John Zeitler

…….the big post about FF13 was supposed to go on time delay for today. Sue me. I was hopped up on chamomile. (Can you really be “up” on chamomile tea? Isn’t that sort of the opposite of its normal effect?) Anyway, a proper post should be up later today. If not, well.

So, some more thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII. I’m two hours into it, which is exactly one hour more than I was at the end of last night… in short, it’s not that the game is boring me, it’s that I have less time to play than I thought I would before I wind up face-down in my mug of chamomile tea.

(On an unrelated note, have you ever had chamomile tea? Of course you haven’t. Because you’re awake now.)

I can see where the complaints about linearity would come into play. There haven’t been very many branching paths, and what ones there have been all lead pretty much immediately to dead ends with a treasure chest sphere. In some circles that’s considered bad game design, and to an extent I agree. More to the point, some of the hallmarks of a good RPG don’t come into play until the two-hour mark, specifically the game’s progression system (here called the Crystarium, it’s a fusion of the Sphere Grid and… I’m getting to that, actually). Overall, a lot of the more strident complaints are valid.

The thing is, though, I’m looking at FF13 as something a little bit different. After the programmer’s-orgasm that was FF12 (which I liked, dammit, because strategy means training your soldiers to think on the battle-level while you think on the war-level), the designers went back to the drawing board and started asking, “do we really need all this stuff?” They redesigned the battle system, looking at it from the abstract point they did back in 1987 when designing the original Final Fantasy, and taking into account the technology that’s available now. The result is probably one of the most engaging systems I’ve dealt with so far, even if on a purely skill-based level it’s not as complex as, say, the Tales system or that found in Eternal Sonata. The short version is: you can still mash A to win every battle, but I can see now how they’re going to change things up on down the road, maybe five or seven hours from now.

What really makes an impression on me, though, is the Paradigm system. In brief: you give your party a “10,000-foot view” set of orders, and they assign themselves into roles based on that set of orders and adjust their Auto-Battle behavior accordingly. For example, in the Relentless Assault Paradigm, your party leader (in this case Lightning) takes on the role of Commando, while the other two active party members (in this case Sazh and Snow) become [I can't remember what they're called right now]. The roles are a hybrid of a character class (along the lines of FF X-2’s Dressphere Grid in that they can be changed on-the-fly) and something more akin to the general party roles present in Dungeons and Dragons’ fourth edition (but skewing more towards FF-traditional classes).

Really, the whole game (in terms of play mechanics) could be likened to D&D 4E. It’s a total revamp: a redesign from first principles and starting with a fresh view of the abstractions necessary. Viewed in that light, the resistance to the game’s changes is at once understandable and expected. But that still doesn’t make the kneejerk complainers right.

About the only thing that I can say is slightly disappointing is that the 360 version doesn’t look quite as nice as the PS3 version, but honestly, the differences (in my estimation) are so negligible as to prompt the thought “who f%$#@ing cares?“.

And the story? Well, I seem to recall thinking, back in 2006 in that darkened theater in Los Angeles, that Square Enix had their work cut out for them getting a decent story out of the concepts shown. And I also seem to recall being skeptical when SE announced that there were going to be no less than three games “branded” as FF13. Well, I have since become intimately acquainted with the flavor and texture of my sneakers, because quite honestly there’s possibly three dozen games to be made out of this story and these characters. Sazh in particular has grabbed my attention; the fact that he looks like he fell out of DJ Hero should not fool you for an instant, because there’s something up with him and I must know what. It has been a very long time since a game has made me feel this way, and it is a welcome feeling.

In reverse order, no less. I’m an hour into Final Fantasy XIII– not even through the first chapter. So far I like what I’ve played.

And last night, I tried making up a home version of the kind of breadbowl-pasta meal you could get for far cheaper at a pizza place. I’ll just say it was a valiant effort and move on for the time being.

More tomorrow, folks.

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

So I spent this night in anticipation of the “lucky” Final Fantasy… by watching the “unlucky” one, The Spirits Within. I still maintain it wasn’t a bad movie, just one that (like, well, most movies) over-promised and under-delivered. The project was ambitious and unfortunately ten years ago the tech just wasn’t there. It is now, which is why we have stuff like the gorgeous (yet, in terms of story concepts, absolutely wretched) Avatar.

That’s part of why I can’t bring myself to hate TSW or Avatar nearly as much as I “should”. To me, those films represent technological leaps that might be a bit over-reaching, but at least they’re trying something different. Would I prefer that a good (or, hell, let’s split the difference and say “not awful”) story go along with them? Of course. But the thing is, if you can only put your money in the writing or the visuals, while writing might get you Oscars, the visuals are going to get you butts in seats.

Let me say this, though. I don’t hate James Cameron. I can’t. The guy directed Aliens. I mean, that alone should be good for at least two or three stinkers. Then he did The Abyss and Terminator 2. The guy’s earned his right to write obnoxious furry wish-fulfillment, if you ask me.

The concept of a Warhammer tournament is a little different from what’s usually thought of by the word. Unlike, say, a poker tournament or a basketball tournament, every participant in these events plays the full complement of games (usually three). Matches are made at each stage of the tournament, usually by rankings, so that everyone stays competitive at any point– a player who gets blown away in his first match could get decisive victories in the next two and come away with an overall win.

Furthermore, since each player has a distinctly different set of figures, and mission objectives change with each stage, there’s almost no predicting what you’ll face. For example, in my Round 2, I wound up taking the attacker’s role against a set of Chaos Space Marines… who were defending by not defending. My opponent chose to keep all of his forces in reserve, let me blunder in and wonder what happened– which also negated the orbital bombardment that I was entitled to at the beginning of the match, because there was nothing there to hit– and subsequently wiped the floor with me.

Overall, though, the $5 or so you pay as an entry fee is really more of a token gesture to the shop hosting the event. That five bucks guarantees you about six to eight hours of wargaming in a competitive and friendly environment. Some shops or clubs will even provide pizza or drinks. Really, it’s best not to go in thinking you’ll win, because unless you’ve got a decent amount of experience behind you, you probably won’t. Instead, focus on the game itself and enjoying the play, rather than obsessing over the results.

Oh, and incidentally: I learned the importance of vehicles. I’d been thinking they were just big targets, but they might just be worth having a couple around… which is why my Imperial Guard army is going to be fitted up with four tanks and four assault carriers.

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

So today I had a better Pittsburgh Transit Experience than I did on Thursday.

Let me set the stage for you. Wednesday night I got it in my head that I wanted to take the bus to work from here on out, as it was (in theory) possible. I had schedules and a fairly strong sense of where I needed to be, and at what times, in order to safely convey myself to and from work. Turns out that getting to work wasn’t a problem at all– I got downtown fairly early, was able to get a hot chocolate from a coffee shop, and was at the door to work before 7:30a. Beautiful. Getting home, however, was a four-hour-long exercise in pain. First, I waited for half an hour at the stop I’d been dropped off at for the bus to take me back downtown, only to discover that it doesn’t stop there on the way back. I instead took a different line downtown, which then became an exercise in finding out where the Port Authority moved my stop for the one line that directly connects downtown to the area near my house. It would have been very helpful for them to put up a sign saying “this stop is closed, please go X blocks that way to catch your line”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. By the time I realized where I needed to be, I had already passed the deadline for the last run of that line anyway. So I caught another line which was supposed to take me directly there, but which instead dumped me off in Wilkinsburg (about halfway between downtown and my house). This was around 6:25p; bear in mind, I left work at 4:30p. I had to wait half an hour for a connecting bus to take me to the Monroeville Mall, which actually overshot where I needed to go but (naturally) didn’t take a route that went anywhere near my house. That line then landed immediately before the connector back to my house arrived… of course, that connector took the long and ridiculously windy path, overshooting my house twice more. By this point the dramamine I’d taken at 5:30a was starting to wear off, and I was starting to get very carsick. Conveniently this negated the ravenous hunger I’d been enduring since, oh, 4:35p.

That was Thursday. Today I managed to find all the correct stops and get there on time every time. I had enough time in transit to finish a game (almost– there was one last puzzle for me to solve), no less. I left work at 4:25p and arrived at the plaza near home at 5:30p, whereupon I had dinner at the Chinese buffet. Simple.

Despite the aggravation and tension involved in catching a bus constantly, I’m probably going to continue taking mass transit to work for three reasons. The first is that it forces me to get some amount of exercise in each day; specifically, the stop near work is about a quarter of a mile down a mild hill from the office, and the interval between the stops downtown is anywhere from three to six blocks. This averages out to about half an hour on foot each day, give or take. The second is because being on a strict timetable helps me with impulse control: I work near the hobby shop that hosts GASP, and if I had my car available every day, I would pretty much be going directly from work to the shop to dump money into Warhammer figures. Same goes for games and anime; removing the easy daily access to the store reduces the temptation to spend money there.

The third reason is that 99% of the hassle involved could be alleviated if I didn’t live out in the middle of East Nowhere, and as a result my next big task is to find someplace within reasonable access of a real bus line.

At 6:37p, I completed “The Elysian Box”, the final puzzle of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box on the DS. This is the sixth game cleared in 2010. Forty-four games remain to be cleared for the 50/2010 challenge.

By the time you read this, I’ll likely be a good distance of the way to work… on a bus.