final fantasy xv Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Final Fantasy XV Impressions

November 30, 2016 by Belghast

Firstly let me start off by saying that I am going to try and be as spoiler free as possible this morning. Last night I began Final Fantasy XV properly… or at least what I mean by that is I actually created a new game. It had been quite a long time since I last played one of the demos that were available through PlayStation Plus so I spent the first thirty minutes or so working through the tutorial room. Firstly I have to say how much I appreciate that the Tutorial Room is completely out of the game and something you can venture into by option. In truth all I really wanted to do was familiarize myself with the combat a bit before setting off on the adventure, and I managed to do that through a series of guided encounters. I feel like this tutorial could have been tightened up a bit, and a lot of the text removed because really… I got what warp strike did without the need for ten panels of text explaining it. However like I said this is entirely an optional experience and it allows you to escape out at any time and start the actual game. What I was pleasantly surprised by is that I am pretty sure… the intro to Final Fantasy V is twice as long as the intro to this game, in that it gets you out and into the action pretty quickly, far more quickly than I was expecting. The game does an excellent job of setting up quickly why you are going on the roadtrip and essentially who these people are that are assisting you along the way. The game also gives you this interesting flashforward… to set up that some bad shit is going to happen eventually. While I originally called this a boy band roadtrip simulator… it actually does an amazing job of making you care about the characters… because from the first dialog the game is fleshing them out for you.

Ignis – Tactician and Master Chef
Prompto – The runt of the litter, but also the romantic… constantly snapping photos
Gladiolus – The strong loyal type, but also ends up feeling almost big brotherly
Noctis – our prince… that ends up not being nearly as angsty as I expected.

We are given some insight to the relationships between Noctis and his father Regis in the intro, and some explanation as to why this road trip is happening… and that it might not be nearly as political in nature as it might seem. The real gem however is the constant banter between your companions that much in the same way as the Dragon Age gives you little vignettes into each of them, and feels like more than just a simple looping soundtrack of quips. It all seems purposeful and helps to flesh out the feeling of this group and explain the character motivations a little bit at a time. I am honestly shocked that only two hours into the game I already care about this team, and for the most part like each of them for their own thing. Hell I thought Prompto would be the new Snow… the character that I wanted to punt off a cliff but even he has grown on me. There are a lot of charming mini-games… the one that endears me to Prompto is the fact that he takes random photos as you go through your daily activities between camping for the night. While you are sitting around the camp fire or your inn room… you can sift through the photos and determine which ones are “keepers”. In fact most of the images for this mornings post come from these. The only complaint is that I wish when I clicked “save” in game that it actually saved it to the PS4 screenshot folder… and not some in game system that never actually goes full screen. I had to drop these in photoshop to crop out the black border before actually using them in a blog post which was annoying.

Another big surprise for me was just how fluid and good combat feels. I might be imagining things but it feels like they have tightened up the system considerably from the time I played Episode Duscae to now. It could also simply be that I sat through thirty minutes of combat tutorial, and I didn’t exactly do that in the demo. Whatever the case I feel like I can navigate combat without really thinking about it… which is honestly the way I like to play combat in most games. I want to push my abilities to the realm of muscle memory, and just simply react instinctively to what is happening on the ground… and this game seems to let me do just that. The only thing that seemed like it might be a little cludgy is the magic system, but thankfully I am not exactly the finger wiggler type. So at least for the case of Noctis I will likely never equip a magical ability… other than maybe Cure. As far as my team goes, they seem to have their own special abilities that more or less take the place of magic that unlock special team up style attacks. There is an interesting mini-game where Ignis being the tactician… suggests an attack combo that will work especially well on your opponent. This is less the Libra command from previous games… and more like a challenge mode to see if you can beat the mob while doing this one special attack. If you succeed you gain additional ability points to spend on top of the normal ones you would receive for simply defeating the encounter.

As far as the game world goes… it feels amazing. This is a Final Fantasy game that has learned what works in Skyrim, the Far Cry series, and Dragon Age… and then re-branded all of that to work and fit perfectly in the Final Fantasy world. The end result is this huge seamless world that lets you roam freely… with honestly very few constraints that I have found. Unlike Final Fantasy XIV for example… you absolutely can walk off the edge of cliffs… or at least you can in some places that I found out while tracking down some mining resources. The world is full of little details… like the ability to sit down beside this strange weather worn mascot for a diner. As you would expect the act of you doing this causes Prompto to want to take a photo, so it feels very much like a bunch of friends out doing goofy shit and exploring the world… free for possibly the first time from the shackles of having to live in Crown City under the watch of responsible adults. Hell there are times the commentary running between the four of them reminds me of some of the random shit my friends and I talked about when we were off on our own road trips in High School. This is easily the most “real” feeling Final Fantasy world I have experienced, and in a strange way it feels almost “American” in the way the various pieces fit together. So the biggest surprise of the game came when I happened to touch what looked like a pinball machine in this same diner, and was thrown into a minigame. Now generally speaking I don’t like Final Fantasy minigames that much, but this was actually really fun. It was a weird amalgam of bullet hell shooter, pachinko and pinball machine… with a strange multi character combat system.

I reached the first point in the story when the game warns you… that if you continue on you won’t be able to return for a long time. I could have simply said yes and moved the story along, but instead I decided to spend a bit more time and try and mine as much interesting bits from the area as I could before I moved the story forward. In the past this always paid off in Final Fantasy games… and I am hoping it will here as well. I decided to use that as a stopping point for the night however, and decided I wanted to go hang out on the sofa with my wife instead of play the PS4 which is hooked up in my office. I really need to give this game a shot over remote play and see how reasonable it is to play that way. The combat is active, but not so active that it would not be fairly forgiving of a little input lag. Menu driven combat is definitely a sweet spot for remote play, but this might just work as well. In any case… the game is good. I am extremely happy that I preordered through the PSN store… so that it preloaded in its entirety. I am hearing otherwise popping the disc into the system causes a 45 minute install process to start, which has to be frustrating. I was half expecting this to be the case with a digital download as well, but instead I was pleasantly surprised that I could just hit play and pop right into game without any fuss or mess. This only serves to cement my decision that digital is always the correct way to go on these things. I would be curious to hear your own thoughts of the game, but please for the time being keep your comments in the spoiler free variety.

Space Diablo

November 29, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a good night. It was a fairly crappy day at work because we were still dealing with the ramifications of events that happened over the break. Nothing says excitement like an 8 am conference call. That said I had an amazing bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on me when I got home. Sunday during the day we made a batch of soup in the crock pot, and for whatever reason soup is all the more amazing on day two. This time around I added a little shredded cheese to it and it was insanely good and the perfect thing to at least in part make me forget the day that lead up to it. As far as my evening the bulk of it was spent hanging out with Grace and Mor in Destiny. While I consider myself still very much a fledgling player, they are more so… and as a result it was kinda fun just to ride along as Mor experienced all of the content for the very first time. The big take away from the night however is that the year one strike bosses are still insane bullet sponges. I kinda find it sad that they never went back and updates these strikes, when much better year two versions exist. The walker in the Devil’s Lair normal difficulty strike… is quite possibly the hardest strike boss ever… or at the very least the one that takes the most time to bring down. I solo walkers out in the patrol zones for fun… and this one just would not die.

Mor calls the game “Space Diablo” and it is fitting because really in the end we are all after tasty loot. Since I had already done most of this content before a bunch of times, I opted to play my Warlock which is generally my least progressed character. On the Stormcaller spec for example I only had the base abilities unlocked that you exit the mission with. By the end of the night however I had a significant amount unlocked, and gear wise my Warlock has suddenly pulled out ahead of my Hunter. The thing with Warlock is that I like literally everything about it… except the jump. Squirrel will probably fight me on this one, but it just feels wrong. It doesn’t work the way I want it to work… and in truth if I could just give my Warlock the Titan jump… everything would be peachy. Then again I would give literally every class the Titan jump, and part of me hopes that they introduce a second round of artifacts that do just this… allow you to customize each character by giving them a different class jump. I don’t think that is likely ever going to happen, so in the meantime I will have to console myself with having permatracking thanks to Memory of Gheleon on every character. If nothing else that artifact is amazing for finding chests… which considering just how many there are in the plaguelands greatly increase how much glimmer I am getting.

Once things wound down in Destiny, I disappeared downstairs and worked on my Deathknight for awhile. Sunday with the start and stop nature of work, I didn’t get terribly far in knocking out some of my dungeon quests. In fact there was a point where I had queued for a dungeon, and shortly after the second boss had to drop group to hop on a work conference call. Were it a guild group this probably would not have been a show stopper given that I could alt tab back and forth as needed, however I excused myself from the PUG and became resigned to not actually finishing up Stormheim. So last night I started off by running Halls of Valor, which went extremely quickly and allowed me to move on in good conscience to Highmountain. Right now I am largely just focusing on the main story of the zone and ignoring any offshoots for the moment, because it already seems like I am going to ding 110 well before wrapping everything up. At the moment I am sitting at 60% into 108, and have just started the quests in High Mountain meaning I have most of an entire zone to level through. I will absolutely ding before leaving this zone, and then I can begin the slow process of gearing through World Quests. I have to say that I love Frost Deathknight for both a leveling and dungeon running spec, and it is going to dethrone my Paladin as my primary alt.

All of this said… I am not likely to work on my Deathknight tonight because I have a date with Final Fantasy. I am too old to stay up and play at the official launch of a game but instead have it sitting waiting for me on my PS4 for when I get home.

Night Means Business

March 23, 2015 by Belghast

Weekly Caps

Another weekend down, and I have somehow managed to cap poetics at the 11th hour. I did not get near as much playtime as I would have liked over the weekend, and I was pretty horrible about managing to do an expert roulette every single day. That said I still managed to cap without a whole lot of issue yesterday evening while watching television. This meant that I also managed to get a second item this week in the form of the ironworks neckpiece. Right now this only leaves me with the ring that is sub 120, as far as the full set of poetics gear I still need a chest and a belt. One of those will take multiple weeks to get, so at this point I am trying to decide whether or not to go after the expensive piece, or to go for another 375 item and upgrade my final 110 item to 120. I really wish that World of Darkness had a shot at dropping jewelry, or at the very least rings since that seems to be the problem item for all of my classes.

The problem with rings in Final Fantasy XIV is that they are unique equipped. Now there is a slight trick to this, that the unimproved and improved version of the same ring count as two separate items. This means I could buy a second ironworks ring now that I have an augmented one and get rid of that last 110 slot that way. This always feels wasteful since you are essentially never going to use that non-augmented ring for anything other than a bridge to slightly higher stats. This is one of those things that I hope they work around in the expansion, making more ways to fill that second ring slot without resorting to wasteful spending of tokens. Another thing I would love to see is for max level players to get a few tokens for running free company mates through low level content. I was honestly concerned that I might not make the cap this week because I spent most of my weekend tanking lower stuff for friends. I wouldn’t change a thing, but it would have been nice to know I am slowly inching towards the cap when we were running Dzemael Darkhold or Aurum Vale.

Lower Content

Other than the stress about hitting the 450 poetics weekly cap, I had a blast this weekend running free company mates through lower level content. Over the course of the weekend I tanked a few primal fights, a couple of trips into Stone Vigil, a couple of trips into Dzemael Darkhold, and if I am remembering correctly at least one trip into Haukke Manor. Essentially anytime a guildie needed something run, I stepped up and offered… sometimes with some caveats attached like that I was already in a run. What makes me even more happy is it seems like most of the guild is doing the exact same thing. Our folks really genuinely seem to enjoy helping, and this makes me extremely happy to see it in action. I find it interesting that even though we are spending a lot of time running content below our actual gear levels, that they still feel fresh and challenging each time we sit foot in them. That is a real testament to just how good their dungeon content is, that after running Haukke for what has to be close to the 100th time, it still feels just as enjoyable.

The awesome thing is that thanks to all of this dungeon running we have a whole new flock of players getting close to hitting the level cap on their first classes. I believe Syl hit 47 on her Black Mage, and I know Grace is somewhere in the 46ish range after our various runs throughout the weekend. What is so awesome about this is that doing 8 player content is going to be all that much easier as we keep adding new folks to the mix. The awesome thing is, there is a possibility that at some point we can actually be running two full parties at the same time. This is going to be great for offering lots of different content options to the group as a whole. It is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV in the Greysky Armada, and all of it just has me pumped to log in each night. I am thoroughly enjoying the game and really looking forward to June and the Heavensward expansion. That said also really looking forward to the 2.55 patch coming March 31st.

Night Means Business

I spent some time yesterday afternoon playing the Final Fantasy XV demo, otherwise known as “Episode Duscae”. The demo starts our cast of road trippers a bit into the content from the sounds of it. Their vehicle has broken down and they are having to make some cash to pay for repairs. This serves as a way to teach the player about combat. The other thing that it should have taught me better was that the day/night cycle means serious business. I did what I always do in games, and went wandering off the path looking for combat wherever I could find it. I took on packs of Saberwolves, and foolhardily a giant pack of what I think were called “Gerdua”. They were these huge lumbering tusked calf things, and somehow I managed to aggro around a dozen of them. I got a lot of practice using the parry options to take them down. As night fell the game reminded me that I really should camp for the night. The problem is it did not really message well where i should camp or even how I should go about doing this. On my map was a house icon, and an exclamation point there saying something about making camp.

So I wandered off in that direction in the middle of the night, and from out of the sky came a horribly bright light signaling an enemy drop ship was just about to flood me with baddies. After dispatching the first party of four heavily armored troopers, I started getting attacked by Goblins. The goblins were no big deal because they had minimal hit points, in fact after some time I started really enjoying wrecking them. That was until a second and third drop ship showed up… so I started trying to juggle eight heavily armored troopers and a half dozen goblins running in to fight me. I was actually holding my own for a bit, until the Saberwolves started showing up… and at that point I was pretty much done for. I thought to myself “That Escalated Quickly” and it really did… one minute I am doing just fine and feeling like I have a chance and the next moment the entire world seems to be attacking me. So when this game tells you to camp… I suggest you camp.

Booking Dungeons

September 19, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Roadtrip

This week the Tokyo Game show is happening and we are starting to get a trickle of goodies out like the long awaited updated Final Fantasy XV trailer. After watching it, I have to say this looks like it might be a Final Fantasy quite unlike the others. My friend Kodra mentioned how unusual it was to see an automobile in the Final Fantasy setting, and I had not really thought about it until then but he is right. It has almost been as though they have denied the existence of Automobiles in pretty much every setting other than Final Fantasy VII. Even in the super futuristic VIII they had the requisite flying airships in the form of giant aircraft… but they still lacked anything even resembling an automobile. Let alone a crazy sedan with suicide doors like they are touring the countryside in for this game.

From the video this seems like the game is going to be more like Final Fantasy XII was in the form of a more “Action Combat” approach to the JRPG. This has its fans and its critics, but I have to say one of my favorite Final Fantasy “cousins” was Vagrant Story that featured a very action combat game play style. I even liked Final Fantasy XII for what I played of it, at some point I want to go back and finish the game. What intrigues me the most about the game is the way it feels like the monsters are almost part disaster movie, like they are taking a road trip to survey the countryside like some sort of awkward rubberneckers. I just hope I can control which ever character I choose, because man I am all about the big dude with the beard and the knock-off buster sword.

Castlevania Dark Souls Edition

Another game I have been looking forward to on the PS4 since this years E3 is the game Bloodborne. At TGS they released a new trailer with some more tasty bits about the gameplay featuring what looks to be multiple classes for the player to choose from. I’ve somehow almost entirely missed the Dark Souls madness, but I am looking forward to this game as it feels more firmly in my wheelhouse. I love Castlevania, and I love the dire battle against the things that go bump in the night feeling that this game has. I just hope that the gameplay is every bit as fun as it looks like in the trailer. For a game like this to work for me, the moment to moment gameplay has to feel amazing… and from what I have played of Dark Souls my problem tends too be the wonky feeling control scheme.

This is probably going to to be a title that I end up trying before actually picking it up. I am sure this is blasphemy here but I actually thought Dragon’s Dogma felt much better than Dark Souls as far as moment to moment gameplay. As such I am really hoping that the control scheme is more similar to Dogma. In any case it is a grim dark game about slaughtering the undead and such, and that along makes me a happy camper. We need more games where we roam the country side slaughtering baddies for fun and profit. The only negative that I can see from the trailer is that like Order 1886 it looks a little bit “on rails” for my tastes. In any case I am watching both of those titles closely.

Booking Dungeons

Wednesday night we had tried to run Pharo Sirius for my friend Waren to complete this first Animus book and wound up failing miserably. In my infinite wisdom I attempted to bring along two of our lowest geared players, one of which was the healer… and quite simply he didn’t have the mana to heal the place at just barely ilevel 48 the bare minimum. Last night however we changed up the mix and brought in a very seasoned healer and cleared the dungeon with minimal effort. That really became the theme of the night, cleaning up dungeons both myself and Warenwolf needed for our Animus books. So in total we ran Pharo Sirius, Lost City of Amdapor, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Stone Vigil. For the last of these we managed to grab one of our up and coming healers that still needed experience and got her roughly a level in doing the place.

Essentially what we learned through the failure that was Wednesday, and the success that was Thursday is that pretty much you can only afford to have a single player in the mix that is significantly undergeared for the content. There were other issues Wednesday night, like the fact that the player had not completed the level 50 quest and was missing both the piece of armor from it and more importantly the critical ability you get that for white mages is your full heal. I cannot impress upon new players enough that the moment you ding 50… go complete your last Job quest. It always gives your class something that you will desperately need from that point onwards. The game assumes you have these abilities, and will throw things at you that often times require them.

As far as leveling goes I managed to get my Paladin to 39, which let me equip a sweet new Grand Company weapon. Since I got Zantetsuken waiting on me in the bank, I thought I would take this opportunity to glamour my weapon to look like the Blazefire Saber. This might literally be the only time I get to use my spiffy gunblade from the Lightning Returns event… since seriously there is no weapon in the game nearly as cool as Zantetsuken. Additionally I have been banking the Hunt Seals needed to buy my Paladin a full set of gear the moment I ding 50. I am not sure what exactly happened, but at this point I have definitely changed focus from leveling the White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. I think more than anything it was my realization that I lacked a class to easily grind additional Atma bits on, now that I screwed up and got my Warrior Atma weapon first. Atma grinding does two useful things for me… firstly I get the chance at atma bits, but more importantly the steady flow of company seals keeps my ventures running. Hopefully at some point this weekend I will have a brand new paladin ready to go.

#FFXIV #FFXV #Bloodborne