escapingburger

[escapingburger]

PAX West 2024: Twenty Years!?

Hello! Is anyone out there? No?

This blog has been quiet for a very long time, but I always write about PAX, and this year I was at PAX once more. 2024 was PAX's twentieth anniversary, somehow, and it was a good one.

A Little Background For anyone who hasn't been following along for the last couple decades, I used to go to PAX--the Penny Arcade Expo, specifically the iteration known as PAX West--every year. I was there at the beginning, and for the first ten years or so it was absolutely my favorite thing. I made lifelong friends, some of whom I had little to no other opportunities to see, and I even kind of met my wife there. But these things don't last forever, and as we all got older it got harder and harder for everyone to make it out--not only did people have jobs and families to worry about, but the tickets sold out so fast that even buying them in the first place was kind of an ordeal. I kept going--and enjoying it!--but it wasn't really the same without everyone there, and in 2018 I decided to stay home, just to see how it felt. In 2019, I returned for a single day, realized how much I'd missed it, and decided to come back for longer in 2020. Then there was a pandemic, blah blah blah, and now it's five years later.

This year, though, I was at last ready to return, especially being the twentieth anniversary. My wife and I committed to the whole experience: Four days of non-stop PAX, with a hotel and everything so we never had to leave, just like in the old days. It was unquestionably worth it, and we're already planning our approach for next year. So, let's talk about what went down:

The Summit The biggest change from 2019 was the new expansion to the Seattle Convention Center. During those rough years when badges sold out within hours, this was kind of a dream: Someday, we were told, they would make the convention center big enough for everyone to come to PAX. Well, it finally happened, with the new (as of last year) Summit building providing an absolutely ridiculous amount of space. It seems to have paid off, as PAX did not sell out--one could walk right in and buy a badge day-of, even on Saturday. At first I thought this might be due to lingering pandemic impacts or shifts in gaming culture or whatever decreasing the demand for tickets, but no, PAX seemed as busy as ever once things got going. There's just finally space for everyone, which is great.

The new building did change the flavor of the event significantly, though. The original building--now dubbed Arch--was still in use, but mostly just for the expo hall. This meant that while the expo hall was generally as packed as you'd expect, the rest of that building was pretty quiet, and the sixth floor wasn't even in use. It felt kind of like it did in 2007, actually, before they had to squeeze things into every available corner. I do wonder if this will last, if PAX keeps growing, but this year it was almost nostalgic.

Summit, then, held everything else: Theaters, tournaments, freeplay of all sorts, an entire second expo hall for tabletop, and a bunch of rooms dedicated to things like Rock Band, speedruns, a cozy gaming lounge, you name it. This building is massive, and it was nice to have so many things centralized in one place, rather than spilling out into random hotel ballrooms and city theaters. The downside is that getting between the two buildings--and just transiting from one part of Summit to another--took time. I think I was used to earlier years where it wasn't too hard to pop from the expo hall to tabletop to a panel or whatever, but here you had to account for potentially traversing multiple city blocks and several very long escalators. Next year, assuming the layout is similar, I think it may make more sense to dedicate a day or two to expo stuff at Arch, and spend the rest of the time in Summit just for efficiency.

Video Games When I was in the expo hall, I basically approached it like I usually do: Don't get in any of the big lines, don't worry too much about games I already know about, mostly wander around the indie booths and try whatever catches my attention. Some of the biggest publishers were missing, as they apparently now prefer to do their own events, but that basically just made more room for the stuff I was interested in. A few games I tried this year were:

The Brazil: A simple 2D game about tunneling through the Earth from Japan to Brazil, this is exactly the kind of indie weirdness I'm here for. Your character moves straight automatically, and the only control is to press a button to curve your path to the left (and only to the left). You can find items and oxygen as you go, and if you hit a hazard or run out of air, the game will helpfully tell you that you died and whether you went to heaven or hell. While Brazil is the goal, it'll also tell you which specific country you ended up in if you emerge off target. This was part of a small booth with selections from the Tokyo Indie Games Summit, and the developer was present to hand out little shovels if you played, and generally be a delight to talk to.

Playdate (console): This isn't brand new, but I'd never had a chance to play it before. This thing is tiny, the crank is fun, and the screen seems pretty crisp despite the lack of a backlight. I tried out Mars After Midnight, Angel Pop, and Pullfrog. I don't think I need one of these personally, but it definitely seems like it fills some kind of gap left behind by, say, the Game Boy Micro so many years ago.

Infinity Bullets: This is something like Vampire Survivors crossed with a shmup like Gradius, which makes for a pretty fun mix. It sounds like it's a "free-to-play" phone game, which is a little discouraging, though it was running on a ROG Ally, I believe, and worked well with the controller inputs.

Tetris Effect: Also not new, and not in the expo hall, but I hadn't played it before so I'm putting it here. This is basically Tetsuya Mizuguchi doing Tetris, and it feels a lot like Lumines--I game I associate strongly with PAX's early days--just, you know, Tetris. It was in the Cozy Gaming Lounge, a quiet space in the Summit building dedicated to more relaxing games. We stopped by here on Monday, after our final pass through the expo hall, and it was a great way to get off my feet and rest for a bit.

Tabletop Games As always, tabletop was well represented at PAX, but the dedicated space in Summit really gave it a chance to shine. My main regret is not spending more time in freeplay; we passed through the game library toward the end of the show and saw a bunch of interesting games, but were out of time to play anything at that point. That being said, tabletop was still a pretty big part of the weekend, particularly:

Klask: A physical game that's a little like miniaturized air hockey with a few neat twists, it seems like this came out of nowhere. I'd actually seen it once before late last year, but PAX had a whole section for it. We played this whenever we were in the area and had some downtime, and by the end of the weekend had some strategies evolving.

The same spot also had Crokinole, which is a much older game, though one I hadn't seen before either. Unfortunately those tables were always busy, but it looked like fun, and I'm hoping it'll be back next year so I can try it then.

Dungeons & Dragons: For years my wife and I have been saying we should try one of the introductory D&D sessions they do at the show, and we finally found time for it. It was fine, but felt very simplified and basically just involved combat (largely due to player choices, but still), so I don't know that it was actually a great introduction to the game. I still think it would be fun to seriously play a tabletop RPG someday, but that's probably better done with a dedicated group and enough time to really get drawn into things.

Magic: The Gathering: I got back into Magic a couple years ago after a brief, 18-year hiatus that started around the time of the first PAX in 2004, so this is actually the first time it's been a meaningful part of the show for me. I don't normally do much in the way of tournaments or whatever at PAX, but Magic is something I actively go out to play with some regularity, so it's kind of opened up a new side of the convention. They had organized events going on all weekend, many with some unusual twist on them, and even a prize table where you could redeem points earned from playing. I only played one event, a Mystery Booster draft, because you can normally only do that at conventions. It was a lot of fun (and I won all my games, though I had a bye the first round), and I'd definitely like to spend more time there in the future. The only downside is the time commitment; my one event took four hours, which feels like a lot with everything else I could be doing. For anyone Magic-inclined, I have my decklist and a few more details over here.

Panels We started things off with the PAX 20th birthday panel, featuring Gabe and Tycho (you know, the creators of the show, and Penny Arcade, etc.). This was a great collection of memories aimed directly at old-timers like myself, and even included some gifts like party hats and lanyards with PAX Prime--the previous name, still beloved by many--printed on them. I may need to bring that again next year.

Other than that, we hit a lot of the classics, including the Make-a-Strip panel (drawing Monday's Penny Arcade comic live on stage) and the concert. There was only one concert this year, which is kind of too bad, but I was busy enough with everything else that I don't really mind. It featured the Triforce Quartet, The OneUps, and a variety of special guests. Everyone was great, but The OneUps were an especially nice treat, since we first saw them back in 2007, PAX's first year in Seattle proper.

I also checked out the Magic panel, previewing the latest set, which was fun to be able to see in person. And at the end, of course, was the final round of the Omegathon--this year featuring five separate games, each on a different 2004-vintage console. The rules were best three out of five, but the competition went through them all: Twisted Metal: Black on PS2, Donkey Konga on GameCube, Power Stone 2 on Dreamcast, Wario Ware, Inc. on GBA, and finally a close match of Dead or Alive 3 on Xbox.

The Future As I mentioned in the beginning, by the late 2010s it felt like the shine had come off PAX a bit. There was nothing wrong with the show itself, but I'd been going for so long, and without all my friends there it wasn't quite hitting like it used to. But this year, there was none of that: PAX, or my experience of it, felt completely refreshed. Maybe it was the five-year break, maybe it was the new building, maybe it was all the reminders of the early days--probably it was all these things--but it felt like I was discovering the show again for the first time. I kept busy for four days straight, barely even making it offsite for food like we used to, and still there was so much I didn't even get to see or do. I'm in for 2025. I can't wait to go back.

[escapingburger]

PAX West 2019: Back Again

If you've been following my PAX posts for a while (which is probably just me and my wife at this point), you may have noticed that I'd been thinking about skipping PAX West for the last several years. There were a few reasons for this--the stress of getting tickets, many of my friends no longer making it to the show, and generally getting older and paying less attention to modern gaming--but the most important may have been that I wanted to make sure I was going for the right reasons. I'd attended every year since the beginning, and I was starting to wonder if it had just become a habit, something I did less because I actively chose to and more because things had always been that way. I wanted to go a year without, just to see what it was like, and make a more conscious decision about investing my time and money in the show in the future.

So, last year was the first PAX West I missed, and it was totally fine. It felt a little weird to not be there, maybe, but ultimately I had no regrets. I was going to skip this year, too, but once the schedule came out we saw that there were a couple Retronauts panels on the last day, and conveniently enough there were still Monday badges available. So Jen and I decided, why not, let's go to PAX for the day and see what we can see. And sure enough, it was a pretty good time.

Some Games With only one day of PAX, and the shortest day at that, our experience was pretty compressed. We got in early to get our badges and even lined up for the expo hall, trying to squeeze as much as we could out of the time we had. With panels in the afternoon, this meant just enough time to do one complete circuit of the expo, playing only a few games with no lines. I would have done more if I'd been able to, but I did have time for most of the stuff I really wanted to see coming in. Number one was N1RV Ann-A, a cyberpunk bartending visual novel and sequel to VA11 Hall-A, which I'd discovered at PAX a few years back and ended up enjoying quite a bit. The demo was brief, but showed a couple new bartending mechanics and a somewhat different mood than its predecessor, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the full game plays out. About the one thing I regret about this PAX is that I wasn't there Saturday night, when publisher Ysbryd Games put on a party at a bar dressed up like the one in VA11 Hall-A, complete with bartenders in costume as the characters. I can only hope they do something like this again.

I also tried out Get in the Car, Loser!, the new game from Christine Love and her team at Love Conquers All Games. I didn't know anything about it coming in, so I was surprised to find that it's a full-on RPG with a combat system and everything, though still built around a visual novel base to tell its story. It's going to be interesting to see how these aspects play together through the whole game. The combat is quite dynamic and will take some time to master, I think, but will it be too jarring while you're focusing on the story? We'll see!

Other than those, I also discovered The Devil's Calculator, a puzzle game where you try to solve unknown mathematical functions in order to calculate The Number of the Beast. It gets points for being both educational and Satanic, reminding me vaguely of the violent driver's ed game my friends and I wanted to pitch many years ago. Finally, I'd hoped to play World of Horror, a game inspired by Junji Ito's horror manga with 1980s Macintosh graphics, making it very much relevant to my interests. Unfortunately, it was pretty popular and I didn't have time to wait in line, but I do intend to check out the demo online.

Some Panels I actually made it to three panels this year, which feels like a lot even for a full-length PAX. The first was on writing interactive fiction, which remains a neglected hobby of mine, and the last two were back-to-back Retronauts panels. Jeremy Parish, who I hadn't seen in maybe five years, was out to host the latter two, covering Super Metroid vs. Symphony of the Night as well as the history of the Dreamcast. It was nice to see a familiar face, and I definitely felt at home with the old-school subject matter, so I'm glad I made it out for these. They were both recorded, and should be up on the Twitch site pretty soon, I believe.

There Is A Next Time By returning to PAX, however briefly, I think I learned two important things:

It's entirely possible to do PAX in a day, without worrying about hotels or committing a whole weekend to it. I still managed to see most of the things I really wanted. But...

I do want to go back, and to go back for longer. The year off really did help clarify my feelings toward PAX and my reasons for attending. I'm glad I had the break, but this visit reminded me of everything I love about the show, and I'm ready to get back in.

What all this means is that I do very much intend to return next year, and this time, I think I'm in for the whole weekend. I don't expect to do that every year anymore; maybe I end up doing single days more often than not going forward. But right now, it's been long enough, and I'm ready for the full experience. It won't be the same as it was ten years ago, but PAX is still great, and I'm excited for more.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy Revisited

Final Fantasy Revisited was a long-term project in which I played through essentially the entire core Final Fantasy series, documenting my thoughts and observations as I went. It ran somewhat sporadically from September 2012 to May 2019, covering the original Final Fantasy through Final Fantasy XV. It's over, at least for now, but we'll see what happens whenever Final Fantasy XVI arrives. Until then, you can find the entire series linked below.

Final Fantasy

Let's Get Historical/Let's Talk About Jobs

Greatest Hits

A Reactive World

Red Magic

Final Fantasy II

Stop Hitting Yourself

Storytime

Not Quite Magical

A Connected World

Final Fantasy III

A Bridge to the Future

Employment Issues

A Growing World

The Tao of Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy IV

Here's Where I Came In

Knowing Your Limits

Next-Gen

Run Away!

Final Fantasy V

Worth the Wait

Back to Work

Odds and Evens

Hit Singles

Throw Your Money Away

Final Fantasy VI

Wheels Within Wheels

Balancing Act

The Path Forward

Transapocalyptic

Still Number One

Final Fantasy VII

New Beginnings

Going Blank Again

Get Equipped

9999 HP Don't Buy What It Used To

Tough Love

Final Fantasy VIII

Crossing the Rubicon

Oh, So That's How You Play This

Summoned Movies

An Urban World

Final Dungeons, Final Thoughts

Final Fantasy IX

Nostalgish

Geared Up

A Better World

Heart and Soul

Final Fantasy X

Rate of Change

The Fourth Element

Pushing Limits

A Narrow World

Knowing When to Quit

Final Fantasy XI

Unvisited

Final Fantasy XII

A Wider World

Automatic

Crafty

And It Goes On Like This

Dedication

Final Fantasy XIII

Paradigm Shift

A Quiet World

Opening Up

Imaginary Numbers

Final Fantasy XIV

Something Different

Plays Well With Others

Fitting In

Final Fantasy XV

A Familiar World

Pieces of Eight

Noctis Lucis and the Too Many Sidequests

Closing Down

The Future of Final Fantasy

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XV Discovered: The Future of Final Fantasy

This is it, folks--I'm finally just about done with Final Fantasy XV, and with it, my nearly seven-year project to play through the entire series. Final Fantasy isn't done, though, with the vaguest hints of a Final Fantasy XVI already starting to float through the air. So as I finish up the series, for now, my thoughts have turned to its future, and what its recent past might suggest about what's to come.

Final Fantasy will be turning 32 this year, one of the few game series that's managed to continue uninterrupted for that long. As these posts have shown, it's taken many forms over the years, which is probably a big part of its longevity: Final Fantasy has never needed a reboot because every game is essentially a chance to start fresh. From a high level, it looks like a great example of how to navigate the many changes in technology and market trends as the game industry has matured. With fifteen games over three decades, we've gotten a new Final Fantasy about every two years, on average, which is quite healthy indeed.

Of course, if you follow the series a bit more closely, you'll know that the average is misleading. Fully eleven of the main series games were released by 2002, in Final Fantasy's first fifteen years of existence, many of them within a year of each other. In the seventeen years since then, there have only been four. Each of those games has its own story, but all told, one wonders if the series has actually ridden out the last couple generations that well. After the steady, frequent releases of the early years, here's what the later era has seen:

Final Fantasy XII suffered from a long development period and the health-related departure of its original director; it eventually released four years after FF11.

Final Fantasy XIII was pushed back by FF12's delays, then moved to a new console generation and a new engine, eventually releasing about three and a half years later.

Final Fantasy XIV came out only a year after FF13, but was so poorly received that they essentially scrapped the game and started over. The new, better version took three more years to complete.

And Final Fantasy XV, as you probably know, started life as a spinoff of FF13. It took so long to finish that it moved platforms, dropped the FF13 connection, and was promoted to the main series presumably because they had no other FF15 in production. It came out three years after the reboot of FF14, and ten years after its own development began.

Now, this may be painting too dire of a picture. I don't think Final Fantasy is in trouble, exactly, but it definitely doesn't feel like the well-oiled machine it once was. Producing a top-end AAA game has gotten considerably more expensive and complex over the last couple generations, and a lot of studios haven't been able to keep up. Square Enix is still pulling it off, but it's been a bumpy ride. Back in the PlayStation era, they managed to set a standard for scope and production values while still releasing a new Final Fantasy every year or two, but now it seems like each one is kind of a struggle. I do wonder: With as long and expensive as FF15's development was, what if it bombed? Will we someday see the Final Fantasy equivalent of Bioware's Anthem, and what will that mean for the series?

I'm not suggesting that Square Enix return to the frequency of their earlier releases; I probably wouldn't be able to keep up with them anyway. But it would be nice to feel that the development process was a bit more deliberate. The actual release of Final Fantasy XV was a bright spot--after years of seeing little aside from CG trailers, Hajime Tabata finished the game up pretty quickly after taking over as director. I get the sense that he brought a more structured approach to development, though he has since left the company, so who knows what means for the future.

Another possible solution is smaller, less risky projects, which Square Enix has actually done quite a bit of. The release schedule I described above is actually kind of misleading, because while there have only been four mainline games in the latter half of the series's life, there have been all sorts of spinoffs and side projects in between. They've released tons of nostalgic content like ports, mobile games, and occasionally something a bit more unique like Final Fantasy Theatrhythm. More critically, we have also seen some direct tie-ins to the main series, like the FFXIII sequels (FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns), or Final Fantasy XV's updates and DLC.

I do suspect the DLC route is something we'll see more of in the future. From a financial perspective, DLC makes tons of sense: Games have gotten a lot more expensive to make over the last fifteen years, but retail prices have actually gone down if you account for inflation. DLC lets developers get more mileage out of their work, helping to earn back what they spent creating the main game. And FF15's DLC has been pretty good--I wouldn't call it truly critical, but it does fill in some noteworthy pieces of backstory, while expanding on the core gameplay in some often interesting ways. It's also important to me, though, that the DLC ends. While I don't mind picking up some new chapters in a game I enjoy, what I don't want is to see Final Fantasy turning into a service-based "forever game" that intends to monetize its players indefinitely. I play these games in large part because I can eventually get a complete story, a complete experience, and then move on. I'd hate to see Final Fantasy lose that to chase the Fortnites of the world.

Fortunately, this doesn't seem too likely, at least for the time being. It's actually oddly heartening that Square Enix cancelled the rest of FF15's DLC when Tabata left, because it meant they didn't want to hand his story off to someone else just to keep the money coming in. And if you want a Final Fantasy that never ends, that's what the MMOs are for. It does seem harder to justify a huge, expensive single-player game these days, but there will always be those of us who want to play them. And that's a role Final Fantasy has been fulfilling for years, whatever else has happened, so I'm hopeful that it isn't going to give that up anytime soon. I still expect the future of Final Fantasy to bring plenty of changes, but that's always been the case. I'm looking forward to what comes next.

The End And that's it, everyone. I'm actually still finishing up a bit of FF15's Comrades expansion, but I don't anticipate any more posts coming out of that, so I'm calling this the end. It's been a long journey, starting in September 2012, but it's finally time to put this series to bed. I am going to post a table of contents to make it easier to go back through everything, but after that, it's time for a nice long break.

So what's next? Honestly, probably not much. Whenever Final Fantasy XVI turns up, I may add it in, but otherwise this page will probably go dormant for a while. I originally started this series as a way to revitalize my blog back at 1up.com, and it kind of turned into something bigger than I'd really expected. But now that it's done, I'm looking forward to playing or doing whatever I want, without having to worry about writing it up for a few people on the Internet. Follow me here or on Twitter to be alerted if I do eventually add something new, but I wouldn't expect anything anytime soon. So long!

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XV Discovered: Closing Down

Last time, I wrote quite a bit about how open Final Fantasy XV is, though I'd heard rumblings of changes in the latter part of the story. And sure enough, not long after, the game took that last post and stuck a huge asterisk on it. Forty-five hours in, I reached chapter 10.

Does this sound familiar? This is how I started my post on Final Fantasy XIII's Gran Pulse, because FF15's approach to its late game is basically the inverse of the earlier title. Where FF13 was an entirely linear experience that suddenly opened up many hours in, FF15 is a wide-open experience that suddenly narrows down. Most of the game offers tremendous freedom and more sidequests than I knew what to do with, but the later chapters are surprisingly directed, guiding you from one challenge or plot point to the next. A primary conceit up to this point is that you're on a road trip, with all the independence that implies, but you spend a good chunk of the later game literally on rails, riding a train along a fixed route to a predetermined destination.

This is a big change, and honestly, it was kind of hard to make sense of at first. I wondered if, like FF13's general linearity or Xenogears's infamous second disc, this was a result of resource pressures during development. The game took ten years to make, after all; perhaps the only way to finally get it out the door was to cut an overambitious second half down to the minimum needed to tell the story. If so, the result isn't actually that bad; there's way more actual game here than Xenogears ended up with, and I definitely prefer an experience that's mostly open to one that's mostly not like FF13.

But as I got further, I became less sure that development time alone was the reason for this. It may have still contributed, but I came to realize that there are actually some very legitimate design reasons for taking the game in this direction. The thing is, once you reach this part of the game, you really start to see big changes in the characters, the plot, and the world. There are major developments before this point, of course, but they're somewhat limited in just how much they can affect without disturbing the open world too much. In a game like this, where you can go wherever you want and take on most quests in whatever order you choose, it becomes more difficult to fit in the sorts of twists that usually punctuate a Final Fantasy plot. It would be hard to justify, say, cutting off access to certain sidequests just because they no longer make sense in the story. By taking the late game out of the open world, Square Enix can essentially do whatever they want with the plot, without worrying about how it perturbs everything else. It's notable that things get a lot darker after this point, culminating in some pretty huge changes to the setting and characters.

What I think we're seeing here is the tension between Final Fantasy XV's new approach as a go-anywhere, do-anything open world game, and the traditional, story-heavy Final Fantasy experience. It's significant that the open world doesn't actually go away, even when the story can no longer support it; you're able to jump back when you want, but it's presented as a return to the past, before all the big stuff happened. It's almost like you're playing two games at this point: The wide-open one you started with, whose plot is frozen in time, and the focused, narrative one that doesn't try to maintain that level of freedom. It feels like the developers ultimately couldn't make a full-fledged FF story work in such an open environment, so they decided to have it both ways.

It can feel a bit weird, especially at first, but in the end I do think this approach more or less works. I appreciated the story developments that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, and I'm glad I could always go back for sidequests and whatnot that I'd missed. I do think the game would feel more cohesive if they'd managed to keep the story and world more integrated, but the tradeoffs there--Cut back on plot developments? Make the world smaller so it can change more?--may not be worth it. I'm curious to see what the next Final Fantasy is like, though, assuming they stick with the open world design. Final Fantasy XV did a great job with it overall, I think, but there are a lot of lessons to learn here that could make the next game even better. If this is the start of a new approach to the series, I'm actually pretty eager to see where it goes.

Not Done Yet I've actually finished Final Fantasy XV, sort of--I beat the boss and saw the credits, which in the earlier series would mean that it's time to move on. But with several DLC episodes and a multiplayer expansion, there's still quite a bit to do. I'll be a little busy with some trips in the near future, but expect one more post on this game, coming a bit later.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XV Discovered: Noctis Lucis and the Too Many Sidequests

Aside from the open world, one factor that's come to define my time with Final Fantasy XV is the sheer number of sidequests. Final Fantasy XV has a lot of sidequests. This isn't new in and of itself, as most games since FF6 at least have had plenty of optional content, but the way they're spread through the game seems different here. Earlier titles usually held most of their side missions for later in the game, or perhaps doled them out little by little as you progressed. But FF15's sidequests are seemingly everywhere right from the start. It can feel like you're constantly running into people needing help with this or that, and every random food stand has a whole list of monster hunts to take on. You do need to follow the main story eventually, but it's easy to spend hours on extra quests between beats in the "real" plot.

Fundamentally, I think Final Fantasy XV has a different approach to sidequests than most of the games before it. The earlier series tends to treat these as a sort of bonus content, giving dedicated or curious players some extra stuff to enjoy if they don't want to go straight to the end. The quests will probably offer some interesting challenges and useful rewards, but you can still have a good time without them. In FF15, though, sidequests have probably made up the majority of my playtime. It would be possible to follow the main story straight through, but you'd be missing out on a huge part of the game, and seeing only bits and pieces of the wide open world. A world like this is designed to be explored, not simply traversed, and the sidequests are a big part of that. It's essentially an MMO approach, and maybe that's where FF15 got it from--as Final Fantasy XII drew many ideas from its predecessor, this might be something FF15 picked up from FF14. Or, perhaps it came in via the open world genre itself, as those games tend to be full of stuff to find and do.

Unfortunately, the quests aren't all winners. Like in MMOs, many of these turn into simple fetch quests or monster extermination jobs. The game still makes many of these work, as a fetch quest can send you to an interesting corner of the world you might not have otherwise discovered, and tricky foes can get you to engage with the combat system in new ways. But when you're returning to the same area or fighting the same monsters again and again, the missions can start to feel like filler. Since these are optional, it's always possible to ignore the boring ones, except you can't easily tell which might have interesting twists or lead to something new later on. So personally, I've found myself completing an awful lot of these, just to see where they go--or just to clear them off the list, so it's easier to keep track of everything else.

Oh yeah, that's the other thing: There's a list. This is the first offline Final Fantasy to have a comprehensive quest log, tracking basically every mission you find. Even random stuff you stumble across get an entry in the log, like hearing a person calling for help or discovering a new dungeon. This is nice in a lot of ways, since as I said, the game has a ton of sidequests--there'd be no way to keep up with everything if the game didn't do it for you. But a quest log does act as something of a crutch for the designers. It's easy to fill the game with a bunch of generic missions--go here, kill this--when you know there'll be a helpful list spelling everything out. The earlier games may have had fewer sidequests, but they also tended to be more memorable, because players had to be able to keep everything straight in their heads.

My other concern about the log--and the volume of quests in general--is that after a while, it can kind of feel like a to-do list. I'm not a completionist by any means, so I don't have any intention of finising every quest in the game, but I do like to see as much as I can of a game while I'm enjoying myself. And when I have a dozen or more items in the log, it feels like a big list of everything I should be seeing or doing before I continue the plot or go do whatever else I had planned next. Without a quest log, I might feel less pressured, and could simply ignore or forget about the missions that are less important at the moment. I realize this is more of a personal issue, and I've mostly dealt with it by understanding the major role that sidequests play in this game: I don't need to rush to get them done just to continue the story, because taking my time with the optional stuff is kind of the point. Still, it can feel a bit overwhelming at times.

All in all, I'm still enjoying Final Fantasy XV's distinctive design, even if I think it could use a bit less filler. (You could say that about most of the series, really.) It's hard to entirely separate the game's approach to sidequests from its open world concept, but together they make something not quite like anything in the series before it. This game remains full of stuff to see and do, and it's hard not to be impressed by that.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XV Discovered: Pieces of Eight

Despite its semi-realistic world, Final Fantasy XV seems to weave together pieces of the whole prior series, often in some pretty subtle ways. (I mentioned the tents and garulas last time.) But as I've played, I've also come to feel that this game has something of a special relationship with Final Fantasy VIII, the somewhat underappreciated middle child of the PlayStation era.

It was actually the magic system that first clued me in to this. Overall, the two games' systems are pretty different; FF15 has far fewer spells than FF8, and I've mostly used them as rare special moves rather than a fundamental part of combat. But the similarities definitely exist: Like FF8, FF15's approach involves absorbing magic energy from special spots on the map, or (with the right weapon) even from enemies. You have to craft this energy into the spells themselves, unlike FF8, but this does recall the earlier game's extensive refining system. And instead of using MP, both games involve a finite stock of each spell that you expend as you cast them. With all the other callbacks to earlier games, I doubt any of this was a coincidence.

This was just the beginning, though--as I thought about it more, I realized that the link between the two seems to go deeper. As I said last time, Final Fantasy XV is a big weird blend of real-world and fantasy elements, but Final Fantasy VIII was trying the same thing almost two decades earlier. FF8's world is full of magic and monsters and time kompression, but it's also a place where people drive cars, watch TV, and go to school. Most of the game's important events take place in cities, not caves or castles. It presents relatively grounded characters, with fewer of the cartoonishly wacky scenarios that cropped up in FF7. The specifics of FF15's world and story are different from FF8, but I think it's the only game since to really hit that same mix of fantastic and mundane.

One consequence of Final Fantasy 8's more urban approach was a world map that sometimes felt like an afterthought. So much of the game took place in human environments that when you did get out on the field, there wasn't always that much to see. This may well have been a factor in later games removing the world map entirely, allowing them to focus only on the areas that mattered. Interestingly, Final Fantasy XV's world is also actually quite empty, but it's a different kind of emptiness. Because it all takes place at human scale, there's a variety to the space not possible in a simplified overworld view. The details matter; different areas have different vegetation and geography, meaning each forest or plain or bend in a river can feel like a distinct location. There's plenty to find if you explore, too: Cooking ingredients to forage, ponds to fish in, even stranded motorists needing help with their cars. Much of this is wholly optional, and a narrative-focused player can still take the direct path to the end if they want. But these sorts of details make the world feel like a place, not just a way to connect the important bits together.

The other reason this emptiness works is that FF15, much more than FF8, is a game about open space. This is where their approaches to reality-inspired fantasy diverge: FF8 is a largely urban game, but FF15 is about a road trip. The long stretches of highway, the tiny rest stops, and the roadside diversions are kind of the whole point. None of this would have been possible in the abstract world map of the series's earlier era, where it was easier to walk across a continent than to rent a car. In this sense, FF15 perhaps feels less like a continuation of FF8's approach than an answer to it. If Squall and crew actually had to travel as far as they supposedly did, what would that be like? What's really filling all that space in the overworld, simplified down to a few repeated grass and forest textures?

I don't want to oversell the connection here--Final Fantasy XV carries and adapts ideas from everything that preceded it, and it's certainly more than FF8 Part 2. But the echoes of the last "modern day" Final Fantasy are strong, and these sorts of links only show how far the series has come.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XV Discovered: A Familiar World

Well, here we are: Fifteen games later, I'm finally playing the latest mainline Final Fantasy, only a couple years after its release. It's kind of nice to use a modern console for a change! As with the last few games, I'll be learning about this one as I go, so my thoughts may shift a bit through the course of it.

Final Fantasy XV's big change is that it's a straight-up open world game, taking place across a seamless, expansive environment dotted with quests and challenges. Of course it's an open world game, right? I don't follow AAA releases so closely anymore, but it sometimes feels like every major title these days can be described as "open world with RPG elements." Different games have different emphases, but there's often a common structure that's familiar even to someone who's, say, spent the last six years playing old Final Fantasy games. I'm not quite saying there's a AAA monogenre, but at this point it might have been a bigger deal if a modern FF didn't follow suit.

So, you could accuse Final Fantasy XV of hopping on a bandwagon--like FF13's infamous Call of Duty influence--but honestly, I think the series had been heading this way for a while. The MMOs are highly open, like most online RPGs, full of sidequests and optional content spread across a web of interconnected zones. But FF12, too, brought much of that approach into a single-player game, and even FF13 offered the sprawling Gran Pulse after thirty hours of linearity. When I played FF12, it felt kind of shocking next to the previous single-player games, but by now I'm not really surprised anymore. FF15's seamless world feels like something the series had already been reaching towards; maybe technology and design trends just finally caught up with it.

More importantly, Final Fantasy XV's take on the open world adventure actually works. It's definitely more of an action RPG than anything before it, which is probably necessary to ground its characters in an increasingly realistic world, but that doesn't mean it's overly simplistic. You still have stats to pay attention to, equipment to manage, and a variety of tactics for a full party of four characters--so in practice, the game certainly carries the stamp of its predecessors, even if it (like every game in the series these days) has evolved in a bit of an unexpected direction. Even beyond the gameplay, though, what's really grabbed me about FF15 is the world itself.

Final Fantasy XV's setting, at least so far, is a bizarre blend of FF tropes and American road trip that comes together far better than I ever would have guessed. You'll join monster hunts by talking to the chef at a greasy diner, or see tourists gawking at a massive crystalline structure when you stop to gas up your car. You'll fight cactaurs in what could well be west Texas, and crash at a cheap motel when the sun sets and the demons come out. You'll pull over while a herd of garulas--yes, that one monster from Final Fantasy V--crosses the road. My favorite, though, might be the camping, which directly recalls using tents at save points in the SNES titles, but is now realized with real-life equipment and the party cooking dinner over a camp stove.

This all can feel a bit uncanny at times, but by and large I've found it surprisingly effective. The game feels familiar in multiple senses, with the FF elements recalling my journey through the series, and the real-world elements tying it in to things I've actually experienced. I understand that may be off-putting to some people, who perhaps feel that it's only diluting the fantastic elements they came here for. But personally, this has made the world more believable in a way that I'm very much interested in. I've always imagined the "real" versions of the characters and events lurking behind the depictions in the games, and Final Fantasy XV feels like the closest yet to what had been in my head all along.

I'm still early in the game, so I'll have to see if this feeling holds up for the length of it, and I may elaborate more on some of this later. But so far, FF15's weird world is working for me. I'm going to post this, and then I'm going to play more.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIV Discovered: Fitting In

If I had to sum up Final Fantasy XIV in a single word, it would be "surprising." At the beginning of the summer, I expected to just dip a toe into the free trial to see what it was all about, but I finally stopped playing only this week, about fifty hours of gameplay later. I didn't finish the game, as much as you can finish an MMO like this, but I did reach the trial's level cap with two classes and decided that was as good a stopping point as any. The sheer size of the trial wasn't the only surprise; it was perhaps a bigger shock that I enjoyed those fifty hours, despite actively avoiding MMOs for the past twenty years or so. I was surprised by the story, which--though still very slow at times--went a lot further than my first dozen hours suggested. I didn't even hate playing with other people when I had to!

I also ended up with a surprising answer to my core question: Does this game actually fit in to core Final Fantasy series, or is it really more of a spinoff? I was skeptical for a while about its place as a "real" Final Fantasy game, as it seemed to have abandoned many of the hallmarks of even the anything-goes modern FF titles, taking up standard MMO tropes in their place. But there was a moment, partway through, when everything suddenly clicked.

It wasn't a big moment, as far as the game was concerned. I was talking to a scholar in a makeshift library, receiving some bit of lore that initially felt like it could have come from any generic fantasy MMO. This was just some NPC chatter, nothing particularly important. But I had a brief flashback to Final Fantasy V, remembering a similar minor conversation with a scholar in a library, and I felt like it recontextualized the whole game. I realized that I'd been judging FF14 against the expectations of a modern Final Fantasy, but the further back I looked, the more some of its choices made sense. Sure, the medieval fantasy setting can feel a bit generic next to the more recent games, but it shares some important quirks with the first six entries in the series, like the presence of advanced technology somewhere on the fringes. Yeah, the lack of a predefined main character is a far cry from the later games' deeper protagonists, but it's exactly what we had in FF1 and 3. And the game might often use simple animations and canned emotes in place of fully voiced and animated cutscenes, but that's what every story scene was like in the early days. It's not that Final Fantasy XIV had forgotten its history, but that I had.

It's possible I'm overthinking this, I suppose, and that the natural limitations of an MMO just happen to line up with some of the limitations of an 8- or 16-bit era RPG. But I do think I was getting too hung up on the shape of modern Final Fantasy games, with their elaborate cutscenes, wildly varied settings, and detailed character histories. I don't think the recent games have lost the soul of Final Fantasy or anything, but they don't hold sole claim to the series's identity, either. Final Fantasy XIV doesn't have to feel like FF10 or 13 or whatever to assert its place in the series, as long as it knows where it came from--and when I imagined some of FF14's scenes and locations as they might appear in a 16-bit RPG, it wasn't hard to see the link. Though the gameplay, of course, is still radically different, I'm convinced now that the team behind it is well aware of Final Fantasy's past, and they're getting a lot more from it than just the names of some monsters or spells.

So after those fifty hours, I think I can answer my question in the affirmative: Yeah, I think this really does deserve a place in the series. As an MMO, it necessarily differs in some pretty important ways, but in the end it feels like a Final Fantasy. I wouldn't say it's a must-play for anyone who's similarly uninterested in MMOs, but who knows? You just might be surprised.

One More And with that, only one Final Fantasy remains. I'll also be taking one last break of course, but if all goes well I'm hoping to start FF15 around the end of the year. Stay tuned.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIV Discovered: Plays Well With Others

You know, it was a lot easier to plan these posts out earlier in the series, when I more or less knew what to expect from each game. There were still plenty of surprises, whether from things I'd just forgotten about or new insights I only gained by playing through in order. But in general, I had a good idea of what to expect, and could write with that in mind. Now, though, I'm basically discovering everything as I go, and it's hard to tell what any one piece of a game may mean in the long run.

Case in point: Last time I said that Final Fantasy XIV didn't put much emphasis on its main story, and that I'd spent most of the game wandering around a forest completing random quests. Pretty much right after I posted that, the story picked up considerably, introducing a bunch of new characters and concepts, and sent me on an airship journey to some very different parts of the world. It turned out that the game just has a slow start--or I spent too much time on sidequests--and there actually is quite a bit more to the narrative, even if it still takes a somewhat different form than the rest of the series. So, I resolved to focus on the storyline, to see where this game was really going, and come back here with another post about it. And then the game surprised me again, and I hit a wall.

See, one of the first main quests after venturing out into the world asked me to complete an instanced, multiplayer dungeon, like, with other people. This probably shouldn't have come as a shock, as "multiplayer" is right there in the name of the genre, and it makes sense that a primary quest (three in a row, actually) would mandate a dungeon to help new players learn about that part of the game. Still, though, I'd been having good time playing by myself up to that point, and frankly I'd hoped to spend my time with the game interacting with as few people as possible. I don't actually like online multiplayer, is the thing--I'm playing FF14 because it's a Final Fantasy, not because it's an MMO.

If it had just been a matter of getting over my discomfort and diving into a dungeon, I probably would have, but this brought up another issue: Time. You can't just start a multiplayer dungeon whenever you want, because you need a party first. There's a handy matchmaking system that can help pull a group together, but this can take a while, especially if your particular role is in low demand. The first time I tried this, it estimated a thirty minute wait time, and I'd just put dinner in the oven, so I had to back out. With the vagaries of life competing for my time, it took two weeks before I could sit down, uninterrupted, for long enough to match and finish the three required dungeons. This is another big reason I don't normally play MMOs: I want to be able to play and take breaks on my own schedule, rather than have to plan out what should be a simple act of relaxation and fun. I like games I can pause, and I don't want to be the jerk who ruins it for three other people because I suddenly realized my food is burning.

I almost quit there, when I wasn't sure I could find the time to commit to a dungeon run--I thought I'd write a little post about it, decide MMOs weren't for me after all, and call it good. But I did end up finding time, and honestly, it wasn't so bad. The dungeons went much faster--and with much less social interaction--than I expected, in part because most of the other players had obviously seen them before. I didn't so much have to coordinate and strategize with strangers as I had to just keep up as they tore through the dungeon, letting me focus on the gameplay that I already knew pretty well. Combat with multiple players reminded me of Final Fantasy XIII as much as anything, with a million things happening at once, other humans taking the role of the AI allies, and brief suggestions in chat ("focus boss") serving as paradigms. It was way more exciting that most of what I'd done before, certainly, and it was actually pretty fun. It was very different from the dungeons in most earlier games--typically far more measured exercises in exploration--but FF14 creates its own kind of experience likely not possible in a single-player game.

Unfortunately, all this did stall me out enough that I don't really have any answers to my original question about the main storyline just yet. But I got past a major stumbling block, I enjoyed it well enough, and I'm still playing. I hope to get as far as I can in the plot before hitting the trial's level cap (and I started another character class to keep from maxing out too quickly), so there'll be at least one more post before I finish with this game. Stay tuned.

P.S.: If you're curious at all about the progress of my character, check it out here.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIV Discovered: Something Different

The last couple games in the series have been new to me, but this one, Final Fantasy XIV, is something entirely different: This is the first time that I've ever seriously tried to play an MMO. So this has been a journey of discovery in a lot of ways, from just figuring out what's new in this Final Fantasy to understanding the whole concept of a game where there are, like, other people. I'm playing the free trial, which is limited in a few ways, but is overall quite generous and has kept me busy for a good while so far. I don't expect to keep playing much once I hit its level cap, but that should still be enough for a couple posts.

As I've played through this series, I've usually been trying to answer the same question about each game: How does this entry fit into the overall evolution of Final Fantasy? But with FF14, I feel like the question is a bit different: Does this game fit into the evolution of the series? For a long time, I've seen the online Final Fantasies as outliers or spinoffs that aren't really part of the core series, which is why I felt comfortable skipping Final Fantasy XI entirely. I think a number of long-time fans feel the same way--it's neat that there are Final Fantasy MMOs and all, but they're no more connected to the main series than, say, Final Fantasy Tactics. But I feel like I've been revisiting that idea a bit, especially after seeing Final Fantasy XII draw fairly significantly from MMO-style ideas, even while remaining offline itself. FF12 presented a very different take on Final Fantasy in many ways, so if I could accept a game like that, is an MMO really out of the question?

It's not hard to draw parallels between FF12 and 14, though the latter tends to take things much further. Like FF12, Final Fantasy XIV offers a very open world, but with even fewer barriers--you can go just about anywhere from the start, assuming you can slip past the higher-level monsters. It's just as open in terms of how you can spend your time, again far beyond FF12; there are probably dozens of activities to take on at any given moment, including tradecraft and just hanging around talking to people. Where previous games offered sidequests as a diversion from the main story, here the main story is just another thing to do, not necessarily more important than anything else you could be doing.

This lack of emphasis on the main story, though, is one thing that makes this game feel very much unlike the bulk of the series, FF12 included. A core part of Final Fantasy, for me, is the focus on a group of characters journeying across the world together. There's always some primary place to go next, a goal you're moving toward, even if you take some detours every once in a while. Final Fantasy XIV feels much more meandering. I haven't really gone anywhere vastly different in the fifteen hours or so I've played the game, instead just gradually exploring a single (though very large) forest. Most of the quests, even in the core story, are pretty mundane, often amounting to little more than killing X monsters or delivering goods to someone. When larger events do occur, they don't have as much punch, since your single character doesn't speak, and nothing can actually change the state of the shared world. Quests mostly feel like they're more about ticking boxes to get EXP than about actually participating in a narrative, and few of the characters I've met stand out like the party members in previous games do.

It's important to point out that these aren't bad things, exactly. While I think some richer storytelling and more creative quest objectives wouldn't hurt, FF14 isn't actually trying to tell single grand story like the rest of the series. This is a game about making your own character and playing with groups of real people, not leading a predefined cast through their particular journey. It's about being able to jump into whatever challenge you and your friends feel like playing that night, not being stuck on opposite sides of the game world because you happen to be at different points in the plot. MMOs have very different design goals than offline RPGs, so none of these are failures to make a more proper Final Fantasy--they're successes at making something else.

This does make me lean toward putting FF14 in the "spinoff" category, however. While the offline games have seen some big changes over the years, there does seem to be a fundamentally different aim to an MMO that goes beyond the usual variation inherent in the Final Fantasy series. But it's probably too early to say for sure, especially without seeing how FF14 might have influenced its successor--after all, I would have easily disregarded Final Fantasy XI before realizing the impact it had on FF12. For now, I'm going to keep playing, and we'll just see where this thing goes.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIII Discovered: Imaginary Numbers

Well, that's another one down: I'm now finished with Final Fantasy XIII. The final bosses were actually pretty difficult, but in a good way, requiring me to go back and reassess my strategy after an initial defeat. In other words, the battle system remained satisfying up to the end, despite its differences from the rest of the series.

In the course of all those fights, I dished out a pretty absurd amount of damage, and that got me thinking again about HP inflation. If you recall, I first wrote about this while playing Final Fantasy VII, after noticing that HP values and attack damage had been creeping steadily upward over the course of the series. By FF7, dealing 9999 damage--the maximum possible from a single hit--wasn't even that special anymore, so the game's strongest attacks had to hit multiple times just to work around this self-imposed limit. These powerful attacks in turn could tear through most enemies like tissue paper, so FF7's international releases added optional superbosses strong enough to survive a casting of Knights of the Round. Emerald and Ruby Weapon each had around a million HP, by far the most of any enemy in the series up to that point.

So, how about Final Fantasy XIII? Well, let's put it this way: By the end of the game, you'll regularly encounter normal enemies with HP in the high hundreds of thousands, basically as much as the aforementioned Weapons. The toughest of the final bosses has nearly 7 million HP. And, I mean, these fights can be challenging, but they're nothing like Emerald or Ruby. You'll be pumping out so much damage by the end that a few million HP is just a good boss fight, not an elite-level challenge for completionists only. FF13 doesn't even bother with the traditional 9999 limit on damage; you can deal up to 99,999 by default, and a rare accessory lets you push that to six digits. Yeah, I think there's some inflation going on here.

As with FF7, these values are all completely arbitrary, of course. Square Enix could have adjusted the systems to scale these down considerably and the game would play exactly the same; this seems like just another case of big numbers looking cooler. The difference here, though, is that the numbers kind of don't serve much purpose at all. FF13's battle system moves so quickly that you often can't even follow how much damage you're dealing in the first place. Your characters can all attack at once, and can execute multiple moves in a row. Many attacks naturally hit multiple times, not necessarily to break the already high damage limit, but just because they look like they should. (For example, a one-two punch or rapid-fire gun will likely cause damage for each individual hit, rather than combining it into a single value.) The result is a mess of numbers flying around faster than anyone could keep track of. Unlike previous games, you can't really add up the damage in your head, or compare different attacks to see what an enemy is weak against. Bigger numbers are good, but that's about all you can get out of it. This wouldn't change even if they tweaked the attack formulas to bring the values in line with earlier games.

This might sound like a flaw, but it really isn't. The thing is, you don't actually need to keep track of how much damage you're dealing. The AI will automatically learn weaknesses as it tries different attacks, saving you the trouble, and every combatant has a health bar, so you can tell visually if you're hitting an enemy hard enough. Arguably, the game doesn't need to show the numbers at all. Many action games, after all, get by with just health bars even if they keep track of numeric values behind the scenes, and FF13 could probably work just fine with something similar. I'm glad they didn't do this, I suppose; numeric damage does go back to the earliest roots of RPGs, and losing such a longstanding part of the series would have generated no end of complaints. But I do wonder if, by this point, the damage popups are there more out of tradition than any real need. Are they really telling me useful information, or are they just another special effect, like the burst of flame that accompanies a Firaga spell?

To be honest, I don't think I'm ready to get rid of numeric damage, either, and I probably wouldn't have written this much about it if I was. But the way FF13 is leaning, it's not too hard to imagine a future without it. As I play through the last couple games in the series, I'll have to see if this game's approach was unique, or if this is starting to look like a trend.

Coming Up Way back when I started this project, I expected this point to be the end. Well, I wasn't even sure I'd ever get this far, but my lofty goal was to finish all the offline, numbered Final Fantasies, which meant FF13 was the final stop. Of course, in the years since, Final Fantasy XV was announced (well, named), finished, and released, so I certainly don't intend to leave it out. Something else happened, though: While I didn't actually play Final Fantasy XI, learning about it made me a bit curious about how the online games fit into the series' progression. And then I found out that Final Fantasy XIV has what sounds like a good-sized free trial. So, I think I'm going to do something I've never done before, which is to create an account for an MMO, and give that thing an actual try. I don't expect to play past the trial, but that should be enough to write a post or two, I would think. I have no idea what to expect! I'm kind of excited!

Of course, that's not happening right away, because it's time for a break to catch up on some other games and life and the like. But when I come back, well, it's going to be interesting.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIII Discovered: Opening Up

Last time, I wrote quite a bit about just how linear Final Fantasy XIII is, though I knew there was supposed to be a change about halfway through. And sure enough, not long after, the game took a big portion of my post and proceeded to throw it out the window. Thirty hours in, I reached Gran Pulse.

Gran Pulse starts out unassuming enough, but you'll quickly arrive at the Archylte Steppe, an area unlike anything previously seen in the game. Instead of a long, narrow path from start to finish, the region spreads out in all directions. Enemies aren't just fixed obstacles, but are scattered throughout--some moving around, some guarding particular spots, but almost all avoidable. This is a good thing, too, since some of them are probably too tough to even defeat when you first arrive. You have an ultimate destination, at the far end of the Steppe, but you can take your time getting there. There are even sidequests--the game's first--in the form of stones that offer rewards if you can hunt down specific powerful monsters.

After thirty hours of running down hallways, Gran Pulse feels refreshing. This is essentially the first time in the entire game where you have a choice of what to do next, whether that's hunting monsters, searching for treasure, or just wandering around to see what you find. You can go pretty far afield, too; I followed one hunt into a completely different area big enough that I actually thought I'd stumbled onto the next part of the game, until I eventually hit a dead end. I mean, this place had its own hunts, and unique monsters, and even cutscenes that I would have missed entirely if I hadn't gone exploring. When you do decide to advance the story, the path forward does become considerably more linear--but you'll still find hunts along the way, and you'll have opportunities to teleport back when you want to break things up a bit.

If this reminds you of Final Fantasy XII, you're not alone. While Gran Pulse is ultimately much smaller and simpler than FF12's Ivalice, its design feels very much like something out of the previous game. The monsters you hunt are even called Marks, so there's little doubt about the influence. This only highlights further just how big of a shift this is, as the first half of FF13 is in many ways the polar opposite of its predecessor.

That's not to say that everything changes in Gran Pulse. One of the biggest remaining gaps is the lack of other people to fill out the world. As I said before, that sort of context is what usually separates an RPG from a dungeon crawl, and FF13's latter half is no better in this area. Where the Cocoon portions of the game mostly saw you avoiding people who wanted to kill you, Gran Pulse is simply empty, occupied by nothing but ruins and monsters (and chocobos). This is still all justified by the story, and it's arguably less jarring than a populated world where you never stop and talk to anyone, but it doesn't change the lonely feeling of the game.

Do you know the worst part of Gran Pulse, though? It takes thirty hours to get there! It's frankly kind of bizarre to see such major pieces of gameplay buried so deeply, and I suspect a number of people would have liked the game better if it started out like this. (You can't ask anyone to play for thirty hours just to get to the "good part," after all.) I do wonder: If Final Fantasy XIII had had a smoother development cycle, or an easier time adjusting to the HD era, would the whole game have been like this? I don't actually dislike what we ended up with, but I do feel like that version would probably be a better game.

So, Final Fantasy XIII is still a weird game. I personally kind of love it when a game makes some crazy change halfway through--see also Final Fantasy VI--and the relative openness of the second half is an improvement, I think. But it's definitely an odd way to go, development problems or not. At this point, it's really hard to say what I might think about this game, overall, when all's said and done. I'm getting closer now, so I guess we'll see soon enough. Until then!

By the Way If you missed it on Twitter, I took a bunch of pictures at the Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary art exhibition in Tokyo last month. Take a look!

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIII Discovered: A Quiet World

Around the time of Final Fantasy XIII's release, there was a fairly infamous quote from director Motomu Toriyama comparing the game to Call of Duty. Unsurprisingly, this didn't go over terribly well. While there's certainly overlap between FPS and RPG fandom--and plenty of crossover between the genres themselves in recent years--there remains a nontrivial contingent of Final Fantasy enthusiasts who wouldn't touch a Shoot Mans game if you paid them. For them, this was evidence that FF13 had finally killed the series forever, just like Final Fantasies VII, VIII, X, XI, and XII did.

I joke, but the discord around this quote did touch on a larger concern about the game. Final Fantasy XIII is extremely linear, at least for the first half or so, and it's stripped of many of the trappings that flesh out a typical RPG's world. The above article says this was all an intentional design, but various reports in the subsequent years suggest that Final Fantasy, like many series, struggled in the move to high-definition consoles and was forced to streamline itself by necessity. The cost of filling out a game's world was immensely higher on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 than it was in the previous generation, so it would be no surprise if Square Enix chose a linear approach simply because there'd less world to make.

The impression I'd had for a while was that FF13 was something of a compromised experience, shaved down into a narrow, focused game just so the developers could get something out the door. But as I thought about this more recently, I realized that it's not actually so far off from Final Fantasy X's approach. That game, too, is largely a single long path from start to finish, with few chances to explore or deviate until the very end. It, though, seemed to be much better received by the general fanbase than FF13 was. So I wondered: What's the difference here, really? Was FFX's take on linearity somehow just that much better, or was it all a matter of timing?

Now that I'm actually playing Final Fantasy XIII, I feel confident saying that there is something fundamentally different between the two games. Timing was still a factor, certainly, as the RPG landscape had unquestionably changed from 2001 to 2010. But even then, Final Fantasy X captured something that FF13 often seems to miss, and I think a lot of it has to do with the people.

Final Fantasy X is full of people. Although there aren't many towns in the game, you're constantly encountering people along the way--fellow travelers, friends, rivals, and other random denizens of Spira. There's a sense that the world is a living, populated place, where everyone has their own lives and concerns. The game isn't just about getting from one end of an area to the other; it's presented as a grand journey that brings you face-to-face with much of the world you're trying to save. This is the sort of thing that separates an actual role-playing game, I think, from a mere dungeon crawl. Even if most of the game is still about fighting monsters and getting treasure, it's all tied together by a broader context.

In contrast, Final Fantasy XIII is a distinctly lonely game. You spend large portions of the earlier game away from people and society, trekking through remote or forbidden areas. Often, the only other people you encounter are the enemy soldiers who are actively trying to kill you. And even when you do, eventually, re-enter civilization, it largely just leads to more battles along a linear path. The closest thing I've seen to a real town at least lets you talk (well, listen) to people for a bit, but you're still basically on rails until the enemies show up again. There aren't even any shopkeepers in the game; all your purchases are made through the same computer terminals you use to save your progress. Most of your knowledge of the broader world comes through flashbacks or written lore entries.

All of this is perfectly justified by the story, as you spend most of this time as fugitives, but it still feels like a big chunk of what makes a game an RPG is sort of missing. Where FF10's linear path seamlessly blended town, dungeon, and overworld, FF13 is more like a long chain of dungeons, one after the other. Or like a series of levels, punctuated by cutscenes. Kind of like Call of Duty.

I feel like this is the most negative post I've written in this series, but honestly, I've still been enjoying the game quite a bit. The battle system remains fast-paced and strategic, so it works well as a series of levels, at least. And the characters, surprisingly, are a real highlight for me. The plot can move pretty slowly, but that gives the game plenty of time to explore the party members' backgrounds, motivations, and reactions to the situation they've been thrust into. Some characters are more believable than others--I'd say Sazh feels the most like an actual person, and Vanille the least--but everyone gets fleshed out well beyond the basic archetypes they appear to be at first. This is a big part of what keeps me engaged with the game, just to see how they continue to grow.

Normally, this is where I'd say something like "FF13's approach isn't entirely successful, but I'm glad I got to experience it." But the thing is, this isn't actually the whole of the game. Final Fantasy XIII, I'm told, drops the linearity and opens up in a significant way somewhere around the halfway point. I'm not there yet, but I think I'm pretty close--so expect another post sooner or later looking at the other side of this game.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIII Discovered: Paradigm Shift

Yes indeed, it's time for Final Fantasy XIII, another game I'd never played before now. I think I knew even less about this one coming in than I did its predecessor--I'd at least seen Final Fantasy XII in action before, but my knowledge of FF13 was based mostly on tidbits picked up from random articles over the years. One thing I was particularly eager to try was the battle system, as what little I'd heard certainly sounded intriguing, but I didn't know how it actually came together until, well, now. So far, I've been kind of fascinated to find that it actually seems to tackle some of the same issues as FF12's system, though in a rather different way.

First, though, I want to give a quick overview in case you're as unfamiliar as I was a few weeks ago. Initially, FF13's combat looks a lot like a flipped ATB system: Instead of waiting for a gauge to fill and then issuing a command, you issue commands in advance, and they'll activate as the ATB bar charges. You can queue up a few commands at once, with more powerful ones taking up more of the gauge. You only control the lead party member, and can use an auto-battle command to select a set of appropriate commands for them automatically. There's a bit more to it than that, but for the first few hours, the level of automation makes combat very fast but also incredibly straightforward.

Things start to get interesting, however, once roles are introduced. A role is sort of a combination of a job and an AI script: they control what abilities a character can use, as well as how they act when automated in combat. A Commando, for example, focuses on dealing as much damage as possible, while a Medic heals and a Saboteur inflicts status conditions. You can change roles at any time during battle, but not individually. Instead, you predefine "paradigms," which assign roles to each party member, and then swap these at will. So, you might use a paradigm full of offensive roles to deal damage, then switch to a more defensive set to heal when you need to. The result is a battle system that's often more strategic than it is tactical--you aren't down in the trenches telling everyone exactly what to do; you're controlling the goal of the characters at any particular moment, but letting the AI fill in the details.

Like Final Fantasy XII, this game can be accused of playing itself, but like FF12, that isn't really the point. Both games have realized that the minutia of combat, choosing Attack over and over, isn't necessarily that interesting, and doesn't have to be a core part of gameplay. Both games aim to let you shape character behavior at a higher level, and take care of the repetitive parts for you. However, their approaches to automation are quite different. FF12 offers more fine-grained control, letting you craft every detail of the AI scripts, and issue direct commands to any character whenever you want. Final Fantasy XIII only offers built-in scripts, and lets you directly control only one character. However, it does solve what was probably my one major complaint about FF12's gambit system.

See, while gambits made it easy to carefully design very specific behaviors for your characters, there was no easy way to quickly change strategies. You'd often want different behaviors in boss fights than during exploration, for example, and your normal gambits could actually be harmful in some situations. But to change these, you need to go into the party menu and explicitly disable or modify every relevant command. And if you do switch everything around for a tough fight, you have to change it all back when you're done--there's no way to save a set of gambits and return to it afterward. I usually avoided this trouble as much as I could, even if that meant not getting the best use out of the system during the biggest fights.

Final Fantasy XIII's paradigms do away with this problem, letting you change your party's entire behavior whenever you want. And while you can't actually write the AI scripts, the built-in ones are quite good, often offering versatility that was difficult or impossible to program through gambits. For example, characters will automatically use the right elemental magic if they know an enemy's weakness, or use area attacks only when enemies are grouped together. The downside is that you need to change behavior much more often to keep your characters on task; there's no way to create a general-purpose script that will both fight and heal as appropriate without a role change.

I can't say that one of these systems is better than the other, because they ultimately serve distinct purposes. Final Fantasy XII's is about automating the details as you navigate through the world, letting you focus on the most important aspects of combat and exploration. Final Fantasy XIII's is about creating fast-paced battles where you actively manage your party's strategy and don't need to slow down to issue individual commands. These are very different games with very different approaches, though they do seem to be coming from a similar place. For better or worse, it looks like Square Enix wants to take Final Fantasy's combat beyond simply selecting actions each turn, and these are two different ways to do it. I think FF12's system worked out pretty well in the end. As for FF13, I'm enjoying it so far, but I'll just have to see as I keep playing.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XII Discovered: Dedication

It was a long journey, but I'm finally done with Final Fantasy XII. I clocked around 95 hours of play by the time the credits rolled, so not quite triple digits, but certainly the longest game I've ever played. And while there are probably ways it could have been trimmed down--and while I'm definitely ready to move on now--I enjoyed those 95 hours, only finishing the game when I decided I'd had enough. I'd say that's pretty high praise.

I've touched on this before, but one thing I appreciated was the game's dedication to maintaining a connected, accessible world from start to finish. With a few exceptions, you can almost always travel back to anywhere you've previously been, no matter what's going on in the story. If you missed a sidequest or hunt on the other side of the world, you don't have to wait until you get an airship hours later to return to it, you can just teleport (or walk!) back whenever you want. I'd say this game has the most open world design since the first two Final Fantasies, FF11 excepted. It was FF3 that introduced lateral movement--where reaching a new area may cut you off from older ones--and the rest of the series more or less followed that model until now. FF12 has a few dungeons that temporarily block you off from the world, but the game even warns you when saving your game in one of these places, just because it's so unusual.

What really impressed me, though, was how this dedication applies even to the end of the game. See, the Pharos at Ridorana is, in almost every respect, the game's final dungeon: It's the last real dungeon you reach, and it's absolutely huge, spanning three separate maps packed with difficult enemies, mazes, puzzles, and bosses. And when you finally reach the top and fight the bosses there... you get to leave. The final boss isn't actually in the Pharos; when you finish the tower, it will be waiting in its own, almost trivially tiny dungeon that you can go to whenever you want. The way I see it, FF12 has separated the final boss from the final dungeon, just to make sure you can get back out into the world and finish up whatever you want before completing the game.

In most Final Fantasy games, it's possible to leave the final dungeon, taking back the experience and items gained to help with any remaining sidequests. But it's work. Even if you have a Teleport spell that can get you out quickly, you'll still have to crawl all the way back through to the end afterward. These places are essentially meant to be one-way, the last big challenge before you finish the game and move on with your life. The fact that FF12 explicitly returns you to the world, and makes it so easy to get to the real final boss, says a lot about the game. It knows you probably have more stuff to do before you're really finished, and it wants you to do it.

It's hard to say from here if this is a case of modern design sensibilities starting to evolve in the series, or if it's just part of Final Fantasy XII's unique approach. Many modern games treat the final challenge as more or less just another mission, letting you play in the sandbox as long as you want afterward, and that's almost what FF12 is doing here. As I play the last few games, I'll have to see if this trend continues.

Coming Up I expect to take a pretty big break after this one--as I've said several times now, this was a very long game. I probably won't start Final Fantasy XIII until after the new year, though I'm definitely looking forward to it. I know it had a somewhat mixed reception, but I know even less about it than I did about FF12, so either way I'm expecting to learn a lot. Until then!

[escapingburger]

PAX West 2017: Still Going

Last year, I made a big to-do about it being my last PAX for a while, but then--oops!--I ended up going this year anyway. The tickets sort of fell into my lap this time, and I had a hard time turning the opportunity down. My feelings on the show are basically what they were a year ago: PAX has changed, I've changed, and it's no longer the (literally) life-changing experience it was a decade ago... but I'm glad I went regardless. I still believe I'd be totally fine missing the show at this point, but if I'm there again next year, don't be too surprised.

This is what I realized this year: PAX is a place. Returning to PAX is kind of like revisiting a hometown years after moving away. Many things have changed, and I'll never actually recapture the experiences I had there in my youth, but it's still nice just to go back and soak in the memories. At this point, maybe my favorite thing about PAX isn't the concerts, or tabletop games, or anything like that--it's just being at PAX. Do I need to do that every year, especially if most of my friends can't make it? I don't know. But I certainly enjoy it when I do.

The Games Of the games I saw, one standout was Someone Has Died, which just launched on Kickstarter. It's a storytelling/persuasion-based card game (a la Superfight) about claiming inheritance. You use a variety of silly cards to create a story about who you are, how you know the deceased, and why you deserve their stuff, and the judge/executor determines who has the most convincing or amusing story. Like a lot of these games, it's less about rules or strategies than just providing a framework to build something funny around. We played a round in which Jen was a sentient venus flytrap who ran a bakery, and demanded the inheritance from a deceased robot because it bullied her as a child.

We also tried Complicated Board Game: The Card Game, a relatively simply card game about playing complicated board games. It features cards that change the rules mid-game (e.g. the card "It's a Co-Op Game" divides the players into teams), as well as ones that represent meta-actions that might happen while playing a board game ("I Flip the Table" removes everything from play). It was entertaining, though I feel like it walks kind of an awkward line between strategic and silly--you might be making legitimate progress toward a victory before some wacky card screws everything up, making the game feel sort of unsatisfying. I think I prefer We Didn't Playtest This At All, which works similarly but makes very clear that winning and losing are entirely arbitrary, so no one gets too invested in it.

On the videogame front, I didn't have a chance to play Way of the Passive Fist, but I liked the concept: A side-scrolling beat-'em-up set on a desert planet where it's too hot to actually fight for very long. Instead, you parry attacks until the enemies wear themselves out, then just push them over. This is the sort of neat twist that's always fun to run into at the Indie Megabooth.

And So All in all, not much to report: I played a few neat games, saw a concert, ate at the Juicy Cafe--basically, it was PAX. I probably don't even need to write these posts anymore; I'm sure PAX is covered thoroughly all over the place these days. But if nothing else, I still like having the record for my own sake, so write I will.

As for next year, well, I'm not going to make any predictions this time. Let's see what happens!