[SQEX-W9] 11. ^ Kuja: Excellent, Kupo! Power, mobility... You truly are the best! You even hurt me...a little.

[SONNICK]

…… It’s this time of the year again, yepp. Don’t be hurt, Kuja, it’s just the usual, useless, annual celebration of all things Square (has put out).

part 9/IX has commenced.
Get ready for the annual change to indulge in what you’d otherwise not dare to tell anyone, time to engage in battle with your ATB(acklog); no matter if it is/has been developed by SQEX, or just published (so basically it is actually a Taito/Eidos/Enix-Square-week, if you want to), go and have some fun.

Or anticipate the newest instalment in this never-ending story of this free-falling long-running series that nobody really cares about, except quite a few actually do, considering the FFXV-hype that was felt when 15 was finally announced some weeks ago.

Due to me having missed where the old SB-archive has landed, I couldn’t see whether/what I did for last year’s installment, but since FF9 didn’t care about 7 and 8, neither do I!

So what’s up this week:

• obviously gonna take a trip around tokyo in TWEWY to see what’s up w/ Fashion Victims up’n’down the road.
• Gonna play the FFXV Platinum demo. No matter how the game actually turns out to play, it just cannot be something that’d resemble a true and proper Platinum (game)-demo. Do I care? No. Just want to see what I’ve missed since aborting my playthrough of FF12 in … 2006, almost ten years ago.
• Life is Strange? Maybe I’ll find out this week~~~
• on my list for a while now (actually since 7-ish years?), Project Sylpheed, one of the first (if not the first) game I’ve got for the last gen.
• gonna watch FF15-Brotherhood:The Anime. Bracing for the worst, hoping for something like Nabari no Ou, which was a nice show to watch, even if cheesy-like-hell.

I'll only get around to do one or two of these things, but like always, it'll be a great time. Join me if 'ye want to, but heed my warning: *No* gunblades allowed. Only daggers, moogles or cute Blackmages.

slightly altered topic-title stolen from the epic Final Fantasy IX Wikipedia entry that has in-game quotes linked where [citations needed] them to be.

[VastleCania]

Just dropping this game I’ve never played here. http://gamejolt.com/games/the-world-ends-with-you-noise-busters/60977

[CourierRice]

I suppose this is as good a time as any for me to look into Murdered: Soul Suspect.

[Rudie]

The World Ends With You Rules.

This had to happen dark souls week or Id devote time to Darius Burst.

[Persona]

Oh dang, SQEX owning Taito does validate Taito for FSQEXW, doesn’t it??

[SONNICK]

yup it does!

[SONNICK]

since i’ve been checking up on Racing Lagoon (with it being sold currently by a fellow SBer), I’ve realized that I somehow have lost the soundtrack-rip from ytube … but ytube has a heart for poor fools like me:

here you go/i go again!

[sleepysmiles]

Oh hey good timing i just recently started a play of FF5A, my favorite Final Fantasy game. Up to the fire crystal. My fighters are mage knights 2-handing swords, my mages have the Barehanded ability equipped so they can be punch wizards, and i am breaking the game over my knee effortlessly. Good times…

[SONNICK]

so, since this year marks the release of FFXV, and it has been almost an decade since trying to play an FF properly (FF12), of course I had to focus on the upcoming flagship/trainwreck that this instalment could be.


I’ve watched the first episode of FFBrotherhood

, and … yeah, it’s kinda nice that you’re getting it for free, but so far in Ep1 nothing much happened except name dropping and setup.

obviously had to follow that up with the PLATINUM demo, and if there’s a thing the game surely cannot live up to, it’s the name PLATINUM. We’re talking of Bayonetta and VANQUISH feelings being evoked here, and these are games that FFXV will never manage to live up to, no matter what it’ll actually end up being, neither that it’d try, I’d say. Still, PLATINUM. Bad choice, and with that out of the way, time to start this sucker.

Since it's me, what'd I naturally do in an instant? Right, go checking out the four-wheelin' action.

nice numberplate there, mate.
You cannot see it in this screencap, but SQEX surely knows how to pander to their oddest fanbase(s), by including …

fxxxing *fading brakelights*, of all things.


seriously.

Movin' on, even when trying the small sports-box for a while, there are a few thing's I've noticed: You cannot use the building blocks for proper jumping action => :confused: . What's more, the handling felt a bit … off(?). Maybe because they decided to separate camera controls from the movement of the car? idk, but drifting felt a bit weird, because

• for one, morphing back into a human when trying to apply the handbrake never happens in other games
• and otoh, even when the wheelbase == essentially length of the car, the rear slided around like it had a tad bit too much inertia. Maybe it’s soil conditions (or rather: parquet flooring)? I will have to try that in the final game for a Final Ferdict (ok, VERDICT, but i just couldn’t come up with anthing that’d let me use FFXV as an abbreviation, i feel bad yeah). Come to think of it, the Cadillac Sixteen (the carThatNoticsAndBuddiesAreDrivinRoundWith) also has quite the long wheelbase and a small, but significantly longer tail than the boxy car in the demo. Maybe it’ll feel more natural going fast/round corners in this … will report back when it happens to be out.

So yeah, it isn’t DRIVING EMOTION TYPE-S levels of magic carpet land-handling (or rather: un-handling), but it isn’t Gran Turismo rivaling stuff either.
I’d place it quite above Disaster Report (anything else’d be a #sickBurn ) and Driving Emo, but still below Sleeping Dogz, that also had a bit of wonky-physics going on, but managed to be tolerable.

So, after getting this out of the way, what else can I say about the game?

it

looks

nice, yupp.

i found fighting needs a bit of time getting used to, but shifting around lampposts and seeing them being destroyed in the process was a nice touch - you can do some hanging 'round action, but that has at least minor consequences - nice, i liked that touch.
That aside, after playing BB recently and remembering how Remember me managed dodging, FF could do with a more fluent way of handling doding action … it never felt as fluent or natural as in the two aforementioned games when sidestepping or dodging an attack (maybe because it is trying to be less video-gamey and more tru2life™?)

in any case, next stop would have to be justice monsters V

so far for the FFXV-related bit this week.

[CourierRice]

Playing through Murdered: Soul Suspect, finally. After one play session I’m probably more than halfway through. It’s not a terribly long game, and it has some hang ups, but it’s pretty good. It’s an easy game, save for the occasional thing that is only difficult for dumb reasons.

Despite being an adventure game, there are enemies in the form of demons. They don’t often appear, and they’re easy to overcome if you get the sneak attack (random and easy to miss) QTE right. They kind of don’t need to exist, and aren’t used to very interesting effect, but I feel like Eidos got worried that without some sort of enemy, people would riot.

It’s a detective game, so you have to collect clues and use them to reach solutions. The problems are that 1) the game doesn’t make you think very hard, and 2) sometimes the solution is weirdly arbitrary and I don’t feel like you’re given the proper direction to reach it. Maybe this is how adventure games have always been, I don’t know. I feel like Ace Attorney made me think fairly hard, and Layton is downright sinister in its expectation of the player, so maybe my criticism is justified.

There’s also collectables eeeeverywhere, which seem to only reward you with achievements. Except in specific cases, where they reward you with really cool and well voice acted ghost stories! Either way, Probably 3/4s of the game is optional collectables. That said, all collectables do give you bits of worldbuilding. The more I collect, the more I end up actually enjoying the world of the game. And that’s probably the key thing about the game, is that it lieu of being a challenging game, it gives you a town with an interesting character to explore. Given that that’s the case, I almost wish Eidos pursued more of a Shenmue route and just littlered the town with little doodads to occupy your time. Granted, the story takes place in the course of one night, so I suppose they want the pace to feel brisk (though it that case, why all the collectables?).

I’m currently in a spooky mental hospital because ooooh the mentally ill! So scary! Not in a sympathetic “having mental illness is scary way,” of course. Only in the “sick people are weird and scary but also occasionally exist for your amusement” way. Most of the game’s jokes exist via reading the minds of the patients.

This post is all over the place, but it’s an okay game.

[BustedAstromech]

secret note!

• demon wrasslin’
• the puzzles
• collectables

were all added / rewritten when SE shipped a Japanese producer over to Airtight to fix the game. Team consensus was he broke it! Lot of hurt feelings around Murdered, or, the usual when an external producer attempts to change game direction from the team’s earlier design.

then Airtight died

[CourierRice]

aw, figures! now I have to have sympathy for the darn game.

[BustedAstromech]

don’t, those who worked on felt more like

[Rudie]

I keep thinking soul suspect is the ghost of the cancelled cavia game with the same premise.