What RPG are you playing right now?

[dlmvii]

Final Fantasy XIII!

XIII! 5 hours in and still in Midgar.

Curses! I get my copy tomorrow from amazon. MrPopo, as a representative from amazon, the blame for this falls squarely on your head, because clearly you are directly responsible for overseeing the entire shipping operation of the company. It also had nothing to do with me being cheap and getting free super saver shipping.

[MrPopo]

Final Fantasy XIII!

XIII! 5 hours in and still in Midgar.

Curses! I get my copy tomorrow from amazon. MrPopo, as a representative from amazon, the blame for this falls squarely on your head, because clearly you are directly responsible for overseeing the entire shipping operation of the company. It also had nothing to do with me being cheap and getting free super saver shipping.

You know we do release date delivery for as many big releases as we can (dependent on the publisher getting us the inventory in time for us to ship it out). And if you're a Prime customer you'll get it for free, without any intervention if you preorder it as a free 2-day shipment and we later offer release date delivery; I just got the notification this morning that Dragon Age Awakening was just upgraded to RDD.

[onedollarkatana]

Currently playing Risen for the PC. It's gotten some flak from reviewers for technical issues, but I honestly don't care--it's turned out to be engrossing. It's pretty much made me drop everything else I was doing to focus on it. It's the first game in a long time that I've really, truly, liked. Recommended.

[MrPopo]

11 hours in. Still in "Midgar". The episodic structure of the first part of the game pretty nice. It makes the story seem more real, instead of the standard contrived "Let's all save the world together!" "Okay! I had something else I want to do, but saving the world sounds good. Oh, but I hope you don't mind when I bring up my personal business many hours down the line." The fact that I haven't been through a single town yet hasn't bothered me; the way things are progressing it would be downright stupid of my chars to take some time out and talk with some useless NPCs. It's going to be very interesting to see how they get the party back together and ship us off to Pulse.

[dlmvii]

How do you feel about the whole straight line thing that seems to plague the game (or at least, the internet tells me as much)

[MrPopo]

How do you feel about the whole straight line thing that seems to plague the game (or at least, the internet tells me as much)

In the part of the storyline I'm in now. I'm trying to get from point A to point B without getting waylaid by the antagonists who are very actively looking for me. So my characters wouldn't have time for sightseeing tours. There are branches in the pathes at times, where frequently one is a dead end with a chest and the other is the way to continue going. And aesthetically the path isn't a straight line; there are a lot of twists and turns that make for interesting locales. But there hasn't been anything maze-like yet. However, in the context of the story this all makes sense.

I'll contrast it with X. X's one straight path really felt like this entire world only has one route to go through it, like Canada's Only Road. XIII dodges that by not showing many of the transitions between one area and the next, thanks to the way it jumps between the different groups of characters. For example, one party just finished a forest area. Then I switched to a different party and went through their area. When the focus came back to the first party I'm now all the way at the outskirts of a city. The intervening journey between the forest exit and the city isn't shown, but it helps to make the world feel believeable. Any given party segment is where they follow their specific path, but it doesn't attempt to preclude the existance of other pathes that other people might take.

I have no idea what the second half looks like, where you go to Pulse. From what I've seen in previews the world opens up a bit more, and allows for more traditional FF exploration. But we'll have to see when I get there.

I'd like to toss in a note about the combat system; it's awesome. It fixes the problems of 12's Gambits eventually making the game completely auto pilot and implements a proper version of the chaining system that X-2 tried to do. I'll talk first about the role system. Each character can take on a role during combat. The roles are physical damage, elemental damage, healer, tank, buffer, and debuffer. At the start a character only has two or three roles available, but more are getting unlocked as I go through. You can change roles in the middle of combat (and indeed, this is necessary for many fights) but there is a restriction. In the menu you can set up to six configurations of party roles. For example, one might be PhysAtk, Tank, Healer, while another might be Tank, EleAtk, EleAtk. When you switch roles you switch the entire party role configuration. I'm assuming that everyone can eventually take on every role, but that means that out of the 216 permutations you can only store 6, so you'll want to take stock of what each kind of configuration can do.

Similar to X-2's dress spheres, your role determines the actions you can take entirely. The healer can only cast restorative spells. The buffer only casts protect/shell and the like. The debuffer's spells do damage in addition to attempting to cause a status effect, but the damage is fairly minimal. The physical attacker is the only one who gets the basic attack command; the elemental attacker gets spells and the tank only gets defensive abilities like provoke and damage guard.

The next thing is the chaining system, which is critical to understand. Like the SMT games, if you don't know how to use this system there are many fights that will just kick your ass. The basics of it are as follows. Every enemy has a chain bar. This starts off as completely empty, and is accompanied by a number: 100%. This number is the damage multiplier for your attacks. As you deal damage, the bar fills up and the number increases. If you can fill the bar, which is at a specific % dictated by each enemy, such as 130%, the enemy will go into a stagger state. This has several benefits. The first is that 100% is immediately added to the multiplier. Thus, an enemy that staggers at 130% would now have the multiplier being 230%. So you're automatically dealing extra damage. As you attack enemies in stagger state the multiplier keeps rising, and at a faster rate than pre-stagger. This is what gives you your big damage against tough enemies. Certain attacks gain a benefit when an enemy is staggered, such as Fira getting extra damage. There are certain passive abilities that take effect when an enemy is staggered, such as the physical attacker launching the enemy into the air. As long as he's being damaged the enemy will stay in the air, which completely prevents them from doing anything. Additionally, some enemies will react in a specific way to being staggered, such as losing a protective shell or being completely immobilized. When an enemy is staggered the filled chain bar will slowly empty at a constant rate. This is your time limit, so make the most of it.

However, if you want to fill the chain bar you have to work at it. The chain bar will empty at a very quick rate. Specifically, the bar remembers its last position as it empties. If you hit the enemy again before the bar fully empties it resets the bar and adds whatever amount your attack adds to the bar. Thus it is very important to keep up a constant barrage of attacks. This can be helped out by the physical attacker. The physical attacker has the inheret ability to slow the rate of emptying of the chain bar of whoever he's hit last. However, he adds very little to the chain bar itself. Conversely, the elemental attacker adds a lot to the chain bar but if he's the only attacker it will empty just as fast. Thus, an ideal combination is to have one of each attacker. One guy grows the bar quickly and the other keeps it from emptying. To give an idea of the difference between the two attackers, on a monster with a stagger point of 130% the elemental attacker might add 2% to the chain bar while the physical attacker might ad 0.1%. Another approach is to have all three of your characters as elemental attackers. If all three of you unleash your attacks all at once you can deal enough upfront chain damage to put the enemy into stagger immediately.

I've found during boss fights that I am constantly switching between role configurations in order to build the chain bar or react to an enemy's "fuck you" attack. I've come close to death in many random encounters when I started getting lazy and tried to damage race my opponents. It's a very active system.

[jmanx81]

Still FF2 for DSi. I picked up Castelvania so that disrupted the FF time, but FF is back on again.

[MrPopo]

At hour 23 I finally got out of "Midgar". Now I'm in an environment similar to FFXII's world (free roaming, lots of quests akin to the mark system). And there's some fucking huge beasties. Let me set the scene. First we have the standard beast, which is about the size and configuration as a lion. Then there's a very large thing, similar to an elephant. Except that the lion-beast compared with the elephant-beast is in the same proportion as a house cat is to an elephant. I got to see that during the cinematic marking my transition to the new environment.

Then the next cinematic had a giant humanoid pick up the elephant in one hand. That fucker is HUGE, and I really hope I get to fight him in a sidequest.

[BakaTanuki]

I am currently playing Summon Night 2: Swordcraft Story.

The plot is basically a really bad anime with too much talking and reiterating points and jokes, but its kinda charming in a way. The sprites are vibrant and cute. The battle system is built around random encounters with a side-view action system. It is a very simplistic game, but I'm enjoying the lack of grinding. One thing that I like is that enemies can be defeated either by killing them or lasting long enough to where their weapons break. For different bosses, a different approach will work best. I'm very near the end and have enjoyed this game. Music is pretty catchy.

[Octopod]

Went back to Fallout 3. Figured I should finish up all the DLC. I've got just over 130 hours in at this point. Next is either Dragon Age Origins or Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.