17th November, 2006
Hero's Journey
Friday, 9:15 am in Gaming
Okay Square, I think I almost forgive you. Almost.
I downloaded Finaly Fantasy XII (that’s XII, not X-II) the other day and whacked it in. After the mangled disaster that was the X franchise, and the woeful attempts at an MMORPG with XI I wasn’t really expecting much. Maybe that paid off. Almost from the outset I think I am in love. It’s hard to say why; they plot has certainly improved over FFX’s woefully dull tale, and even so early on in the game (I’ve just met Mr. Pirate and the Bunnylady) the game is infinitley less linear. I no longer feel like I’m being shunted along from cutscene to cutscene. The character designs remind me a lot of Square’s forgotten Vagrant Story, which is not a bad thing, and any game where the (male) army of one of the main factions wears halter tops, miniskirts and bitchboots totally has my support. The English voice acting still annoys me, though they’ve actually gone through this time and used different accents to represent different regions, which is interesting.
For those who’ve played Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance, Montblanc shows up fairly early on in the game, and one of the first outside areas you get to explore are the good ol’ Giza Plains.
The real-time battle system is interesting, and again reminds me a little of VS in that the actions execute in real time but the decisions you make don’t. Gone is the break-transition to the battle screen, instead you simply encounter enemies on the field. I’m currently a big fan of stalking up behind creatured and sniping them with a bow before they aggro me. The whole system is actually a bit like Kingdom Hearts except with more control over your companions, and much less frenetic and random. The actions of members of your party can either be directly controlled or ‘programmed’ via the Gambit system. Interestingly, unlike the party AI from games like Baldur’s Gate, Gambits are actually part of the game and you can go and buy different Gambit ‘targets’ from various appropriate shops around the world.
The Licence system is also interesting. Gone is FFX’s sphere grid, instead being reaplced by a more chessboard-looking thing in which each square represents a ‘licence’ to use a particular item or ability. Squares can be ‘flipped’ by buying the license with LP, which accumulate alongside XP from monster kills. Once a square is flipped, the squares immediatley around it also become avaliable for purchase. But buying licences off the board isn’t enough; all spells and technics (as well as weapons and armor) must then be bought from shops before they become avaliable to the party. In a way it’s fairly effective against early-game pumping (you know, getting to L.99 before leaving the first area) and people like me who are connsumate cheaters.
The only thing that has really given me the shits yet about the game is the free-form camera, which I can never get in a decent position, and which has a tendency to ‘bump’ off walls and zoom-rotate in a crazy fashion when indoors.
But yeah, other that that; grats Square, it’s been a while in the wilderness but looks like you’re finally back.
On top of all that, I went and bought Neverwinter Nights 2 yesterday as well. NWN1 was a dog of a game and dull as an auditor, but NWN2 boasted scripting by the same guy who bought us Planescape: Torment, arguably the best of the isomaetic DnD adaptations (I love you, Nameless One!). Thus far the game looks almost exactly like NWN1 with slightly more detailed graphics; and it runs like a dog, I actually had to turn the settings down gasp horror. It suffers from the terrible malaise of a great deal of Western games in that it goes for a hyper-real graphics style which just end up looking cheap and bland (EverQuest II I am looking at you). ~Mat [h] remarked that the problem with 3D graphics now is that they look like 2D graphics ten years ago, and I’m not entierley convinced he’s wrong on that one (though FFXII thinks otherwise). When will game-makers learn? Aesthetics, please!
NWN2 also suffers from a massive overload of character races. I’m a Tiefling, for example, and every single common subrace of elf, gnome and dwarf is also playable, including the Drow and dreugar. In a move almost unheard of I ended up playing a female character, since all the male models were hideously ugly (though the female ones weren’t much better to be honest). Damn you, Obsidian!
Anyway, like every other DnD game and every other fantasy book ever written, you start the story as the orphan of some terrible war, living with a mysterious foster father (I bet the bastard is a Harper or something; fucking Harpers) in Rural Nowheresville when suddenly your idyllic life is shattered by a rampaging hoard of creatures from the Underdark (or something) who are looking for a) you, and/or b) the dingus your mysterious foster-father found with you and has kept hidden all these years. It’s now up to you to set out on a quest to find out what the hell is going on.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Hey, fantasy writers; that plot was old when Tolkein wrote it, capiche. Everyone loves the Hero’s Journey and all, but please can we mix-n-match the elements a bit? Torment broke the mold; you woke up in a morturary after dying, for godssakes. Let’s try and be a bit more original next time. At least let me be some sassy amoral highway bandit reluctantly sucked into a quest to save the world (Poison Elves). Or a pirate. Or a prisoner forced to work for the state (Morrowind/Oblivion).
I think the one thing that really annoyed me about NWN1 was the huge number of identical, multi-roomed dungeons that you were forced to slog through for no real point, each one more dull than the last. That and the complete lack of interesting side-characters to get along with. Dalen Red-Tiger was cool and all, but where was Minsc and Boo the Giant Space Hamster? Where was Mort the talking skull? Or Falls-From-Grace the intellectual succubus? NWN2 actually re-introduces the notion of a fully-controllable party (the only things that are limited are level progression; once a Fighter always a Fighter), which is good, and the character writing and interactions seem a bit better than NWN1. My first real companion is a Dwarf Fighter who wants to go to Neverwinter in order to track down some monks to teach him how to be a leet fighter. He’s not quite the Evil Dwarf Monk from NWN1, but at least he’s a bit more interesting that your standard companion archetype.
So, yeah. The game could go either way at the moment I think; I’ll let you know.
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