So, back in the day, 13 years ago to be exact, Final Fantasy XII came out. At that time I had been an almost life long fan of the Final Fantasy series. The original Final Fantasy was the big thing I'd gotten for Christmas the year after I got an NES. I didn't get a SNES for some time after they were released, but when I did, the first game I bought was Final Fantasy II(IV) and then one of my friends got Final Fantasy III(VI) for his birthday, and we all gathered around to watch at a sleepover as he played through a large portion of it. It may sound pretty silly these days, but at the time, we were pretty blown away by the graphics, and the music, and the story, and the characters. We didn't care that it was eight of us watching one guy playing a game that, by today's standards, is pretty archaic. It was an experience. I bought that one a soon as I could afford it too. I downloaded fan translated roms of the Final Fantasy games that didn't make it to the USA, and then bought those when they were released for various platforms here at last. When Final Fantasy moved into the next generation of consoles, I, like the idiot I was, bought an N64 in anticipation, only to have Final Fantasy VII be announced for Playstation. And I had quit my after school job by that time, due to hating every single second I was at work, so I had no way to buy the new system. Through the help of a friend, I was able to get my hands on one, and snapped up Final Fantasy VII. I was hyped up like crazy for VIII and IX, and the CG Spirits Within movie, buying both the games opening day, and as I was working as a projectionist at the time, watching the movie after closing time at the theater a couple days before release. The movie was kid of terrible, but I loved the games. Then came the Playstation 2, and all of the craziness it took to actually get my hands on a console there. The launch for that system was flippin harsh. And Final Fantasy X, which I hadn't been quite so hyped for as the three previous games, but was still rather excited to play. It was okay, not great, not terrible. I think it might have been better had they, at the very least, allowed me to play the game with the Japanese voice cast, because HOLY FREAKING CRAP the English cast is absolutely AWFUL.
And that brings me to Final Fantasy XII. At the time that this game was announced, I had allowed Final Fantasy XI, the first MMORPG of the series, to suck out my soul. I played that game for so many hours a week that I look back on it now and cringe. I let it take over my life for so long that I don't know how I even managed to finish college. At that time, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, and the guy who wrote all of the stories for the games, and came up with all of the characters and stuff, had left the company in disgrace after the massive flop of the Final Fantasy movie, and left Squaresoft in such financial disorder that they had to be bought out by long time rival Enix, making Square-Enix. The Final Fantasy series was still their flagship series, and so they announced another game. Right from the beginning, in the first trailers and info from the game to be released, something felt off to me. It wasn't the same. Something wasn't right. Something was missing. Then it was announced that series music composer Nobuo Uematsu would also not be returning. I own the Final Fantasy soundtracks. I still listen to them today. I LOVED his music for those games, and this announcement kind of hit me a little hard. The two men most responsible for my enjoyment of the Final Fantasy series were not taking any part in this game.
But, I was a Final Fantasy fan, and I was still going to buy and play it no matter what. So when the game came out, I went and bought it, popped it into my PS2 and absolutely hated it. The characters were annoying, the voice acting was atrocious, the battle system was clunky and very buggy, and the skill system was a nightmare of idiotic ideas that somehow had not been rejected, and actually made it into the final product. The story was bland and painfully cliche, none of the characters seemed to have any real motivation to be doing anything, and I just did not enjoy the gameplay at all. So I never finished it. I gave up after a few hours. I remember the exact moment when I said to myself, nope, this one is not for me. It was the revelation that the king had been killed by someone's evil twin. Yes. An evil twin. You can't get more cliche than that. Until now, this game has remained the one and only main line Final Fantasy game that I didn't finish, and after finally going back and finishing Final Fantasy XV a few weeks ago, I saw a banner ad online for a Nintendo Switch re-release of Final Fantasy XII. I figured, it's been 13 years, and they've probably made some improvements to the game, maybe it's not as bad as I remember it being. And I've recently gone back to games that I'd abandoned, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Final Fantasy XV and finished them, coming away from both feeling that I was glad I gave them a second chance, so maybe I'd feel the same way about Final Fantasy XII.
Nope.
I did not.
I did finish the game.
But I thought it was awful.
So, let me start with the positives, because there are some good things in this mess of a game. For the Switch version of this game, which is a port of the PS4 version, I'm told, there have been some improvements over the original game. The music was completely redone of this version of the game, reorchestrated and rerecorded in HD, and the game gives you the option of playing with the old soundtrack, or the new. The graphics are pretty great for a PS2 game, and they transferred to HD pretty well, which is not always the case. It's a beautiful game to look at, and it has some pretty seamless transitions between gameplay and CG cutscenes. This version of the game saw the introduction of an actual job system, rather than the hot mess the License Board was in the original version, giving less customization options for your characters, but also removing the extreme headache of trying to figure out a path through that damned license board that makes sense for each of them. This was one of the main reasons I found the game so frustrating in the original version. The battle system has been tweaked a bit so it runs more smoothly. The Gambits are a lot easier to set up in a way that they'll actually function as intended now, which was another thing that I found to be unbearable in the original game. They also added a speed multiplier, where you can speed the game up by 2x or 4x. The game slows back down to normal speed for cutscenes, but this allows you to run through the countryside at increased speed, level up quickly, and move from place to place without spending hours walking there at normal speed.
Now for the bad. First of all, the music. It's boring, bland, and horribly generic. For the life of me, I can't remember a single track off the entire soundtrack, except the ones that came from previous Final Fantasy games. For me, the music is always part of the experience, and when the music is so boring and forgettable, it doesn't make for a very good experience. The story is extraordinarily cliche. It's also very poorly written and told. Nothing in this game seems like it's happening for any real reason. It's just happening because the script says it has to. There's no real driving force behind anything that happens. And a big part of that is the characters. 4 of the 6 playable characters have no reason to be there. Including Vaan, the supposed protagonist of the game. Vaan, I feel, has the least reason of all of the characters to actually be there. He has absolutely no motivation whatsoever as a character. He's just there because reasons, and because he's, apparently, the main character. He has no stakes in anything, and is frequently asked what his motivations are, to which he replies, with I'unno. I mean, how are we supposed to care about a character who has no reason to be there, and doesn't even know why he's there, himself? Penelo fades into the background, because she's only there because Vaan is, but as flimsy as that is, at least she's shown to have SOME motivation as a character. Balthier also has absolutely no reason to be there. He's got this very thin, oh, I'm in it for the money, but he's never actually seen getting paid, and he's never really even promised any sort of reward either. He does have reasons, which is more than I can say for Vaan, but they are very thin, and they take a very large leap of logic to connect to him wanting to accompany the group for any amount of time. He is the character I hate with a fiery passion. I absolutely despise him. He says nothing in this game that is not the most horribly cliche line he could possibly say in any given situation. Even Fran, his longtime friend and partner, calls him out on his BS at the end of the game, which made me laugh. The guy is just wretched, and every moment he is onscreen and speaking is torture. Fran, like Penelo, is only there because Balthier is, but she maintains a presence in the story by being the mystic of the group and knowing about all of the mystic things so she can explain them. She also constantly tells Vaan how stupid he is, which made her my favorite character just for that alone. The onyl real characters that have a reason to be there are Ashe and Basch, which are trying to get Ashe her throne back and liberate her kingdom. They're the only characters in the main cast with motivation to do anything, and it's really just not enough. The problem is that neither of them are, in any way, likable or sympathetic. Even though they're the only characters in the game that have a reason to be there, they're just terrible characters that I found it very hard to like or care about.
As for playing the game, yes, they did fix the gambit system and the battle system so that they run more smoothly, but that also makes gameplay very boring. Once you tweak your gambits just right, the game, literally, plays itself. All you do is choose the direction your characters run in, and they will automatically kill anything in their paths. Oh, you can control your characters all individually if you want, but why would you? Combine this with the speed multipliers and you can just zip through areas, kill everything in your path without raising a finger to do so, and arrive at your destination all leveled up to fight whatever big bad may be waiting for you. It makes the game feel very hollow and unsatisfying, but at least you can get through it without wasting too much time or effort doing it. Combine this hollow, unsatisfying feeling with the horribly cliche and terribly written story, and the characters that just don't have any reason to be there, and, well, you have an absolute mess of a game that is just not very fun to play.
I have to make one more point here about the English voice acting. It's terrible. The actors are just not very good, the direction is pretty terrible, and there are actors who I KNOW are white doing very, very bad Middle Eastern accents, which feels a little racist in this day and age. But the worst, most annoying thing about the English voice acting is this. There are probably 3 dozen separate actors in this game that all, EVERY ONE OF THEM, mispronouce the word Marquis. I mean, of all the people who spoke the word incorrectly, and all of the recording team and director, not one of them stopped and said, hey, wait a minute, I don't think you say it like that? REALLY? It was so freaking grating. I was literally yelling at the screen, "It's pronounced Mar-kee, you idiots!!!" dozens of times throughout the game.
So, my final thoughts on this game: Avoid it. It's not good. It's a waste of time and money for anyone that doesn't care about series completion. The story and characters are terrible, and the gameplay is boring and far too automated. This game experimented with a lot of things, but it didn't really do any of them well. The music is bland, boring, and forgettable. The series creator and writer, and the series composer, both left the company and had no or very little part in this game, and it shows. It has the feel of a game that was thrown together as fast as it could be thrown together, just to get another game out during he PS2 lifecycle and milk a bit more money out of fanboys like me. I felt that this game was a complete drudgery to play, and found little to no enjoyment in it. As someone who loved all 10 main line Final Fantasy games before it, I felt very disappointed and somewhat betrayed by this game, and I can't recommend it to anyone for any reason.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Final Fantasy XV
So, a while back I saw Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition in the $10 bin at Wal-Mart, and figured, hey, why not. This is the version that includes all of the expansion pass goodies, plus a bunch of new additions unique to that version of the game, including expanded final dungeons and boss fights etc. I made a post about how I felt I'd gotten my money's worth out of the game. It was okay, not great. Very light on story, heavy focus on side quests and open world exploration. Plus it had all of the story DLC (that had been released at the time) included. I played it for a bit, got my $10 bucks worth, and lost interest, moving on to other things without finishing it.
I don't know what made me go back to the game with the intent to finish it, but I did. The first half of hte game is a bit of a mindlessly enjoyable open world game. But the second half is much more involved, story-wise, and removes the open world aspect almost completely. I enjoyed the second half of the game a heck of a lot more than I did the first half, and finished the game from where I'd left off at in just a couple of days.
So here are some final thoughts on the game before I get to my rant on the DLC. The characters are a bit flat. So much so that Square-Enix actuall made a short anime series just to give the characters development and back story that was completely absent from the game. You know, the things that motivate characters to do the things that they do? Yeah, you have to watch an anime series on youtube to get those. They're not in the game. And that, right there, is the biggest problem with this game. So many vital story and character elements are just not there. Would it have killed them to put these anime scenes into the game as flashbacks at camps or something? And then there's the Kingsglaive movie, which, again is vital to understanding the plot and how everything comes together, but was not included in the game, because SE wanted to rake in some more cash on a theatrical release, which they did, it was a pretty high grossing movie in Japan, if nowhere else in the world. I really enjoyed it. It's a pretty good movie. And there are SO MANY Breaking Bad jokes to be made throughout its runtime. But, again, it was story elements cut from the game, that you're kind of lost not knowing. This is the problem. I can forgive flat, or ridiculous characters. I can forgive outrageous plot threads, and plot holes you can drive a medium sized moon through. These are staples of the Final Fantasy series. Don't believe me, go replay Final Fantasy VII. I'll wait. You back? Yeah, now you see what I mean, right? I can forgive those, because they're part of the charm of the series. What I can't forgive is vital story and character information being left out of the game and only available from outside sources. This is not how good storytelling works, folks. Imagine playing through the fall of Insomnia as Regis, or Nyx, or hell, even Lunafreya, instead of having to watch a movie to find out what happened off screen while the Bro-Force was asleep in Galden Quay. This was also a huge problem in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, except there was no anime series or movie you could go watch, you had to read all of the lore and character information in datalogs that you actually have to hunt down through a maze of menus to even find. It's a step up on XIII, but still not great.
Anyway, the story does get good about halfway through, and the end of the game is decent, if feeling a little rushed. Again, I only paid $10 for it, so I got my money's worth.
I also played through the story DLC. I don't mind supplemental story being added to a game after the completion of its story. Sometimes I'll even actually pay for it, but usually not, because I've discovered something wondrous, ladies and gentlemen. If you wait long enough, eventually there will be a complete or game of the year or whatever version of the game that includes it all, and usually for a reduced price. But then there's games like Final Fantasy XV, where vital sections of the story are removed from the game to be sold later. This, I do not, and cannot support. Let's take a look at Final Fantasy XV's season pass compared to another game I bought the season pass for, Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The season pass for FFXV was $15, with with you got a few weapons, an online multiplayer mode, and 3 story DLCs ranging from 1 hr to 2hrs in length each. The season pass for XBC2 was $30 and you got all kinds of free goodies, a challenge battle mode, the ability to alter character appearances in the main game, a new game + that allows you to set your level for the difficulty you want in a replay, more rare blades to summon, and an expansion to the game that took me almost 30 hours to complete. the story DLCs for FFXV were blatantly cut out of the main storyline of the game and sold separately as additional content. the story in XBC2 is complete in itself, and the story DLC there is like a completely new and separate game that takes place in the same world to delve deeper into the back story. Even at twice the price, I felt the XBC2 season pass waswell worth the money. If I hadn't had the expansion pass included in the Royal Edition of FFXV I wouldn't have bothered.
So, there are 4 story DLCs for FFXV
Episode Gladiolus
Episode Prompto
Episode Ignis
Eisode Ardyn
Episode Ardyn is not included in the royal edition or the season pass. There are also the canceled Episode Lunafreya and Episode Aranea, which are being rumored to be getting made after all, but probably not.
Episode Gladiolus is the most blatantly cut out of the game, dude randomly says hey guys, I'm out for a bit, catch ya later, then comes back and never says where he went or what he did. This is probably the least enjoyable of the 4 in my opinion, because it just wasn't very interesting, and I found the combat difficult and clunky. It was just a series of boss battles without much in the way of story.
Episode Prompto was much better, and it shows some very vital story elements for Prompto that really needed to be in the main game. His motivations as a character are all laid out, and he's given a lot more depth than he otherwise has. I had trouble playing through this one, becuase it's a combo of stealth sections and shooter sections, and I absoltely despise stealth games with the fiery intensity of a million George Foreman grills, and I don't really care for shooters either. Story is great, and the character development is necessary, and really needed to be added into the main game.
Episode Ignis is by far the best of the original 3 season pass DLCs, and it is aboslutely vital to the the story of the main game. If you do not play this, there are large elements of plot and character motivations that make absolutely no sense whatsoever without. Ravus' random side change? Yeah, that's explained. Ignis' complete personality shift in the second half of the game. That's explained too. I WOULD say to play this immediately after fighting Leviathan, except for one HUGE problem. IT SPOILS THE FREAKING END OF THE GAME!!!! They remove a vital section of the story, on that elements of the ending of the game make no sense without, and put it behind a paywall to get, and you can't even play it where it needs to be played because it spoils the end of the game! The story was good, the character moments were great, and Ignis' combat is really fun to play.
Episode Ignis was the best of the 3 season pass DLCs, but Episode Ardyn is far and away the absolute best of the four. It gives so much back story and motivation to the game's main villain that was just completely missing from the main game. where the other three DLCs were blatantly removed from the game, this one looks like it was made because the creators felt they needed to explain more about Ardyn's character. This is more in line with the type of DLC I'm more supportive of. Supplemental material that either adds more past the ending of the story, or clarifies parts of the story that were maybe a bit vague. The combat is really fun, and Ardyn is just so gleefully evil that he is a hell of a lot of fun to play as. You have an entire city to run around and just destroy and murder to your heart's content, all while he makes wisecracks and sarcastic comments. It's probably the most fun I've had with Final Fantasy XV, period. BUT at $9.99 for a 2 hour story DLC, it is ridiculously overpriced. But, again, I only paid $10 for the main game and other DLCs, so I figure $20 altogether I still got my money's worth. I loved this one, I only wish it had been a bit longer. My advice would be to wait another 6 months or so until they release the super mega royal edition, which includes Episode Ardyn, or periodically check out the PSN/Xbox/Steam/Whatever store for a sale on a bundle of the royal edition and episode Ardyn.
So, in the end, I enjoyed the game. I was suffering from a sever case of lowered expectations after all of the marketing and initial reviews of the vanilla game, but Final Fantasy XV today seems to have had a lot of the problems fixed, a lot of the holes filled in, and if the DLC is blatantly removed from teh main story, you can get it included in the royal edition. The Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV anime, and the Prelude to Episode Ardyn anime are both free to watch on the official Final Fantasy XV youtube account, and the Kingsglaive movie can be rented and streamed from Amazon for $0.99, it's definitely worth a buck to watch. Episode Ardyn was probably my favorite part of the entire game, but, again, it is RIDICULOUSLY overpriced. If you can find the royal edition of the game for cheap like I did, I definitely recomend it. While I don't feel the game was really worth full price, I do feel I got my money's worth and more for the price I paid.
I don't know what made me go back to the game with the intent to finish it, but I did. The first half of hte game is a bit of a mindlessly enjoyable open world game. But the second half is much more involved, story-wise, and removes the open world aspect almost completely. I enjoyed the second half of the game a heck of a lot more than I did the first half, and finished the game from where I'd left off at in just a couple of days.
So here are some final thoughts on the game before I get to my rant on the DLC. The characters are a bit flat. So much so that Square-Enix actuall made a short anime series just to give the characters development and back story that was completely absent from the game. You know, the things that motivate characters to do the things that they do? Yeah, you have to watch an anime series on youtube to get those. They're not in the game. And that, right there, is the biggest problem with this game. So many vital story and character elements are just not there. Would it have killed them to put these anime scenes into the game as flashbacks at camps or something? And then there's the Kingsglaive movie, which, again is vital to understanding the plot and how everything comes together, but was not included in the game, because SE wanted to rake in some more cash on a theatrical release, which they did, it was a pretty high grossing movie in Japan, if nowhere else in the world. I really enjoyed it. It's a pretty good movie. And there are SO MANY Breaking Bad jokes to be made throughout its runtime. But, again, it was story elements cut from the game, that you're kind of lost not knowing. This is the problem. I can forgive flat, or ridiculous characters. I can forgive outrageous plot threads, and plot holes you can drive a medium sized moon through. These are staples of the Final Fantasy series. Don't believe me, go replay Final Fantasy VII. I'll wait. You back? Yeah, now you see what I mean, right? I can forgive those, because they're part of the charm of the series. What I can't forgive is vital story and character information being left out of the game and only available from outside sources. This is not how good storytelling works, folks. Imagine playing through the fall of Insomnia as Regis, or Nyx, or hell, even Lunafreya, instead of having to watch a movie to find out what happened off screen while the Bro-Force was asleep in Galden Quay. This was also a huge problem in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, except there was no anime series or movie you could go watch, you had to read all of the lore and character information in datalogs that you actually have to hunt down through a maze of menus to even find. It's a step up on XIII, but still not great.
Anyway, the story does get good about halfway through, and the end of the game is decent, if feeling a little rushed. Again, I only paid $10 for it, so I got my money's worth.
I also played through the story DLC. I don't mind supplemental story being added to a game after the completion of its story. Sometimes I'll even actually pay for it, but usually not, because I've discovered something wondrous, ladies and gentlemen. If you wait long enough, eventually there will be a complete or game of the year or whatever version of the game that includes it all, and usually for a reduced price. But then there's games like Final Fantasy XV, where vital sections of the story are removed from the game to be sold later. This, I do not, and cannot support. Let's take a look at Final Fantasy XV's season pass compared to another game I bought the season pass for, Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The season pass for FFXV was $15, with with you got a few weapons, an online multiplayer mode, and 3 story DLCs ranging from 1 hr to 2hrs in length each. The season pass for XBC2 was $30 and you got all kinds of free goodies, a challenge battle mode, the ability to alter character appearances in the main game, a new game + that allows you to set your level for the difficulty you want in a replay, more rare blades to summon, and an expansion to the game that took me almost 30 hours to complete. the story DLCs for FFXV were blatantly cut out of the main storyline of the game and sold separately as additional content. the story in XBC2 is complete in itself, and the story DLC there is like a completely new and separate game that takes place in the same world to delve deeper into the back story. Even at twice the price, I felt the XBC2 season pass waswell worth the money. If I hadn't had the expansion pass included in the Royal Edition of FFXV I wouldn't have bothered.
So, there are 4 story DLCs for FFXV
Episode Gladiolus
Episode Prompto
Episode Ignis
Eisode Ardyn
Episode Ardyn is not included in the royal edition or the season pass. There are also the canceled Episode Lunafreya and Episode Aranea, which are being rumored to be getting made after all, but probably not.
Episode Gladiolus is the most blatantly cut out of the game, dude randomly says hey guys, I'm out for a bit, catch ya later, then comes back and never says where he went or what he did. This is probably the least enjoyable of the 4 in my opinion, because it just wasn't very interesting, and I found the combat difficult and clunky. It was just a series of boss battles without much in the way of story.
Episode Prompto was much better, and it shows some very vital story elements for Prompto that really needed to be in the main game. His motivations as a character are all laid out, and he's given a lot more depth than he otherwise has. I had trouble playing through this one, becuase it's a combo of stealth sections and shooter sections, and I absoltely despise stealth games with the fiery intensity of a million George Foreman grills, and I don't really care for shooters either. Story is great, and the character development is necessary, and really needed to be added into the main game.
Episode Ignis is by far the best of the original 3 season pass DLCs, and it is aboslutely vital to the the story of the main game. If you do not play this, there are large elements of plot and character motivations that make absolutely no sense whatsoever without. Ravus' random side change? Yeah, that's explained. Ignis' complete personality shift in the second half of the game. That's explained too. I WOULD say to play this immediately after fighting Leviathan, except for one HUGE problem. IT SPOILS THE FREAKING END OF THE GAME!!!! They remove a vital section of the story, on that elements of the ending of the game make no sense without, and put it behind a paywall to get, and you can't even play it where it needs to be played because it spoils the end of the game! The story was good, the character moments were great, and Ignis' combat is really fun to play.
Episode Ignis was the best of the 3 season pass DLCs, but Episode Ardyn is far and away the absolute best of the four. It gives so much back story and motivation to the game's main villain that was just completely missing from the main game. where the other three DLCs were blatantly removed from the game, this one looks like it was made because the creators felt they needed to explain more about Ardyn's character. This is more in line with the type of DLC I'm more supportive of. Supplemental material that either adds more past the ending of the story, or clarifies parts of the story that were maybe a bit vague. The combat is really fun, and Ardyn is just so gleefully evil that he is a hell of a lot of fun to play as. You have an entire city to run around and just destroy and murder to your heart's content, all while he makes wisecracks and sarcastic comments. It's probably the most fun I've had with Final Fantasy XV, period. BUT at $9.99 for a 2 hour story DLC, it is ridiculously overpriced. But, again, I only paid $10 for the main game and other DLCs, so I figure $20 altogether I still got my money's worth. I loved this one, I only wish it had been a bit longer. My advice would be to wait another 6 months or so until they release the super mega royal edition, which includes Episode Ardyn, or periodically check out the PSN/Xbox/Steam/Whatever store for a sale on a bundle of the royal edition and episode Ardyn.
So, in the end, I enjoyed the game. I was suffering from a sever case of lowered expectations after all of the marketing and initial reviews of the vanilla game, but Final Fantasy XV today seems to have had a lot of the problems fixed, a lot of the holes filled in, and if the DLC is blatantly removed from teh main story, you can get it included in the royal edition. The Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV anime, and the Prelude to Episode Ardyn anime are both free to watch on the official Final Fantasy XV youtube account, and the Kingsglaive movie can be rented and streamed from Amazon for $0.99, it's definitely worth a buck to watch. Episode Ardyn was probably my favorite part of the entire game, but, again, it is RIDICULOUSLY overpriced. If you can find the royal edition of the game for cheap like I did, I definitely recomend it. While I don't feel the game was really worth full price, I do feel I got my money's worth and more for the price I paid.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
What I've been doing lately.
Okay, so, I got to a point in my first draft of Shadows of What Might have Been, sequel to Memories of What Never Was, and said to myself, yikes dude, you need to put this on the shelf and do a bit more brainstorming before you finish. So I set that on the shelf, and am working out a few scenes that I need to add to the portion I've already written to make the ending I have planned actually make sense.
So what have I been working on in the mean time? My final draft of Spires of Infinity. Coming back to it after a few months off has given me some fresh eyes for finding problems that need to be fixed, things that need to be changed, and things that need to be added/removed. I'm nearly halfway through, and have made some small, yet pretty significant changes. Most of them having to do with Gabriel and Sam's characters. I've added one scene of significant length, reshuffled a few into what I felt like was a better order, and made some minor tweaks here and there. Mostly I feel that the changes help the story flow along better, and give a bit of a deeper connection to the characters. So, I just have half of this book to go on editing, and then maybe a quick read through to make sure everything works and then I can start the really hard part, trying to sell it.
I'll admit that I haven't been doing a whole lot of work writing this year. I'm still feeling pretty burnt out from Christmas at work. In my 16 years of working at the post office I have NEVER seen a Christmas that bad. I was working 7 days a week 12-15 hours a day because my complete moron of a boss doesn't realize the need for hiring to replace substitute carriers that quit, and we were horiffically understaffed and insanely overburdened. I mean, really, Christmas comes at the exact same time every year. You CAN prepare for it before hand if you're not a complete idiot. It was a very long, very hard, very draining six weeks. It just drained out all of my will to do anything productive. I took a break back in January, but it wasn't long enough, and I already have the rest of my vacation time allocated this year so I can't take another break now and try to recover. On top of that, I've been working on losing weight, and I'm kind of burning out on that too. It is HARD work. I've lost 50 lbs so far, and my goal is to lose 20 more, but it requires a pretty strict diet, and 90-120 mins of exercise every day. It kind of wears you down. With how much work and effort it has taken to lose the weight I am SO never letting myself get that fat ever again. This has been a nightmare. And it also cuts into my writing time, because it's very hard to maintain a pace on an exercise bike while also reading/editing/typing on a laptop, and completely impossible while out jogging. Also, I've been working on paying off my car as quickly as possible to clear up some room in my budget, and looking at buying a house, which bring their own piles of stress with them.
Anyway, so that's what I've been doing the last few months since Christmas ended. It's been a rough few months for me, and I still feel burnt out, but I've been making myself work on Spires of Infinity for at least an hour or so every day. I am going to finish this thing, dammit! And once I do, I'm going to finish Memories of What Never Was. That one only needs one more draft too, I think. I'm just about finished with both of these projects, and having them so close to being done while not doing anything to finish them has been nagging at me.
So what have I been working on in the mean time? My final draft of Spires of Infinity. Coming back to it after a few months off has given me some fresh eyes for finding problems that need to be fixed, things that need to be changed, and things that need to be added/removed. I'm nearly halfway through, and have made some small, yet pretty significant changes. Most of them having to do with Gabriel and Sam's characters. I've added one scene of significant length, reshuffled a few into what I felt like was a better order, and made some minor tweaks here and there. Mostly I feel that the changes help the story flow along better, and give a bit of a deeper connection to the characters. So, I just have half of this book to go on editing, and then maybe a quick read through to make sure everything works and then I can start the really hard part, trying to sell it.
I'll admit that I haven't been doing a whole lot of work writing this year. I'm still feeling pretty burnt out from Christmas at work. In my 16 years of working at the post office I have NEVER seen a Christmas that bad. I was working 7 days a week 12-15 hours a day because my complete moron of a boss doesn't realize the need for hiring to replace substitute carriers that quit, and we were horiffically understaffed and insanely overburdened. I mean, really, Christmas comes at the exact same time every year. You CAN prepare for it before hand if you're not a complete idiot. It was a very long, very hard, very draining six weeks. It just drained out all of my will to do anything productive. I took a break back in January, but it wasn't long enough, and I already have the rest of my vacation time allocated this year so I can't take another break now and try to recover. On top of that, I've been working on losing weight, and I'm kind of burning out on that too. It is HARD work. I've lost 50 lbs so far, and my goal is to lose 20 more, but it requires a pretty strict diet, and 90-120 mins of exercise every day. It kind of wears you down. With how much work and effort it has taken to lose the weight I am SO never letting myself get that fat ever again. This has been a nightmare. And it also cuts into my writing time, because it's very hard to maintain a pace on an exercise bike while also reading/editing/typing on a laptop, and completely impossible while out jogging. Also, I've been working on paying off my car as quickly as possible to clear up some room in my budget, and looking at buying a house, which bring their own piles of stress with them.
Anyway, so that's what I've been doing the last few months since Christmas ended. It's been a rough few months for me, and I still feel burnt out, but I've been making myself work on Spires of Infinity for at least an hour or so every day. I am going to finish this thing, dammit! And once I do, I'm going to finish Memories of What Never Was. That one only needs one more draft too, I think. I'm just about finished with both of these projects, and having them so close to being done while not doing anything to finish them has been nagging at me.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Xenoblade Chronicles X - This time with 100% lowered expectations
Way back when the Wii-U was a thing, I bought one because a new Xenoblade game was announced for it. I thought the console was a little weird and clunky, and Xenoblade seemed to be the only game coming out for it that I cared for, but it was new, and there would probably be more games, right? RIGHT? Well, the Wii-U kind of flopped, and the only other games I ended up getting for it were remasters of a couple of Zelda Games. It is fully backwards compatible with Wii games, though, and all of my virtual console stuff transferred over to the new system. It also isn't region locked like the Wii was, so you can play EU games on it, both Wii and Wii-U. So it wasn't a complete waste, buying the system. I basically just replaced my Wii with it, and gave the Wii to my brother. I don't regret buying it for one single game that I never actually finished, because it did offer that backwards compatibility.
The Xenoblade series, is BY FAR my favorite current series being made today. They offer very deep and expansive stories, in huge and immersive worlds, with excellent characters. So when I heard that there was a new game coming out, I didn't hesitate to preorder it, and buy myself the console it would be coming out for. When it finally arrived, I was somewhat disappointed with it. I enjoyed the gameplay. The graphics were pretty stellar considering the Wii-U hardware limitations. The music was pretty hit and miss. For me, the music is always part of the experience in a video game. That's why I always mention it. There are some really good tracks, but the majority of it is either awful, or extremely irritating. And the characters were kind of flat and shallow. The character you control is an avatar that you create, never has his or her name spoken in any dialog, and never speaks in any of the story scenes. I have ALWAYS hated silent protagonists in video games. It's supposed to bring you more into the story by allowing you to choose a character's every response and action, but in my opinion it does nothing but take you OUT of the story when you're constantly being prompted for dialog responses that are never spoken aloud by your character. You go from Shulk, a very deep and emotional character in Xenoblade Chronicles to Cross, a completely silent automaton in Xenoblade Chronicles X. It kind of stung more than a little for me, with how much expectation I had coming into this game. The original Xenoblade game set a VERY high bar, and X just didn't quite clear it. The story was pretty weak, the characters were pretty weak, and though the world is beautiful and fun to explore, it's just so empty. There's like, nothing in it. You have all these places to go and nothing to do in them. I got to a point in the game where, in order to progress to the next part of the story, I had to go out and do mandatory exploration, something I very much dislike, and several side quests, which I also very much dislike, and level up, which I find boring and tedious, and I also had to go level up affinity for characters I never use, and then gear up and use those characters for affinity missions. I looked at all of that mountain of crap I had to do in order to continue the story and said NOPE!!!
Well, anyway, since I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and it's expansion Torna: The Golden Country (definitely worth the expansion pass pricetag, if you're wondering. I got a good 30 hrs of gameplay out of it, and didn't even come close to 100%ing it.) I've been having this nagging feeling of wanting to go back and finish Xenoblade Chronicle's X. I spent all that money on the game and the system to play it on, and I never even finished the game. So, I tried to pick up where I left off. Yeah, no, that game is WAY to complicated to play to just pick up in the middle and go back to what you were doing. So, I started over from the beginning. This time, with 100% lowered expectations. I knew it was going to be a slogging grindfest of lvling up, forced exploration, and forced sidequests. I knew the story and characters were going to be lackluster. And I knew I didn't have a very good time the first time around.
So, I sucked it up and plowed through. I'm not a fan of games that say, look, and open world, go have fun. I don't really play games for that. I like having a strong story with strong characters. Exploring huge worlds is okay, but just so long as there's characters I like, and exploring it is part of the story. Xenoblade X doesn't really have that. It's just exploration for the sake of explorations. There's a pretty weak story reason for it, but mostly it's just exploration for exploration's sake. But I was determined to finish this game, so I could say that I have played all of the games in the Xeno series to the end. With such low expectations, I kind of had fun with it. Like I said, the game is fun to play. It has pretty cool controls and combat. The story and characters are weak, especially when you compare it to the other two Xenoblade games, but this time around I knew what to expect, and I found myself enjoying them. I never got far enough to get to control giant robots the first time around, so I didn't know this at the time I started over, but as soon as you have access to them, the game goes into overdrive on the grindyness. I finished with just over 120 hrs of gameplay, I would say that at least 100 hours of that was spent grinding out money for giant robots and giant robot weaponry. This game is literally 80% grinding out money to pay for the things you cannot finish the game without due to a pretty steep difficulty curve at the end.
So, in the end, was it a bad game? No. It really wasn't. Did I treat it unfairly when it was released? Yeah, I probably did. Is it worth shelling out the cash for a Wii-U to be able to play today? Probably not. I mean, if you can find a really cheap console in good condition, yeah, go for it, but I wouldn't say it's really worth it if you have to shell out more than $50 for console+game combined. If you enjoy the open world sort of games, you may enjoy it more than I did, but, again, the game is ONLY available on Wii-U. Rumors of a Switch port have been debunked by Monolith Soft. They said they thought about it, then realized that because of the Wii-U dual screen functionality, literally half of the game's code would have to be rewritten, and as they are a very small developer they just can't spare the manpower for it.
This game deserved better, in my opinion. It feels like what it is. A game that reached for grand ideas, but fell short of them because Nintendo stripped away almost half of the dev team and put them to work on Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It feels like an unfinished game, because it kind of is. I've been reading up on what was planned for it and had to be cut because they just didn't have the manpower to get it done. This game was gutted to give only the most bare bones of what it could and should have been, because Nintendo felt Breath of the Wild would be more lucrative. You can really tell that there were a lot of people stripped out of the dev team. Usually a game like this has end credits that go on over 10 mins. The end credits for this game were less than 3. That's how few people they had left to work on it, and because of that, the vision of what it was meant to be had to be trimmed away into what they could do with the people that they had. Which is sad, but an unfortunate fact of the gaming industry of today. I can see the game it might have been in the game that it is, and I can appreciate it for what it is, and what it aimed to be. I'm glad I took the time to finish it. And I hope that, with the overwhelming success Monolith has had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nintendo will never do that to them again in the future.
The Xenoblade series, is BY FAR my favorite current series being made today. They offer very deep and expansive stories, in huge and immersive worlds, with excellent characters. So when I heard that there was a new game coming out, I didn't hesitate to preorder it, and buy myself the console it would be coming out for. When it finally arrived, I was somewhat disappointed with it. I enjoyed the gameplay. The graphics were pretty stellar considering the Wii-U hardware limitations. The music was pretty hit and miss. For me, the music is always part of the experience in a video game. That's why I always mention it. There are some really good tracks, but the majority of it is either awful, or extremely irritating. And the characters were kind of flat and shallow. The character you control is an avatar that you create, never has his or her name spoken in any dialog, and never speaks in any of the story scenes. I have ALWAYS hated silent protagonists in video games. It's supposed to bring you more into the story by allowing you to choose a character's every response and action, but in my opinion it does nothing but take you OUT of the story when you're constantly being prompted for dialog responses that are never spoken aloud by your character. You go from Shulk, a very deep and emotional character in Xenoblade Chronicles to Cross, a completely silent automaton in Xenoblade Chronicles X. It kind of stung more than a little for me, with how much expectation I had coming into this game. The original Xenoblade game set a VERY high bar, and X just didn't quite clear it. The story was pretty weak, the characters were pretty weak, and though the world is beautiful and fun to explore, it's just so empty. There's like, nothing in it. You have all these places to go and nothing to do in them. I got to a point in the game where, in order to progress to the next part of the story, I had to go out and do mandatory exploration, something I very much dislike, and several side quests, which I also very much dislike, and level up, which I find boring and tedious, and I also had to go level up affinity for characters I never use, and then gear up and use those characters for affinity missions. I looked at all of that mountain of crap I had to do in order to continue the story and said NOPE!!!
Well, anyway, since I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and it's expansion Torna: The Golden Country (definitely worth the expansion pass pricetag, if you're wondering. I got a good 30 hrs of gameplay out of it, and didn't even come close to 100%ing it.) I've been having this nagging feeling of wanting to go back and finish Xenoblade Chronicle's X. I spent all that money on the game and the system to play it on, and I never even finished the game. So, I tried to pick up where I left off. Yeah, no, that game is WAY to complicated to play to just pick up in the middle and go back to what you were doing. So, I started over from the beginning. This time, with 100% lowered expectations. I knew it was going to be a slogging grindfest of lvling up, forced exploration, and forced sidequests. I knew the story and characters were going to be lackluster. And I knew I didn't have a very good time the first time around.
So, I sucked it up and plowed through. I'm not a fan of games that say, look, and open world, go have fun. I don't really play games for that. I like having a strong story with strong characters. Exploring huge worlds is okay, but just so long as there's characters I like, and exploring it is part of the story. Xenoblade X doesn't really have that. It's just exploration for the sake of explorations. There's a pretty weak story reason for it, but mostly it's just exploration for exploration's sake. But I was determined to finish this game, so I could say that I have played all of the games in the Xeno series to the end. With such low expectations, I kind of had fun with it. Like I said, the game is fun to play. It has pretty cool controls and combat. The story and characters are weak, especially when you compare it to the other two Xenoblade games, but this time around I knew what to expect, and I found myself enjoying them. I never got far enough to get to control giant robots the first time around, so I didn't know this at the time I started over, but as soon as you have access to them, the game goes into overdrive on the grindyness. I finished with just over 120 hrs of gameplay, I would say that at least 100 hours of that was spent grinding out money for giant robots and giant robot weaponry. This game is literally 80% grinding out money to pay for the things you cannot finish the game without due to a pretty steep difficulty curve at the end.
So, in the end, was it a bad game? No. It really wasn't. Did I treat it unfairly when it was released? Yeah, I probably did. Is it worth shelling out the cash for a Wii-U to be able to play today? Probably not. I mean, if you can find a really cheap console in good condition, yeah, go for it, but I wouldn't say it's really worth it if you have to shell out more than $50 for console+game combined. If you enjoy the open world sort of games, you may enjoy it more than I did, but, again, the game is ONLY available on Wii-U. Rumors of a Switch port have been debunked by Monolith Soft. They said they thought about it, then realized that because of the Wii-U dual screen functionality, literally half of the game's code would have to be rewritten, and as they are a very small developer they just can't spare the manpower for it.
This game deserved better, in my opinion. It feels like what it is. A game that reached for grand ideas, but fell short of them because Nintendo stripped away almost half of the dev team and put them to work on Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It feels like an unfinished game, because it kind of is. I've been reading up on what was planned for it and had to be cut because they just didn't have the manpower to get it done. This game was gutted to give only the most bare bones of what it could and should have been, because Nintendo felt Breath of the Wild would be more lucrative. You can really tell that there were a lot of people stripped out of the dev team. Usually a game like this has end credits that go on over 10 mins. The end credits for this game were less than 3. That's how few people they had left to work on it, and because of that, the vision of what it was meant to be had to be trimmed away into what they could do with the people that they had. Which is sad, but an unfortunate fact of the gaming industry of today. I can see the game it might have been in the game that it is, and I can appreciate it for what it is, and what it aimed to be. I'm glad I took the time to finish it. And I hope that, with the overwhelming success Monolith has had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nintendo will never do that to them again in the future.
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Doctor Who Series 11
So, with this season of Doctor Who over and done with, I thought I'd write out what I thought of it. First of all, I thought Jodie Whittaker did a pretty good job as the Doctor. She played it a lot like David Tennant's 10th Doctor, just a little more scatter-brained. David Tennant was my favorite of the new Doctors, and Jodie Whittaker is a close second for me. I also like how they handled the Doctor being a woman. She wasn't constantly commenting on it, she only really said anything when she was faced with something sexist that brought her up short.
The writing, for the most part, was a hell of a lot better than anything out of the Moffat years. The worst of Chibnall's first season was better than the best Moffat ever achieved. Mostly, because Chibnall knows how to structure a story, where Moffat doesn't know the first thing about it.
Most of the episodes were a little mediocre. They would start out good, and then they'd just get a little dumb once the villain was revealed, and kind of grating when it came time for the moral of the story. There were some extremely good eiposdes in there, The Demons of Punjab was probably my favorite, with Witchfinder being second. But, overall the season was more mediocre than good. But, again, Chibnall's mediocre is lightyears better than Moffat's best.
Previous show runners on the new series have limited historical episodes to one per season. Which has been more than fine with me, because the historical episodes were some of the worst episodes of the season. There were three in this season, and two of them were my two favorite episodes of the season. The third was the aboslute worst of the season. Not because it was really all that bad, but, more because it was extraordinarily lazy. It was the laziest episode of the entire season. That would be Rosa. Look, Rosa Parks is an American hero. She deserves a better tribute than a terrible Doctor Who episode. It was like the writers were all together, brainstorming ideas, and someone said, hey, let's do Rosa Parks. Everyone said, yeah, that's great. And that was all the thought an effort that went into it. The thing is, though, that Chibnall was EXTREMELY proud of this episode. In every interview he gave, this was the episode he brought up. And it was just awful. It was boring. It was badly written. It wasn't exactly all that historically accurate. And, kind of worst of all, is that Rosa Parks only succeeded in taking her stand, because of the efforts of a white woman.
Another problem that this season had, was that it wanted to have a message. The problem was that the messages were usually extremely heavy handed, and they weren't very well incorporated into the stories. What you basically got was a five minute or so stretch in almost every episode where the canst would pretty much look at the camera and say, and this is today's moral of the story... GET IT!?!?!?! It's really kind of distracting, and it makes episodes that would, otherwise, have been decent, possibly good, kind of not all that great. I have no problem whatsoever with social justice messages. What I have a problem with is when the entire story grinds to a screeching halt so that we can address the moral of the story. It should be integrated into the story in such a way that it's not popping out in your face. The characters shouldn't take time out of the story to tell you , hey, look, this is the moral or the story. It should be woven seamlessly into the story, and it just wasn't.
So, all in all, it was an okay season. It's the best season since Russell T. Davies left by a very long shot, but it did have it's problems. While a few of the episodes were excellent, most of them were just sort of mediocre and okay. If I could give Chibnall one piece of advice for the next season, it would be to tone down the social justice a notch or two, and better integrate it into the story. It's really jarring when all action and forward motion in the story comes to a halt so that we can discuss the moral of the story. It needs to be better woven in than that. I get that it was kind of his schtick when it took over, but there's for more compentent ways to do it than the way it was done here. It was an okay season, with a great new Doctor, some very good new companions, but it really needed some work on the writing.
The writing, for the most part, was a hell of a lot better than anything out of the Moffat years. The worst of Chibnall's first season was better than the best Moffat ever achieved. Mostly, because Chibnall knows how to structure a story, where Moffat doesn't know the first thing about it.
Most of the episodes were a little mediocre. They would start out good, and then they'd just get a little dumb once the villain was revealed, and kind of grating when it came time for the moral of the story. There were some extremely good eiposdes in there, The Demons of Punjab was probably my favorite, with Witchfinder being second. But, overall the season was more mediocre than good. But, again, Chibnall's mediocre is lightyears better than Moffat's best.
Previous show runners on the new series have limited historical episodes to one per season. Which has been more than fine with me, because the historical episodes were some of the worst episodes of the season. There were three in this season, and two of them were my two favorite episodes of the season. The third was the aboslute worst of the season. Not because it was really all that bad, but, more because it was extraordinarily lazy. It was the laziest episode of the entire season. That would be Rosa. Look, Rosa Parks is an American hero. She deserves a better tribute than a terrible Doctor Who episode. It was like the writers were all together, brainstorming ideas, and someone said, hey, let's do Rosa Parks. Everyone said, yeah, that's great. And that was all the thought an effort that went into it. The thing is, though, that Chibnall was EXTREMELY proud of this episode. In every interview he gave, this was the episode he brought up. And it was just awful. It was boring. It was badly written. It wasn't exactly all that historically accurate. And, kind of worst of all, is that Rosa Parks only succeeded in taking her stand, because of the efforts of a white woman.
Another problem that this season had, was that it wanted to have a message. The problem was that the messages were usually extremely heavy handed, and they weren't very well incorporated into the stories. What you basically got was a five minute or so stretch in almost every episode where the canst would pretty much look at the camera and say, and this is today's moral of the story... GET IT!?!?!?! It's really kind of distracting, and it makes episodes that would, otherwise, have been decent, possibly good, kind of not all that great. I have no problem whatsoever with social justice messages. What I have a problem with is when the entire story grinds to a screeching halt so that we can address the moral of the story. It should be integrated into the story in such a way that it's not popping out in your face. The characters shouldn't take time out of the story to tell you , hey, look, this is the moral or the story. It should be woven seamlessly into the story, and it just wasn't.
So, all in all, it was an okay season. It's the best season since Russell T. Davies left by a very long shot, but it did have it's problems. While a few of the episodes were excellent, most of them were just sort of mediocre and okay. If I could give Chibnall one piece of advice for the next season, it would be to tone down the social justice a notch or two, and better integrate it into the story. It's really jarring when all action and forward motion in the story comes to a halt so that we can discuss the moral of the story. It needs to be better woven in than that. I get that it was kind of his schtick when it took over, but there's for more compentent ways to do it than the way it was done here. It was an okay season, with a great new Doctor, some very good new companions, but it really needed some work on the writing.
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
NaNo day 20
Woohooo!!! I hit 50k. Now the rest of this moth can be a stressful miserable horror without the added bonus of feeling like I have to spend every waking moment home from work writing. I'm a little over 95k words on the first draft of Shadows of What Might Have Been. I'm somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way done. I'm expecting the full first draft to end up around 130k words at the moment, unless something drastic changes and I need to add more in. BUT with my day job, and the Christmas season, it's probably going to have to wait until after the new year to get finished up. We're more shorthanded than we ever have been in all the 15 years I've worked for the Post Office this Christmas, so it's looking like a heck of a lot of really, really long, gruelling hours and little time else to do anything but eat and sleep. So yay for that.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
NaNo day 13.
13 days in and I just hit 30k. It's my day off, so I haven't seen the horrors which work has in store for me this Christmas season yet, but if past years are anything to go by, it's going to be ugly. I think my supervisor tried to call me in to work today, but I wasn't about to answer. The day after Veteran's Day is the absolute worst day for mail out of the whole year, and there's no way I'm giving up my day off to work it. I like my job, but I don't like it that much. Just 20k left to go, and 17 days left in the month. I only need about 1100 words a day to finish. Hopefully I'll be able to find the time between work and everything else to get at least that much done for the rest of the month.
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