Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate (4)

The Triple Triad minigame was met with mixed reactions: deeply appreciated for its complex mechanics or toroughly hated because of its pervasiveness. You could have a match with most of the Non-Playing Characters in the whole game, and succeeding was a must for completionists and card collectionists. Card pictures other than monsters include Guardian Forces and Characters, which I think are unique in the game.

Around the beginning of the game you get a deck of cards, each representing a monster found in the game; each card has specific statistics, which give it what you would call an 'attack power' depending on where you put it on the playing board, a 3x3 grid. You and your opponent take turns placing your cards, and each time a card is played, cards placed near it may be 'flipped' (netting you a point each) depending on the attack power balance of adjacent cards.

It's a lot more complicated than this: because of various and ever-changing rules, matches can require different strategies, or even be almost entirely luck-based. At the end of a match, you may win and/or lose cards, according to the current rules.

The good part about this minigame is that, thanks to some Guardian Force abilities, you can turn the cards you win into useful items and spells, therefore making the drawing process less important, if not entirely optional, for maxing out your characters' statistics. The bad parts are: it's still relatively time-consuming to get the best cards, so if you don't like the game (I bought FFVIII because I wanted to play a JRPG, not a card game) you're better off not playing it, because it requires practice, and one mistake could cost you one of your rare cards (i.e. a reload of your last save).

Final Fantasy VII already had its share of minigames, but they were just mindless pastimes compared to this, and you could play all of them in one place (except you had to go around catching Chocobos for the race game). As you may have guessed, I really didn't like Triple Triad, so I was stuck with drawing spells and killing monsters to sate my lust for stat-maxing (in retrospect, it served me right...).

I'll just take one more paragraph to add something to the growth system of the game: every time you defeat an enemy, your characters gain experience (except for 'bosses'), and eventually get to higher levels, which means getting stronger. In this game your enemies level-up with you though, so gaining experience is either useless, or it makes the game harder, because enemies may get stronger with the same amount of levels as your characters. So you have to balance things out by getting spells and junctioning them to get better statistics and survive.

Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate (3)

Let's talk a bit about the overall presentation of the game, shall we?

That was the time when Computer Graphics were undergoing huge improvements, both in quality and popularity; the CG cutscenes in FFVIII were a nice example of that. Compared to the rather raw-looking ones in the seventh episode, all movies in VIII were really beautiful. Too bad that by then I had already overcome my enthusiasm for pre-rendered animations, so those cutscenes didn't impress me as much as most other players, except for one which sported a nice transition from 'in-game' graphics to the CG scene. Still today I don't really like all those CG movies (Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks alike): I guess there's something in the animations which bothers me.

CG aside, the game wasn't that different, technically speaking, from its predecessor: you have your polygonal characters and monsters move over a pre-rendered background (while in towns or other confined places) or on a full-3D map, while battle scenes were full-3D. All these areas got some improvements, mainly because of 'textures' (instead of using many coloured polygons, you use less, but apply images onto them to make them look better). The first result of this move was improved realism (helped by normal character proportions compared to the 'puppets' in FFVII), while the second one was that everything looked shabbier: maybe it was just me, but it looked like there was much less colour.

All these improvements weren't entirely free: I already mentioned in the previous post that the game was slower, and it's partly because of its better 'graphics', although I hated the slower animation more.

A special mention goes to the music department of the game: before I say anything about the artistic quality of the soundtrack, I must make it clear that I hate the choice of instruments in the game! I also didn't like the battle music (it made me feel the game was even slower) and some other tracks, but really, no other Final Fantasy game I've played or watched has ever made the same effect to me. I once read on a videogame Forum that someone had defined the song 'Eyes on Me' (the main theme of the game) something like a crime against humanity. I wouldn't go that far, but for me that song foreshadowed a worrying trend in Japanese videogames; I won't tell which it is though.

Next post will be about playing cards! I'll write it down so I don't forget it.

Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate (2)

Let's resume the hate!

Ok, I was screwed with the magic system, but it was actually more complex than that: magic spells could be linked ('junctioned') to your characters' statistics, meaning that you could make your characters stronger by basically 'equipping' them with more and/or stronger spells. It's a lot complicated to explain in a few sentences, so just know that this caused the 'draw syndrome' in a lot of Final Fantasy VIII players, i. e. a player would spend hours upon hours battling random enemies just to draw spells from them and get more powerful; additionally, they wouldn't dare to cast 'junctioned' spells unless necessary, because that would mean having to draw more to get as powerful as before. It's not really mandatory in the game, but I'm pretty sure it was the norm back then: after all, when you play an RPG you tend to make your characters stronger as fast as possible.

That may be a bit extreme gameplay strategy, but I know for certain that I only cast Ultima once (a very powerful spell and quite rare) in my first playthrough just to see how it looked, in order to keep 100 of them junctioned. I don't remember right now, but I think that spell couldn't be drawn from enemies (not regular ones anyway), only from rare 'draw points' which would recharge after a long while (while you can draw spells from enemies endlessly).

In short, to me magic spells were little more than equipment. After all, I found that casting spells were only useful earlier on, when you can exploit enemy weaknesses to certain magic to end battles faster, because in the beginning other alternatives just aren't viable:

• attacking with your weapon doesn't really deal much damage, even if you junction spells to your strength attribute; moreover, you can't enable junctions to all your attributes from the start for all your characters, you need additional Guardian Forces which are found later in the game
• using items for healing is feasible, but they cost money, and you get that periodically (not from battles like in the previous FF) or by selling other items, so why not use healing spells, which are free? Attack items aren't an option either (do they exist? I don't remember)
• summoning Guardian Forces, magical beasts which generally attack all enemies at once with magic, may be useful, and that doesn't consume anything, but initially they take a very long time to summon (spells are cast instantly) and you only start with 2 of them (3 shortly after the start), so you probably won't be using them regularly
• getting low on health to unlock your 'Limit Break', a sort of powerful near-death technique, is a nice option to your regular attack, but the initial ones aren't very powerful, having low health is risky, and the animation lasts longer (boring...)

Oh, regarding the last point, did I mention that battle animations are incredibly slow? Sure, even Final Fantasy VII had its share of slow battles, but this one is even worse! Most regular attacks and spells are quite slow, the initial loading for each battle is long, and enemies always have a dying animation, but the worst offenders are surely Guardian Force summoning sequences; FFVII had very long ones as well, to be fair (I feel they were slightly shorter on average though). But overall FFVIII felt way slower: I blame the designers for trying to convey a more scenic and realistic look to the game, which a lot of players appreciated, but not I.

This is getting too long, see you next post!

Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate

Some posts ago I expressed my dislike for the eighth chapter in the Final Fantasy series. It could be said that a lot of people who played and enjoyed the previous one as their first JRPG would have hated this game just because it's not another Final Fantasy VII, it doesn't have story or characters in common with it (all Final Fantasies didn't, but many didn't know), and it introduces a completely different growth system. I'm sure it isn't just that.

I wanted to put in this post some of my other reasons for hating this game. Maybe it will take more than one post to list them all, but here goes...

First of all, when news and screenshots of FFVIII I was really excited, but only for a very brief moment: some graphical effects shown in the pictures looked great to me, but then I looked at the concept art and started disliking it. Characters, settings, the gunblade (basically a gun with an extremely big bayonette), I didn't really like any of them, maybe because they were going for a more realistic and serious look. In hindsight, I wish I didn't followthe development of this game so much, as I probably would have enjoyed playing it more. I barely knew anything about Final Fantasy VII before playing it.

Some time after the initial information was released, I read that the magic system wouldn't use MP: simply said, instead of using a single pool of magic-casting energy for all spells, you could have up to 100 casts of each spell for each character. This meant two things for me: using magic was going to be much like using items, and the MP-based system was gone. These impliy that going to rest wouldn't replenish your magic-casting ability (as it was in all previous episodes), and the simplest way to get more spells would have been to 'draw' it from enemies (there are other ways, but they're either harder or less efficient). I had played other RPGs before that, videogames and pen&paper alike, and frankly the MP system was my favorite for simplicity and flexibility; it's just my personal preference though.

Wow, I guess this is gonna take a lot more posts than I thought! I'll be back for more.

Final Fantasy

I thought I'd make another post about JRPGs in order to close the topic. Final Fantasy is the other most recognized series of Japanese RPGs other than Dragon Quest; it is also the most famous one worldwide, and that's probably because of the success of the seventh episode, my very first JRPG, Final Fantasy VII.

At the time the game stood out for various reasons: the graphics were out of the ordinary, Computer-Graphics animated scenes weren't very common, as was the game's setting (your typical RPG would be set in a medieval-looking fantasy world, this one had a much more modern look).

Mechanics-wise, the game isn't that much different from Dragon Quest (see previous post), as you can find about the same adventuring theme (although the plot makes it feel different), random encounters with monsters and other enemies, battles in which you take turns to select your actions (except there are special timers for actions), character improvement by fighting and buying new equipment. I wasn't new to table-RPGs, so I could recognize some game elements such as character levels, statistics and equipment. However I couldn't grasp most of everything (including the English text), so my playthrough would be considered very chaotic by an expert of the genre. I still had a lot of fun playing it, for uncountable hours.

The first time I saw something about Final Fantasy VII was at a comic convention, where I saw someone playing the game: I just remember the battle screen, which looked incredibly good to me (full 3D perspective, even though there only was Aeris/Aerith fighting a Shinra dog). I had to wait to see one of my friends play it at home to make me curious enough to buy it.

After this, through "emulation" or remakes, I played some other episodes in the series, basically all of them through VIII. It's worth noting that there are twelve out so far: this means I skipped the most recent ones. I could blame Final Fantasy VIII, which was so much a turn-off for me I quit (but I played it to the end), or IX, in which battles looked so slow I gave up; but in the end I think all of them never gave me reason to get back into the series.

But I really want to give a more extensive explanation about my dislike for the eight episode, since there's so much I don't like in it, and since it's one of the most controversial ones in terms of criticisms and fan base. I'll save all this for a later post though, for I'd have a lot to say.