Still playing FFXIII-2. 32 hours in, just started episode 5. This is one game I might actually go for a 100% completion after I finish the main story.
I actually just stupidly missed the Fate and Freedom Paradox Ending (had the strategy guide open to the page, and just didn't read it), and now I'm not sure if I can even get 100%.
So how would 9 turnovers in one game affect the overall rating?
Yeah I know, it's only one game. One game out of seven that we're talking about here. None of this amounts to a very big sample size yet.
Now imagine that candy bar, only the chocolate is actually poo. See, that's why we don't click things when we don't know what they are.
I agree - SSX was always more of an arcade-style snowboarding game, with all that that entails. This is just bland. I might still buy it because I've missed me some SSX over the past few years, but this really doesn't look like the SSX I know and love.
I did enjoy the races, but what made them enjoyable for me was how crazy they were.
Well yeah, but that just reduces battles to paradigm shifts, which is about as much fun as hitting X repeatedly. All the battles I ever fought in XIII, and so far in XIII-2 as well, have amounted to "X-X-X-X-X-X-X-L1 (select paradigm)-X-X-X-X-X-X-L1 (select paradigm)-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-L1 (select paradigm)" etc. and both games are still probably the easiest FF's I've ever played. I've lost maybe 3 or 4 battles in XIII-2 up through episode 5, and those were all because whatever enemies I was fighting happened to get in a few lucky shots all in a row in the span of 2 or 3 seconds. It wouldn't have even mattered if I'd been selecting commands myself.
I mean 2/3 of your party is being controlled by the AI anyway, and they're no less important than you are - why would you think whatever small number of commands you might pick differently than the AI for your 1/3 of the party is going to make any tangible difference other than just slowing your character down?
7 and 8, and from what I recall the earlier FF's as well, *forced* you to manually select commands for *all* your characters, every turn. That basically mandated some strategic thinking on the player's part. FFXIII and XIII-2's battle system is fundamentally broken by comparison. I still love XIII-2 for other reasons, but it has probably my least favorite battle system of any of the FF's I've played (though it's marginally better than XIII's, but still the same basic system).
I can't speak to 4-6, but 7-8 both had options for "active" or "wait". I don't recall which was default, though I think "wait" was. If you had it set to "wait", it was 100% turn-based. If you set it to "active", it was turn-based unless you went to make a sandwich in between turns, and then maybe the enemy would take a turn while you were away.
Also, I finished XIII with no trouble at all using "auto-battle" in every single battle, and I am in the last episode of XIII-2 and have only strayed from using auto-battle because I wanted to see what Ultima Arrow looked like. I get 5 stars and 15,000+ points in basically every battle that way (including boss battles), and my battles are usually over in less than a minute. That's just the way the battle system is. People who think you *need* to use something other than auto-battle just don't have enough faith in the AI. The AI is always going to be more efficient than you are at fighting. You're a human trying to fight the game; the AI is the game trying to fight itself. It knows better than you what's going to work and it can select the right commands instantly.
I would *love it* if I actually had to use something other than auto-battle to win, but alas, the chances of winning and winning with the best possible spoils are greater with auto-battle than without.
I remember liking X-2's battle system a lot, though I don't remember many of the specifics of it. I just remember you could change roles, which were like the earlier FF jobs, and that sort of evolved into the current paradigm system.
If I remember right, XII was the first of the real-time FF's, and I didn't much like XII (though I know some people did).
Gah! EA's logo animation and sound alone just made me jump back from my PC. This video needs some kind of warning!
FFXIII's battle system is the opposite of a turn-based system. It's totally real-time.
That looks like the PC version of FF7 to me. I'm one of the few people that own that, I guess.
It *could* be an emulator, but I don't know how you can "tell" that. It looks like how I remember the PC game looking.
I really miss the turn-based battle systems of the earlier Final Fantasies. In both XIII and XIII-2, I just sit there mashing the "X" button over and over on "auto-battle" because frankly, it is the most efficient way to win most battles in the new FF games, which are really just about speed. If you spend one second just moving from one ability to the next in the menu, that can be the difference between a 5 star 15,000+ point battle performance (and consequent rare drop bonus) and a 4 star performance where you get nothing.
Moving to real-time also has to be what's responsible for only allowing us to control one character in battle, since the other characters all have to be doing stuff at the same time.
In the end, I find the newer FF games' battles to be just kind of a mess. I don't really even look at what's going on on-screen, I just monitor my health and ATB bars and that's it. FF's real-time battles are much more about preparing properly in advance, then just watching how your preparations affect the battle and monitoring your gauges so you know when to change paradigms.
And that's true of pretty much all RPG's with real-time battle systems. I will tolerate it in FF because I love everything else about FF games. But any game that doesn't offer everything else I like about FF is going to have to give me some real strategy in the battles themselves. FF's battles *used* to be strategic too.
I'm actually curious as to what RPG's have the best turn-based battle systems these days (other than DQ, which I really have just never been able to get into).
A lot of old console games were originally arcade games - they were ports. The home video game market used to be almost completely arcade-based - if the games weren't direct ports, they were usually copies or derivatives of "arcade style" games, since often the straight ports were exclusive to one system or another, or at least one publisher.
But home systems didn't have the power to really replicate arcade machines at that time. So straight ports were more about trying to get people to re-live the feeling they have playing the arcade game, even if the home port doesn't really stand on its own. And even a lot of the copies or derivatives are about that same thing.
If you don't have a lot of experience with the original arcade games (which almost all *are* still universally as good as they always were), then you can never understand why anyone ever played most of the home versions.
But fire up an emulator and try to relive what it was like going to an arcade in those days - from about 1979 onwards, almost all the arcade games that were popular at that time are still highly addictive. And you can understand why people would want to approximate that experience at home, even if the home systems at the time could never quite get there. (Occasionally you would get a port like Burgertime on Intellivision or Donkey Kong on Coleco Vision that was close enough, though.)
I don't remember anything specific about the game itself, but I do remember thinking Chrono Cross was one of the best RPG's I'd played at the time, and definitely an antidote to the FF7 withdrawal I think I felt myself going through at the time. (I can't remember how many years apart they were, but IIRC I think CC came out soon after FF8, which I found unsatisfying in many ways after FF7.)
I might be able to get Omega if I try now, about 25 hours in and having just leveled up massively over the past couple nights in Archylte Steppe (I'm trying to collect all the materials I need to level up my silver chocobo for the chocobo races). At this point, though, it's almost more for curiosity than any useful reason that I'd want Omega. I've already got a pretty well leveled-up chocobo commando, but I find I rarely use two commandos anyway (and I like having my one commando be Noel or Serah, since they seem to have the most abilities). On offense I stick with either Relentless Assault or Delta Attack, and when I do use Aggression, I leave Serah and Noel to the commando duties and call in a ravager.
I don't know about the $10 credit, I guess I didn't get it. The real reason I ordered through Amazon instead of Gamestop, though, was that they were $10 cheaper on the strategy guide, so maybe it all worked out anyway. I would have been paying $10 for the Serah costume by ordering through GS, not just this $2.99!
I did get the SE of the game, but I got the regular guide. With XIII I did the opposite, so I figured I'd change it up this time. Also having the SE of the guide made me really not want to use the guide for XIII; having the regular guide for XIII-2 means I can throw it around and leave it open all the time and not worry about it.
As far as I know, all the costumes are paid DLC unless they decide to do some special giveaway or something. There was also one costume available as a Gamestop preorder bonus. (I preordered through Amazon instead, so I got Omega Weapon, which ended up being totally worthless because you basically cannot beat him until you've pretty much finished the game. I may as well have gone for the costume from Gamestop.) I agree that's totally lame.
As a single purchase, it's not like $3 would break my bank. But I just think it's a terrible precedent because then they'll think they can sell every little thing for $3. $3 for an outfit, $3 for a weapon, $3 for a monster, to the point where if you want even the kind of collection you'd have had in previous games for free, all of a sudden you've spent $70 or $80 just on "extra" things, plus the cost of the game. I mean didn't extra outfits just come with FFX-2? (As part of the different roles.) And the alternative is you just have this bare-bones game that still cost you $60.
I hate the whole idea of this kind of DLC, but if they're going to make you pay for it, it's got to be priced so low that nobody really even thinks about it.
First, I wonder why Kotaku decided to link "[this.Havin]g" in my comment up there... weird.
Anyway, my point is I always see people say stuff like "go get yourself a real girl" as if there's something to be ashamed of in thinking someone who's computer-generated (or even hand-drawn!) can be attractive. What year is this? We're not in the 20th century anymore; eventually that kind of statement is just going to date a person and make them seem really old and out of touch.
I also feel like people who say stuff like that probably don't have anybody themselves, because my experience has been that I feel *more* free to admit that I like stuff like this since being married, because I'm not trying to impress anybody. Yeah, I'm a nerd and I like to look at virtual boobs. So what? My wife doesn't care, and at some point I turn the game off and we spend our time together. Probably better for me to look at virtual boobs than somebody else's real ones, as far as she's concerned.
I'd get this outfit, but not for $2.99.
I don't think I would ever buy an outfit for Noel, so I still wouldn't be happy with that, and anyway I think $1.50 per outfit is still too much.
As a happily married guy who's secure in his situation, I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I want that Serah outfit. But I will not pay $3 for it.
And I'll buy it again, goddammit, because I'm a sucker.
