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.

The New Type of Dance?

Even though I’m not at E3, I’ve still been keeping up through Google Reader on the latest and coolest action there. One of the things that has been getting my eyes and ears ready for some epic epicness is the new game coming out for the Connect from Harmonix. It’s called Dance Central, and I’m pretty excited (as you can already tell).

Coming from the perspective of a long-time DDR and ITG player (check out the link to DDRecall at the bottom page if you would like proof), I’m excited for the opportunity to be able to exercise to some good music, but to also get other parts of my body involved in the action. While there’s nothing wrong with playing all of the 10s, 11s, 12s, and 13s in the normal arcade setting, the play does end up getting a little boring by oneself and just playing to test one’s own skills. Being able to incorporate the other limbs (I’ve gotten to play ParaPara Paradise before and really thought that it was cool to get the arms and legs involved!) presents a great opportunity for fun, the chance to incorporate other people into the fun, and also a way for players and families to push themselves for exercise. I think exergaming is a great way to have fun, get into shape, and provide the basis for a healthier life, and I would love to help design these games, as I’ve lost 60 pounds playing DDR and ITG (in the groove if you’re unsure of this acronym). I also hope that there will be awesome DLC to continue keeping the game fresh, along with combining multiple players through XBOX Live (as I wouldn’t mind encouraging any other players out there to exercise!). Even having the ability to record one’s own routine and possibly incorporating homemade music into the mix may also bring about an opportunity to bring people together through dance, gaming, and exercise.

With the advent of another music game, I still have some reservations about how the gameplay will be like. From my experience, “easy” and “medium” are pretty good exercise routines, mapping pretty well to the music, but “hard” and “expert” really challenge the player and put much more moves/steps in the chart than what most people expect/can handle. With this in mind, I hope there is a lot of playtesting to make sure that all of the moves map well to the music and don’t place many arbitrary “things” into the mix just to make things hard. Examples of these are: making notes not match the music (see “Two Weeks”, Drums Expert, Rock Band), making the scroll rate multiples faster/slower than what the actual music is rated (see any of the Maxes, DDR), or assuming that all music placed into the game will be in 4/4 (that’s a common time signature – see any songs by Rush/Soundgarden in Rock Band to see that asymmetric time signatures don’t work so well). These are the biggest aspects of the game that I think pull the player out of the experience of having fun and exercise, forcing the player to concentrate on the game aspect of the game, rather than enjoying the music and becoming a part of the experience for the audience and other performers (granted, for the hardcore, this is what the experience they want, but as someone who can play the tough stuff, it irks me to no end). That’s the type of play I’m hoping for in this game, and you can find me at the end of this year most likely playing it. I look forward to it, and exergaming with you, the reader, if you are up for some epic music and exercise.

I would also love the opportunity to be able to playtest it, but that doesn’t seem to be likely any time in the future. In the meantime, I’ll keep exercising in the gym and in the arcade to keep my weight down and tone my body for the next costumes I am making :D .

Have a great one!

(images from joystiq and destructoid)

Talking it Out

So after another week in capstone, I don’t have too much to report on from a standpoint of grabbing more materials, but I was able to talk at great length with many different people about what I would like to do for my capstone, which has helped me to get to move forward, even though I felt like I lost a lot of steam this past week.

Results from Talking

My peers in the HCI/d program were extremely helpful in helping me to look at different aspects and far reaching-ness of the totality of cosplay and self-expression. I was suggested to maybe look at how people dress their avatars and try to make sense of how that maps to real life clothing. Some suggested to just take a look at what people are wearing and see what aspects of their personality are found in their expression of their clothes. I was also asked to see how the DIY culture can be found in cosplay and maybe discover something in that realm. I plan also looking into exemplars like the gap app for the iphone which help one to see what they will dress like with certain clothes on.

A repeating concept that was suggested was to look into how people form their own identities through their clothing and their actions, and I’ll be definitely looking into that. I was also referred to more websites and groups online who practice modding their own clothes, and I would like to see how those actions help to create whom the person is. I’ll also take a look at spyn, and the history of quilting as well to see how the story is embedded within each of our clothes. I was also reminded that some cosplayers like to have many different costumes, and to see why and how people choose the different costumes they choose to make and wear.

BUT…

This past week I also got in touch with some of my friends who are actually cosplayers. They are extremely good people and are quite willing to talk to me about cosplaying. So, I starting talking to them about how it was to dress in costume and then go to cons, and I found out something extremely interesting: while in costume, the cosplayer feels the need to be sociable, but is quite intimidated when around certain spectators at the con. This is the start I needed, and now feel the need to start researching and designing!

Protip: talking to actual people whom you care for in your design will help you substantially.

So, a Mini Elevator Pitch

Here’s a crack at it:

Cosplayers are a group of people who like to dress up in their favorite gaming and anime characters’ costumes. One of the places they go to express their love of anime and gaming is cons (conventions). While there, they feel the need to be sociable to the spectators and other participants, but there is a reluctance to talk and reach out to other people at the con. What I would like to do for my capstone is to take a look at the process of cosplay, the con life, and to see if there is a way to help vocalize this love to others who share the love of anime and gaming.

In order to do this, I plan on researching the self, costuming, the process of cosplay, the con life, and how the con changes the “game”. In order to do this, I plan on taking an ethnomethodological approach to studying the cosplayer and the con, by utilizing ethnographic observations, contextual inquiries, participatory design, focus groups, and experience sampling. Ideally, I would like to be able to go to a con to try out my tool to help vocalize the cosplayer, but if not, I’ll at least try and get a holistic view of their world through interviews and such.

I would like to attempt to make my submission eligible for the student research competition at CHI, hoping to represent the human-centeredness and practical approaches our program has to offer.

xxxHolic / xxxHolic Kei

Another one of the anime series I finished watching and now be recommending to you are the 2 seasons of xxxHolic. While the title may have the adult characters XXX in them, this series is far from adult themed. On the contrary, it is mostly humor and Japanese-culture based.

The story follows protagonist Watanuki, a high schooler who is fed up with seeing strange spirits everywhere. On his way to school one day, he finds this mysterious fortuneteller and her store, and decides to go in. He wishes for the spirits to go away, and while he can’t see them anymore, his troubles are far from over, as he now has to work for the fortuneteller to work off this wish. The two other main characters, Doumeki and Himawari, also accompany him on his travels through Japan and the spirit worlds he gets roped into going. Watanuki also has to cook and do other chores for the fortuneteller, Yuuko, while proprietors come in and tell her about their troubles.

This series was very well done storywise, and has a very interesting artistic style – the arms and legs of all the characters are much longer in proportion to the rest of the body. The story left me wanting to know more about the culture of Japan, as it went in-depth about superstitions, cooking, and ghosts. It also even went into great depth on how to play Mahjong! The music and sound were pretty well done, but the aspect of this series I’ll remember most is how Watanuki’s mood can drop at the change of a hat – from swooning in love to great anger. The way he flails his arms and legs is quite funny as well (and is accompanied by a wonderful sound effect!).

It also left me putting a Mokona (the dancing animal in the video above) on my Christmas list, too. It kept getting drunk and wanting food – so funny. It put a big smile on my face.

Enjoy!