It's interesting hearing your opinions on FF6, as that's one I've not played yet myself.
I played some more Fire Emblem 6 yesterday (and for your benefit Pierrot, it was because I was away from home this weekend and thus had no access to my Dreamcast ) and cleared chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 5 was interesting because it takes place in a circular mountain range. You can go around the top and defeat all the enemies, or open a gate directly left from the starting point and rush the boss, which you're encouraged to do.
Unfortunately, that ends up being a terrible idea for a few reasons -
1. the boss is surrounded by enemies who are actually more annoying to deal with this way then going the long way around.
2. The boss has a killer axe as his default weapon which is capable of one shotting any of your characters - but he also has a hand axe, a weaker weapon he can be encouraged to use if you stand 2 squares away, as it's ranged. Rushing him results in a likely death, but playing it safe is much easier.
3. Because of the extra enemies and the need to take the boss slowly, the gate ends up being a choke point that's quite tough to defend, especially as all the enemies near the boss have ranged weapons, putting your usual tactics of 'strong guys with ranged characters behind' at risk as the mages and archers end up super vulnerable.
4. The top route actually has lots of choke points through that are easy to defend thanks to enemies with axes being inaccurate, and lots of forts and forests making your sword users basically have 100% dodge rate vs them.
5. Enemies on the top route are more spread out and slowed down by the forests, so you take on less of them at once.
6. Enemies by the gate can walk over mountains, which almost none of your party can. That means that that can surround you even more, making them more dangerous. Mountains also provide big defence and evasion bonuses, making them harder to deal with, and they have ranged weapons, meaning they can move into the mountains completely out of your reach and keep attacking you.
In the end I ended up seperating my party in 2. Whilst my long route party was holding up great, I had a few hairy moments at the gate that required me to pull half my top party back down to help. It's weird that on a map where you're encouraged to take what is supposedly a more strategic route it ends up being better playing it the hard way.
Finally got back to Startropics. I played through a couple more dungeons. To be honest this might go into my games not beaten like soon. I find it a lot of fun at times but I find it extremely frustrating at others. I’ve found myself looking at a guide on a couple occasions because I’ve just gotten fed up with walking against walls until I find the secret path. The last dungeon I did had a death where I jumped to the next screen into lava, and it was my last life. Very aggravating.
Mostly I just expected this to be a shorter game though. How long to beat showed an average of 12 hours and given how far I am in the game and how long it has taken me to get here, I’ll be playing for well over that. Maybe people were showing their clear times and not the actual time it took them to beat it including game overs, or maybe I’m just bad at it, but I can’t imagine it will take me 12 hours at my rate. I just don’t feel like investing 20+ hours into this game when I have so many others in my backlog.
I’m glad I gave it a start though. I can certainly see the charm of it and maybe sometime when I have more free time (I’d guess in 30 years or so when I retire) I can actually beat it.
I think I’ll move to Crimson Skies next, or I might make Batman (NES) the replacement for Startropics and finally beat that. I just beat Revenge of the Joker and I’ve got a hankering for playing the better NES Batman game.
pierrot wrote: It's not really the events of the game that have any impact on the characters, they just have all their own baggage that they're sorting through independently of the events they're immediately living through (terrible, horrible, awful, atrocious things that they're largely unfazed by).
At least for several of the characters, their horrible back story is tied up in the events engulfing the world now. So by exploring their own history you discover more about the current conflict. But I do largely agree. The characters seem to exist almost in parallel to the world, and not really inside of it, at least at times.
pierrot wrote:That comic relief completely undoes any meaningful scene they were hoping to achieve there, though. The tone of the scene shifts so horrendously sharply that I'm a little surprised I wasn't the one ralphing on the deck.
This. There's some of this in every Final Fantasy, but it's so abrupt and constant in Final Fantasy VI and also in VII. The tonal shifts are disorienting and, rather than providing relief from the darker moments, undercut them completely.
pierrot wrote:I also just feel like touching on Kefka, again. He's completely one-dimensional. I just can't abide this type of antagonist... That's all he is though. His psychotic persona entirely defines him, and there's nothing else. I don't know how people couldn't get tired of him as a character, because he's recurring throughout, and he's the same deranged thing at each point.
I feel very much about Kefka the way I feel about the Joker from DC Comics. He is largely a one-note trick. Actually, I have lots of other problems with the Joker, but this isn't the thread for that. At first Kefka seems interesting, because he is both bumbling and evil, and the bumbling turns out to be this sham. But at the same time, he hits a particular point and it's just like, "Yes, I know, Kefka's CRAZY evil. You don't have to keep reminding me."
pierrot wrote:Well, I can't imagine many are going to read even most of that, but despite all of my bitching, I still kind of like the game more than I used to. It's quite playable, but I would not be shocked to realize that my increased enjoyment is entirely due to Gau's substantially increased role in my playthrough this time. Although, last time I gave up on the game entirely because I hated the new world that I'm about to get to again.
I am enjoying reading your comments. It helps confirm that my unpopular views on this game aren't entirely crazy. It isn't some perfect RPG, as some make it out to be.
alienjesus wrote:It's interesting hearing your opinions on FF6, as that's one I've not played yet myself.
I couldn't recall if you actually left it on your list, but it looks like you didn't. Hopefully I don't end up coloring your experience with it too much, once you get around to it yourself.
alienjesus wrote:(and for your benefit Pierrot, it was because I was away from home this weekend and thus had no access to my Dreamcast )
This is quite a relief.
marurun wrote:I feel very much about Kefka the way I feel about the Joker from DC Comics. He is largely a one-note trick. Actually, I have lots of other problems with the Joker, but this isn't the thread for that. At first Kefka seems interesting, because he is both bumbling and evil, and the bumbling turns out to be this sham. But at the same time, he hits a particular point and it's just like, "Yes, I know, Kefka's CRAZY evil. You don't have to keep reminding me."
Yes! The Joker! I hadn't mentioned it, but I've caught myself a couple times thinking of Kefka as sort of a bootleg imitation of Joker. I guess conventional wisdom might suggest that the Batman universe is as good a place as any to filch a villain or two, but yeah, I'm burnt out on Kefka's shtick.
ExDeath "THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE MEAN NOTHING!!"
Kefka wants the usual world domination.
ExDeath wants to implode the universe in on itself destroying every fabric of existence... including himself.
ExDeath is the GOAT of FF villains. I also don't think Kefka compares much at all to some of the other crazies, like Albedo (Xenosaga) or Luca Blight (Suikoden II).
Eehhh, that's just Exdeath having been consumed by the Void and giving form to its essence. That's the Void that wants to wipe everything out, since it's the Void.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
I whipped Kefka's monkey ass so hard he may as well have just let me pulverize him back at the imperial camp to save himself the embarrassment, and save me from playing the game for more than a few hours. Would have been much better, and much less pointless that way. I could have beaten up the final boss way worse if the way the game had me setup the party for the battle was even moderately intelligible. I think I spent about half an hour trying to set up all twelve characters I had with me with the best load-outs I could muster. When it had me pick the order, I sort of assumed it was going to have them shifted in, in parties of four, for each stage of the battle; So I started with my party of "weenies"--Lock, Edgar, and Stragus--escorted by Mog, with his (her?) relic that avoids all random battles. I ended up losing Mog, and Lock as it transitioned to the final form, which brought in Celes, and Shadow. At that point, it was all over. I made Tina and Celes into impenetrable whirling dervishes of magic, and hot, molten death. Celes didn't even have the Soul of Thamasa relic on her, though, and I had Gogo in her party for a lot of the time mimicing her chain magic, or Shadow's throws. I rounded that party out with Umaro, because Celes can really take care of herself, and he takes no work to set up. Also, I was surprised by how good his special, where he throws an ally into the enemies, is. I would have expected it to do damage to the ally too, but nope. The last party I set up for the raid on the tower consisted of Tina, Mash, Gau, and Setzer. For the most part, I was using Tina, Celes, Gau, and, generally, Mash, after the cataclysm, and I would have liked to just finish the game with them, but the game had other ideas of how to waste my time, so--.
Probably a good time to mention that all of these battle mechanics are pretty interesting, but they don't really freshen up the rote doldrums of combat, partly because the whole game is piss easy. I may have been fairly overleveled at many points, but I never really spent any time actually grinding levels. All I really did was use special attacks that did the most damage, equipped Earrings/Giant's Gauntlets/Brave Rings, and later in the game, abused the magic evasion glitch. So, while there's just a zillion and one different methods of attack, abusing just a handful of them kills most things in one or two hits.
So, there's an amazing thing, and a not very amazing thing that I realized at a certain point after the cataclysm. First, the not so amazing thing: The "FF" in "FF Fandom" stands for "Full of Fraudulence." (More on this in a moment.) The amazing thing is that, while I thought I had actually gotten the Falcon when I was playing the PS1 version, I'm now certain that I just got fed up with not being able to beat Funbaba, and quit playing. Because of that, I did not realize that the game opens up into sort of a sandbox world (what's left of it, anyway). For a while, I started to rather enjoy myself at that point, without the story intruding on my experience. That is, until I was sick of it, and just wanted the game to be over. That moment was about at the time I had climbed to the top of the Fanatics' Tower, and beaten the boss, fairly early into my beefing up process, but was one-shotted by his practically insta-death desperation Ultima, because that's totally fair. I didn't have Reraise at that point, but even if I had, there was no way for me to know he would even do that! Total BS, and that's what the end of the game kind of devolved into: A selling point for the strategy guide. I ended up doing pretty much everything other than completing Gau, and Stragus' secondary magic lists (I missed a couple of enemies for Gau, anyway, even though I was checking a missables walkthrough along the way--that's on me). Also, I didn't do a whole lot with the Colosseum, 'cause it's kind of dumb.
Back to that fraudulence, thing; Final Fantasy VI is just a much worse Final Fantasy XIII, or, if one would prefer, Final Fantasy XIII is a much better version Final Fantasy VI. The games actually have almost identical structures: Linear segments introducing the character focused narratives, that flow out into open world gameplay. Where they differ is really in the much more interesting open world XIII provides for exploration, XIII's outstanding combat and crafting/growth, and the significantly better characters in XIII. I'm sure a lot of people's immediate response to that last bit would be, 'Well, what about Hope?' What about him? I don't like Hope, but that doesn't make him a bad character. Hope is actually a better character in terms of dimension, growth, and actual, human character than just about anyone in FF VI. (Honestly, I'm at the point where I think Interceptor might be the only redeemable character in the FF VI cast.) FF XIII did the sensible thing, and didn't spread itself too thin by trying to focus attention on twice the number of characters, and failing to even really construct one fully formed human being.
I guess I'll finish up by touching on some story stuff that still just really bothers me:
FFVI's story just does whatever it needs to to make things convenient for itself, but I still find it so incomprehensible. What in the shit is Cid doing building the raft in secret. There's nothing about Celes' character to suggest that she would keep him from doing it; It just doesn't make any sense. His actions make no sense, unless he really wanted her to kill herself. Also, all Celes needed to get over her despair was to fail her attempt at suicide? That's just water under the bridge? Nothing to see here?
What the fuck is going on with Relm? She's a completely different character after the cataclysm, but Stragus is just like, 'Yep, that's my grand-daughter. Same as she's ever been.' No, you old fruit! She's fucking possessed, or something. She was not anything like that before!
Tina is such a completely wasted character. Her character arch is so hollow, and vapid, which is depressing because she's one of the only characters to even approach some sort of development. That "conversation" with her father, before the credits, was really useless, too. While we're talking about the ending, for what reason would she need to be flying out in front of the Falcon, other than to set up some weird omnipresence for her dumb utterances as she falls out of the sky in the most self serving way possible?
Just-- Kefka. WHY!!!! I have been given nothing even approximating a reason for this sudden obsession with destruction, and the end of life, other than it hammers at this last minute, ditch effort to slap together some philosophical struggle to the final battle. So, I'm to believe that this was all just an effort to find purpose in the power of--"friendship." It's annoying. It was clear to me very early that the writers were overshooting the moon on this one, but--. Well, no. Really, the hackneyed ending is just par for the course.
I just can't forgive that everything starts to immediately come back to life during the credits, though. There's really no reason to believe that killing Kefka should have had any positive effect on the world, to begin with. Oh my god. I have to stop. The story in this game is such a frothing cesspool.
Oh, man. All right. Well, that concludes my journey through the numbered Final Fantasies. I was really hoping to get through it yesterday, because I really was getting excited at the thought of playing Dragon Quest VI. Feeling a lot less enthusiastic now, though.
Unfortunately that didn't really do anything for my progress on the Summer list, which now looks like:
1. Garou: Mark of the Wolves
2. Sega Rally 3. Killer 7
4. Metroid Prime
5. Super Monkey Ball
6. Streets of Rage
7. Zelda II
8. Uncharted 1
9. Virtua Racing
10. Dragon Quest VI
Reserve:
- Final Fantasy VI
I did want to get into Dragon Quest VI, but I might go with some Sega games first. I was going to play Super Monkey Ball, like a month ago, but my Gamecube memory cards are full now, and I'm not too sure what I'm going to do about it.
Hah, this FFVI conversation is really interesting. I haven't played it in over a decade, but it was my first and only Final Fantasy, and I really liked it. I'll say that I enjoyed the story events and plot of the world at large more than I cared about the protagonists' relations to them, though, so the comments about the characters being blah are on-point for me. By contrast I remember feeling physically ill when I realized what was going on in the Magitek Factory, for example.
About Kefka, though. I really enjoyed him as a character because at the time I'd never seen anything quite like him before. Maybe if I'd read Batman or had watched Star Trek: Next Generation before then, he wouldn't have been such an interesting take to me. But from my perspective (if I'm remembering correctly), here was a villain who just didn't give a fig. He just wanted to see things burn for the hell of it -- to see what it would do if he upset the balance of nature, like a curious scientist doing an experiment on the most epic of scales yet somehow also dismissing the subject (existence itself) like it was a paltry nothing. I found his psychopathy a breath of fresh air against all of the over-inflated "I have a rabid vendetta!"s and "I just want to rule the world!"s and "But this one thing happened to me once and now I'm ridiculously homicidal!"s out there. And that's what I found so scary about Kefka: he never really seemed to feel like he had anything to lose because he had no goal at stake. His goal was just to ruin everything as far as he could. For the lulz. This was fresh to me when I was sixteen.
As far as my Summer Challenge goes, I was going to start The Last Express, but I've been dragging my feet on some modifications I need to make to my Windows 95 virtual machine to do it properly -- and while dragging my feet, my copy of Metroid Fusion came in, and I read the manual:
"When I woke, the scientists told me that the hatchling had saved me once again."
Yeah, we're playing this now. Like right this split second. Firing it up in five.
EDIT: Is it weird that I enjoy pierrot's reviews so much when he's angry?
BogusMeatFactory wrote:If I could powder my copies of shenmue and snort them I would
I have to admit, the level that it bothered him reminds me of that time I made Hobie play through Deus Ex by gifting it to him. And that was a good week when I did that. So while I think his impressions of FFVI are the signs of a diseased mind, the level of vitriol is amusing.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
Key-Glyph wrote:EDIT: Is it weird that I enjoy pierrot's reviews so much when he's angry?
That makes me feel a bit better. At least I'm not just shouting into the wind. It would probably be a lot better if I could, more often, get this worked up about things I really like, though.
Key-Glyph wrote:Hah, this FFVI conversation is really interesting. I haven't played it in over a decade, but it was my first and only Final Fantasy, and I really liked it. I'll say that I enjoyed the story events and plot of the world at large more than I cared about the protagonists' relations to them, though, so the comments about the characters being blah are on-point for me. By contrast I remember feeling physically ill when I realized what was going on in the Magitek Factory, for example.
Yeah, I was kind of more interested in what was going on with the Empire. That kind of felt like the story to me, but it was pretty much abandoned later on. None of the main characters even made a peep about the Returners, or Banon at that point, either. I felt the underlying storyline was all right, but I'm left really dissatisfied with what it potentially asks me to take away from it, if anything. It might just be my expectations, though. This was definitely a game targeted at the "young adult" demo.
Key-Glyph wrote:About Kefka, though. I really enjoyed him as a character because at the time I'd never seen anything quite like him before. Maybe if I'd read Batman or had watched Star Trek: Next Generation before then, he wouldn't have been such an interesting take to me. But from my perspective (if I'm remembering correctly), here was a villain who just didn't give a fig. He just wanted to see things burn for the hell of it -- to see what it would do if he upset the balance of nature, like a curious scientist doing an experiment on the most epic of scales yet somehow also dismissing the subject (existence itself) like it was a paltry nothing. I found his psychopathy a breath of fresh air against all of the over-inflated "I have a rabid vendetta!"s and "I just want to rule the world!"s and "But this one thing happened to me once and now I'm ridiculously homicidal!"s out there. And that's what I found so scary about Kefka: he never really seemed to feel like he had anything to lose because he had no goal at stake. His goal was just to ruin everything as far as he could. For the lulz. This was fresh to me when I was sixteen.
All right, I can kinda dig it. I prefer more nuanced villainy, but put that way, I can kind of see the draw. I still can't quite get over the leap he took over the year of chaos, though. Like, somehow he just hit another gear, and attained an even higher level of insanity. I can make plenty of excuses for him, like maybe the year of isolating himself, while raining death and destruction down upon the citizenry did it, but in the context of the game, it feels sort of abrupt, even though he only really goes from one plane of psychotic to another.
I don't know how to explain this, either: I decided to load up my old save from the PS1 version, and I had, in fact, gotten the Falcon. I even re-recruited Cayenne, but I don't remember doing any of that back then. I guess it just made more of an impact on me this time. Also, on a mildly related note, while watching the cutscenes introducing the Falcon, when it's being piloted by Deryl, I could only think of that South Park episode about the shop teacher: "Chase me, Richard!"
I fired up my completed save of Final Fantasy XIII, too, just to poke around a bit. I kind of want to replay it now. It has so many great callbacks, like the world outside of the world in FF IIII, the branching, nodal growth tree similar to FFX, or the crystals as an actual part of the game, if only as a symbol of the power they posses. That was another thing about FFVI: All of its call backs were to FFII--. Yuck. (Yes, I am salty about the little kid baiting me into using the "Wild Rose" password, and finding out that I was a filthy spy of the resistance.)
All right, I really need to move past this. We're on to Dragon Quest.
MrPopo wrote:So while I think his impressions of FFVI are the signs of a diseased mind, the level of vitriol is amusing.
Awwww, thank you!
Key-Glyph wrote:As far as my Summer Challenge goes, I was going to start The Last Express, but I've been dragging my feet on some modifications I need to make to my Windows 95 virtual machine to do it properly -- and while dragging my feet, my copy of Metroid Fusion came in, and I read the manual:
"When I woke, the scientists told me that the hatchling had saved me once again."
Yeah, we're playing this now. Like right this split second. Firing it up in five.
That's another game I never finished, from around the same time. I hope it clicks with you the way the other games in the series have. Maybe I should just finish up the Metroid Prime save I have, and cross that one off my Summer Games list. It feels like I'd be doing the game a bit of a disservice that way, but that's the same logic I used in restarting FFVI, and we know where that got me.
) and cleared chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 5 was interesting because it takes place in a circular mountain range. You can go around the top and defeat all the enemies, or open a gate directly left from the starting point and rush the boss, which you're encouraged to do.
