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Second Opinion: Final Fantasy XIII-2

By
Chris Scott
– February 13, 2012Posted in: Blogs, Chris' Blog, Columns, Editorials, Second Opinion, Staff Blogs

Note: Just like getting diagnosed with inoperable blue warts might cause a patient to look to another doctor for a second opinion, gamers sometimes need more than one take on a particular game.

There is little denying the fact that Final Fantasy XIII did not resonate with gamers the way past entries in the series have and for many, XIII signified a directional shift heading down the wrong path. For a variety of reasons, developer/publisher Square Enix set out to right the perceived wrong and the fruits of their labor is the tragically named, Final Fantasy XIII-2.

XIII-2 picks up three years after the events of Final Fantasy XIII. Lightning, one of the main protagonists from XIII, is in Valhalla, serving as a guardian for the Goddess. Everything is tranquil until the mysterious villain Caius appears creating distortions in time that need to be stopped. Enter Noel, a time traveler from the future, who is tasked with finding Lightning’s sister, Serah, and reuniting the two. To try and explain it any further would be a disservice to the gamer but suffice it to say that as in all Final Fantasy games, the end goal is far grander than initially thought.

Time travel is a fascinating subject and one that has worked quite well before in games. However, due to the subject matter’s confusing nature the writing needs to be well thought out and scripted. Final Fantasy XIII-2 fails to do these things and for as interesting a premise as the game brings to the table, the delivery of the storytelling is abysmal. The dialog in particular is some of the worst written in a Japanese roleplaying game this generation and with the game’s focus on only two primary characters (Noel & Serah) the poor dialog leads to poor characterizations which causes additional problems.

As mentioned, Final Fantasy XIII-2 focuses solely on Noel and Serah’s story and in so doing the game takes a drastic turn from how previous games in the series were handled. There is no eclectic band of heroes to team up with. XIII-2 is all Noel and Serah, all the time. If you end up hating either of the two main characters you will undoubtedly be in for a long, uncomfortable ride with the game, granted, not anywhere near as long as its predecessor.

The campaign of XIII-2 will take most players anywhere between 25-30 hours to complete, relatively short for a Final Fantasy title but still a game packed with more content than many other games available. Having time travel as the core concept of the game means there will be a lot of different areas that get visited over and over in a variety of eras. Getting from one area to the next is done by collecting artefacts and unlocking gates. There is quite a bit to collect and unlock, although not all of it is essential to the main quest. With that in mind though, the time travel aspect lends itself quite well to return visits and returning to the game once finished with the main quest will open up additional story aspects worth exploring or re-exploring.

Considering how Square Enix presented this game, as a title that will fix many of the issues of its predecessor, it is odd to see that what is included in XIII-2 is such a mixed bag. Things like towns and shops make a return but their implementation is so awkward that they might as well not be there. The towns that are in the game are small and have very little to do in them, especially considering the shopkeeper is a time-traveling chocobo lady that sells everything and appears quite often along your story path. The game also includes a weird story progression system called the Live Trigger. Live Triggers are a four pronged dialog choice that steer the current conversation in a particular direction but aside from some seemingly random rewards received after doing one, there is no direct correlation to what is chosen and how the story progresses.

Possibly the most puzzling of all the design choices in the game though is the reintroduction of random battles. Out of all the complaints that I have heard levied at Final Fantasy XIII by critics of the game, not having random battles in the game was never one I heard brought up, so reintroducing them is a major head scratcher. These are not your standard random battles though, instead enemies will randomly appear in the vicinity of the player and combat is initiated by attacking the enemy, having them attack you or simply letting a countdown clock expire. The advantage of attacking first is being awarded a pre-emptive strike as the real battle starts. Initiating said combat though can be a tad big frustrating as the action controls feel wonky at their best.

But for every weird design choice that was made, XIII-2 features some truly worthwhile additions to the traditional Final Fantasy formula. Save points, something that has long seemed archaic to many gamers, are a thing of the past in XIII-2, as players can now save whenever and wherever they want. There is also a fairly decent auto-save system in place so lost progress can be easily avoided. XIII-2 also wisely sticks with XIII’s battle system. The Paradigm system as it is called, keeps battles fast paced and exciting as players are tasked with shifting between different combat roles to quickly take down opponents. The paradigm system was built on the foundation of a three party member system, of which the cast of XIII-2 only fills two of those slots. To get around this issue, XIII-2 allows for the third slot to be occupied by captured monsters. While I did not want to catch them all, I can see many people getting thoroughly sucked into trying to.

Much like Nintendo’s Pokemon series, collecting monsters is only half the fun though. The other half is upgrading them to perform better in battle. These upgrades are done using the retooled Crystarium leveling system from the original game. Instead of using Crystarium Points, which are awarded to Noel and Serah to be used in their own retooled Crystarium, monsters use special items that are collected from battle, chests or the Chocobo lady. There are few things in the game more satisfying than leveling up a Behemoth and watching him lay waste to enemies in battle. It would have been nice to be able to actually control the monsters in battle but sadly that is not the case.

The odd dichotomy of design choices the game exhibits continues along the technical and artistic side of things as well. XIII was a great looking game and its sequel is no slouch. Environments and character models are highly detailed and they blend perfectly with the pre-rendered cutscenes in the game. The artistic design of the environments is top notch and they all have a wonderful sense of place. However the character design itself feels lazy. Tetsuya Nomura, Square’s go-to character designer over the past decade, has seemingly hit a wall. Everything he does is starting to look the same, with Noel even looks like a mature version of Sora from Kingdom Hearts. It just feels lazy and at least for me, is somewhat off-putting.

Even more off-putting is the music in the game. Say what you will about XIII as a game but in my opinion it was the best soundtrack in a Final Fantasy game in over a decade. XIII-2’s soundtrack is the exact opposite. There is no sense of consistency in the musical choices and at times it feels like the soundtrack selection process was done by picking songs out of a hat. Worse than the consistency issues though is how terribly bad a lot of the music actually is. Nothing has so violently assaulted my ears in years like the strange death metal sprinkled throughout the game. For a series that features many of the most memorable themes in videogames to have something that is so sub-par honestly makes me sad.

Inconsistency is the one thing I took away from playing XIII-2. The game features some great high points but it also features some amazing low ones. For the most part the gameplay of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is fun and engaging. Sadly though, XIII-2 is a roleplaying game and the success of such a game, particularly a JRPG, is reliant on having a strong story and iconic characters in addition to that solid gameplay. XIII-2 does not have any of that. It does not have that as a roleplaying game and it most certainly does not have that as a Final Fantasy. There are glimmers of greatness buried beneath all the dreck but judged on its own merits, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is just a passable game, it is nothing more than that and when you bear the Final Fantasy moniker that in itself is something of a disappointment.

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2011 Year End Awards – Chris Scott’s Top 10 Films

By
Chris Scott
– January 17, 2012Posted in: Blogs, Chris' Blog, Editorials, Staff Blogs

Another year has passed us by and once again I spent a lot of that year watching films, a great many of them in the theater. Sadly I didn’t get to see everything I wanted, stuff like “Drive”, “Moneyball”, “Warhorse” and “The Artist” will have to wait until early 2012 or whenever they are released on video. However, out of what I did see this year, there were a slew of films that kept me thinking about them well after I saw them, the below are the best of those films.

10. Insidious

The ghost story has been done to death, which is probably why I didn’t give Insidious a chance at first. However, this simple tale of parents attempting to save their child from the clutches of evil spirits is a terrifying thrill ride. Directed by James Wan and written by Leigh Whannel, the team behind the original Saw, the film does something many horror films today don’t do, it provides actual scares.

9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

I won’t deny that I was highly disappointing in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, however Part 2 makes up for it in every conceivable way. If you are a Potter fan, this is the culmination of a journey that started a decade ago and director David Yates handles it with grace and dignity.

8. Our Idiot Brother

Paul Rudd plays Ned, the titular character whom is a free spirit that lives life to the fullest. But the film isn’t really about Ned but rather his sisters, who are so wrapped up in the minutia of their lives that they have forgotten how to actually live them. Ned, through a series of awkward, yet hysterical instances, comes to show them they have been doing it wrong. There is just something about Rudd that is charming and endearing and Our Idiot Brother captures it majestically.

7. Fast Five

The Fast and Furious movies have always been one of my guilty pleasures but with Fast Five, the pleasure is no longer guilty. Fast Five is hands down the best action movie of the year. While the Fast crew already operated like a well-oiled machine under the guidance of director Justin Lin, it is the addition of The Rock that really pushes this film (and series) into overdrive. The Rock looks reinvigorated and once again able to claim the action hero crown and his energy was seemingly infectious as Vin Diesel is on fire in this movie.

6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

While I’ve yet to read the book, I loved the original Swedish film. I felt it was an engaging mystery with a great sense of pacing, as well as some excellent acting performances. Unsurprisingly, at least to David Fincher fans, this English language version actually improves on the original in nearly every way. Lisbeth (played by Rooney Mara) is a deeper character here and that makes a lot of the changes carry more weight. The only reason this isn’t higher on the list is because I had seen the original and because of that a lot of the tension of the investigation just wasn’t there for me.

5. Source Code

Every once in a while a film comes along and surprises you with how smart it is. Source Code is one of those films. Director Duncan Jones delivers a tight, tense, sci-fi thrill ride and most surprisingly it is done almost entirely by repeating the same eight minutes over and over again. Source Code is a film that makes you think, presenting both a solid mystery as well as some interesting ethical questions.

4. I Saw the Devil

I love a good revenge thriller and there were none better this year than the Korean language film, I Saw the Devil. The film is excessively violent and gory and at nearly every turn it threatens to fall victim to becoming just another torture porn film, but somehow director Jee-woon Kim is able to walk the tightrope instead delivering an artistic tour-de-force exploring the destruction of a man’s sanity in his pursuit for revenge.

3. Hugo

At its core, Hugo is a whimsical story about an orphan who befriends a young girl and has a wondrous adventure but hidden amongst the simple adventure is Martin Scorsese’s love letter to his craft. It is a film about remembering and celebrating the past, while at the same time pushing forward to new adventures. Simply put it is a film that anyone who has a love for the medium should see.

2. Super 8

If Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s love letter to film making, Super 8 is J.J. Abrams love letter to Stephen Spielberg. There is such a classic feel to everything in Super 8 that at times it is hard to imagine that it did not come out 25 years ago. But what the film does the best though is capture the magic of 80s era Spielberg and in doing so Super 8 effectively made me feel like a kid again, entranced by the magic of the silver screen.

1. The Muppets

Call me a fool all you want but nothing this year put a smile on my face like The Muppets did. It is without a doubt the funniest, most feel good movie of the year. It gets everything right about The Muppets and in so doing, delivers a perfect viewing experience that can bring a smile to even the most hardened of hearts.

Those are mine, what are some of yours?

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2011 Year End Awards – Chris Scott’s Top 10 Games

By
Chris Scott
– January 17, 2012Posted in: Blogs, Chris' Blog, Editorials, Staff Blogs

2011 was a good year for games, some might even say a great year for them. For my part, I had a lot of fun with the games I played. Sure, some were stinkers (Homefront) and some left me rather disappointed (Uncharted 3, Mario Kart 7) but, there were more games that left me in a state of utter satisfaction.

I finished 45 games this year (down from 60 last year) and the overall quality of what I played seemed to be greater than last year; considering last year had Mass Effect 2, Halo: Reach, and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, well… I think you get my point. There are of course games I still haven’t played (Saints Row 3) or had enough playtime with (Star Wars: The Old Republic) but regardless, it is all subjective in the end, so without wasting any more of your time, here are my top 10 games of 2011. Leave your favorites in the comments down below.

10. Bulletstorm

I will admit it, the preview coverage of Bulletstorm made it look like a Duke Nukem wannabe and if it hadn’t come packaged with the ability to play the Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta I may have overlooked it. I am glad I did not overlook it because it was a fun, albeit somewhat crassly written, take on the first person shooter genre. It might have been inspired by Duke Nukem but it does Duke better than Duke did himself and playing with the leash was some of the most fun I’ve had with a weapon in a game this year.

9. L.A. Noire

L.A. Noire is deeply flawed. It features an open-world that has no purpose. It has a weak back half. And worst of all, the interrogation system (which much of the game is centered on) is inconsistent and often frustrating. But it is also a great example of how the adventure genre can still be relevant to today’s gamers. The narrative was solidly crafted and a wonderful attempt to bring film noire to games. The music was some of the best in a game this year. And graphically, the game took things to a new level with its facial animations.

8. Dead Space 2

I loved the original Dead Space, it was a great attempt to reinvigorate the survival horror genre. Dead Space 2 is not a survival horror game, it is a shooter and a damn good one at that. Nearly everything in Dead Space 2 improves upon its predecessor and I loved nearly every minute of it. To me Dead Space is Ridley Scott’s Alien, whereas Dead Space 2 is James Cameron’s Aliens. Both are great but Dead Space 2 (much like Aliens) is more my cup of tea.

7. Batman: Arkham City

Arkham Asylum was a great game and probably the best Metroid styled game I’ve played in years. Arkham City is something different and it took me a bit of time to get used to that but once I did, everything fell into place. Arkham City is a great experience, even if I do not like it quite as much as I like Arkham Asylum.

 

6. Dark Souls

Dark Souls engaged me in a way that I didn’t think possible, especially considering I did not enjoy Demon’s Souls all that much. People claim Dark Souls is hard, I don’t know how much I buy into that line of thinking. The game forces players to be patient and learn how to approach each encounter. Failure to do those things will surely result in a quick death(s) but like many other games, Dark Souls has its own rules and it is unwavering in its adherence to them. It is a game unlike any other.

5. Alice: Madness Returns

Alice: Madness Returns is a platformer with just serviceable platforming, so how did it end up this high on my list? Artistically, no game was able to create a sense of place like Alice did for me. American McGee’s twisted version of Wonderland is truly something special. Additionally the story of Madness Returns is something that really stuck with me all year long. It is a story that touches on some very heavy material and for me at least delivered the best ending of the year.

4. Bastion

Bastion was a game that had caught my eye early on in its development. It had a very interesting art style and the action role-playing gameplay seemed to be right up my alley. What I wasn’t expecting was a story that captured me with its organic deliver method and a soundtrack that still has me in awe of it. Bastion just goes to show that sometimes the best stuff comes in small packages.

3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim is awesome, but I have a feeling you already knew that.

2. Super Mario 3D Land

I have had my complaints about Nintendo this year, and I am sure they will continue into next year as well but when it comes to Mario, they have their stuff screwed on right. Super Mario 3D Land is without a doubt the reason to own a 3DS. Sadly, in my opinion, it is the only reason to own one and I can’t recommend spending $200 or so to play this game but if you have a 3DS and don’t already have it, what are you waiting for.

1. Gears of War 3

Epic hit the ball out of the park with Gears of War 3. The single player campaign, which is also playable in co-op, is the best in the series and actually delivers some emotional characterizations to characters thought to have no emotion. Horde mode was drastically remodeled and delivers one of the best co-op experiences this year. Beast mode is an incredibly fun reversal of the Horde formula. And the competitive multiplayer is deeper, more balanced and more fun that it has ever been. The game controls better than ever, the new weapons are a ton of fun, and it looks better (and more diverse) than any Gears game to date. In fact everything about Gears 3 feels incredibly polished. No game offered the complete package that Gears of War 3 did but most importantly, I had more fun playing Gears 3 than I did any other game this year.

 

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L.A. Noire Disappoints [I'll Be That Guy]

By
Christopher Coke
– May 24, 2011Posted in: Blogs, Chris' Blog, Staff Blogs

Over the last week, I’ve been spending a good chunk of my gaming time in 1940′s Los Angeles. It’s a beautiful place, L.A., filled with an incredible amount detail and color and the irretrievable sense that this is all one big set piece.

See, my problem with L.A. Noire is that the world, with all of it’s incredible tiny details, is perhaps the least interactable of any Rockstar game ever. Maybe that’s not fair; L.A. Noire is it’s own game, of course. This game is not Grand Theft Auto may as well have been published on the back of the box, they’ve said it so many times. That’s great, except for the fact that the game itself implores you to treat it the same way. You’re encouraged to do the driving from point to far-off point. Every mission sees the attentive player finding new ways to scale buildings and get a new perspective on this wonderful city. The attention to detail just screams explore me. Except, and this is a biggun’, there is absolutely no point to it. There is no reward. No usefulness to the freedom of the open world. Nothing. I am left with the sense that all of the work that went into building this incredible recreation of post-war L.A. is really just a giant waste of time.

The world is only part of it. Perhaps equally important is how limited the player truly is. You have a gun but you can’t pull it. When you can pull it, every shot is a kill shot — there’s no taking a suspect down with a quick pop to the leg. Or sometimes you can pull it and fire a warning shot to stop a fleeing POI. Except this too is independent of real freedom. In Red Dead Redemption, the player could fire shots into the air to make his point. In L.A. Noire, you hold your fun on a suspect’s back until a cutscene starts and the computer fires for you.

It’s not just gun play. You can drive on the sidewalk and pedestrians will simply float out of the way, cursing your ineptitude behind the wheel. You will have better luck wreaking havoc trying to knock a mailbox in the right direction rather than simply drive over someone. I’m a very bad person, aren’t I? That’s just it, though. This is a video game, not a movie, and not a T.V. show. If I want to step outside of the narrative and take advantage of the “freedom” the game purports to give, I should be able to do that. In L.A. Noire you are actively penalized for leaving the story. Every piece of damage you do counts against you. If you plan on raising a little hell, also plan on getting reamed out by your captain and failing your case report.

This is not an open world game. It’s an adventure game pretending to be one. And, to be fair, the adventure, interrogation, investigation parts of it are really good. The facial animations are fantastic (if eliciting the uncanny valley effect more often than I’d like). If Rockstar had focuses on delivering a narrative adventure without all of the open world posturing, the game would be better for it. There is a sense of delivering to expectation because of expectation, and that’s not a good thing.

Rockstar fans have long come to expect freedom from their virtual worlds. If they want to be bad, they can. If they want to play the good guy, they can do that too. They expect some semblance of realism. L.A. Noire simply doesn’t support that. That’s a shame because there is really a great game here. The investigations are top-notch police procedural. The acting, and animations, and settings are fantastic. L.A. Noire could be something truly great but it’s muddied with it’s emphasis on setting. Sometimes you want to be a character in a story. Sometimes you just want to play a video game. Let’s hope they give in with a good, alternate universe expansion pack. I don’t need zombies (Undead Nightmare), I just need freedom. Give me that and you’ll have one of the best video game worlds ever created.

Otherwise you have a gigantic, cardboard set.

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First Impressions: nVidia 3D Vision and RIFT

By
Christopher Coke
– April 5, 2011Posted in: 3D Gaming, Blogs, Chris' Blog

Wow! Am I glad to be back. It’s weird not blogging for a big stretch of time after you’ve been at it for a few years. But, here I am and it’s good to be home.

Now for the big news. I didn’t want to say anything until it arrived, but I was lucky enough to get the first of several 3D Vision kits nVidia is sending over to Vagary TV. This is part of the reason I’ve been gone for so long –  and not a small one, either. I’ve been following this technology for a long time. A couple years, at least. So when Ryan (whom you might remember from such About pages as this one!) called me from PAX East to tell me he’d gotten an interview with nVidia, and then called later to tell me they’d offered to get us “3D ready,” to say I was excited would be an understatement. If there’s one thing I geek out over, it’s upgrading my computer. Chalk it up to a hardware limited childhood. Anyways, over the next week and a half, I emailed back and forth with their marketing lead to get everything set up. All told, they sent over a stock 580 GTX (not branded, straight from nVidia), a new 23″ 3D-ready monitor, and the 3D Vision kit, which consists of the shutter glasses, IR emitter, and cables.

Probably the biggest question I’ve been asked is “why?” That’s a pretty good question. Vagary is up and coming, growing more every day, but we’re still no IGN or Kotaku. This is a grass roots operation and anything we do, we do on our own as volunteers. What it comes down to, I think, is that nVidia really just wants to get the word out about how awesome this technology is — and it IS awesome — and realize that word of mouth is a great way to do it. They didn’t put any conditions on us. No “you must say glowing things” or “this hardware must be returned by X date.” It’s simply: when you get 3D games, write about them. Very fair and something I’m definitely willing to do.

So how is it? Hands down, this is the single best 3D experience I’ve ever had. 3D monitors tend to be 1080p and that high resolution makes IMAX look archaic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that some games, like Dragon Age: Origins, look more HD than HD. Games most often utilize the 3D to add depth to the environment, so playing them is more akin to looking through a window than viewing a monitor. Then comes something comes along that surprises you: pop-out. It’s not gaudy or gimmicky. I’ve yet to have something fly at me. What I have had happen is pop out adding to the depth effect. For example, I was running around in Scarwood Reach this weekend, happily questing, when a falling cotton floated right in front of my eyes. I mean literally – it made me jump back a little bit. But, then, it’s expected. Instead of playing the game by looking through the camera, you are the camera. After seeing what depth can add to games — even those that aren’t designed for it — I’m excited to see those that ARE. There’s some great potential here.

I can’t say everything is perfect and ready to roll right out of the box. In a lot of cases, it is ready, but the thing is, not all games are designed for 3D and that can cause some issues. LotRO, for example, renders the sky in 2D and the rest of the game in 3D. What that means is real terms is the sky is flat. Where the landscape goes on to the horizon, the sky is a close swatch of color and wisp. It’s not bad, per se, but a little disconcerting. Thankfully, nVidia has compiled a list of over 350 games that work great and there are many others not included. The drivers will try to render just about anything in 3D. So, if you’d like to play a game not included on that list, there’s a good chance you can make it look good just by playing with the wide array of settings. Then there’s the simple fact that people’s eyes, and how they experience 3D, are different. To accommodate the wide array of potential users, the IR emitter has a depth wheel so you can adjust how prevalent the effect is right down to nothing. There’s also a bevy of other settings you can tweak and save for each game.

Here’s another cool thing: Have a 3D-Ready TV? nVidia’s 3D kit will work with that as well through a handy “3D Sync In” port on the emitter.

Since RIFT if my game of choice right now, I’ve spent the most time playing with that (though I’ve tried it in at least a half dozen games since Friday). At first I was disappointed; the game pretty much had two planes: the UI and the game world. And for some reason where I would SEE the mouse pointer was actually about an inch to the left of where it was actually pointing. A little digging found this thread, however, and I got it going pretty quick. Apparently, RIFT shares the same .exe title as another game from the late-nineties and applies those settings to our 2011 MMO. After the tweaks, the change is breathtaking. (It’s also worth noting that this is the only game I’ve heard of this happening with. Every other game I tried worked great, right from the start).

Imagine Telara as existing within an aquarium. You’re looking in through the side panel and while you’re playing the rest of the room goes dark. All the sudden, you can look up through the glass side and see that the top, where you should be seeing an air filter or glass ceiling, actually extends miles into the air breaking into a beautifully distant sky. The horizon, which should end feet before your nose actually goes on. You can feel the distance. That mountain cat on the far rise really feels far. Not far as in “that cat is small” far, but far like “I’m walking to the corner store.” The inside of every porticulum looks like liquid, swirling and bubbly. And just as you’re leaning in, getting as close to that world as you can, something surprises you by reaching out and stopping just before your face. Sometimes it’s a fluff of cotton or a falling leaf. Sometimes it’s a spell effect. But every time, it feels like that glass wall has disappeared and part of you is actually there. That’s the beauty of the technology. In the same way the glasses trick your eyes into making two images one, the added dimensions trick you into feeling like you’re in a real place.

Some of you might have gotten the Nintendo 3DS. Let me use that for comparison. Take that depth, that resolution, that immersion and multiply it three-fold. At least. THAT is nVidia 3D Vision.

Right now the kit goes for $150 and will work with any 120Hz monitor. If you have the chance, I definitely recommend picking it up. Stay tuned for a full review when out Managing Editor gets his unit. We’re going to do a dual review to give the best perspective.