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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.

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Shelved It #1 – Paper Mario: Color Splash

More Information from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Wii U
  • Shelved At: Bowser’s Castle, basically the last couple hours of the game.

It may seem weird that I shelved a game when I knew I was near the end of the game, but for this game it was basically the point of no return for me.  Paper Mario: Color Splash was a frustrating experience.  Frustrating because it’s a much better game than the previous entry, Sticker Star, but also because the key story points generally introduced changes in mechanics that seemed to counteract everything that had been going on before.

One of the big things that really turned me off from playing Sticker Star was the need to collect stickers just to continue the battles.  This has unfortunately not gone away, but at least for the bulk of the game, is not a huge issue.  There are now a couple shops in the main town that sell standard cards, as well as the more special-case Thing cards that are the primary mechanic of most boss fights.  That said, the convenience of them being there is fairly heavily counteracted by the need for them to be there.  Going into a boss battle, you generally don’t know what you need to do to win.  You may know what cards you’ll need, but not when or how to use them.  Because of this, it was not uncommon for me to go into a boss battle blind, effectively expecting to die so I could actually prepare for the fight.

Because this entry is also not a stat-based RPG, the effective growth curve of enemies results in you needing upgraded variants of cards, and therefore a higher overall cost.  The cost is both coins if buying directly, or amount of paint used if using unpainted cards.  This ended up pushing me to a point where to get past where I shelved the game, I would have had to just grind through battles with cheap cards in order to buy the expensive cards I now knew I needed.  Because the first fight in Bowser’s Castle effectively starts out by removing your paint supply, then limiting you to specific colors of cards, simply stocking up on cheaper unpainted variants was a recipe for death.  While grinding then wouldn’t have been difficult, it wasn’t worth the amount of time needed given how many frustrating boss fights I’d already encountered getting to there.

If nothing else, there were some positive signs in this game if a future entry cleans up some of the less fun shenanigans.  The story itself was much more entertaining than either Sticker Star or the sort of related Paper Jam, and was definitely much closer to the quality of the RPG entries in the series.  While the battle system had some collecting issues, when I was just using the cards themselves, it was still a mechanically tight and fun to use turn-based system, with a lot of variety in the cards beyond the standard jump/hammer.  The visuals and soundtrack were also both fantastic.

At this point, I’m not really sure what this series needs.  My instinct is to say they just need to go back to making a straight RPG experience, and Paper Jam was certainly enough of an indication that a Mario RPG is still fun to play.  That said, they’ve shown that non-RPG Paper games can be a lot of fun with Super Paper Mario, but that was nearly 10 years ago at this point.  I suspect what they really need to do is just take a break and try some other things before deciding to come back, because their attempts at new things within this IP have become at best a mixed bag.

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Game Ramblings #22 – Forza Horizon 3

More Info from Turn 10

So, I like Forza.  Of the now 11 games I have for the Xbox One, 4 of them are Forzas.  It goes without saying that I was looking forward to this one.  This was also a bit of an experiment for me, as it’s the first of the new Xbox Play Anywhere titles I’ve gotten, so it was going to set the tone in how I considered those purchases going forward.

Let’s get this out of the way.  The PC port was rock solid.  Visually it didn’t look that incredibly different than the Xbox One version, but that was already a fairly solid looking title on its own.  What it did get right are the details.  It has really solid 21:9 aspect ratio support, which a lot of PC games still don’t get right.  It has both really solid quick configure video settings for more casual users (including a really solid dynamic visuals system to keep framerate steady), as well as highly configurable settings for your higher end users.  Even on ultra, getting 60 fps was not a problem.  Also of note, they added a bunch of wheel support with promises to continue adding more.  Having played some with the Logitech G27, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it was definitely worth a laugh.  So, that out of the way, the question then is how good is the actual game?

The racing itself is about what is expected of a Horizon title.  The cars still have a pretty solid feel to them, with the actual steering, breaking, etc still feeling relatively realistic, even if it tilts more towards the arcadey side of things when it comes to drifting.  Different classes of cars are very obviously in different performance tiers, and it’s obvious to tell the difference between the handling and acceleration dynamics of various vehicles.  To some extent the amount of damage that vehicles can take, even with simulation damage on, is somewhat outlandish, but given the gameplay it feels pretty appropriate without being completely over the top.  That said, AI drivatars are still somewhat rubberbandy, and definitely exist purely to provide a mark of in-race progression, because they generally have a tendency to run their line to a fault, even if you are already in the middle of the race line.  Overall though, the speed of races, and continued hilarity of the cross country events provides an experience that stays fresh as you proceed through each event.

The progression system of Horizon 3’s meta game has definitely seen some improvements over 2.  Whereas 2 had you going through a fairly linear path of championships back to back, 3 really pushes the open world to the forefront.  The name of the game is gaining fans, and gaining more fans allows festival locations to be upgraded, unlocking events, PR stunts, and ultimately the Horizon showcases.  Because everything you do inherently gains fans, you are much less locked into a core path.  One minute you may be doing a race, then hopping to a Bucket List, or looking for speed traps and jumps.  You also aren’t locked to vehicles for non-championship events, so I was changing vehicles at a much higher frequency than in 2.  Overall the game provided a much better play as you want it experience than past games, despite the fact that the first 2 titles were already fairly open in their progression.

I guess if I were to end it with anything, it’s that this is probably a good game to jump into if you’re at all a racing game fan.  If you’re purely a PC gamer and haven’t played a Forza game, this would fall in line with recent Need for Speed games, or the older Burnout Paradise as comparable games that have made it to PC.  If you’re a console gamer the list is pretty similar.  Really, if the idea of plowing through a field doing 180 in a Ferrari, all while mowing down bushes and jumping off a cliff into a river sounds at all appealing, you’d probably dig this one.  Yes, that happens.  Regularly.