Final Fantasy 13

As a gift to myself after I finished grad school, I ended up buying myself Final Fantasy 13. I really, really enjoy RPGs and the Final Fantasy series in general, which also helped me to see buying this game as a no-brainer. After completing it this past week, after playing it for almost 3 months, I want to share my thoughts and feelings about the experience of playing FF13 with you. Hopefully, after reading this, I hope you get the game and also send your thoughts my way to help propel gaming and design for games and experience forward.

A Great Story and Epic Epicness


I enjoyed a lot of the experience of FF13. I loved all of the character designs and the depth of the characters. Lightning, Snow, Fang, Hope, Vanille, and Sazh all had interesting and beautiful costumes. The designs outdid themselves in their visual design of these characters, and the fully animated cutscenes looked beautiful and polished. It was VERY pretty. My favorite character was Vanille: not only was she the most well-rounded attacking character (she could debuff and attack – any time I had trouble with a boss, which happened a lot more than I expected), but she also was one of the characters who cared most about her friends in the main group and about protecting the world for the today, and for the future. The environments were also beautifully rendered, and I enjoyed going through all of them and trying to find all of the hidden items. They also ended up using a very good cuing system that would help me find all of the items, know when bosses were coming up, and also when I should be leveling up (which was quite often – any time when I got to a new environment, had enemies that just wouldn’t go down, or when there was intense music on). All of these small, subtle aspects of gameplay I still take for granted: without these small details that take into account the human aspect of gaming, I’d be remarkably less happy with this game.


I also really liked the crystarium. Much like the sphere grid of FF10, which is what I call the crystarium much of the time, it was a great way to entice the player to keep grinding to get to the greatest of rewards: the power to wipe any baddie off the screen as fast as possible through tons of HP, attacks, and abilities. The crystarium also had different sets of spheres to let the player know what is coming up to work for, which was great for me, as it helped me plan my playing sessions around how far I could get my characters to evolve during the current session. The crystarium also was beautiful visually to look at, which was a step above the plain sphere grid of FF10.


The Mixed Feelings of the Paradigms and Battle System


I did like a couple aspects of the battle system. The paradigm system was very flexible, allowing a player to create a setup to attack almost any type of situation. On the flip side to this, though, if the player wanted to switch out characters to better adapt to upcoming battles, the player had to reset everything over and over again. Setting up paradigms does take a little time to do, and it would have been more convenient for the game to keep your paradigms, regardless of the characters in the current party. With the flexibility of the paradigms, it allowed me to take advantage of something new to Final Fantasy: the chain gauge. The percentage reflects how much damage the player will do to the enemy, and repeated attacks can make the enemies become staggered, preventing them from attacking many times and also yielding higher and higher percentages of damage (but caps at 999.9%), which is essential to utilize against bosses and enemies with high HP, otherwise you’ll get completely decimated.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the battle system: I didn’t appreciate having to have my characters “locked in” to the different roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, medic, saboteur, synergist) and having to devote time to switching roles with paradigms. There were many times in this game where many of my characters would die because they would get hit during the paradigm switches or right when they were about to save themselves. The last part is sort of expected with gaming, but, at least on the 360, pressing the left-bumper, along with the directional pad, wasn’t very responsive, so I would lose even more time pressing the same buttons over and over again trying to get my team to switch to healing or back to attacking. That is totally aggravating. I also didn’t like how, for every battle, that the first switch of paradigms took forever, but all the rest were quick. This is a classic “cool” thing we get taught in design school: it may be cool to put in for an effect that’ll be used a couple of times, but it quickly loses its charm when it’s repeated thousands of times. And it was repeated at least a thousand times. And then another thousand. While it fits in the realm of Final Fantasy, it does pretty much nothing to help the player, and that’s what I don’t like.

A smaller, yet just as annoying aspect of the battle system, is that you couldn’t tell the characters where to stand during battle. You can help tell them what they should be doing, but pretty much they are glued to the same spot the whole time. And, conveniently for the player, all the characters happen to stand in the same location, making it super-easy for all the enemies to unleash seas of AOE (area or effect) attacks on you, without pretty much any way to defend against them. That causes a lot of unnessecary deaths and a lot of frustration.

A Lot More of the Same


While I do enjoy the ability to jump into a game and the battle system, I have to say there’s a lot of the same. The same grinding experience. Over. And over. And over again. I was able to clear the game in a little over 70 hours, which is about par for a long RPG (it’s 3 discs, after all). But, for more than half of them, I was sitting in the same parts of the world, whether on Grand Pulse, in the mountains, on flying ships, or in fantastical realities just walking around and waiting for monsters to respawn. That’s because the characters I control didn’t have enough abilities/HP/attack to be able to take down a good proportion of the monsters. I got killed – a lot – because either they would 1-shot me, debuff me completely, or just have too much HP and outlast me. And I take care to max out my characters whenever I can, and when this happens, I know that the balance is tipped against the player; this is especially true when most of the monsters have 6 and 7 digits worth of HP. And don’t get me started about the final boss run – it was the first Final Fantasy bosses that actually gave me trouble, even when I was as maxed out as I could be; the designers did a very, very good job at knowing how to make the end as tough and as infuriating as possible.

I also am still contemplating about trying to 100% the game. Evaluating how much I have left to do – maxing out the crystarium (which is about 30 million or so points left to go for me), getting the best weapons and leveling them up to maximum level, and going after all of the hunts on Grand Pulse – will take me, at a conservative estimate, around 70 or so more hours. Before grad school and being at work for most of the day, I could be able to do this in around 2 weeks. Now, with the ability to play about an hour or so a day, and wanting to invest my time in other activities, I’ll probably get to this in about half a year when I’m really bored. Sorry, Square, but that is just a huge wall to complete, and the experience of the battles in this game and the extras is compelling enough for me to come back. I’d come back to make Hope’s costume, but that’s about it.

And this game used the typical bad guy motivation I’ve seen over and over again in many RPGs to destroy the world. While not writing this down to spoil the game for you, I’m really getting tired of this same motivation. Whatever happened to psycho bad guys, homocidal maniacs, or just the most evil people that we have ever seen? I’m hoping those return soon, as I don’t want to be able to guess how the story ends from the moment the final bad guy appears one-third through the game. I think this is one of the elements of many games that pulls me out of the experience of being absorbed in a great game and story and into just a regular game with different characters in it.

I may be a tough gamer, but I really want to help push the medium and the design of games forward. They rely upon building and delivering great experiences, but many times fail to deliver. I would hope they try and use more human-centric means to help build these experiences, and not what technology and sales say games should be.

Even with this in mind, the overall experience of FF13 was quite enjoyable, and I’d recommend it to you. Just make sure you have the time to put into the game, as I’d say you should be able to devote at least 2 hrs per session to get the most out of this game. That’s both its greatest power and weakness. And how to make this game even better? I’ve put hints at what I would have liked to do to help the player: take advantage of how the player wants to play through the battle system, help the player utilize their time better in a game full of grinding, and provide more cues to the player to help him/her not die as much.

Bayonetta

After taking a long play through Bayonetta, I’ve changed my opinion about it from what I have seen in the commercials. Bayonetta, for me was a great, frenzied, and much more forgiving action game than when I played Devil May Cry. I did enjoy the experience overall, and I hope from these words you’ll see why and possibly try it yourself as well.

So who/what is Bayonetta?


Bayonetta is one of the last remaining Umbra Witches from the time of the Middle Ages. This group, without giving away too many spoilers, is one of the two groups of magical women who overlooked humanity and helped to make sure it didn’t fall into ruin. The player finds Bayonetta and a mobster trying to take out the legions of angels that are coming after her and trying to destroy the world. Through the course of her utter decimation of these beasts, she ends up finding out more and more about her past, an interesting set of characters (a bar owner who gives Bayonetta new guns, techniques, and information; a journalist who is trying to find out the past of the Umbra Witches, who also has the eyes for Bayonetta (there’s a lot of humorous moments with him in action eying her, and also just getting into a lot of trouble); and a crazy priest who is trying to take over the world), and a whole range of environments and ridiculously hard puzzles and fights that will make you want to cry and shout at the television – I know I did many, many times (but not as many as Devil May Cry).


And the reason for this comparison? Bayonetta plays very similarly to Devil May Cry, but also has its differences. Both games require super-fast reflexes, dodging, and killing of thousands of enemies. Both games also have a rating system of how fast, accurately, and how easily you fly through the levels. If you do well, you can get a ton of bonuses to your health, attack, and magic that can help you survive against the worst of challenges. Bayonetta is a little more graceful than Dante, as she can dodge pretty much anything. The caveat to this is that the designers want you to put yourself in danger often: dodging at the last possible second activates “Witch Time”, which slows down everything and you can send out a ton of pain very quickly. Bayonetta also can send her leather clothing out in the form of demons to attack enemies, too, which is not only a satisfying ending for many of the boss battles, but is good for those who enjoy fan service (there’s a ton of this in the game – a ton of it – I had many facepalms when there were cutscenes that were seeping with this). Bayonetta’s guns also do more damage than Dante’s, which is great, because that’s the style of action I prefer: keeping enemies at bay instead of bringing the hero/heroine into extreme danger (and my own frustration), although this is the exact opposite of what the designers want the player to do.

The Good Parts


There was a lot of good fun in Bayonetta. The story was pretty well-done, and was one of the only things that kept me playing. I loved the transformation of the characters, especially Bayonetta herself. Originally, she started out as a slightly general awesome heroine who can pretty much kill anything that comes her way. Through the course of the story, though, you get to see her transform into a protective mother who actually cares about the people around her: it’s no longer business as usual to her – the people, and the world, matter (which reminded me why I loved the Witchblade anime so much). It felt really, really empowering to be Bayonetta, as you could feel her attitude and motherly love in the controller as you were playing through the levels and the harrowing challenges that the designers threw at you. If I were female, I would definitely want to make a cosplay out of her; she’s quite a powerful and fun personality to be and also to watch. As a fellow gamer, I can understand and respect those who want to cosplay her even more now. While in number of words this may be outweighed by the number of things that were absolutely frustrating and annoying about this game, I enjoyed it so much that it made most of what comes next seem not as bad. The art style of the game and the costume designs were also superb.


Oh, and one of the other best parts is the satisfaction of knocking down large enemies with Bayonetta’s hair, sword, punches, kicks, and torture attacks. For all the frustration, this satisfaction of completely owning many of the enemies is completely worth it.

The Annoyances and Frustration

In simple terms, this game is not for those who want something that is fun and mostly doable from the get-go. Just like Devil May Cry, this game is very, very punishing. If you don’t learn how to put yourself in and out of danger, you’ll find yourself dying every 5 minutes (which happened to me a lot, for many of the reasons that follow). This comes to my first critique: the inconsistent cuing for Witch Time. The game teaches you how to do Witch Time relatively easily in the first few levels: they put guards that come right up to you and swing relatively slowly. Then the framerate will drop for about a half-second. It’s at this point the player needs to press right-trigger (I’m on a 360) to evade and activate Witch Time. As the game goes on, this doesn’t always happen: with large projectiles like buildings and meteors that get thrown at Bayonneta, this camera cuing will happen, but pretty much ceases to happen against most of the regular enemies that she has to kill. Later on, though, to obfuscate this issue even more, Bayonetta gets the ability to negate damage by pressing right-trigger at the exact moment of getting damaged. Why is this frustrating? Because normally before this point I’ve already pressed right-trigger to evade the attack, but can’t really see that I’ve already gotten damaged. So this basically turns into a controlled evade-spam on the controller, which isn’t the most of fun.


Just like many of the games that have come out today, this game also inherits the model of interactive animated sequences, or what has been termed “quick-time events”. These should just die in a fire, in my opinion, as they pretty much remove all fun from the game and turn the game into a pre-planned movie where the player has to see him/herself die multiple times before getting to the end of it (which is why I still yell at Resident Evil 4 to this day, even though I enjoyed it). There are a lot of these in this game: during boss fights, during regular fights, and during many of the cutscenes. I died a lot in this game because these would just hit me out of the blue, and I wouldn’t be able to react. I’m still under the belief that I should be in control during the gaming and cutscene experience. A cutscene is a reward, and I should be able to enjoy it as part of the natural progression of the game. I shouldn’t have to skip through it up to the point where I have to react and pray that I get it right in time to only move a little bit forward and then die many times over. This lack of cuing is hopefully something that will get better as more games are created, or maybe adapted to fit a better medium of control (maybe this might be better on a touch-screen?). To improve on this, as a designer, I would either not put these in the game to reinforce this view of control, or do a better job of letting the player know these are coming up (e.g. longer window of time, utilization of a fixed camera angle that would let me know something is coming, a cue from Bayonetta herself (like a voiceover or something), or some other equivalent) would greatly shift the emphasis of the game back on the action in the story’s progression, rather than arbitrary moments. This cuing is also poor during the game’s two critical moments, where the player has to guide a bullet/projectile to a destination but has no idea that the player is in control because the game looks like a cutscene at the moment. Had I not read ahead in the GameFAQ, I would have been even more upset with this game.

And on another note, there’s a lot of button spamming during these challenges, especially to get to the best rankings. I also really, really don’t like having to press a lot of buttons over and over again, especially when I have to repeat the same challenges multiple times over.

The other main critique that I have is that this game transitions to other types of games at the drop of the hat, for many times of no apparent reason other than the game designers wanted it to be difficult or what they think is cool. There are: motorcycle events, jumping challenges, gunning events, and Ikaruga-like challenges, all of which inherit the same annoyances and challenges of the main Bayonetta experience. There was even a rafting challenge, and out of all of these random challenges (it was a boss battle), it was the easiest and most naturally-controlled out of all of them. During motorcycle events, thousands of things keep coming at you from in front, all of which you must destroy and avoid at the same time (all the while, to get the best rating, you should evade right at the point where it is about to hit you, which the game makes hard to time). This wouldn’t be too hard, except that Bayonetta’s awesome hat and hair covers everything in front of her: so by the time you see something you need to avoid, it’s already too late. I had to drive like a drunkard while holding down the shooting button to get any idea as to where I was supposed to be going. This was the same for the Ikaruga-like challenges, except throwing in the fact that the game doesn’t auto-invert the axes for you, so you’ll probably die or get hurt many times before actually getting adjusted to the new control set. The same also goes for the Angel Attack gunning challenges, but those weren’t too bad, as I ended up getting slightly used to having normal axes for this FPS challenge. There were also a couple of challenges were the designers had Bayonetta in a turret, where she has to kill not only the giant boss in front of her, but the thousands of missiles that the boss throws at her. Miss one, which happens a lot because the turret covers some of them (and also the explosions do too), and your life will pretty much instantly go down to zero. And no idea on how to activate Witch Time during this, even though sometimes it would randomly turn on as I would leave the turret. Good job, designers – more like fail.

Basically what this boils down to is that the gameplay especially reinforces the character design: what many male players might deem as complete perfection in a woman. And that type of play style leads to a game that is utterly compelling in its story, but leaves the player utterly destroyed if they don’t know how to understand what the game is telling them. At the end of the day, I had a good time with this game, but it left me shaking my head in frustration at how I can be able to play this game on any of the harder levels.

I’d recommend this if you loved Devil May Cry, or want a really, really powerful story involving the themes of love and protection. If you’re in it for the story, I’d recommend playing it on the easier levels unless you’re wanting to get punished, like I did. It’s not just a fanservice game like I originally thought, but a game about a protective mother who is fast and can take out legions of enemy angels.

Dead Space

I just finished Dead Space and I had a ton of fun playing it. I also hope you get a chance to play this game as well, so I’ll provide my thoughts and reflections on this experience.


The Premise

You get to play Isaac, a space commander sent out into the depths of space when reports of a planet-sized spaceship have gone awry. When Isaac and his crew get to the spaceship (more like a space station), his crew gets sucked into the spaceship, which is conveniently wrecked. Once you gain control of Isaac, you have to find out what has been happening on the ship, to the crew, and most importantly, get yourself off of the ship and back to safety.

Sounds pretty cool, right? You even get to see how this game takes on the dimensions of the Alien universe, bad B-rated horror movies, and how the occult in outer space merge together in this very fun and interesting third-person shooter.

The High-Points and Fun Aspects

There was a lot of really good stuff in Dead Space. From an interface and control aspect, the designers put in many tools to help the gamer get through the ordeals they set up for you. First, they gave you the “mystical blue line that tells me where to go”. By tapping on the right control stick, Isaac puts out his hand and a blue line appears, telling you the direction you have to go. This is very handy because the environments are quite large and dark, and can also help in preparation for many of the ambushes the designers have set up in advance. Another cool aspect is that all of the necessary information from a gaming standpoint (i.e. health, ammo, stasis (the ability to slow enemies down)) was all on the body of Isaac: his spine was his health, his stasis was on his back, and his ammo was displayed whenever one is readying the trigger. Isaac also had some pretty cool telekinetic powers, too.

The designers also did a very good job setting up the mise-en-scene for the game. The lush environments are very reminiscent of the Alien movies, and all of the setups that come from that universe (e.g. scariness and cheap scares). The sounds and the music made me feel like I was actually in the derelict spaceship and I felt a little tense, even though I knew I was playing a game with many cheap B-horror movie scares in it (it got close to the feel of playing Silent Hill, but didn’t get all the way there in terms of scary/creepy). Each chapter (read “level”) was also a convenient section of the spaceship, which you had to explore because new things would go wrong with the ship and Isaac was in the convenient section of the ship to take care of the problems.


All of these great aspects of the game, including relatively simple and straightforward puzzles, kept me interested in this game and I rarely put it down. These great aspects covered some of the parts of the game that ruined many parts of the game for me and turned a great movie/game into utter frustration and horror.

The Let-Downs

While these may be an equal amount of let-downs to the greater aspects of this game, these flaws are pretty obvious and should be brought forward to help other games improve upon them. Isaac’s controls weren’t the best. I found myself fumbling through their controls (but thank goodness I was able to invert the y-axis) and using up my stasis power at times where I wanted to use the telekinesis (pressing left-trigger and X was stasis, and left-trigger and B was telekinesis – their locations were so close and not expected that I would fumble through them and take damage often from this confusion). Isaac was also ridiculously slow – he can stomp enemies and swing at them, but would take an eternity for him to wind up and swing. This was horrible, because there would be many times I would run out of ammo, and the game mentioned to use these tactics if necessary (they mentioned to save ammo, which also means it’s a valuable means to deal damage as well). Also, the mechanism to hold the gun and shoot was horrible as well: using left trigger to aim and the right trigger to fire. Yeah, you read that right – double trigger. If anything, since this game looks like Resident Evil 4 and 5, except that Isaac is on the other side of the camera, I should be able to use the right-trigger to aim and then A to fire, which is certainly more natural and responsive in desperate situations than the double trigger approach (there are A LOT of ambushes in this game where quick timing is necessary for survival).


Another let down were the environments and puzzles the designers put in the game. Not only were some of the puzzles tough and intimidating, but the mystical blue line of awesomeness wasn’t even helpful. Some of the pictures on the side here showcase my point – trying to run through engine turbines or using cover to prevent oneself from being burned alive. Or even trying to send an asteroid out into outer space to bring a help beacon into communications range of another ship. Or even the random turret challenges that send thousands of annoying things at you. Yeah – that’s b-e-a-utiful – and like they say in Galaxy Quest “makes no sense!” (well, it sorta does if one looks at the story as a whole, but in the middle of the experience, it seems as if many of these just appear as mere annoyances that are much larger and deadlier). I found myself dying a couple of times to find out what the designers wanted me to do, rather than having me use the cues in the game as a helpful mechanism for success.


While there were many ambushes, they only helped to reinforce the fact that I was playing a game, and not in an actual spaceship. Whenever I saw a large room, whether circular or rectangular, I knew an ambush was coming. And the ambushes were quite large, too. Lots and lots of enemies that I had to sever their limbs off to make sure they die quickly (but the fact that they spouted items was a good idea – it helped me to see when they were dead). These ambushes would also happen when I had to go outside in outer space too, where there’s an air meter, and I would get blindsided multiple times before I could find out how to defend myself. Not fun whatsoever (but, I’m not advocating for easiness, either – a good challenge is always good, but it should be a challenge overcome by my skills and not through taking advantage of code or multiple lives).

So, it may look like I may be ranting more about some small details about the game, they are indeed quite large ones that I feel are still prevalent in the gaming industry. Maybe I’m just blowing things out of proportion, but these small things are the things I look for in the gaming experiences to make me enjoy them even more.

I’ll have more thoughts on Bayonetta, which I just finished, too. And that game has a large reflection waiting for it too.

The Last Remnant

Every time I get an RPG to play, I’m usually excited. There’s always a good story to look forward to, a battle system to learn and get used to, and a wide range of characters to know and find some favorites. That’s at least what I was thinking when my copy of The Last Remnant came to my mailbox last week, but I was quite saddened and annoyed after playing it (title screen on the upper-left and a cutscene on the upper-right).

A Possibly Good Story

I’ll be upfront with this: I sent the game back after playing around 5 hours of this game. It started off with a good premise: Rush, the main character, is quickly swept into an epic war between two large armies as he is trying to find the evildoers who have kidnapped his sister. In this world, remnants are capable of being used to wield a wide variety of magics, with Rush being special to be able to control them all (at least that’s my guess). There are possibly hundreds of other different characters to learn about and level up. One of the coolest was Lord David (Da-veed pronounced in this game), who wore some cool armor and wielded a gun that could send large blasts of magic down from the sky and wipe out anything that moves. The game most likely followed Rush’s tale across the large 2 disc world to find his sister, complete with twists and turns, but I didn’t get to see those.

Loading Screens Galore

The aspect of this game that broke the experience of a possibly-great RPG. Now, RPGs are normally built with having multiple loading screens, as cutscenes, towns, and other aspects of the world need to be rendered when appropriate. But this game took this aspect a little too far (general loading screen on the far left and battle loading screen on the left). There were loading screens for every town. For every time the map was brought up and I wanted to go to a different part of the world (or town I was in). For every time I started a battle (and there were many, many battles – about 6-7 per submission, but no respawning enemies). So, that might not make the case for you, as you may be used to playing RPGs that have this many loading screens. It wasn’t bad at first, but each time there was a loading screen, it took anywhere from 5-10s to load and let me continue playing. In the gaming world, that’s a really long time. The loading screens also weren’t too helpful in determining how long the loading time was going to be either. I would either receive a tip I knew many times over, or receive a pulsing, glowing screen before every battle. With this happening all of the time, as the game is based upon battling to level and finding new towns and locales, I could not see myself staying for the duration of two discs. Sorry, Square Enix, but this was one of your games that I won’t play (even though it was released in 2008).

Other Let-Downs

And to top all of this off, whenever there were more than 5 people on the screen, the game’s frame rate slowed down to a crawl, so you would just see an explosion/a player’s action take about 3x longer than it should have (or explosions that would clutter the screen and just become pixellated or just be smoky).

The battle system was also quite different than I’m used to and didn’t make too much sense to me either. You control up to 25 people on the field, arranged in different units of 5 people. The unit is measured in terms of HP and AP (hit points and action points for health and magic/actions, respectively). Whenever the unit runs out of HP, the whole unit dies, regardless of whether one of the 5 received all of the damage or all 5 took a little bit of damage equal to the unit’s health. This is something I have never, ever seen before and still confounds me even while writing about this. Another aspect of the battle system which annoyed me was that at completely random times, if I can press a button within a time window presented to me on the screen (this events were critical attacks and critical defenses), I can be able to do some really, really cool stuff. But, these events went by usually way to fast, or came at a point where I wasn’t paying attention (which happens a lot when I play mindless battles in RPGs) – even though the game presented a short window of time for me to press the right button: it would show the controller, and highlight the button it wanted pressed, indicating when the critical event would execute. The designers were cool enough to let me know there was an auto-critical feature, but I could never find it in any of the menus.

If you would like to play this game, by all means go ahead, but just beware of the things I’ve mentioned here. You may be sitting there in front of your TV like I did, sleeping while waiting for action to start.