoyed the hell out of me the entire time, even when the stories weren’t complete nonsense.  In FF XV’s case, this is the exact opposite.  Right from the very beginning you start off with the entire effective party, and the growth of the group as a team, and the interactions between them as they go on their adventure are fantastic.  I so wish I could spoil things here, because there were moments that surpassed the death of FF7’s Aerith for me in their emotional impact.  Also of note, the use of the song Stand By Me as both the intro and credits scene could not have been a more perfect choice to end the misadventure of this crew.

Now that said, the battle system is definitely rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.  It’s been since FF9 that we have seen the same battle system used twice in a row.  That game was the end of the long-used ATB system.  FF10 used a more traditional turn-based system.  FF11 and 14 were MMOs, with 12 using a very much MMO-styled real-time system.  13 then followed those all up with an ATB-like system, with some key changes in how it queued up events.

15 has thrown all that away, going for easily the most action-focused battle system they’ve ever done in a mainline title.  Gone are menus, gone are spells, gone are waiting times between turns.  In this one you have an attack button, a pseudo-dodge button, a warp button, and a jump button.  The combination of those actions, and the ability to switch between weapons and a handful of element-based attacks gives you your entire range of functionality.  You only control one character, with the other three members of the party being AI-based, mostly ending up being support characters by the end of the game.  Rather than the skill of the game being asset management, this brings timing to the forefront as the main skill to the game.  The primary dodge and attack buttons are both hold to execute, so attack chains don’t require button spamming, and dodge can be held to automatically avoid a lot of simple attacks.  In the end, the flow of battle is dictated more by which button you are holding down, rather than the more frantic button combo systems that a lot of ARPG games use.  The closest comparison I can really give is the Tales of series, but even then I don’t think it’s an adequate comparison to the system in place here.

FF XV has also shown quite a lot of western influence, particularly with the Elder Scrolls series, in the design of the overall gameplay flow.  If you were to just rush the story, I suspect this game could be easily completed in 15 hours or less.  However, the overarching story is that the group is on a road trip, and the game definitely plays to that.  Rather than fast travelling around the world, the group initially drives around the world, radio blaring, going from town to town.  Each town and rest stop typically acts as a quest hub, giving a number of general side quests, as well as typically more challenging creature hunts.  There are also fishing areas scattered around the world, and a number of hidden dungeons to explore for extra treasure.  In doing this, you can easily spend the bulk of your time playing this game just hopping around the world doing absolutely everything but the main story, giving lots of longevity to the game outside of the typical story loop.

So, in the end, this game and its universe are easily something I would recommend.  There is also some good additional content that will help give light to some of the world’s backstory in the Kingsglaive movie and Brotherhood anime.  That said, the core of the universe is definitely the game, and it’s a good one.  It’s likely to go down as one of the most controversial games in the Final Fantasy series, simply due to its departure from the style of the past, but I think Square has made a good decision here in reestablishing that Final Fantasy are at their core extraordinarily well produced games of any style at their core, and not just RPGs that have stick to a set of conventions to get by.

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Game Ramblings #26 – Pokemon Sun & Moon

More info from Nintendo/Game Freak

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: 3DS

So one of the things that was continually talked about pre-release for these games was how much the 7th generation was going to change up the formula for Pokemon.  Having now finished the game, I’m not that convinced they really changed much at all, and in a lot of ways they seem to have stripped out features to get to a simplified base to start the generation.  While I’m pretty comfortable saying that as usual, this was a fantastic game and is the best Pokemon entry that’s been released, it feels like another iterative step in the series, and not at all a big change to the formula.

So, I guess to start, let’s look at what actually is new.  We’re in a new region, Alola, this time taking place on a bunch of islands.  The theme of a lot of the new 80 or so Pokemon in the Gen 7 Pokedex revolves around this, particularly in the large amount of legendaries available in the post-game content.  In addition, there’s a handful of Gen 1 Pokemon in new Alola forms, such as the Dark/Normal Rattata or Ice/Steel Sandshrew.  In all you’re talking about 100 or so new entries into your overall strategy.  There’s also a replacement to Gen 6’s Mega Evolutions called Z-Moves, super powered moves tied to type- or Pokemon-specific Z-Crystals that are found throughout the main story.

So all that is well and good, but is largely comprised of expected changes.  From there we have to get into the kinda sort asterisk changes that were really claimed as the big steps forward, as well as some features that were removed from Gen 6 games that are definitely to be missed.

The big one here is the change associated with gyms.  Gyms are gone! You aren’t collecting badges! …kind of.  Gyms were effectively replaced by a new captain challenge system.  Each captain challenge is a special area on each island in which you take on a type-specific challenge.  As an example, in one you are tasked with researching a series of disturbances in a lake, culminating in a series of water Pokemon fights, with the reward being a water Z-Crystal.  Long story short, they technically aren’t gyms, and technically aren’t badges, the functionality is effectively the same, going from area to area to fight type-restricted fights.  Alongside the gym changes, there’s also some big asterisks associated with changes to the Pokemon League that are effectively covered in the story.

As far as removals go, Alpha Sapphire/Omega Ruby extended the gameplay of Gen 6’s post-game in some smart ways that no longer exist.   The first big one of these is the Soar feature, where you could fly on the back of Latios or Latias over the Hoenn region, giving you access to both battles against flying Pokemon, as well as a larger number of Soar-exclusive legendary Pokemon areas, and post game content.  In addition, the DexNav feature is completely removed.  This has two important consequences.  First, the per-route visual indicator of what Pokemon are available is gone.  Second, the entire hidden Pokemon feature is gone.  In general the second-screen experience is effectively only restricted to combat inputs and an always-on Town Map, which fairly heavily simplified the count of non-essential mechanics available to the player.  In addition, the removal of Mega Evolutions is at the very least curious given the amount of marketing push it received throughout the entirety of Gen 6.

All that being said, overall I still think the game is a step forward.  In shedding some of the old mechanics, they have definitely simplified the game back to a much cleaner slate, giving them a good base to start with looking forward to the probable move to the upcoming Switch.  It also provides some questions as to how they are going to handle the assumed Gen 4 remakes when they’re ready to move in that direction.  The team at this point seems to have caught up to a lot of the type mechanics added within the last couple of generations, with a lot of the new Pokemon adopting dual-type combos never seen before.  The addition of region-specific forms also gave us curious new type combinations, lending a bit of mystery to what kind of Pokemon is coming up next when you’re told that you will be facing a Sandslash.  If they really run with some of these features through the rest of Gen 7, we could be set for a huge jump in the quality of the Pokemon games from this point forward.

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Game Ramblings #23 – World of Final Fantasy

More info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita

Given the month and year we’re currently in, you’d expect that the monster capture RPG that everyone wants to play is Pokemon Sun/Moon.  However, Square-Enix decided to launch World of Final Fantasy anyway, so here we are.  WoFF is decidedly a monster capture RPG at its core, but with characters and a story that blend a large number of past FF games, and a battle system pulled straight out of the SNES and PS1 entries in the series.  Overall, while it may not end up being the best monster capture title this year, it certainly is worth playing for any serious JRPG fans.

WoFF takes place in the world of Grymoire, where pretty much everyone but the two main characters are little chibi folks.  The story is your usual overpowered bad dude taking over the world nonsense, but it generally works and provides enough of a reason to move forward.  The even better reason to move forward for FF fans are the constant cameos from past FF stars.  The cameos run the gamut from FF 1 through 13, and tend to hit all the big protagonists, including the return of the voice actors for the titles that had voice acting.  If you’re a fan of the series at all, you’ll get a kick out of the constant barrage of recognizable faces as you get to new areas.  It’s a fun time throughout, and ends up working out well enough to provide an entertaining backdrop to the core gameplay.

The setting also provides the depth of FF monsters for you to capture. You’ll be grabbing everything from Chocobos to Cactuars to Tonberries on the low end, all the way up to recognizable summons like Ifrit, Bahamut, and Diabolos at the high end.  The wide range of sizes and styles all feeds back into the way that you build out your team, providing both the fun of capturing all the things you’ve fought in the past, as well as a huge amount of depth to building out teams that mask each other’s weaknesses while boosting their strengths.

That said, the battle system is the real star here.  The core of it is the instantly recognizable Active Time Battle system from the FF4-FF9 games, and it essentially remains the same.  What is different here is how the party is built out.  The general idea is that each of the two main characters exists in a stack consisting of a small, medium, and large NPC.  Because the main guys can be normal human form or chibi form, they can fill the large or small slot.  The rest of the slots are then filled out by the monsters you capture.  This stack then combines its stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities to form the unified character stack that takes its turn in battle.

What this ends up doing is providing a pretty large meta game to how you build out your party.  While you may want some fire attacks, this would expose the stack to a weakness against water.  To combat this, you can then also place a character strong against water, eliminating that elemental weakness, and providing an overall better prepared stack.  On the other hand, you can combine the stack with another fire user to really increase the strength fire resistance, as well as providing boosts to the strength of fire attacks used by the stack.  This mix and match continues throughout the game, to the point where I would typically have entire new rosters each time I entered a new area.

The other nice system that came in from other FF games is the way that the monsters you capture gain ability and stat increases.  Beyond just gaining flat stats through leveling, every species has a grid-based upgrade system very reminiscent of the Sphere Grid system from Final Fantasy X.  Some upgrades in this system are flat stats as well, but by and large you use the system to gain active and passive ability upgrades.  The system also is used to unlock the evolutions of monsters, where the upgrades earned from one variant of a species carry over as you evolve into another variant.  Of note, the monsters can evolve up and down to any variant of a species that you have access to at any time, so there’s never the question of whether or not it’s worth evolving a monster.  You just change it to what is most useful at the time.

Overall this was a really solid JRPG to be playing, especially in the lead up to the Pokemon series’ next entry.  It certainly wasn’t immune to problems; the end game in particular got really grindy.  However, it showed that there’s still a lot of life in the FF series, while still allowing for them to branch out into other interesting gameplay types that aren’t just the core series.  While FF15 is going to be an incredibly different game from this one, WoFF also gives me hope that Square is giving their Final Fantasy teams all the resources needed to pull off incredibly high quality games, with the time needed to make sure they are in the right place to succeed.