Final Fantasy XV Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Games of the Decade: 2016

December 24, 2019 by Belghast

We continue this morning towards the trajectory of recounting the games that were especially important to me over the last decade. Yesterday I stated that I had been trying to avoid talking about expansions and DLC… and now this morning I am going to break that guideline and include an expansion. I guess that is the good thing about this being a very personal list and not some attempt at a “greatest ever” concept, because I can make the rules as malleable as I like. All of these games feel very fresh in my memory as though I could have played them yesterday.

Doom (2016)

I somewhat hate that they titled this game the same as the game that came out in the 90s… because it forever means that we are going to be stuck putting a year in parenthesis behind it. However on another level it absolutely makes sense. This game is effectively a re-imagining of the original game and bringing it up to modern fidelity. It feels like a game that is a throwback to an older era of visceral shooters that were fast paced and twitchy. It also adapts the style of the game to include much needed breaks in the action allowing you to catch your breath and collect any power-ups that might be laying around before charging head first into another furious wave of combat. This was one of the things I loved about the Painkiller series, and it is nice seeing the originator cherry picking some of the best features of those who ultimately copied it.

Final Fantasy XV

I will admit when I first saw the concept of this game I viewed it with some serious side-eye. I was not sure how I would feel about what looked to be a boy band on a road trip. The end result however is charming as hell and one of the most unexpectedly touching games I played during this year. I was not sure what the future of Final Fantasy would be, but I never quite expected an ode to Route 66 roadside towns. Having lived my entire life near the “mother road”, there is so much of this game that resonates with me and they somehow managed to capture so many aspects of it perfect… albeit filtered through a Japanese lens. What I found the most compelling however was the combat and how it still very much felt like a Final Fantasy game while remaining fully action based. I need to spend some time and finish this game up and play through all of the side content that I missed.

The Division is a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings, not all of which are positive. I latched onto this game hard when it came out and pretty much dedicated every waking moment to exploring it. The narrative it presented was infectious and I gobbled up every bit of lore I could get my hands on about how exactly the fall happened. I personally found it to have some pacing issues as you got higher in level, and not having a stable group was a major detriment to my long term stability in the title. Soloing the content felt amazing at first but eventually became way more challenging since I am not naturally drawn to cover shooters. I kept wanting to try and play this like my beloved Destiny, with a run and gun nature… but was thoroughly punished for it. Regardless of all of this it still carved out a very important place in this very packed year of games and deserves its space on the list.

This is the year that Pokemon Go became a phenomena and people absolutely lost their shit. This also represents the very first time that a mobile game mattered to me. Up until this point I had downloaded and installed very few games on my mobile phone. The interface never felt compelling to me and it always seemed like a worse version of a game genre on either a hand held or console. Pokemon Go was an entirely new type of game-play that only worked on mobile connected devices, and I took wandered outside of my house at night looking for the illusive creatures. The biggest problem I have had with the game is that if you are in Rural areas or the Suburbs, your game-play experience is not amazing. You have to go places to be able to play, because still to this day I can go for a walk around my neighborhood and only encounter a half dozen critters. whereas if I do the same thing in the downtown Tulsa are I work I am constantly coming across new and interesting things. It has earned its place on my list because I still to this day keep popping it open when I am in a new place to see what I might encounter.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Up until 2016, had you asked me what my favorite World of Warcraft expansion was, I would have predictably said Wrath of the Lich King. In many ways I considered that to be the pinnacle of the WoW experience and everything since that point has more or less been a downhill slide with occasional plateaus. Legion was an expansion that I didn’t expect much from because quite honestly it seemed like a bunch of elements left on the cutting room floor from other expansion ideas. However what it wound up being was a complete and total revitalization for World of Warcraft that I greatly miss. Battle for Azeroth has been a disappointment in every possible way, and I think that has been all the more apparent because of the unexpected greatness that was this expansion. My hope is that Shadowlands brings us back to this era of the game and I can wholeheartedly love it again.

Moogle Charro Suit

March 8, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I had all of the intent in the world to come home and stream some Monster Hunter World nonsense. Wednesday is likely going to be one of those days I stream because it is a relative dead spot for the rest of the Moogle’s Pom team. When I got home from training however I was just mentally toast and was not sure if I could handle non-streaming interaction… let alone being “on” while playing something. As a result I slipped into the comfortable chill of Final Fantasy XV. As you can see I have decided to go with a completely different outfit for Noct because the Mariachi Charro suit with a Moogle Riding a Chocobo on the back is freaking amazing. I’ve always thought the classic Mariachi attire looked classy as fuck, and since FFXV is sorta this weird homage to the Americas it sorta fits. I also swapped the Regalia paint job for a classic two tone with black/gold rims and the black and white interior.

This is mostly going to not be a post about Final Fantasy XV but I had some screenshots to break up the blocks of text so I am using them. I’ve been in ITILv3 certification classes and it is simply a lot of information to consume and remember. What is making things more difficult is that some of our practices at work go against the norm and even attribute completely different meanings to some of the terms I am going to have to be tested on. Some of my peers talked about just being mentally toast when they got out of class each night and that is precisely what I am going through. We’ve taken six quizzes, a 40 term vocabulary test, a bunch of brain dump review sessions… and today is the day. We have a handful of study activities and a practice test… and then finally at 1:35 to be exact I take the online proctored certification test.

I spent some time reading last night and watched a few study guide videos… but I could tell that no more data was going to fit into my brain that evening. Its almost as though there is some maximum buffer of learning that I have reached each day and only sleep manages to come along and clear it out. At this point we have covered probably well over 100 specific terms that we are going to need to understand and differentiate from other super similar terms. It is not like my job is on the line if I don’t pass… but I will catch massive hell because my predecessor did not when everyone else that went through a giant class together did. So far I have made roughly 80% on all of the quizzes so I am trending to be able to make the minimum of 65% needed to pass the test and get certification. Ultimately I will feel better once I have taken the practice exam and seen how I do on that.

In the meantime… I am ready for some normalcy to return to my week. I’ve been in training each day since Tuesday with my entire focus being absorbing as much raw information as I can. Coming back to work Friday and doing normal tasks is going to feel super odd given that I have been holed up in a classroom for the last three days. It honestly may not be until the weekend that I have decompressed enough from this experience to be able to interact with other human beings on a regular basis. I have stuff that I ultimately want to do in both Final Fantasy XIV and Monster Hunter World, and I have not even had a chance to check in and see what the weeklies are this time around. I know the Wiggler quest ends soon, and then shortly after that the Anjanath Horizon Zero Dawn quest. I need to make sure that everyone I know has the bits from that quest they still need before it poofs.

On the Final Fantasy XIV front I need to burn through the rest of the main story quest so that I can unlock the rest of the dungeons needed for Expert Roulette. I would really like to get into a comfortable pattern of coming home and doing the few daily roulettes for bookrocks in order to catch up gear wise. I would also really love to grab some people I trust and run through Rabanastre so I can get some quick explanations of the fight before I start tanking it on a regular basis. I could in theory run it as Samurai, but I am not sure if my gear is good enough to get in there on that class.

Finally last night I spent a little bit of time downstairs in bed playing around with my 2DS XL. Firstly I have to say how much better I like using this than the 3DS XL. For whatever reason the screen on the 3DS always screwed with my eyes. I could never actually see the 3D paralax effect and as a result everything just looked fuzzy even with the 3D settings flipped all the way to the lowest settings. As a result the 2DS screen looks so much crisper and as a result every game just feels better. The other awesome side effect is the fact that it is so much lighter, and also qualifies as a “New” device meaning I can finally put some of my favorite SNES games on it. I managed to catch Monster Hunter 4U on sale for $8… but sadly at the time of posting this it has gone back up to its full price. I started that game and already like it more than I did Generations, and I managed to defeat the Well-Done Steak boss on my first attempt because of figuring it out from World. These games feel so fresh and new… and I have to think a lot of my reluctance to play them had to have been how much the screen frustrated my eyes.

One Big Download

March 7, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was mostly an evening filled with frustration… at least the tail end of the night. I’ve talked about this before but I have a slightly different setup from most people in that all of my gaming stuff is upstairs in my office with both consoles and my real gaming pc hooked up to my 4k television up there. My wife needed to grade last night which is traditionally a downstairs activity and after about an hour and some change I felt sorta bad being upstairs while she was downstairs… when I was technically playing something I could play on the laptop. So I stopped the stream and headed downstairs to in theory chill on the sofa.

The core problem with that idea is that FFXV is a 75 gigabyte download which took legitimately a couple of hours to download over the wireless. However once we reached what I thought would be the end of the download… it stalled out for thirty minutes with zero activity. In the past when this has happened I have paused downloads in steam and restarted… and then things wake the hell up and finish up. That was not at all what happened this time however and the game decided to start downloading everything again. So when I finally gave up last night we were about 40 gb into download number two… and I have zero clue if it actually finished over night.

According to Steam I have spent 72 minutes playing Final Fantasy XV and for the most part it feels great and looks amazing as a PC game. There are some weird hiccups where the game would freeze but I was not sure if that was part of the whole combat engine or not. It would always happen after I did a big attack so maybe this is something that also happened on the PS4 that I am simply not remembering. As far as the actual feel of controlling the game with mouse and keyboard… it feels amazing other than the menu interactions. What it seems like you would logically do is select the menu item with your mouse, but that is not at all what happens. Instead you have to sort of scroll through the menus with WASD or a super awkward move the mouse in a general direction to pick an option scheme.

Combat however feels way more fluid for me using a mouse and keyboard than a controller which is ultimately the mode of the game I am going to be interacting with the most. This is one of those times that I am super thankful that the game is constantly prompting you which button you should push when, because it allowed me to drop right into the game and start playing rather than trying to memorize the keybindings. The biggest thing that just feels instantly better thought is basic sword attacks because I always felt like I was never quite dexterous enough with my fingers to do all of the interactions I needed to do. I was constantly missing blocks and parries which are things that I just sorta now do instinctively with a mouse.

I didn’t make it super far into the game because of the nonsense I tried to do with the laptop, but I did make it to Gauldin Quay which moves the story forward a tiny bit. That said I was absolutely more into doing the side quests than I ever cared about the main story. All in all I am happy I wound up picking this up for PC and look forward to making it further than I did on the console. This is mostly going to be a downstairs and chilling game for me, and the demo performed well on my laptop. Sure it lost a lot of detail that I get on the full gaming rig, but it will be fine for running around and slashing things to death.

Aloy and Horsebirbs

February 28, 2017 by Belghast

We live in trying times… and what I mean by that is right now there are entirely too damned many great games coming out in a very short period of time. I was already woefully behind in my progress in literally everything, and when compounded by the fact that I am apparently bingeing the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV you end up with a lot of stuff simply not getting accomplished. For example… this month the AggroChat game of the month is Final Fantasy XV. It is in fact MY pick… but I have been high center in the game for a long time and last night I attempted to fix that. I kept telling myself that I would only do the main story quest, and that lasted for a little while but not long. Firstly I wound up bumping into a bunch of ridiculously higher level mobs on the way to my next quest objective. One of which was freaking Midgardsormr… just hanging out chilling on the river bank. When I made a tactical retreat and pushed forward into the cave… I found that pretty much the mobs inside were also going to kick my ass. So that means I have hit the wall that my gear and level seems to be able to get me to… so as the evening went on my purpose seemed to disintegrate and I was once again wandering aimlessly and doing all of the side quests in a vague attempt to catch up level wise.

Ultimately I am suffering from the exact same problem that I had when we were doing Fallout 4 as a game of the month. For many of the folks in our podcast… winning the game is the goal and seeing the story to its conclusion. For me that really isn’t a thing… and instead I like doing all of the little objectives and inhabiting the world, participating in it. So in many ways moving the story forward… defeats that purpose because I keeps moving me past things that I kinda want to get out and roam around and explore. When it comes to trying to push a game like this… it ends up making me miserable. Ultimately I am not going to be even closed to the end of the game when we record the podcast this weekend, and largely I think I am going to be okay with it. Final Fantasy XV is still one of my favorite games from last night, and I really don’t much care about story spoilers in the first place. That was never why I was playing the game, and never why it clicked with me. It clicked because it was finally a Final Fantasy game that embraced my desire to roam around and get off the beaten path… and then actually rewarded me for doing so. Now I wish I had been playing the game all of this time, because last night I really enjoyed myself. However I end up getting caught up in wanting to be around actual living breathing people… and for me that means MMOs. Getting bit by the Final Fantasy XIV bug hasn’t helped lately either in my push to get everything to 50. However this is still a game that I am enjoying moving through, albeit slowly.

The game that is going to be the death of me right now however is Horizon Zero Dawn. During the mishap with my account and a bunch of others getting compromised on PSN, I ended up getting $50 funded to my Playstation wallet. They were unable or unwilling to reverse the charges on my credit card, so I had this pot of cash that was sitting there needing to be spent on something. As a result I ended up pre-ordering Horizon and when I checked my PS4 yesterday morning it had already installed and was simply waiting on the magic moment to launch. This is going to fall down into the “bel knows better” category… but by now I should have learned not to attempt to play a game at 11pm central when things generally officially launch for me. However I did this thing… and as a result I wound up getting to bed significantly later than I would have liked. Also as a result I am groggy as hell sitting down this morning to write this blog post. That said I need you to marvel at how adorable babby Aloy is… and that you end up playing as her for a bit and not just through a sequence of cut scenes. I’ve barely scratched the surface and not even really made it through the tutorial section… and this game already has me hooked in both game play and its world.

Admittedly this game did not really have to try terribly hard to hook me given its theme. Awesome bow lady that fights zoids for fun and profit. What I didn’t expect was just how damned good the controls feel and how responsive combat actually ends up being. Things have happened already in the story line that I did not expect to happen… and I am super intrigued as to how they end up playing out in the long run. I don’t want to get too much into my thoughts about story events, because literally the game just unlocked last night and I don’t want to spoil anything really. What I do find interesting is that so far this game has confirmed my theory about something. Several years ago I would have told you that I simply did not enjoy playing female characters in games. I now know that is completely wrong… and I do absolutely enjoy female characters so long as they are the equivalent of the sort of male characters I enjoy. I like warriors… I like playing badasses that are armed to the teeth and more importantly armored. Over the last few years there have been a long list of characters that I have really enjoyed from the modern reboot of Lara Croft, to Zarya in Overwatch, to Sonya in Heroes of the Storm. Aloy is just another in a long line of these characters that I enjoy playing, and apparently it was never a gender thing… and just a warrior thing. I will be anxiously watching the clock today at work, so I can get home and play some more Horizon and see where the game takes me. I know that Tam stayed up late last night to go ahead and start playing, and he seems to be enjoying it as well.