The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The downside of taking breaks between installments of this game is that when you have a game so thoroughly built upon making an extended project out of your characters, you occasionally… forget what you were doing with your characters. Luckily, it usually just takes a few minutes of glancing at abilities to figure out what I was doing again with character abilities.
With the plot? Not so much, since we have unfortunately slipped into a mire wherein we are going in a seemingly random direction for no reason beyond the fact that there’s stuff in that direction or something and I guess we can go that way or something? We seem to have nicely stepped away from our ostensible goal of finding the Earth Crystal, that’s not great. So it’s off to the Desert of Shifting Sands, because that’s close on the map and we haven’t been there yet, so why not?
Demo Driver 8: Dollar Dash
If anyone ever asks me to explain EVE Online again, I’m just going to lock them in a room where they have nothing to play other than this game. That should serve as an object lesson.
The problem with any sort of endless game is that you have to provide a reason why people are going to keep playing. You need to offer something, well, unique.
It’d be unfair to say that Dollar Dash is a bad game. As games go, it’s pretty well functional. I might argue that it’s on the lower side of functional, but that’s not the point and it doesn’t really help or hurt the game on the balance. The problem it has isn’t about whether or not it works.
No, the problem is that it’s a game with the barest form of a game beyond the expectation of having multiple players beating the snot out of one another on a regular basis. Its single-player offering is perfunctory, there to train you and help you unlock things for the online experience, and that online experience is reliant on people deciding that they’d rather play this game as opposed to the countless entries doing the same thing, only better. It’s surplus to requirements, and it offers little to compel the player to care.
Compression play
It’s hard to stress how wonderful flying feels in the game, and it’s very hard to say whether having a longer game with more opportunities for flight would make it feel better or just tedious.
I’m almost finished with Saints Row: Gat out of Hell. I bought it right away, of course, because it will be an odd day indeed when something is released within that franchise that I don’t want, but I saved it for a while with full knowledge that I would be able to blow through it in a very short amount of actual play. True to form, here I am, with the game almost completely finished, even down to picking up the wobbly collectibles scattered throughout the game, a technique I generally eschew because it’s massively time-consuming in a larger city.
At the same time, I can appreciate the height of the end all the more because of where I started.
The start of the game, you see, drops you right back at the beginning of the usual Saints Row power curve, and leaves you at the end in roughly the same place as you were at the end of Saints Row 4 with an arsenal of slightly different superhuman powers and a flight system that’s both brilliant and fun. The difference is that instead of sinking 40 hours into the game to be most of the way to completion, I’m almost there in five. As there’s an extra layer of appreciation there.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The party has a boat again, which is a good thing. It’s impossible to imagine that the fate which befell the last boat will also befall this one, due in no small part to the fact that this boat is not being pulled along by a sea serpent. With this boat, we can hopefully prevent the last crystal from shattering, which would both be the first successful effort that the group had made thus far and also be kind of a failure anyway.
I mean, we’re down to saving a quarter of the world-preserving crystals here, somehow I don’t think the one still working will make the other three better.
Still, no point in not trying, right? Off we go, and to the great surprise of absolutely no one, there are only a handful of locations to go to that we haven’t already visited, thus making the process of locating the Earth Crystal chiefly a matter of finding which one has something relevant to do there. At least it’s consistent?
Demo Driver 8: Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians
Are you? Is there a reason I was supposed to care about this? Were you going to tell me why I should care about it?
I’m not generally a fan of Steam’s recommendation setup simply because, well, it doesn’t work too well. It picks out things that it thinks I’ll like, but it bases those recommendations upon elements that aren’t necessarily delivered with any panache. Case in point: Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians.
Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of pairing music with gameplay. When done correctly, it really marries rhythm to action, something that creates a different gameplay flow than you normally find. So the idea of Beatbuddy, of having an action-adventure game that flows along with the beat, is very appealing to me.
Unfortunately, the game fails to deliver on that promise. Beatbuddy has great music, great visuals, and even largely solid gameplay mechanics with a few downsides. But not only does the music fail to flow along with the gameplay, in many cases the marriage between the two makes the game less fun and playable, rather than more. Which seems pretty notably backward, all right.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 