3. Final Fantasy X- As the first of the series for the PS2, this game was nothing short of groundbreaking.  The visuals are beautiful, the storyline is dramatic and engaging, and the characters… well, the characters can still be annoying at times.  Come on, did you really expect that part to be any different?  This game was the reason I bought a PS2 (at least it was already out when I did, unlike my somewhat preemptive purchase of a PS3 for its descendant…), and I never once regretted my decision.  To this day, I would count it one of the top three games on the system (but don’t ask me what the other two would be… they float around a bit according to my mood).  The battle system is fairly traditional, with the added bonus of a strength/weakness system (*gasp* You mean like Persona?  Yep.) and customizable weapons.  There are plenty of opportunities to branch out from the main storyline for those of us who enjoy side quests; getting everyone’s ultimate weapons can be maddening and nigh-impossible in some cases (I’ve never managed to get Tidus’s….), and the trips out to get all of the Aeons are incredibly rewarding.  Really, I think the key to greater enjoyment of Final Fantasy X is this: you can’t think of Tidus as the main character.  Let it be Yuna, or Auron, or whoever, but Tidus… *sigh*.  It’s all in the perspective, I think.  The temptation to rename him something like “Bitchface” or “Mangina” is very, very strong for me.  I usually manage to resist it, though.  Usually.  Oh, but fuck Blitzball.  Seriously.

2. Final Fantasy VII- This was the first Final Fantasy game that I played, and in fact one of the first RPGs I played, period.  I don’t think anyone could rightly dispute the importance of FFVII in the gaming world.  It’s spawned spinoffs, “sequels,” re-releases, and ridiculously priced eBay auctions, not to mention truckloads of screaming fans.  I am, of course, counting myself among those; my heart about stopped when I saw that tech demo from waaaaaaay back at E3 2005.  But aside from simply being the first of the 3D Final Fantasies, this game just has a lot going for it.  The characters are well fleshed-out and interesting, the story is epic, and the Materia system is addictive.  Side quests a-plenty enable you to trick out your party and make them incredibly powerful by the last battle, and you can spend infinite amounts of time breeding and racing Chocobos if that’s your thing (or if you simply want access to the super-potent Knights of the Round).  There are even optional characters that you can obtain to round out your party even more (I always want to skip Yuffie, but I can never quite make myself do it…).  If you haven’t played this game, you should.  If you have, then you don’t need me to detail the story.  What I will say is that my party almost always consists of Cloud, Tifa, and Red XIII, and that writing this has made me want to go watch Advent Children again.  Perhaps I’ll do that.

1. Final Fantasy VIII-  I know this isn’t a particularly popular choice for a favorite Final Fantasy game, but I’ve always loved it.  There’s just something about the way the characters and the system and the world come together that clicked with me the first time I played it, and I’ve been coming back to replay it with that same joy again and again ever since.  I’ve spent literally hours sifting through different sets of junctions to optimize my characters, and I keep charts so that I can rebuild with minimal effort when things switch between Squall and his crew and Laguna and his.  I won’t go on to the first cave until I’ve drawn the maximum amount of magic at that point.  I’ve made Boosting an art form.  I even made a Rinoa costume for Halloween two years ago, and have plans (if I can ever overcome my crippling fear of needles) to have a small wing tattooed on my shoulder blade.  VIII rubs some people the wrong way because it really does stick more to the science fiction side of things than the “Fantasy,” but I don’t feel that’s really a first for the series, nor, looking at XIII, does it appear to be the last.  The leveling system is, particularly at first glance, absurdly complicated and technical, but that’s actually one of the things I like about it; it takes planning and a certain amount of skill.  Things that are bonuses for some people, in this game as well as others, can definitely be detriments to others, and that’s why this isn’t the Definitive List of Best Final Fantasy Games… I don’t think such a thing actually exists.  It’s just the way *I* prefer them.  That’ll be different for everyone, and that’s as it should be.

Links get!

Shatter

World of Warcraft

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Street Fighter IV

Shadow Complex

Fat Princess

Halo 3

Pokemon Platinum

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Final Fantasy XIII (demo)

Trials HD

Earthbound

July NPDs

Slim PS3 confirmed, and soon!

Fable 3 announced for 2010

Interplay classics coming to Steam

360 Elite console now shipping with new packaging and without HD cables

Persona 3 PSP coming to Japan November 1

Little Big Planet GOTY edition dated Sept 8

Brutal Legend demo coming in September

Loco Roco Carnival coming to Japan, will be download only

Little Big Planet PSP has no multiplayer

Gran Turismo 5 finally incorporates car damage

Chromehounds servers shutting down

Want to send us stuff?  Well, that’s great!  Here’s where you do it: podcast@someothercastle.com.

7. Final Fantasy XII- There was a pretty long wait between X, the first Final Fantasy on the PS2, and this one, which came out in 2006.  This was a time at which I was still really uncomfortable with real-time combat, which put me in an awkward position regarding the game.  It was Final Fantasy.  I had been waiting a long time.  But it wasn’t really turn-based.  What was I to do?  Well, what I did was pick up the game anyway, of course.  Even after playing the demo (which was initially included with Dragon Quest VIII, a game that I didn’t like at all–but that’s a story for another time), I still wasn’t sure, but I was determined to persevere for the good of my fandom.  It did, admittedly, take me a while to get into XII, but it did eventually happen.  In fact, it happened so well that I spent close to a hundred hours diving into side quests and tracking down elusive Espers.  I liked the License Board system, although many of my characters ended up with essentially the exact same configuration of skills; my biggest problem with the skill progression, though, was that if a character isn’t in a battle, he or she gains no experience, meaning that if you neglect someone (in my case, it was most frequently Penelo, who can die in a fire), and then are forced to use them, say, if the rest of your party dies in battle, then you’re just well and truly fucked.  In order to give yourself the best chance possible, you really do need to switch out party members so that they stay, if not level with each other, at least functional.  I hated that.  I prefer to get into a comfortable routine with a party that I like, and stick with it, so I fought that feature for a while.  It didn’t work out too well.  It is nice, though, that you aren’t forced to keep any particular character in your party at any one time, so instead of dealing with Vaan the Giant Vagina, I generally kept Ashe as my leader.  My Ashe was a raging badass.

6. Final Fantasy VI- It’s probably my own fault that I don’t have more of an appreciation for the SNES era FF installments; since I never had a Nintendo console until the N64, I didn’t really get to play them at all until later ports came out, and by that time the flashier 3D versions had captured my attention more effectively.  That said, it’s hard to ignore a game with a story as good as VI’s.  I find it fascinating when series like this take a facet of their particular mythology and actually bring it into the spotlight, which is what this game does with the Espers; instead of merely serving as battle bitches who c0me out and lay the smack down when called, they’re actually an integral part of the storyline, which I found really neat.  Plus, you know, there’s political intrigue, forbidden love, betrayal, and ninjas!  Who doesn’t love ninjas?

5. Final Fantasy IV- I know I’m not alone when I note that I relatively recently replayed IV upon its rerelease on the DS, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, it would probably have been higher up on the list if there wasn’t so damn much grinding involved to make it through.  I know it’s kind of a non-unique complaint with these games, particularly the older titles, but it just seems to stick out more in my memory with this one.  Remember the Moon?  Remember how TERRIBLE the Moon is?  Yeah.  The Moon doesn’t fuck around.  For serious.  However, the awesomeness of the characters makes up for it, along with some seriously unforgettable plot moments.  Cecil’s conversion from Dark Knight to Paladin on the mountain has got to be one of the coolest, best-told vignettes in video game storytelling that I can remember, and I’d wager many who have played the game would agree with me.  Sure, there are some more contrived elements, like the weak little girl who magically transforms into a summoning badass, but overall, I’d say IV just barely edges out VI on my list.

4. Final Fantasy V- Yeah, yeah, I know.  How could I put this above the beloved classics on the list?  Two words for you, my friend.  Job system.  I’m a sucker for ‘em, and it was this game that really made me into one.  I can take or leave the story; in fact, I confess that I had to hit up Wikipedia for a refresher on what exactly the story was (give me a break, it’s been a while), but the insane level of customization that the job system in this game gives you for your party is enough to catapult it this high on my list.  I *wanted* to level grind, because every battle got me that much closer to giving my characters the mastery of the skills that I wanted them to have.  I’ve been wanting to play this again for a while… maybe I’ll get into that.  Samurai are awesome.

So, that’s the second portion of my list… only three left!  Once again, I want to hear your thoughts, and look for the top of the list soon….

11. Final Fantasy III- Don’t wig out on me; American numbering, remember?  This isn’t the one with Terra and Kefka, et al.  This installment wasn’t even released in the States until relatively recently (late 2006), on the DS.  I’m normally a big fan of games with job systems (hence my weird affection for X-2), but for some reason, I just couldn’t get into III.  Maybe it’s because I hadn’t played any of the older games in a while, and was getting used to the style of the console-based titles, or maybe it was just that I don’t have the patience anymore for the grindy-type RPG when it doesn’t come with any sort of associated nostalgia, as is the case for many of the other games on this list.  Progression felt unwieldy and slow, and the storyline was silly even by JRPG standards.  Put those together and what do you get?  A big pile of “meh.”  For me, at least.

10. Final Fantasy II-   You know what’s a pain in the ass?  Searching for FFII images.  I keep getting ones from IV… anyway, this is another one of those early titles that doesn’t rank particularly high up on my list.  Any game that straight up kills you right off the bat is just bound to make me angry (I *hate* the mechanic of battles you’re supposed to lose, even when I know they’re coming).  The characters are better fleshed out by far in this game than in its predecessor, but not enough that I was that thrilled about running them around in little circles to see what happened next.  Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever finished this one, even though I know I own at least two versions of it right now (PSP and PS1), and have owned a third (GBA) in the past.  Guess I’ll have to remedy that.  For completion’s sake, you know.

9. Final Fantasy I- I actually liked this one more than either of the other two I’ve listed, which is a bit odd, because I find myself thinking of some of the very things I had issues with as pluses where this game is concerned.  The plot isn’t great, but it’s straightforward: there are four crystals!  Go get ‘em!  The characters are one hundred percent generic, but that’s okay too, because that way you can just sort of mold them into whatever you want.  There aren’t that many jobs to keep up with, but as a job system, it works out pretty well, at least in part because it’s so basic.  I don’t know, maybe I just have a soft spot because of all the time I’ve spent reading 8-bit Theater.  Oh, that crazy Fighter.

8.  Final Fantasy IX- Sigh.  I know a lot of people really like IX.  For anyone who didn’t care for the more science-fictiony turn that VIII took, this was the perfect remedy; the whole thing had a less serious cast to it, and the characters were…. were… look, I can’t do this.  The protagonist is David Bowie with a fucking monkey tail, okay?  I can’t respect that.  While we’re on the subject of annoying characters, I’ve gotta say that I also had a big problem with Quina, the chef-hat-wearing thing with the giant tongue that you pick up along the way.  I’m not much of a fan of blue mages in general (except Quistis, god bless her), but this went beyond that.  I did like Freya, though, so I guess that’s something.  There were some parts of FFIX that I enjoyed, namely the skill progression, which takes place through different pieces of equipment that teach you the skills, and the “Active Time Events”, which are essentially side glimpses into the stories behind the characters.  While I don’t mind if games contain elements of stereotypical JRPGs, though, to me that’s pretty much ALL this one was- one big fat stereotype.  As a side note, though, I think this is the game wherein originated my favorite JRPG minigame, “Is That A Dude?”  Seriously, Kuja.  Damn.

I think that’s where I’ll stop for now; that’s four games down, and seven to go.  Look for the next installment of my list soon, but until then, I’d like to hear where you stand on these games (or any of the other ones you feel should have appeared in this bottom chunk).  Agree?  Disagree?  Let me have it.

Links for you folks will go here a bit later today but we wanted to get the episode out as quickly as possible.  For now why don’t you folks have a little chat with Fox.  Maybe he’ll give you his pager number if you need a hook up…..

(I am a terrible person.  Maybe next week I can get my act together for good, before Elaine strangles me.  ~Leah)

Delicious linky goodness!

Persona 4

Rhythm Heaven

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena

No FFXIII demo on US Advent Children bluray

Texan sex offenders may be required to register online gamertags

Broken Steel DLC is…. broken

Retro Game Challenge 2 not coming to the US

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 releasing 7/29/09?

Rise Persona 4 figure makes Elaine happydance

Ghostbusters will be PS2/PS3 exclusive in Europe

Peggle comes to the iPhone 5/12/09

Turtles in Time remake coming to XBLA; and there was much rejoicing

Batman Arkham Asylum pushed to at least the end of summer

3D Realms shut down; you can stop whining about Duke Nukem Forever now

Microsoft’s Massive department loses about 28% of their staff to layoffs

Break music this week is ”Code Red” (while sneaking) from Chronicles of Riddick:  Escape from Butcher Bay.

You remember how Leah loves listener mail right?  Email us at podcast@someothercastle.com or find us on Twitter or Xbox Live.  You can also record a mp3 of your question and send it our way and we’ll put that in an episode.

Linkativity!

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Dark Athena

Persona 4

Pokemon Platinum

Resident Evil 5

Wil Wheaton’s Just A Geek

Marvel vs. Capcom 2

The GameBoy turns 20

Peggle now available in WoW

Trojan virus infects some visitors to Atlus’s website

Square Enix admits they take too long to make games

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years site goes live

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete sells 271k

Texas bill gives tax breaks to game companies

Break music is “Master of Shadow” from the Persona 3 OST

Feedback!  It keeps me from succumbing to the zombieism, you know.  Send it to podcast@someothercastle.com and make me a happy girl.

Having (almost) finished Star Ocean this week, I found myself hacking through some of the post-game content and realizing that while I love the genre–perhaps a little too much–there are definitely a few things that get on my nerves.

1. Games that require a guide

I use strategy guides for pretty much everything.  If that makes me less of a player in someone’s eyes, that someone is cordially invited to go straight to hell.  However, when the game has content that absolutely cannot be accessed without a guide of some sort, that makes even me annoyed, because at that point, you’re excluding the portion of your audience that doesn’t want to shell out the fifteen or twenty extra bucks.  My stock example for this is Final Fantasy XII, where there’s a completely badass spear that you don’t get unless you DON’T open four specific treasure chests throughout the game.  There’s nothing special about these chests, nor is there any particular clue stating that you shouldn’t hit that.  You just have to KNOW, somehow.  That’s dumb.

2. Cutscenes that are a little too epic

I’ve never really understood people that don’t watch the cutscenes in JRPGs at all; the story is a major part of the appeal, to my thinking, and being annoyed that they’re there at all seems a little silly.  However, when I have to turn my controller back on not once but TWICE due to the length of the scene (and yes, this did actually happen at the end of Star Ocean), it’s a bit excessive.  Related to this, if I can’t pause it or skip it the second time around (if it happens to come before a boss fight or something else that I have to repeat), that’s just as annoying.

3. Enemies that make their own rules

Part of the reason to level one’s party or to strive for specific equipment in a JRPG is, logically, to ensure that battles and advancement are easier, or at least that certain factors can be controlled.  So when, for no reason whatsoever, those hard-earned bonuses suddently cease to function, it’s really aggravating.  In Star Ocean, for the entire game, I’ve had one equipment slot taken up by an accessory that prevents my party from being on the receiving end of surprise attacks.  In addition, my main character has a skill, fully leveled, that prevents him from being knocked down from enemy attacks.  In the dungeon I’m currently exploring, for no reason that I can determine, neither of these things function.  It’s infuriating.

4. Horrible voice acting

When this convention is reversed, it’s a glorious sight.  Or sound, rather.

5. Stupid, suicidal enemies

Okay.  Enemies?  I have a suggestion.  When I am level 90-something and you are level 20-something, please do not attack me.  I’m not going to get anything out of killing you, but if you force my hand, you are going to be very dead and I am just going to get annoyed.  So if you stay out of my way, I’ll let you live.  Okay?  Okay.

6. Backtracking for no particular reason

This is related to #5 above, because they often occur in sync; if a quest requires me to go back to an area or dungeon that I’ve been to before, be it recently or much earlier, having SOMETHING be different would be great.  If I’m forced to fight my way through rabid mice to get my ultimate weapon, that just seems unnecessary.  Also, having to fight my way out of a dungeon when I’ve just fought my way in and cleared the boss out is a sure way to make me annoyed.  I just killed your master, bitches!  Show some respect and step off before I smack you with my sword!

7. Grinding

I don’t even have a problem with leveling, as long as you give me something to do while it’s going on…. side quests?  Something?  I just don’t want to run around in circles killing the same five things over and over again until I get enough XP to go on.  Makes me feel like I’m back in Azeroth.

8. Men who look like women

This gives me the opportunity to play my favorite game, “Is That A Dude?,” but seriously, Japan.  I’m not saying he has to be uber-manly or anything, just don’t make me look up my protagonist’s skirt to find out what the deal is, okay?

9. Women who can’t fight

Quick, name five female JRPG characters who actually engage in hand-to-hand combat as their main attack.  I’ve got… Tifa…. and Rikku, I guess…. ummmmmm….. yeah.  Women are, almost invariably, cast as archers/projectile users or mages in JRPGs.  This isn’t to say that they’re any less badass, in general, but they do tend to play a more “support” oriented role.  I’ll be interested to see how FFXIII handles this, with its lead being female…. you know, if it ever actually comes out.  Sigh.

10. Save points (and the lack thereof)

This is actually sort of hit-or-miss.  In some games, you can hardly turn around without tripping over a save point, while with others, if you have the bad fortune to die, you’re going to be going back for hours.  There’s got to be a better way to handle this, don’t you think?

Of course, given my preference for JRPGs as a genre, even though I’ve got ten things to rant about, there are obviously MORE than ten things that I love about them.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t be playing them as often as I do.  There are always going to be those little quirks, though, and those are much more fun to rant about.

This is what emerged from the shipping envelope.

A closeup on the Badge of Courage and cool little drawing included with my handbook.

The book!  You can see that there is a nifty dust jacket on the handbook.  It appears that the inside is a neat poster of the characters from the game.

Inside the book you can see the really cool artwork and the time that obviously went into this thing.

I’ve made it very clear in past installments of this column that I have largely felt RPG games were out of reach and too complicated for me to get in to.  I’ve since realized that this isn’t true at all.  What I need to do is look at RPGs from a different perspective than a fighter or a shooter.  I’m finding if I view an RPG like a book the level of patience I have for figuring out the game mechanics completely shifts.  Watching someone else play through one of these games made this abundantly clear.  I’m much more patient with slow character development, complicated location changes or even ridiculous dialog in books.  In games I’m used to writing this stuff off as secondary and useless because ultimately all I’m going to do is shoot people in the head.  

The entire act of watching someone else play through a RPG is what clicked the comparison on for me.  With Leah piloting the game that I thought was too complicated just became a slightly ridiculous story that I was compelled to follow.  I was willing to understand the mechanics because I wanted to follow the story and the mechanics just come up so much that you can’t help but to learn them as you go.  So what does all of this mean in a broader sense? 

For me it means I’ve had a huge shift in the way I view games and activities that I previously saw as too complex or frustrating.  Now, I want to play a newer RPG by myself and experience figuring out the mechanics and following the story as the game driver.  I also find myself curious about Dungeons and Dragons, something that I previously thought was way over my head.  I’m still in love with shooters, fighting games and puzzle games but I see a place in my gaming time for RPGs and potentially table top game experiences as well.  I have to admit that this is in fact a little odd for me because I thought as I got older my specific gaming tastes would cause me to “specialize”.  My thought was that as my time dwindled I would be forced to choice a specific subset of games (in my case mostly shooters and fighters) and ignore most things outside of my specialty.  I suppose I thought my hobby would imitate my academic career….

It’s turning out that this isn’t the case for me.  As I get older I see reasons for having wider gaming interests.  The more diverse my interests the more people I get to talk to and interact with on a daily basis and the more folks I can drag into pieces of the hobby that I love so much.  The only enemy to this is time.  I don’t have the energy to stay up all night and I have a mountain of responsibilities outside of my job that I have to deal with.  I suspect that in order to balance my rapidly diversifying tastes with my restriction in time I’m going to need some sort of time management strategy.  I may need to once again invoke a schedule for my game time so I can actually get meaningful hours in on as consistent a basis as possible.  This could be a sustainable plan if I could just convince my husband that watching me play an RPG is more interesting than the terrible horror movies he likes to spend his time watching.

I will probably revisit this point in future posts because this new mindset is ever changing.  I am compelled to follow my newfound interests.  This means buying more games in the name of science and exploration!

This week’s vicarious gaming session was especially awesome for me.  I watched Leah play for about 3 hours and I spent way less time confused and asking questions then ever before!  We played until right after the Djose Temple which means we have ourselves a shiny new Aeon to use in battle.  It can best be described as an awesome Zebracorn.  Yes that’s right, Zebracorn, as in a unicorn with zebra markings.  I should really start keeping a dictionary of all the words I make up…..

After watching about 10 hours of Final Fantasy X I really do feel like I am starting to become competent in the mechanics of the game.  I get the sphere grid now and I understand how you progress through it as well as how you essentially level up and gain abilities in this game.  That makes me particularly warm and fuzzy inside because that was really scary the first few times Leah pulled it up.  It’s just so different from any other leveling and abilities interface I’ve encountered before.  We’ve already established I get scared and confused by things I don’t understand so you can see how I might be terrified of this sphere grid thing.

On top of finally grasping the idea of adding spells and abilities to a character I really am starting to understand the dynamics and which characters are good at what.  I find myself particularly enthralled by Lulu because well, she can kill things with fire.  How could I go wrong there.  I actually had a specific moment of revelation this week related to Lulu.  The relationship between an enemies abilities and what spells will cause maximum damage is totally like Pokemon (not that I play Pokemon or anything….).  Fire and ice go together as do water and thunder.  Yes I realize 10 hours is a particularly long time to figure things like this out but I never said I wasn’t slow.  

To recap this week:  I made up a word, I get the sphere grid, spells are no longer scary, Lulu is awesome.   Finally getting a grasp on all this really makes me feel accomplished.  It also makes me feel like I could reasonably pick up a newer RPG and with some patience be able to actually figure the game out.  Before that happens though I’ll have to acquire some patience.  If anyone out there has any extra lying around send it my way.