It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do

So I've spent about three hours with the new Steam version of Final Fantasy IX and my first impressions are extremely positive. Square-Enix is not known for their ports on PC so I was a bit worried about what I would find here but so far I'm happy with it.

Look at those resolutions!

Something I wasn't expecting with this update were several decently substantial changes that came along with all of the modernization enhancements common with these types of projects. You've got your resolution settings going up to 1080 (what I'm playing it on thanks to my new laptop!), controller support (which actually changes button prompts this time which is incredibly useful during the quick time events this game has), and updated graphical sprites which were all expected but masterfully done all the same. If I have one complaint about the graphical enhancements it's that only the characters were redone in higher resolutions so they sometimes stand out against the lower res backgrounds or unrefined characters. It's not as glaring as the PC port of Type-0 but same basic idea.

The other changes I'm talking about are minor but welcome. In the original game, you could find things on the ground by walking around and hitting X a whole bunch in hopes that the character will find an item. Now, whenever there is anything of interest to your character, an exclamation mark appears above his/her head. While some may be irritated by this modernization, I won't miss running into walls constantly as I mash the X button. Also, on top of the standard controller support, they actually made sure that all controls are completely re-mappable. Finally, they appear to have added a few tutorial screens that I don't recall seeing in the original. This is something I could do without as tutorial screens have been a pet peeve of mine for a while but hey, that's the way the world is going and I know I'm in the minority on that issue.

Just in case I'm too dumb to figure out how cursors work.

 There are some other changes too like optional boosters (read: cheats) that work similarly to how Final Fantasy VIII on PC had it but with more robust options such as no encounter modes, maximum Gil and other things. I won't be using any of these for my playthrough but I know some will appreciate being able to blaze through the story quickly.

Otherwise, things are so far pretty much the same as in the original. Quirks and all. I haven't delved too much into the battle system so there is still a ton to see and I look forward to every second of it. I realized I haven't spent much time talking about the background of this game so I'll probably get into that in my next post. For now, enjoy this scene showing off some of the new character models. They're pretty great!

Game on!

Try giving him the wrong answer 64 times and see what happens. No joke.

Oh Hi! Fancy Seeing You Here

This may come as a surprise but as it turns out, I didn't play Final Fantasy IX! I know, I know. It's a major shocker to everyone. I believe I did turn the game on again once after my last post but I didn't get far. The thing was, that lag that occurred whenever battles started became just too much to handle. I couldn't take it anymore. Imagine playing any RPG with random battles but instead of the standard load times, it took 20 seconds to load. The game was playable but not in any fun sort of way. Then there was the promise of a better tomorrow.

You see, at the point of my last blog, I was fully intending on getting a new laptop. One with much more gaming strength than what I had. So, I quietly tabled Final Fantasy IX until I got my new laptop. Then that kind of got dragged out longer than I expected. But now, I have my new laptop and it's gorgeous!

My exact laptop against my perfectly white wall and table!

Not to gush too much about it, it's got an Intel i7 processor running an Nvidia Geforce 940M graphics card. Needless to say, it's much better equipped to deal with emulation than my previous laptop which used integrated video processing on an i3. However, by the point I got this, there was another new promise. One granted to us by the RPG gods on high from the fabled land of Japan. A Final Fantasy IX Steam port was coming! Screenshots would again be a possibility and thus, my blogs would no longer look like giant blocks of text.

Then it came out on Android/iOS but a Steam port was nowhere to be found. I asked Square-Enix and received the nebulous response of, "coming soon". Well... that was a bummer. But I didn't want to fight with those damned PSX emulators again, risking further problems since I knew that as soon as I managed it, the port would be released because karma.

And so, I waited... and waited... and waited... and looked at the viability of playing it on my Android tablet... and waited some more. But the fabled day has arrived for a notification on my phone that came in not 30 minutes ago has told me that Final Fantasy IX has finally been released on Steam! Needless to say, the game finished downloading about halfway through writing this blog and I am just about ready to jump in. I'll have to replay the first few hours but it should be well worth it for decent performance with the game.

So, even though it's almost a year later, nothing from my previous blog posts has changed. I still haven't read or heard any spoilers about this game's story and am still excited to experience this game for the (sort of) first time. You can look forward to my first post about Final Fantasy IX very soon.

Game on!

Super-Deformed Alexandria Time!

I sorted out my issues with Final Fantasy IX. I settled for using the PSX emulator (which I hate so much) and managed to get it working well enough. It still has serious slowdown when entering a battle which I'm sure will get irritating by the end of the game and it is having trouble actually taking screenshots so this may be yet another game without screenshots. Sorry.

I'm gonna rant a little bit about emulators here, stick with me. Every emulator I've used outside of PSX emulators are simple. You download the emulator, it has its built in features, and then you use it to play ROMs. Simple. For some stupid reason, PSX emulators have to be unbearably complicated. If you just download the emulator, it tells you it's missing the BIOS. The freakin' BIOS! So how do you get that? You have to google search for the specific name of the BIOS and download that to put it into the emulator. Is that enough? No, of course not! It may come with a built in plug-in or two but in order to get any games actually working properly, you'll need to download special plug-ins and configure them to, in many cases, work with your specific game and hardware. There aren't really tutorials for any of this stuff so it's sort of a trial and error system where you try to find what works the best for you. Since all hardware works differently, there's no guarantee and no easy answer to find for your machine. It all just seems completely unnecessary when compared to something like SNESx9, the emulator I used for FF4-6. It worked fine out of the box and it also came with a ton of extra graphics plug-ins so you could try whichever ones you liked the best but it wasn't a requirement like it is for PSX emulators. I'm not sure why they are the way they are since later emulators like my PSP one don't work this way.

Oh well, whatever. Anyway, Final Fantasy IX. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with anything Final Fantasy and grasped every little tidbit about the series that I could. Not owning an NES, SNES or Playstation, that wasn't much but I tried. Final Fantasy IX was the one game that, somehow, I learned literally nothing about. Everyone debated between Final Fantasy VII or VIII but I never heard a darn thing about IX at any point. Years later, when I got my PS2, a friend lent me Tactics and IX to boost my then middling library of games. I utterly hated it.

"That stupid art-style with their big heads and cartoon faces! This was blasphemy compared to FFVIII!" Still, I gave it a chance but for whatever reason, when I realized weapons had individual abilities you had to learn, I just couldn't take it. I shut the game off after leaving the Evil Forest and never looked back.

Until now. I still know nothing about the game's storyline or anything. I somehow managed to stay completely ignorant about this game up to this point and that has got me extremely excited. You see, even though I hadn't played most of these Final Fantasy games, I knew about a vast majority of them. Aeris dying wasn't a surprise to me any more than Cecil going to the moon was. Kefka was an intimidating boss but I knew the major twist in FFVI would be the World of Ruin so it didn't have much of an effect on me. But IX is new territory. Anything can happen.

I'm about three hours into the game now and just passed the point where I originally left off after the Forest of Ruin. Honestly, I slap younger me in the face. After the dark and brooding VI, VII and VIII, IX is a breath of fresh air. The art style is still goofy but now I'm liking it, rather than turned off by it. It feels light-hearted and whimsical, not so heavy as the last several entries.

I haven't delved too deep into the gameplay yet, having basically been hand-guided through to this point but it seems fun. The characters all have their own unique abilities and attributes which I am very excited about after dealing with cookie-cutter characters all through VIII. The weapons seem logical which also takes me out of the game less than VIII's ridiculous arsenal. Overall, it just feels like it's going to be a fun game to dive into.

We'll see if tedium rears it's ugly head again but for the first time in a while, I'm really hopeful.

Game on!

It Didn't Get Better...

Well, Final Fantasy VIII is done and no, it didn't get better from last time. In the end, you get to go to the future, a decimated world ruled over by Ultimecia, and fight her in her crazy, Resident Evil-esque castle before she gets pwnaged. Sweet scene commencing where Squall is lost in time, Rinoa brings him back with the power of love and white feathers transformed from flower petals... Tada! Happy ending.

No explanation about GF's ganking people's memories, no explanation of what a Sorceress is, really (there is a brief mention that may suggest they are simply descendants of someone from the past although it doesn't explain how they have special powers or what those powers may be), no resolution of any character subplots, if they even had any to begin with, no explanation of what Time Compression means. Just... nothing. Ah well, but Rinoa and Squall make the cutest couple, the way he constantly ignores her and she launches her dog-

But that's okay. Because at least I have Final Fantasy IX to look forward to, yeah? Well, maybe not. You see, I had downloaded an eboot rom which takes the PSN version of Final Fantasy IX and plays it from a PSP emulator. I wanted to do this because the PSX emulator I had gotten for Final Fantasy Tactics didn't work wonderfully and I wanted to use the smoother option. Problem is, PSP emulators don't play eboot roms. What the hell is the point then?! I have yet to find an answer to this but I will keep looking.

I have a couple of other options that may work out but I haven't nailed anything down yet. I may be able to use my tablet as a PSX emulator and play the original version of FFIX which would be the best option, barring using my laptop. Otherwise, I'll need to buy it for my PS3 at home which means I'll have significantly less time to spend on the game (at best, six hours per week) and won't be able to take screenshots. But anyway, I'll figure something out and get back to you.

In the meantime, here is my ranking for Final Fantasy VIII amongst all the FF titles so far:

Rankings:

Final Fantasy 2 < Final Fantasy VIII < Final Fantasy Adventure < Final Fantasy < Final Fantasy Legends (all three in order) < Final Fantasy III < Final Fantasy V < Final Fantasy IV < Final Fantasy VII < Final Fantasy VI

I know that may seem low but I honestly just didn't enjoy it much when compared to the other games. I feel badly about it because the system could be so much fun leveling up GF abilities and mixing and matching but when placed in this game, it just becomes overly tedious and not a lot of fun. It's still a lot better than two because at least you aren't beating yourself over the head literally but it still requires unnatural gameplay in order to succeed by constantly drawing magic from the same enemies again and again while getting the crap beat out of you.

As far as the version, I HIGHLY recommend the Steam version of Final Fantasy VIII. It's available on Steam so it's very easy to get and while it uses the awkward PC port from back in the day as its base, the new Steam version comes with both Chocobo World which may be a fun throwback to tomodachi days and also a Magic Booster. This is a system built into the launch window that allows you to boost all low to mid-level magics to 100 for any save as often as you like. It doesn't completely solve the problem since you still need to draw the high level magics for the end game but it means you don't need to grind for the vast majority of the game. If you want the pure experience, you can still play it like normal and it's more or less a direct port of the PSX experience but you can change your mind at any time. The version also has Xbox 360 controller support built in. It's awkward since button prompts only say B1 or B2 but it was manageable. Just remember you have to actually press X on your keyboard at the beginning to start the game. I don't know why this is but it's the only time you actually need to use your keyboard. For only 12 bucks, it is far and away the superior version of this game. An original boxed copy will run you about 60 dollars but is available on Amazon if you so choose.

Game on!

Squall Cast Disillusionment on Self

(To start things off, I realized after about 25+ hours with Final Fantasy VIII that I wasn't actually taking any screenshots. Turns out, Big Screen Mode has to be on in Steam to use the Xbox button + RT thing to take a screenshot. Epic fail on my part... Sorry, everyone. Just gonna be text right now.)

When I was a kid, Final Fantasy VIII was the granddaddy of RPG's. My buddy had it for PC and I was enthralled. It's what I thought of when I heard Final Fantasy. Collecting and training GF's sounded awesome and the graphics were incredible (for the year 2000), it just looked like the game to play. I still thank it for getting me interested in Final Fantasy but otherwise, boy, was I wrong.

I've always stood up for Final Fantasy VIII against anyone bad-mouthing it. Everyone online always either loved it or hated it and I fell firmly in the loved it camp. The problem was, I had never actually played through it. Later in life, I played up until the Garden takes off and you can fly it around but stopped shortly after that for... some reason I can't remember.

Now, despite being a firm supporter of the game to start, the more I play Final Fantasy VIII, the more I utterly despise this wretch of a game. Everything from the plot to the characters to the gameplay mechanics is broken as sin and it just keeps getting worse. Let me explain:

1) The Plot

Final Fantasy VIII starts off fairly well. You are a member of a mercenary school called the Garden and you have to pass your final test to be a full-fledged SeeD. Yeah, it stands for something but I don't remember what. Basically, you're a mercenary who works for your school err... Garden. On your mission, your rival Seifer goes AWOL causing him to fail the test. Failure eventually sends him straight into the waiting arms of Edea, the big baddie for most of the game.

Now, if this is what they had focused on, the game could have been great. An interesting dynamic between rival students, the struggle between your personal hatred of the guy versus your duty to your school to save him. Interesting, right? Well, here's where things go crazy. Instead of following Seifer's downfall into Edea's grasp, that happens off screen while you get a mission to help Rinoa (read: female lead because the script says so) and her Forest Owls! The Forest Owls are a terrorist organization made up of three people who want to free their town of Timber from the evil Empire of Galbadia, similar to AVALANCHE from FFVII. You spend a bunch of time helping them in Timber, hijacking a train, meeting the townsfolk and getting on TV. Seifer is met, battle ensues and Edea takes him and flees. Forest Owls are NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. I'm not clear if we somehow saved the town or not. It doesn't seem like it since Imperial soldiers are still there. I have no idea. Anyway, Rinoa joins your party and no longer gives a flying fuck about Timber for the rest of the game...

Instead, she decides to join you and your mercenary team that she hired in the first place to assassinate Edea for your next mission! Even the party members seem confused since they introduce the rest of the team as fully licensed SeeDs and then Rinoa as... nothing. Anyway, main goal is now Edea which the team inevitably fails at resulting in Squall's death. Or not since he wakes up in the next disk with absolutely no explanation as to how he survived a giant ice spear through his heart. Team is now in prison and Rinoa/Irvine bust in to save you because apparently, in Final Fantasy VIII world, two people can break into a highly guarded prison with no problem at all. Hell, one of them doesn't even need to be trained in anything! Awesome.

Out of prison you get and here is where the story gets really bizarre. You find out that Edea is in charge of the Empire now and plans on shooting missiles at two of the Gardens, Balamb and Trabia. Half your team goes to the missile base to stop the missiles and half goes to Balamb to... die, I guess.

Balamb is Squall's Garden so obviously, Trabia gets nuked first. Too bad, Selphie, your people just weren't important enough to the plot. After watching the first wave of missiles get shot, they infiltrate and fail to stop the next missiles too. Great job, guys. Second half of your party gets to fix the mistakes of the first by trying desperately to debrief to someone who gives a shit without success. You find out that a fat blob thing is the financier of the Garden and lives in the basement for some reason. Squall and friends kill this fat angry blob and decide that pressing a mystery button in the lower basement is a good idea. Lo and behold, the Garden flies! And so, the giant building flies off, out of the way of the approaching missiles.

I may go into more detail later but the plot further devolves as we find out that none of the characters remember anything because of their GF's but they actually grew up together and Edea is their orphanage mother! I didn't even mention how you keep having flashbacks to a guy named Laguna who seems somewhat aware of you because Ellone, Squall's non-biological sister he didn't remember has some sort of power to send people back in time to other people's memories. There are people known as Sorceresses, who are somehow different from your team who uses magic regularly, who SeeD was created to fight against despite never fighting against the Sorceress they knew existed until Squall came around. Then it turns out the Sorceress helped create SeeD to stop herself when she'd go crazy from being possessed by a Sorceress from the future who wants to make a Time Compression which I guess is bad for some reason. There's a super advanced city who imprisoned the last Sorceress in space and you get to go to space too and then the moon is filled with monsters and a big plaque a la 2001: A Space Odyssey gets excavated by the Empire to create a space elevator for monsters from the moon... HOLY CRAP!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!

It's important to note also that I'm just about to enter the final dungeon and absolutely NONE of this has been explained at all. The game just keeps throwing twists at you with no lead-up or anything. Nothing makes any damn sense at all but the game just keeps going with its nonsense. Honestly, all of this could be tolerable if it weren't for...

2) The Characters

Oh, Lord, the characters in this game... You guys remember back to Final Fantasy V? When I complained that the characters were more or less all the same and didn't feel like they had personalities? At least you could forget about them, unlike Final Fantasy VIII which shoves it's flat, 2D characters into your face CONSTANTLY. In fact, it's basically as though the writers didn't know the difference between personality and backstory since that's really all you get.

Squall is the main character. If you thought Cloud was brooding, he's got nothing on Squall. This character is so boring and bland, all of the dialogue choices you get throughout the game actually start with ellipses. This guy is so horribly unlikable, it makes Rinoa, an already unlikable ditz of a character even more hateable since she for some reason likes this jack-off. Rinoa is the leader of the Forest Owls despite barely understanding how basic strategy works. She immediately falls in love with the equally incompetent Squall because of his utter loathing of conversation. Our two lovebirds are accompanied by such memorable characters as Zell, the overly-energetic punching bag who does literally nothing throughout the entire storyline, Quistis, the 18 year old instructor of soldiers who joins Squall because she also can't keep it in her pants. Selphie, basically Yuffie with even more incompetence, and finally Irvine, a sniper who doesn't like to shoot things.

These people are so boring with zero motivations of their own that I literally root for Seifer through the whole damn game. At least Seifer has some proper motivation for doing what he's doing. He's egotistical and allows himself to succumb to the Sorceress' manipulation that makes him feel like her Knight. Instead, you get these six numbskulls during the era when developers were trying to fix the problem of most characters in RPG parties sitting unused through the whole game. Their solution, to make you constantly switch between them in almost every dungeon. These switches are so contrived, one of the explanations for a character being unavailable is literally that she is taking a nap. Your base is under siege by an invading force and she's decided now is a good time to sleep. Great job... Fortunately, she wakes up in time to get possessed so, that's great.

As if the characters weren't bad enough, their weapons are completely ridiculous. Now, many people laugh at the famous Gunblade, wielded by Squall. This is a pistol merged with a sword. Honestly, I think it's kind of cool, especially when compared to the others. Zell literally punches things to death. When you are picking out weapons for weapons training, literally surrounded by choices, who says "Nope, I just want to punch the living hell out of everything!" Idiot... Quistis uses a whip. Heh, she's an instructor? Sexy librarian thing going on? Uses a whip? Get it? No? Moving on. Irvine is a sniper so he uses a shotgun. Obviously. Because those two are guns and otherwise are the exact same thing- STOP ASKING QUESTIONS! Selphie uses nunchaku which may make sense from a weapon standpoint but considering Selphie seems to be the most physically weak character other than maybe Rinoa, it's an odd choice of weapons since it's super close-range. Anyway, the best has been saved for last. Rinoa uses what can only be described as an arm slingshot which she uses to shoot a boomerang disk. I could not make this up. It's a disk thing that comes back to her and she shoots it like a slingshot from her wrist. Even better, her limit break is that she shoots her DOG from this wrist launcher. Yes, in Final Fantasy, there is a character who slingshots her dog at enemies. Wow... just wow.

3) The Gameplay

Here's the sad thing about the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII. This system is not inherently broken by itself. In fact, it could be really cool. Basically, the system uses an evolved version of Final Fantasy VI where you equip summons to each character to determine their abilities. Except, instead of just giving them active abilities, this determines their stats and everything else as well. You can equip multiple GF's, as they're called, on one character or leave a character without a GF (although that's a really bad idea with no noticeable benefit) but however you do it, you will then need to junction (read: equip) magic to each individual stat that the GF allows. Different magics will benefit different stats differently and will increase it more if more magic's are stocked.

That leads us to the magic system. Anyone can use any magic at any time but they have to be stocked like items. Magic can't be bought in stores though, they have to be drawn from either draw points found throughout the world or drawn from monsters in battle. Different monsters have different magics that can be drawn and drawing will take several casts of a magic of your choice. You will need to wisely think out which magics you are going to junction to your stats and which you will keep for casting since they benefit your stats more if you keep a higher number of casts available. You can still use them in battle but it will lower your stats accordingly.

All of this would be cool if it weren't for the fact that they tried really hard to make you use all the characters by switching them constantly for the plot. This ultra-crunchy junctioning system quickly becomes tedious and painful when you have to spend half an hour every few hours just setting up your party and getting them ready to fight. There's thankfully an auto-feature for junctioning magic but it rarely gets things exactly right and really just provides a jumping-off point. The assumption was probably that people would equip one or two GFs to each character and would keep them there but this would be stupid in actual gameplay because you need to level up your GFs abilities which can only be done by keeping them active participants in battles. So what results is just constant tedium which makes you hate whenever they force you to change characters, further increasing your hatred for these already boring non-people!

Weapons also cannot simply be bought but instead, must be crafted. You go to a store like usual but you need to discover weapon blueprints, found in magazines, before you can do anything there. You then need to have the correct items found from monsters in order to actually make the weapons for each character. These raise their base strength and hit percentages to give you that extra boost to attacks for battle. The problem is that these items often need to be stolen from enemies as the drop rate for some is extremely low. If you were like me and never stole anything in previous games, this is a painful lesson in FFVIII since your attacks will be left woefully pathetic by the endgame when you're still using your starting weapons. Of course, there isn't anything that tells you this, you just have to figure it out.

This is something that's especially odd since otherwise, the game goes way overboard in making sure you understand the systems. Since you are a mercenary working with an organization, you actually get a salary throughout the game, given to you at time intervals. Your salary is based on your SeeD level which is mostly determined by the level of tests you have passed. That's right, this game has tests. You know, those things that kids take because they're fun? Oh wait, that's not right...

Anyway, at any point in the game, you can take tests up to whatever Squall's level is at the time up to a maximum of 30. Each test has 10 questions and you have to get 100% in order to progress up the levels. Doing the math, that means you need to answer 300 questions about the game before it deems you worthy of playing it. Since you get more money for higher levels, the game also doesn't tell you which of these questions you got wrong. Best case scenario, if you can't pass a test, you have to wade through menus of support documents to find the correct answer. Worst case scenario, they ask about an extremely specific situation that you actually have to go out and find before you can answer it. It's a pain in the ass that didn't need to be so opaque. The problems of this system are made even clearer by the fact that playing it today means you can just look online to find the answers. This is also way more helpful, allowing the test to actually teach you the game rather than just make you feel like an idiot.

Anyway, I'm near the end of the game, about to jump into the Pandora something or other and finish this bullshit so I'll save my final judgment for then. Perhaps some story threads resolve themselves but I'm not holding my breath. I'll finish this up probably this week and get back to you though. I've got a hold of a ROM of Final Fantasy IX which I can play through a PSP emulator (since it was released on PSN) so that's good to go also! I'm kind of excited to jump into that since I was immediately turned off by the art style back in the day but am told it's actually a really great game. It'll be fun to play a Final Fantasy game that I actually know nothing about. I don't even know the name of the villain going into it!

Game on!

The Many, Many Systems of FF VIII

Ooooo Final Fantasy VIII. This really is the big one, huh? I don't mean the most famous or the most talked about or anything like that. No, no, no. Final Fantasy VIII is the big one because this is probably the most divisive title in the franchise. Some will argue vehemently that this is the best Final Fantasy title of all of them while others will argue just as passionately that it's the worst. Let me tell you right now, it's not the worst. Opinions are one thing but there is no way anyone could convince me that Final Fantasy VIII is worse than Final Fantasy II by any standard.

Eh-hemm... anyway... The storyline, characters, etc. aren't the issue here. The thing people get hung up over is the gameplay mechanics. That is to say, ALL the gameplay mechanics. No matter what side of the fence you fall on FF VIII, you can't call it simple. In fact, this is probably one of the most complicated JRPGs to come out in any gaming generation. So many differing systems all working together, altering each other. It's a lot to handle. Hell, even the game thinks it's complexity is worthy of the games first tutorial mode accessible from anywhere and even tests to confirm that you understand the material. Let me try and break it down for you.

While there are a ton of systems in FF VIII, they are almost all actually just evolutions of previous games systems that you've seen before. Most of the games mechanics revolve around GFs, FFVIII's summon system. Remember the Espers from Final Fantasy VI and how you'd equip them to different people to give them different abilities? GFs are like a way more complex version of that idea. Each GF learns skills in the same way that Final Fantasy Tactics works. You pick one skill from a list to learn and as you win battles, you get AP which is EXP for skills. Skills can do various things like create skill junctions (more on that later), increase passive stats or give new in-battle abilities, amongst other things. As GFs level up, using traditional EXP and levels, and gain more skills, they help to improve the person they are equipped to.

That's simple enough, right? Well, the way a GF increases a party members stats is actually something the player controls through a system called Junctioning. You can Junction both GFs and Magic, both of which work in a different manner. Junctioning a GF just means you equip it to a person, like the Espers in VI or like armor or weapons in any other game. Once Junctioned, you can choose which active abilities you want to equip to the party member which the GF has learned. Magic Junctioning is where most people get tripped up. One of the types of skills a GF can learn is stat junctions. This basically means that once learned, you can junction magic to a specific character statistic like strength or HP. Junctioning magic means you pick one of the magic spells that the character has learned and you use that spell to increase the stat sort of like equipment specifically for one statistic. If that sounds confusing and complicated, it's because it is. Each magic spell can only be designated for one stat so while the beginning is fairly light, by the end, when most stats are junctionable, balancing which spells will have the best effect for which stat becomes a huge hassle. Fortunately, this can be automated by picking a priority like Attack or Defense. It wouldn't be as bad except that you rarely will be able to maintain one setup for very long whether because a character leaves your party, joins your party, etc. So even people who understand how Junctioning works still get annoyed by it because it requires near-constant upkeep and micromanagement.

Oh but that's not all, not by a long shot. So you've got your GFs equipped to people and you've got your stats all worked out but how do you get those magic spells you Junction to your stats? If you said "like any other Final Fantasy" I'd smack you and ask again how it works since that's no damn answer at all. If you then were to say "by leveling up and getting new spells" well, you wouldn't get smacked but you'd still be wrong. No, Final Fantasy VIII is the only game in the franchise to use as system like this. Basically, Magic is treated like an item but not something you buy in stores. Instead, it's found in enemies and throughout the world in special Draw points. In order to access it, you need to have the active ability Draw equipped to a party member from your GF. You then draw it out of enemies or the drop points sort of like pulling from a well. A successful draw may net you 8 Cures or Thunders. Every enemy has different spells which may or may not be known to your character depending on whether you have knowledge of that enemy or not. There is no MP either in this game, instead every time you use the spell, it uses up one cast of that spell. If you run out, no more casting it. Not only that but you also have to have at least one in order to Junction that spell to a stat for a party member. You seeing the complexity ramp up here? Not only do you need to maintain this magical stockpile but it's unique for each character so you have to spread the Draw love around and make sure everyone has access to the spells he or she needs for both Junctioning and casting.

Are we done yet? NO! Of course not! Next we get to deal with Limit Breaks. These work similarly to how they do in previous and subsequent Final Fantasy games where it's a character-specific super move meant to be used when you're in trouble. Unfortunately, like everything else in FF VIII, they decided these needed more complexity, too. Each character is different but all require some level of management whether it's a system choosing whether to automate or even activate a Limit Break at all or learning new Limit Break abilities in the same way GFs learn new skills, there's always some level of customization you can inflict on yourself.

Now, what else could they possibly make more intense? How about equipment? Actually, some people may consider it simplified but the fact is, equipment works differently than in other JRPGs so it's just one more thing to figure out. There is no armor or defensive equipment at all in this game. All of that is dealt with in Junctioning. Weapons, however, are upgraded through a crafting system. Before you even have the option to craft a weapon upgrade, you have to learn about it from a magazine. Magazines are located all over the place, sometimes out in the open, sometimes not. These give you new options for when you go to weapon stores. When at the weapon store, you can choose which upgrade you want but if you thought all you'd have to do was pay for it, well, you clearly haven't been paying attention, have you? Nope, you need special items for each upgrade in order to craft that particular enhancement. These aren't common items either, they all come from monsters in one way or another. If you're fortunate, the items come from a drop but if you aren't, you're gonna have to use that Steal action that you rarely ever touch in RPGs because it's a pain in the ass to constantly waste turns until you finally wind up taking a potion 20 hours into the game. And how do you Steal? Well, you have to get a GF that can learn that active ability, of course.

If, after all that, you've decided that the game just doesn't have enough depth for you, Squaresoft kindly added an optional card game that I JUST CAN'T FIGURE OUT!!! Basically, you can collect monster cards by battling monsters or GFs which have various stats like in a collectible card game such as Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic the Gathering. You can then battle various NPCs throughout the world at this card game. Here's the thing, they couldn't have possibly just made a simple card game. No. They decided to make it more realistic. You know how with popular games, people often come up with their own house rules? That's how this works too. Different regions, people will play under different variations on the basic rules. These can affect anything from the way you win to how many cards the winner takes from the loser. But wait, there's more! These aren't just static rules, either. In fact, the more you play under certain rules, the more those rules can spread throughout the world as they become more popular. Honestly, many players play FF VIII just to master this card game. It's absurdly deep and has actually been ported to several other devices as a stand-alone game. Final Fantasy XI offered it as a packaged option but also, it was just recently brought to the Japanese-only Final Fantasy mobile hub as it's own game.

So, where do you fall on all of this? Obviously that's a ton of stuff to take in but some players crave the complexity. The more inaccessible, the better as it enables constant learning of new tricks to eke out those extra few points of damage. These are the players who will thrive in FF VIII. Others would rather have simple mechanics that offer more general tweaking or just allow them to get on with the game without menu surfing every few seconds. Neither way is wrong but it's extremely polarizing, especially in such a main line franchise like Final Fantasy.

Let me know in the comments what you think and as always, game on!

Final Fantasy Legends 1-3

Hey everyone! Guess who's back?

I know, it's been an obscenely long time since my last post and, to be totally honest, it's because I haven't really done anything worth posting about. That's right, I haven't really played any Final Fantasy since my last post back almost a year ago. A lot has happened including: I got married, moved into an apartment, bought a house, moved into the house, multiple family members passed away... It's been pretty crazy lately.

Still, I have found time to game and decided I wanted to take a break from Final Fantasy to play through a series that I've always intended to do but never got around to, the Infinity engine games. namely: Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 1+2. I modded both heavily with quality of life mods just to improve things like resolution, UI, text size, etc. but otherwise left the games as they were originally released. I loved all of them. Every second of venturing through the Sword Coast was a pleasure and while I wasn't a fan of the Planescape setting and it took me a while to get used to D&D rules (I've never played before), Torment was still one of the best games I've ever played. I also spent some time with Icewind Dale 1+2 and Neverwinter Nights although I didn't finish any of them. After that, I got a little RPG'd out and decided to play through Dark Forces. I'd played Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy but never played the first game in the series so I played the DarkXL mod which remakes the game in a more modern engine. I had a great time with that.

So it's been an eventful year but, you know what? I'm ready to get back to my pilgrimage. I've been having some trouble with Final Fantasy Tactics and the untimely death of my PS2 has caused some hiccups for me but I decided that while I figure out a workaround, I'd jump into one of my first Final Fantasy titles I got to spend real time with, Final Fantasy VIII.

You may be wondering, after that super long introduction, why I titled this Final Fantasy Legends 1-3 then. Well, I am getting started (again) on FFVIII but I haven't really done anything yet so I wouldn't have much to say about that. So instead, I'm gonna talk about three games I didn't play on this pilgrimage, the Final Fantasy Legends games for the original Game Boy. I played all three of these games back in the day and they were actually the first Final Fantasy games I owned, personally, and finished. Since all I had as a kid was a Sega Genesis and a Game Boy, these were the only ones I could play on my own. Well, these and Adventure but I already went into that one. So I'm not playing them now but I'll give you guys the brief rundown on each.

The Final Fantasy Legend

So, you may remember from my post about choosing to skip these games that the Final Fantasy Legends games aren't technically Final Fantasy games at all. In fact, they're from a series known in Japan (and the US much later) as SaGa. The games were a hit in Japan but Squaresoft was still hesitant about throwing its weight behind a localization effort since JRPGs just weren't huge sellers in the US normally. Final Fantasy was a big hit though so they decided to just call them Final Fantasy games here and assumed we were too stupid to figure out the difference.

Players of the first game seriously noticed though that this wasn't quite the same as the others. Similar to the first few Final Fantasy games, The Final Fantasy Legend game didn't have named characters but unlike those, you don't even have a consistent party. You start off by picking characters of whichever classes you want but if one dies you just go to a shop and pick up new characters. Yeah, you likely won't finish the game with any of the people you started with. It's a lot more like D&D or other western RPGs in this sense.

The game sounds a lot like the more modern RPGs, Resonance of Fate or Sword Art Online. Your characters are living in a giant tower with the promise of wishes if anyone reaches the top of the tower but no one who has tried has ever returned. You gather up your party and up you go.

Honestly, this is easily the worst of the Legends games. The gameplay is absurdly difficult and harkens back to the first Final Fantasy in the worst of ways. If you do manage to reach the top, you'll get a storyline reminisce of something out Xenogears where you fight God himself. Otherwise, there is very little story to speak of in the game and no real attachment to the characters since they're just nameless, replaceable peons. At the time, it was great as a Game Boy RPG but after the next two came out, it just became meaningless.

Final Fantasy Legend 2

Known as Sa Ga2 in Japan, Final Fantasy Legend 2 feels more like a JRPG and is much better for it. The story follows a kid who's Dad leaves to discover the secret of the MAGI, a substance thought to be from the gods. Daddy never comes home though so it's up to you to collect all 77 MAGI and find out what's going on.

This game has a lot more to it and feels more fleshed out instead of the dungeon crawl that the first Legends game turned out to be. It doesn't break new ground, especially to players today, but it was great for its time. Honestly, not much more to say about it other than if you want an RPG on the original Game Boy, this was up there as one of the good ones.

Final Fantasy Legend 3

This was the best of the bunch, in my opinion, and it actually had an influence of the later game, Chrono Trigger, with its use of time travel as both a plot and gameplay gimmick. Basically, a large beast is destroying the world in the future, past and present simultaneously. Your group of adventures has to take down the monster by assembling a time traveling vessel called the Talon.

One of the cool things about this game was the class system. Basically, classes were constantly being changed for each character by using items received from monsters on them, somewhat similarly to how Golden Sun worked by equipping djinn on characters to change their abilities. Since this was in 1991, it was a reasonable evolution of Final Fantasy III's job system and, if SaGa had caught on more in the west, could have seriously changed the way we play JRPGs even today, considering how much of an influence III/V had.

So that's a little bit of an overview of the Legends games. If you are desperately craving some RPGs to play, they're worth a look although their age shows through painfully. If you do read Japanese, all the games have been remade, Legend for the Wonderswan Color and 2/3 for the DS, but unfortunately for us English speakers, the Game Boy titles are all we're likely to see for a while yet.

If you are into the SaGa games, a new title has been announced for the PS Vita to be released this year. No news about a localization has been released but if you all cry loud enough, a digital localization isn't out of the question. Hell, look at Final Fantasy Type-0.

Game on!