On November 21st 2014 The Pokemon Company released Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. A remake of the much beloved Ruby; Sapphire; Emerald. The game sports the 3DS graphical upgrade, the charming touches from X&Y and for those of you who have the handheld console 3D graphics. Minus the touch they gave to Heart Gold and Soul Silver of being able to have your first slot Pokemon follow behind you while in the over world.
After ten years we are treated to a graphical upgrade to a game that redefined the series with implementation of being able to choose the gender of your character and not getting your pokemon from a sterile lab but throwing you right into a battle. The Hoenn Region has not changed at all save for the real world references it makes. The games story has not changed. You are still the child of a gym leader who just shipped his family up from Jhoto. You still have to stop Team Magma and Team Aqua from trying to destroy the world with Land or Water dominance.
From the opening cut scene you are treated to a visually smoother and richer Hoenn Region, the land is more fleshed out much like in the newer Pokemon games. You start off with your NavGear like in the original game. But here is where things get wonky. You get upgrades to it like a radar that helps you detect near by potentially rare Pokemon. From what I am told the more you use it the easier it is for the radar to pick out rarer subtypes of Pokemon. Once you reach the town your father is in you are given the ability to play online with others. It gives you the options you had in X&Y to Wonder Trade, Battle, Trade, Global Trade anytime anywhere......
This is where my beef with the new games lay. Wifi has made an easy game easier. The ability to connect to the internet without the need to hook it up to a line or a special device you have to shell out cash for. Each game has a mystery gift event pokemon that you get when you launch the mystery gift feature. You recieve a Shiny Beldum..... so essentially you are giving a hard to find Steel Type to a new player where there is no elemental weakness for it in the first couple of areas..... Way to break the game right out of the gate. With the Wifi feature you can essentially get anything you want within minutes or if you know friends who already have what you want you can trade or get better Pokemon and get through the game faster. Lets not forget that the series started making it less challenging when you gave out experience for catching Pokemon. The Experience Share Item makes leveling easier cause it effects EVERYONE on your team. There is no challenge anymore, no more need to go to the surrounding area and train to figure out patterns to beating the leaders team.
Maybe it is because I am getting older or maybe I am just so jaded to everything. It just seems like these new innovations to games are just pandering to the GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME youth of today. Innovation in games is good, but when you dumb down your content to pander that is when you lose what made you great. Why spend so much time innovating and making great new features when they will lose their novelty quickly. When you can use WiFi to battle, trade and beat the game with little to no effort.
I give this game a 3 out of 5. Why? On a grand scale the game is playable, it is fun. But the story has been done already. The enemies have not improved. The game world itself has not changed to a point where it can be differentiated from it's source game. As a fan of the series I would have much rather waited a few years for the next generation to be created instead of getting an updated version of a game I already have. The graphics nice, the music still nice. Make the game more difficult and stop dumbing it down.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Thursday, November 13, 2014
A Long Overdue Review
Square Enix the creator of some of the most well known and arguably best RPGs of the next gen consoles. I say arguably because there is many fans of their series who love their work and other fans who absolutely hate what they have done to the series they control. Let us dive into what I view as the absolute WORST game in the Square Enix library of games.
Final Fantasy XIII
Spanning a total of three games. Final Fantasy XIII takes place in a dual world. Gran Pulse and Cacoon, for the most part of the story you find yourself on Gran Pulse and the world you see around you is on a graphical level..... BEAUTIFUL. The world looks well articulated, well designed leaving you in a sense of wonder of what will come once you explore it....... That is where the game quickly falls apart. Your limits of exploration is what is down the hallway. I am not even kidding, you are forced to take your character down a ridiculously long hallway looking around like there is hope of exploration. This perpetual hallwayism as I call it, stems from XIII's predecessor Final Fantasy X another beautiful setting which forces you to follow a strict path pushing ever forward. When you give your players this beautiful backdrop do you expect them to just go. "OH WOW.... hey next point in the trip... oh there's stuff in the background. Nope not caring." You do such a huge disservice to your fans when you put so much time into the world only to make just look at it.
Allow me to give you a good example of a BEAUTIFUL game that doesn't force it's players to a strict path. Skyrim, with it's rich and beautiful world. Fully articulated and programed to a point where the players can become immersed and forget life for awhile. Do not get me wrong Skyrim isn't perfect but for what it is, it blows Final Fantasy XIII out of the water.
The story of Final Fantasy XIII starts off with such promise. It builds up this grand over arcing theme only to become what Final Fantasy X was. A story driven by some mythical creature that feeds off of the people and forces them to do their bidding else something bad will happen..... And it is so vague as to what it is you have to do. Even the characters are like "Uhhhh what the F$*%& are we suppose to do?" As the player I am sitting their going "Yeah.... What The $*%& is going on....". The story progression doesn't give you any clue as to what is suppose to be going on. Other than some deity thing just gave me and my friends super powers.... BUT WE MUST PERFORM SOME TASK IN WHICH I WILL ONLY SHOW YOU A GLIMPSE OF...... Come on the story can only go so far on this premise and it insults your creators intelligence and creativity when they had stories of much grander scales told on far less superior graphics with text blocks explaining what was going on.
It is my fear that with the innovation of graphics the story is being protrayed in cut scenes rather than in the fashion of a story that is being told as you progress. If you are going to blow your money load on graphics why not just nix the game play and switch to CGI movies? Final Fantasy since X has proven that they are no slouches when it comes to graphical cut scenes in games. But saddly more money is made when you mass produce it and put game play into it.
Surely Hiei even with the story so bad and the hallway being just two things of bad points in this review there must be something good. A bad story can be forgiven if the game play is good.....RIGHT?...WELL RIGHT?
In most cases yes you would be right. But this is not one of those cases. Final Fantasy XIII is the first game in the entirety of the franchise to force the player to control just one character. This limits your options as you are forced to relay on the AI to control your teammates and HOPE they can be tactical. While AI learns and regurgitates working patterns. It lacks what a human mind can process, such as tweaking a plan on the fly and being able to direct your actions to save the team from doom and get back into a rythem to beat your foe. You have the option to switch things up with paradigm shifts but again you are still controling just one person and not being able to control the actions of your teammates.
Another aspect of XIII is the Star Rating. One being bad, five being you are super amazingly awesome. The stars are what fills up your character's summon meter..... WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? WHY DID YOU OVER COMPLICATE A SYSTEM LIKE SUMMONING. It turns battles into button mashing cause the only way to get a five star rating in battle is through speed. You made this system so underwhelming it is terrible.
The battles are pointless and needlessly challenging. You have bosses that will just aggravate the ever loving crap out of you cause they regenerate health. Even low level enemies do this at times. I am at a lose for any semblance of coherent thought that went into this process. Another thing you get from battles (besides the urge to rage quit) is crystium points. Yes folks final fantasy XIII has pulled another note from Final Fantasy X. The Crystium System or as I like to call it Sphere Grid 1.5. Take away sphere levels and replace it with Crystium points and make it so you can pick and chose what you get. Oh and make it so if you don't have enough CP you can't fully progress to the next part of the job. You have Sphere Grid 1.5. It is an exact replica of The Sphere Grid from X minus one continuous path and needing the right amount of points to level up.
The one thing I will give Final Fantasy XIII. The music. The soundtrack for XIII is stunningly beautiful to listen too with some very catchy beats on certain levels of the games. But music is not enough to save this collapsed hallway of a game. Final Fantasy has fallen victim to trying to innovate way way to much. It has lost it's path since the jump to the better graphics. Stories feel rush and vague. Battle Systems goes to the crapper really quickly. Sneak mechanics in a final fantasy game. Just don't work. There was no need for two sequels to this series. Final Fantasy XIII took everything wrong with X and made it 1000 times worse.
I recommend playing older Final Fantasy Games over XIII the game just has too much wrong with it. XIII-2 was too little too late in terms of game play. And XIII-3 Lightnings Return is a straight up rip off of X-2 with changing clothes to change jobs on the fly and with only 1 person to control. Square Enix has plagiarized themselves with this game.
Final Fantasy XIII
Spanning a total of three games. Final Fantasy XIII takes place in a dual world. Gran Pulse and Cacoon, for the most part of the story you find yourself on Gran Pulse and the world you see around you is on a graphical level..... BEAUTIFUL. The world looks well articulated, well designed leaving you in a sense of wonder of what will come once you explore it....... That is where the game quickly falls apart. Your limits of exploration is what is down the hallway. I am not even kidding, you are forced to take your character down a ridiculously long hallway looking around like there is hope of exploration. This perpetual hallwayism as I call it, stems from XIII's predecessor Final Fantasy X another beautiful setting which forces you to follow a strict path pushing ever forward. When you give your players this beautiful backdrop do you expect them to just go. "OH WOW.... hey next point in the trip... oh there's stuff in the background. Nope not caring." You do such a huge disservice to your fans when you put so much time into the world only to make just look at it.
Allow me to give you a good example of a BEAUTIFUL game that doesn't force it's players to a strict path. Skyrim, with it's rich and beautiful world. Fully articulated and programed to a point where the players can become immersed and forget life for awhile. Do not get me wrong Skyrim isn't perfect but for what it is, it blows Final Fantasy XIII out of the water.
The story of Final Fantasy XIII starts off with such promise. It builds up this grand over arcing theme only to become what Final Fantasy X was. A story driven by some mythical creature that feeds off of the people and forces them to do their bidding else something bad will happen..... And it is so vague as to what it is you have to do. Even the characters are like "Uhhhh what the F$*%& are we suppose to do?" As the player I am sitting their going "Yeah.... What The $*%& is going on....". The story progression doesn't give you any clue as to what is suppose to be going on. Other than some deity thing just gave me and my friends super powers.... BUT WE MUST PERFORM SOME TASK IN WHICH I WILL ONLY SHOW YOU A GLIMPSE OF...... Come on the story can only go so far on this premise and it insults your creators intelligence and creativity when they had stories of much grander scales told on far less superior graphics with text blocks explaining what was going on.
It is my fear that with the innovation of graphics the story is being protrayed in cut scenes rather than in the fashion of a story that is being told as you progress. If you are going to blow your money load on graphics why not just nix the game play and switch to CGI movies? Final Fantasy since X has proven that they are no slouches when it comes to graphical cut scenes in games. But saddly more money is made when you mass produce it and put game play into it.
Surely Hiei even with the story so bad and the hallway being just two things of bad points in this review there must be something good. A bad story can be forgiven if the game play is good.....RIGHT?...WELL RIGHT?
In most cases yes you would be right. But this is not one of those cases. Final Fantasy XIII is the first game in the entirety of the franchise to force the player to control just one character. This limits your options as you are forced to relay on the AI to control your teammates and HOPE they can be tactical. While AI learns and regurgitates working patterns. It lacks what a human mind can process, such as tweaking a plan on the fly and being able to direct your actions to save the team from doom and get back into a rythem to beat your foe. You have the option to switch things up with paradigm shifts but again you are still controling just one person and not being able to control the actions of your teammates.
Another aspect of XIII is the Star Rating. One being bad, five being you are super amazingly awesome. The stars are what fills up your character's summon meter..... WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? WHY DID YOU OVER COMPLICATE A SYSTEM LIKE SUMMONING. It turns battles into button mashing cause the only way to get a five star rating in battle is through speed. You made this system so underwhelming it is terrible.
The battles are pointless and needlessly challenging. You have bosses that will just aggravate the ever loving crap out of you cause they regenerate health. Even low level enemies do this at times. I am at a lose for any semblance of coherent thought that went into this process. Another thing you get from battles (besides the urge to rage quit) is crystium points. Yes folks final fantasy XIII has pulled another note from Final Fantasy X. The Crystium System or as I like to call it Sphere Grid 1.5. Take away sphere levels and replace it with Crystium points and make it so you can pick and chose what you get. Oh and make it so if you don't have enough CP you can't fully progress to the next part of the job. You have Sphere Grid 1.5. It is an exact replica of The Sphere Grid from X minus one continuous path and needing the right amount of points to level up.
The one thing I will give Final Fantasy XIII. The music. The soundtrack for XIII is stunningly beautiful to listen too with some very catchy beats on certain levels of the games. But music is not enough to save this collapsed hallway of a game. Final Fantasy has fallen victim to trying to innovate way way to much. It has lost it's path since the jump to the better graphics. Stories feel rush and vague. Battle Systems goes to the crapper really quickly. Sneak mechanics in a final fantasy game. Just don't work. There was no need for two sequels to this series. Final Fantasy XIII took everything wrong with X and made it 1000 times worse.
I recommend playing older Final Fantasy Games over XIII the game just has too much wrong with it. XIII-2 was too little too late in terms of game play. And XIII-3 Lightnings Return is a straight up rip off of X-2 with changing clothes to change jobs on the fly and with only 1 person to control. Square Enix has plagiarized themselves with this game.
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