A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged final fantasy
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS)
Jul 8th
I’m not sure I like this. I did play it for about three hours last night, which would suggest that I do like it, but it annoyed it me a fair bit.
I don’t think I like the jobs and abilities system. Rather someone having a class, you learn skills from bits of equipment, but only if you’ve currently got the correct job set. So everyone changes jobs every couple of fights. My main character was a soldier, but is now an archer. My black mage became a white mage, then a beastmaster. My thief was an animist, but is now a moogle knight. That’s confusing enough on its own, trying to remember during a fight who’s meant to be doing what. But it’s made more confusing by the menus. It’s far too easy to end up forgetting to put abilities and equipment back after a job change – and it’s a pain when you do remember. Especially when you have to fiddle about in the Unit Info menu, then pop off to the shop for a bit, then go back and fiddle some more. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out I was spending more time on micromanagement than on fighting. I long for a step-by-step series of screens that would lead me through the process more easily.
Also, the law system is completely unfair. It’s one thing not to be able to perform certain actions – but when your characters are taken over by the enemy then you still get penalised if they use the forbidden actions. So my archer last night was charmed by some horrible monster and attacked a friendly unit, using his bow. Which was forbidden. Law broken. Gah!
So, yeah, I don’t like those bits. But there’s still something compulsive about it. I need even more time with it to decide on a final verdict.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS)
Jul 7th
Played for about an hour and a half. The actual fighting seems incredibly simple and easy so far, but everything outside the fights seems incredibly complicated and bewildering. I have no idea how jobs and abilities work as yet. I think that your job dictates which abilities you can learn, along with your current equipment, but I’m not sure. And there seem to P,R and A abilities, or something. My main character has an ability I can put in an A slot, which lets him use a shield, but he seems to be able to use a shield anyway without it being there. Maybe because of his current job, I’m not sure.
Anyway, I’ll play it a bit more and if I don’t get a handle on it all within another couple of hours I think I’ll go back to Disgaea, which was the original plan anyway.
Final Fantasy IV
Jan 19th
Hmm, this is tricky. Tricky, tricky, tricky.
You see, there are these Yellow Jelly monsters that appear in groups of four. They don’t do much damage, but they can only be hurt by magical attacks. There’s only one person in my party who can do that sort of magic and she’s only got a limited number of magic points to spend.
Normally in a Final Fantasy I’d stock up on Ether, which recovers magic points, and we’d be all set. But there’s only one town I can get to this early in the game and it doesn’t sell Ether.
So I’m getting so far into the dungeon and these slimes appear and I’m all out of magic and there’s nothing I can see to do but turn off the Micro and try again. There doesn’t even seem to be any way to run away from a battle. That might be possible with a long button press, or something, but I’ll have to wait until this evening and check the manual to find that out.
Still, makes the bus journey fly by. Nearly missed my stop because of some pesky goblins this morning.
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 15th
Ah, the glamorous life of an adventurer.
I started this evening in my home city of Bastok, so ran straight out to kill things. Which wasn’t very easy, given the entire geek population of the earth had decided to do the same thing. I found enough things – worms mostly, the odd bat – to get me up to level three… and then I got killed by… oh, this is humilating… by… by a Walking Sapling. Yes, a tiny, baby tree salughtered me. It did it with ease, too. And while I was trying to run away.
So when I reincarnated myself back in Bastok I sold everything I could and bought a sword. A cheap, bronze sword worth half as much as a simple potion – yes, even potions are well out of my financial league right now – but a sword nonetheless. I felt better straight away. A sword is always going to be better than a dagger. I don’t care about stats, it’s better because it’s bigger and longer.
Yes, I have issues. Sue me.
Anyway, I ran out into the world and picked my way through the massive crowd and found a vulture. I readied my new sword and… died within seconds. Again I ran out into the world and after five minutes or so I found a rock lizard and I readied my sword once again and… died with seconds. Again I ran out into the world… and stuck to any worms and bats I could scavenge until my sword skills had reached level one and I’d reached level four.
And then I stopped playing. Level five seems a long way away, I’ve got no money and so no hope of saving up for any new clothes or anything. I’ve still not got any new spells. I assume you have to buy them, but I’ve not seen a magic shop. I bet they’re not cheap, either. I still don’t know why there’s a question mark before my name.
And I still haven’t talked to anyone. I did see a familiar name run past – Beertiger. I would have said hello, but I couldn’t be bothered to reach for the keyboard. Maybe if there had been some sort of voice chat…
I don’t feel like an adventurer. I feel like a slum dweller who has to survive each day by going to the rubbish tips and hoping to find trash worth selling before the million other people there do. It’s really not a life of high excitement and great deeds. It’s frequently boring, full of annoyances and yet… and yet… I played it for a good hour and a half this evening.
Final Fantasy IV
Jan 15th
It was in my Gameboy Micro waiting to be started.
I couldn’t resist.
It’s excellent, but it’s too late to explain why.
Bed time now, most definitely.
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 15th
Well, I’m going to give up. At least for this evening.
Things started well enough. I found the person I was meant to deliver the report to and completed my mission… but things started to fall down a bit at that exact moment because as far as I can tell I didn’t get any experience, money or items for completing it. Very odd. I then started mission two, which seems to involve me going to a dangerous area and… er… waiting for some paper to change colour. Or something.
I’m pretty sure that’s beyond me for now.
I talked to a few more computer-controlled people, but didn’t get any quests. Not that I seem to be able to do much right now. If I stray more than a hundred yards from the town gates the enemies are too strong for me.
I didn’t get any experience from that mission I did. If there are any quests that I can do there’s no easy way for me to find them in this huge city. And who’s to say if they’d give me experience if the mission didn’t.
The only way I can see to level up is to go out and fight the monsters just outside the city gates, who I can kill pretty easily. Or, rather, I could if there were any. This being a new beta, six billion other people have got the same idea and there simply aren’t enough monsters to go round. I got lucky and managed to tag three in about twenty minutes of wandering around. All of them in a two minute period where I found myself in the eye of the storm for a moment. An oasis of calm in the sea of adventurers.
Still, I’ve now got an annoying white blob on my screen that means I’m fighting for my country, or something, and have got some items – Flint Stone, Bat Wing, Zeruhn Soot, Wind Crystal, (another) Bat Wing, Beastman’s Seal, (another) Wind Crystal and Insect Wing. No idea if I’d regret selling them, so I’m keeping them for now.
Maybe I need to wait a few weeks until I’m the only newbie left in the village and see if I can level up by killing monsters then. Unless anyone knows any other ways for a solo red mage to get some experience points…
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 14th
Well, I’ve checked the Internet for guides to the two tasks I had. (I normally wouldn’t, but, well, it seems okay because this is a beta, somehow.) For the mission, I was being an idiot – I’d completely forgotten to check one part of the city, which – obviously – turns out to be where I need to go. The quest, though, really needs the Internet FAQs. There’s no way in-game of knowing that it’s actually a level 20 quest – and after the initial conversation, there’s no way to know that it’s set in a mine that isn’t the one that’s in the town where you get the quest.
Maybe that’s been purposely been designed to get people to work together, but it just seems like rubbish game design to me.
But then in MMOs I’ve generally been a lone wolf who teams up with people now and again when the circumstances fit, but who generally likes exploring alone. (Mainly because I often have short play sessions and need to leave at a moment’s notice.) So I sense that FFXI might not be the game for me, which is a shame. Okay, it does seem to do some things very wrong (from my point of view) but there does seem to be a nice game there.
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 14th
I’m a bit annoyed right now.
Partly because there aren’t enough monsters to go round, but mainly because of the way quests and missions are recorded.
I decided not to run for miles when I started the game again, so I talked to some more people in Bastok. I got a quest and a mission.
The quest was immediately annoying, because it wasn’t recorded decently in my quest log. It gave the location of the quest giver, but not the name or location of the person I was meant to talk to next. Which, as I forgot within seconds of walking away from the person who I got the quest from, was very annoying.
The mission was better, telling me in the information who I should talk to and where they were. So I found them – more or less by accident – and then got told to take the report they gave me to the president’s office. The only problem being that, according to the map, there isn’t a president’s office in Bastok.
Oh, and going back to the woman who gave me my quest gave me the name of the person I had to talk to and a rough location – the mines. Now, hopefully, there’s only one mine. If there are more, I’m fucked. The only niggle is that I talked to everyone I came across in the mine… and nobody was the person says I should talk to.
Not wishing to be entirely negative, I did manage to get up to level two, which was nice.
I’ve had to stop playing for now, annoyingly, because I don’t like leaving things like this hanging. I’m really shocked by the lack of information in the quest log, though. Unless I’m missing a way to expand it.
There doesn’t seem to be a mini map, either, while I’m complaining.
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 14th
Well, I’ve played it now. I’m some kind of big Hulk-like fucker with white hair. And I’m a Red Mage, which means “jack of all trades”, as far as I can tell. Anyway, I started off in some town called Bastok, where the game immediately played a terrible trick on me. There was a cut scene of some woman not being allowed out of the town because it was too dangerous and she didn’t have a bodyguard. So I assumed, as one would, that she’d ask me to accompany her for a while and our mini adventure together would be a neat tutorial in the ways of the game. Instead she just ran off, saying she would like to show me round but that that she was too busy. Oh.
So I wandered around town and gave an adventure coupon to a nice lady who gave me some money. Wandered into the residential district and found I had a house, staffed by a friendly Moogle. Kupo. Baffling, but friendly. Kupo.
Anyway, I wandered off and talked some random NPCs until one of them gave me some supplies to deliver to an outpost in another region. Seemed a bit much for a level one quest… or mission… but I decided to do it. (Missions and quests are different in FFXI, somehow, and though the supplies appeared in my inventory, the mission to deliver them didn’t appear in my mission list. Or in my quest list. Very confusing.)
I ran out of town and killed a couple of hornets with a combination of my Dia spell and my Onion Dagger. Go me!
After that I ignored monsters and just ran to find this outpost. After about fifteen minutes I passed one, but I was still in the starting region, so I didn’t think that was it. I needed to go to the next region to the north. Found myself in a nice area with windmills, but no outpost. So I went further north to some dunes and discovered I didn’t have a map of that area. But I decided to run around anyway.
By this point my suspicions had been confirmed. This wasn’t a mission for level one characters. This is probably something high level players do inbetween riding chocobos and sipping champagne and laughing at the antics of newbies from their heavenly cloud palaces. Or something. All the monsters were, to quote the game, “incredibly tough”. Luckily, they didn’t seem to care I was there… until a goblin assassin decided he didn’t like my lovely white hair and killed me in one hit as I ran past him. So I respawned… back in Bastok, where I’d been forty-five minutes earlier.
I think I might just go and kill hornets for a bit while my pride recovers. Those supplies can sit in my inventory and rot for all I care.
Final Fantasy XI Beta
Jan 14th
I’ve not played it yet.
It’s been installing on my 360 for an hour or two and there’s still half an hour to go.
I’ve had to sign up to Sony’s Play Online service, too, which seems absolutely horrible.
I bought a keyboard this morning, too, more or less just for this game and the registration process. Taking into account the cost of the magazine with the game disc it’s becoming very expensive for a free beta.
