final fantasy Archives - Page 5 of 22 - 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.

Eorzean Melancholy

September 29, 2016 by Belghast

I find myself going through a bit of an odd patch with Final Fantasy XIV, or more so I guess one that has been dragging on far longer than I expected. When A Realm Reborn launched I was reluctantly playing because my friends were playing. However something happened along the way and I fell in love with Eorzea. We drifted apart once our little circle of friends started exiting the game, only to come back a year or so later in full force. Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV was the game that we left, without really having a reason other than simply running out of things we were able to do. Mind you… not things we WANTED to do… things we could realistically do with the gear levels we had without copious amounts of grinding. When we ultimately came back there was an entire years worth of content waiting for us to explore and it quite literally took every moment up to the release of the expansion… and a bit after it to be able to see and explore all of it. I cannot remember another expansion for any game that I looked forward to with near the anticipation that I did Heavensward. While the story content was fun to level through, it was also an expansion of limited scope. It is strange that getting two dungeons per patch cycle instead of three makes a huge difference… but it really did and it made each new set of experts feel monotonous. You would ultimately have the dungeon you liked, and the dungeon that you disliked… and it always felt like you ended up getting queued into the dungeon you really did not care for. I am looking at you Neverreap.

Once again we faded away from the game, and while I stayed subscribed this time… I pretty much only poked my head in for new content patches and holiday events. Recently we made a push to “get the band back together” and start raiding again. The problem there being that while I am interested in raiding with my friends… I really want to put zero effort into actually getting the gear NEEDED to raid properly. When I lay out the options I have before me each night… I never end up choosing to spend my time in Final Fantasy XIV. This week another content patch was released, and the game has almost lapped me once again since I was existing in “barely eligible” territory before. There are several of the new things, like the story content that I can complete right now with my item level. However to be a proper and reasonable tank I really need to get in and devote some time to gearing. Unfortunately I really just don’t want to. It is extremely hard to stay viable in a game that you find yourself only willing to play once a a week. The malaise has been strong with this game for me, and I am not entirely sure why. I have always been one to complete each and every holiday and quest that springs up… and now I have this sad line of broken quests that I never actually finished. I completed one part of the multi-part burning rangers quest… but never actually finished that up so while I have the armor I have none of the poses. The Yokai event has been started but I have not actually put enough effort into anything to actually get pets or weapons. Similarly I realized last night that I apparently completely missed The Rising, because while I kept thinking I will do it someday… I ran out of somedays to do it in. Finally the Palace of the Dead arrived… and while I have done some with friends I have yet to actually finish any weapons.

I guess it disturbs me how uninteresting all of this seems to me right now, and I have no clue why. Its like waking up one morning and realizing that you and your best friend… really don’t have much in common. So often when I fade away from an MMO there are clear reasons why, this decision or that decision that caused me to get frustrated and quit. Final Fantasy XIV however is just simply dying from my own neglect and unwillingness to visit it. On some level that makes me really sad because I am not sure what it was about the Heavensward cycle that made it so much less sticky for me personally than the Realm Reborn. I think a big part of it is my attraction to loot, and the fact that it feels like there is nothing that I can really do with my time other than hopping on the expert dungeon train. What I mean is that FFXIV for all intents and purposes is a lootless game… or at the very least a game devoid of interesting drops. Sure there are chests at the end of dungeon encounters that reward items, but I am talking about is open world free range loot. I like the fact that in other MMOs there is always a chance, albeit slim that I might get something awesome to drop when I kill any random mob out in the world. This pushes me to run amok and slaughter everything I come across… in the hopes that this one might be the one that gives me something awesome. Final Fantasy unfortunately gives me stacks and stacks of crafting materials that I don’t care about, especially since I find the auction house system and selling said materials cumbersome as hell. So what ends up happening is every mob death feels equally meaningless to me, because there are no situations being set up like that one time I killed a Giant in Stranglethorn and go`dt the Skullflame Shield.

Final Fantasy XIV has hands down some of the best group content, but similarly it is equally boring. Sure there are the occasional item that has a nifty graphic that you can pick up from roulette, but for the most part you are running dungeons not to get interesting gear… but instead to increment a number of tokens until you can then spend those saved tokens on a piece of gear. Even then, for the most part gear is an incremental stat stick, that unless you are replacing a 180 with a 220… is not immediately noticeable that the game feels immediately better. Granted this is a problem with a lot of MMOs when you pick up items that don’t do something. I am running into this problem with World of Warcraft at the moment in that every single trinket I get just seems to give me a bunch of stats and doesn’t actually do much in the interesting column. The big problem however is that I just don’t feel more awesome when I put on better upgrades in Final Fantasy XIV… largely because how I judge that “feel” is by my effectiveness to take down random stuff out in the open world. Since there is nothing actually interesting to kill in the open world… it is defusing that feedback circle for me. Ultimately I get gear to feel more powerful taking down things that maybe I once struggled. It is the “Sand Giant” effect played out in a smaller scale over and over and over for me. In Everquest there were these mobs called Sand Giants that decimated players in what was ultimately a level 20ish zone called the Oasis of Marr. However there was a moment of sweet retribution when you could come back at 45-50ish and destroy them and get all of that pent up revenge. Gearing in an MMO has this same effect for me… as I level there are always big bads that I maybe struggled to take down… and then it feels great to eventually turn the tables on them. Apart from the early raid content… I don’t have that experience in FFXIV and I think it is why the open world combat feels so dull to me. Anyways… this post has gone on far longer than I expected it to, but it still is sad to me… that for many of these reasons… I am just not finding myself playing much Final Fantasy.

A New Tank Enters

August 23, 2016 by Belghast

Down to Goblin Town

This morning I am having one hell of a hard time getting started, largely because it feels like I don’t really have a whole lot to talk about. It was a Monday night, and that means raiding in Final Fantasy XIV. However it was also a night that I was seeming to have a pretty frustrating migraine headache. So in truth it was a good thing that we were breaking in a brand new tank… or at least one new to our group. Pixel Executioner I am pretty sure is something that once upon a time I knew from the Blog Azeroth community, but thanks to the miracle of the fact that everyone seems to be connected on the internet I am getting to know him again thanks to Neph. Pix had apparently never quite finished the original run of Alex so we started our evening there, with turn four otherwise known as “Burden of the Father”. This went down in really short measure, and so long as you are tanking the boss… you really don’t have a clue there are any mechanics that need to be dealt with. The only thing as the boss tank that you have to worry about is Discoid which signals you are just about to take a ton of damage. As a result this was the absolute perfect first tanking foray of the evening to break him into the rhythm.

After that we moved into the next part of Alexander and ran through the next four turns. The awesome thing about this is that it gave me a nice little break between fights to kinda chill out and try really hard to forget my head was trying to kill me. I am pleasantly surprised where we have come as a group, because I remember struggling a little bit when we first did Alex Midas, but last night it seemed really easy. Well that is until we reached turn seven… which has a significant amount of madness going on. The awesome thing there is that we finally learned how to mechanic one of the phases. Previously the answer to getting through the fire jail was just to have rez ready to go to bring back whoever happened to get locked in it. Instead this time we learned that during the fire phase you just stand still and do nothing until your group brings you out of it. If you move however… you die… and we were trying to do stuff and move… which is apparently a bad idea? The best part about the night is that we managed to actually finish the second Alex for Pix. We were coming down the to the end of our normal run time, and I honestly thought we did not have anywhere near enough time to finish. However we managed to pull a victory out on the final boss… having only gone about five minutes over our normal close time.

It was a really great night and apparently luck was on my side. For awhile now I had been sitting on one of pretty much all of the items needed for the various armors that require two items. Over the course of the evening apparently the game decided it liked me, because I won a significant number of rolls and suddenly shot up in item level. I managed to complete the arms last week, but this week I managed to complete helm, boots and belt bringing my item level up to a respectable 113. At some point I really need to spend some time getting back in game and finishing off my weapon in Palace of the Dead, because there were several moments last night when the fact that Pix my co-tank had one… made it harder to maintain threat. In all honesty I have been struggling to remain interested in Final Fantasy XIV. I am enjoying raid nights, but I am simply not wanting to put any of the other time in to make sure I am geared enough. Which I know has to be frustrating to my raid mates. I feel like I am fairly horribly geared as a whole, at least compared to what I could be. The problem being when I sit down after a long day of work… I keep logging into World of Warcraft instead of Final Fantasy XIV. Especially with the launch of Legion happening next week… my FFXIV time is likely to continue to be in Triage mode for awhile.

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.