I beat parasite eve. what a satisfying little thing. perfectly self-contained for what it is, and feels like it captures the best of 16 and 32 bit era squaresoft in one package.
the composer of parasite eve’s (incredible, moody) soundtrack is the same lady who did the entire soundtrack to super mario rpg! that’s honestly crazy! very impressive range!
Finding out she also did most of the music for Street Fighter 2 was surprising but also made a lot of sense? At least in that they’re both great.
Never beat PE back when, but this tune still pops into my head from time to time.
my favorite detail about saint row the thirds WE’RE GOING EVEN MORE OVER THE TOP message is that the reward for like the first mission in 3 (helicopter) is the you-beat-the-game reward in 2
Very interested in this game. I have read that only the first half is great, and then it just becomes absurdly difficult. Is this so?
The remaster has all the DLC unlocked from the start, and it’s hard not to be tempted to use the VTOL and VTOL hover bike right from the get go.
I’ll always miss that Saints Row gave up on Saints Row 2’s absurd improvised melee weapon system. Grabbing a stop sign or mailbox right out of the ground and wailing on dudes was a good time.
Nah, the second half isn’t that difficult. I remember a pretty smooth difficulty curve. The final boss and postgame were too difficult for me, though.
Honestly even without that it’s still ridiculously easy to get shit, even without missions. At the beginning you can quickly just start a war outside your starting safehouse and then just jack a tank and rush it into the garage and then run in the house and you’re all clear and also have a tank now.
And on the tank subject what the fuck is GTA doing when I see videos of GTA V tanks and cars are bouncing off them while SR has been letting tanks run over and crush them for ages.
GTA can’t do anything interesting with physics or vehicle damage anymore because all the development focus is around the online portion. Does it help the online? No? Then it’s not part of the game.
I’m almost 30 hours into my FFXII replay and I’m surprised at just how bland it is. I remember being excited when it was first released because Nomura wasn’t involved in the visual design which signaled a return to “realism” in my mind. However, man, like, i kinda want blitzball and leather and buckles and weirdness in my old age. I’m more interested than ever to figure out exactly why Matsuno left the game and what changes he could’ve made because this game is so breezy it almost feels inconsequential.
The battle system though, they pretty much got it right, with a few modern quality of life improvements (switching out teams without going into a menu) it would’ve been basically perfect.
I was expecting this one to hold up with the passage of time but I suspect I’ll be ranking it as a lesser Final Fantasy game when I finish.
The more subdued, bland approach is something I really loved about XII. It feels like the party and their journey are quite secondary to the wider issues and themes of that world in a way no other FF has managed in my mind. It raises some really interesting questions about what a nation really is and where class, race and duty to others vs. personal desire fall into that question.
Granted a lot of the actual ‘stuff’ you encounter in the midpoint is pretty tedious or dull but I think the combat and class system helps carry it through.
It’s a Matsuno-team story through-and-through and it really asks a decent amount of political knowledge from the player. I’m surprised that post-merger Square-Enix was willing to risk a budget like that on that team, and I’m sure a lot of the tension was between that budget’s commercial needs and what audience that implied and the game they wanted to make.
What I don’t understand is the battle and class system. The gambits can’t fall through or be linked or do anything interesting; it seems like everyone just putters around trying to make ‘Steal’ half-work. To me the battle system falls in line with other Square work in the past fifteen years; they new where they had to take RPG combat past formation stances, they were looking at MMOs and action games as sources to pull from, but they hadn’t figured out how to get user input both closer and further away in the specific lower-engagement fights they want. Compare Final Fantasy XII to the MMOs it pulls from and I think the combat is normally less engaging; boss fights and hunts still work but only when the player is interceding against the combat systems’ UI affordances to play it like a traditional RPG.
What’s good about the battle system?
What’s good about the gambits?
What’s good about the class system?
The greatest crime FF12 committed is forcing you to buy new gambits like weapons or armor and limiting the number of slots you have behind leveling. I like everything else about it but as soon as it became apparent that I couldn’t really actually interact with the gambit system for many hours I put it down for good.
In a few hours you get flooded with items to sell so money isn’t a problem but yeah, they should have had all slots available immediately. My guess is they wanted to ease you into gambits over time. I loved this enough to beat it twice and put more time into it than any other FF. I think I was drawn to it aesthetically and wanted to see as much of that late-byzantine-steampunk world as I could. I liked that gambits gave you a way to avoid JRPG menuing and just let the game play itself as you gawked at the world and watched the political drama play out. I think it got to a point where classes didn’t matter and it was just up to your own preference, like if I wanted to run through with three crossbows or spears it would work itself out through filling out the skill grid. And I guess I found all that ok enough to play it as much as I did.
I liked the battle system a lot!
The way I see it, either
I agree that stealing with gambits sucks though
That sounds like we had a similar experience, but it played to me like a formless mass of animations and attacks. Did anyone find depth in the gambits or if it’s just the results. In other words, would party members who were already set up with reasonably intelligent combat playbooks bring everything you liked about gambits?
so, at some point, Sega patched in a mode for PD Mega39s/Megamix where you can play the game on the Switch’s touchscreen, giving each button a quarter of the screen and still letting you do swipes and, aside from the issue of being able to occasionally cover up the notes you’re hitting (but you know the song charts already, right), this is good enough of a feature to take the game from “why would you play this over Future Tone on the PS4 in our current hellscape of not being able to go places” to “okay, yes, you should buy this game because now it’s playable portable-y without having to deal with the joycons”
it’s singlehandedly good enough that I’m probably going to grab the Western release (note: the price on the NA eshop for the deluxe edition is cheaper than either the base game or the season pass on the JPN eshop)
Tinkering with Gambits to make counters to specific enemies was neat and felt like a more engaging development of the usual prep phase of most JRPGs. Managing optimal equipment output when prepping any JRPG party and seeing the fruits of that in battle is roughly comparable in my mind to Gambits but, by their nature, Gambits make the outcome slightly less predictable because of the variables involved and because you have to learn the logic of the system. When you’ve mastered it it doesn’t really stay interesting but I think it was enough to maintain momentum for at least the first two thirds.
Some of the more unusual Gambit conditions (e.g. Foe: Character Status = Blind) also make you consider how they might be used in bizarre or unintuitive ways, whereas in a traditional JRPG combat system, the opportunities for strategy aren’t as clearly hinted at in a way that still requires you to figure it out.
I agree that Gambit slots should have unlocked in a more natural way (maybe be tied to character level?).
I like the flexibility of the class system in the Zodiac version. I just like knowing that almost any of the characters can be forced into certain classes or you can just stack multiclass combinations (3 half-monks). It’s not necessarily unique to XII but I like it.
For me, I think I was mostly just lazy as in Tuxedo’s first bullet point but occasionally it felt good to have to make small tweaks here and there to get nice surprises and speed up the whittling down of life bars. If the party had pre-made gambits set up the moment each character joins maybe I would feel a little too detached to enjoy myself?
I finally figured out you need to play through the Ridge Racer 4 Grand Prix with each race team to get all the dialogue, so I’ve just started my third racing career with the Mappy team and Sophie Chevalier.
Good Lord this is a fantastic game.