Comments on: Because I am Stupid I Make Myself Suffer

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:44:15 +0000

I failed to care about the characters or the story. The same thing happened in 10, X-2, and 8. So I ditched the game. Too bad, I actually really liked the inner loop as you put it. I love finding new abilities on the checkerboard. I love being able to say “Your gun sucks. You now know how to use a staff. Go beat on something.” As much as it disturbs my enlightened good self, I enjoy watching a bunny-eared high-heeled fishnet-stockinged woman run around. And she had a cool accent. But I hated the main character. I just don’t like playing shiftless layabout thieving guys who only care about themselves. I suppose he would have grown out of it eventually. And the save points were way too far apart so it didn’t fit with the amount of time I wanted to spend at any one given spot. Oddly enough I will probably get a ps3 eventually so I can try the final fantasy advent or whatever they are doing for it. One of these days I’ll find that magic of being a kid playing rpg’s for the first time…

By: Eric Tilton

Eric Tilton — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:50:03 +0000

Man, that same thing happened to me — except that, since I’m like an abused gaming child, I obsessively saved at the save point that was RIGHT THERE.

In my case, I was looking for the ghost in the first place. I’d managed to miss where it was actually at, and assumed it would be in the crazy morass of corridors that I had just been romping through like an hour earlier. A morass of corridors that had not been filled with very tough monsters. However, apparently once I went back to the dungeon when I was *not* following the story tracks, they went and upped the difficulty level of all the monsters by a huge margin.

I think that’s bullshit game design; you can’t spend an hour or two acquainting a player with part of your terrain, and then turn right around and say “OK, now that you’ve looked away for a second, this portion of the game will now be way too hard for you for quite a while.”

By: psu

psu — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:35:07 +0000

After playing Shadow Hearts I picked up FF10 because I enjoyed SH a lot and Final Fantasy is ya know, the iconic JRPG.

I can’t say that I enjoyed FF10. The production was sort of stilted and the game didn’t have the same enjoyable rhythm as Shadow Hearts. I gave up on it.

FF12 has been better.

I personally enjoy the Japanese take on the RPG because they generally have streamlined away some of the aping of D&D that the “Western” games do. When done well, it’s a less tedious way to move from plot point to plot point. Of course, the genre comes with its own baggage, and most of the games suffer for it.

Maybe this would make a good topic for another article.

By: Jon Mann

Jon Mann — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:40:56 +0000

So — what is the attraction of the Final Fantasy games? I’m honestly curious; I’d like to at least understand the level of devotion it inspires, even if I fail to share it. One of the first games I played on PS2 was Final Fantasy X, and after a little progress (past the first stadium sports match thingummy) I just couldn’t see the point.

I’ve played a fair number of ‘Western’ RPGs, starting with the gold box games and continuing through to Planescape, so it’s not that I dislike RPGs, it’s just that ‘Final Fantasy’ seems to be a radically different definition of RPG.

Is there a better starting point for the newbie than number X? Perhaps VII?

By: peterb

peterb — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:15:15 +0000

Ha ha, I told you so.