T w e n t y S i d e d
This week Rocketeer is betrayed by Vossler, the tall, humorless, duty-obsessed military guy who wants to guard the princess. I was glad to be rid of him, since I already have one of those on the team and Basch isn’t any fun either.
In listing his grievances against Vossler, Rocketeer says:
he gets a fucking greatsword by default, while I have to dick around with sword-and-board for entirely too goddamn long;
I hunted in all the shops I could find in Dalmasca. I checked the Bazaar. I stopped and talked to every pissant trader I found. I even hiked to the other side of the Giza plains to Nalbina Fortress and checked those shops. I checked with every merchant in Bhujerba. I honestly thought I was losing my mind. Obviously I’m supposed to have a buster sword. There was probably one offered for free in the tutorial and I somehow missed it.
I was hours into the game, and Vaan was still slumming around with a sword and a small wooden shield like he was a starting character in Skyrim. It was embarrassing. How did I mess this up so bad?
It was quite a shock when I looked online and discovered that I hadn’t made some ridiculous blunder and I was having the intended experience. All of my characters were using more or less conventional real-world weapons, and I wasn’t missing out on a buster sword, a gunblade, an arm-cannon, a sword made of water, or other stylishly ludicrous weapon.
Welcome to the No-Fun Zone
Of all the characters in this story, Cid is the only one who seems to be having a good time. And he doesn’t show up until the halfway point. Also, he’s a bad guy. Everyone else is a humorless mope.
Nobody tells any jokes. There isn’t any romance, aside from the one that ends in death before gameplay starts. Nobody wants to play cards or engage in any treasure-hunting minigames. We don’t chase chocobos, put on a concert, play videogames, gamble away our gil, rescue an adorable animal, or compete in a sports tournament.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about this seriesAgain, I’m talking about games 7 through 10 here. is its sense of playfulness. All of that has been removed or toned down to make room for this downer plot. Final Fantasy XII is like a version of the Matrix where they cut out all the kung-fu and gunfights so they had more time for scenes of everyone sitting around the ship in rags, eating food paste.
But of all the fun things they decided to get rid of, removing oversized swords bugs me the most. I always felt like that was a signature feature of the franchise.
You don’t get any big swords until very late in the game. And even then, they’re just regular big swords. Two-handers. You never get the chance to swing around something the size of a surfboard.
And it’s not like this game doesn’t have silly weapons! Remember our fight with Judge Ghis a few weeks ago?
We run into lots of foes with outrageous weapons. But none of those weapons seem to land in our hands.
More than anything, this makes me think of the “abandoned MMO” idea Rocketeer has alluded to. While it feels a little weird to play a Final Fantasy game where the party is equipped with disappointingly sensible weapons, this is how your typical MMO works: You spend the entire game on a treadmill, working towards the endgame when you get all of the best toys.
Disclaimer: I just took what the game gave me. I didn’t open up the wiki and go sidequesting for exotic gear. I tried reading about how the Bazaar workedRocko will talk about that next week. but it was so mercilessly boring I couldn’t be bothered.
Footnotes:
[1] Again, I’m talking about games 7 through 10 here.
[2] Rocko will talk about that next week.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Thankfully modern games have provided a solution to this issue by allowing players to make in-game purchases with their own real money. Wonders of technology amirite?
I would absolutely pay real money for equipable Seymour’s Hair.
Imagine buying a lootbox in the hopes of getting an epic sword or similar weapon…
…and instead, you got Seymour’s hair.
…five times, in different colors.
Truly, this is the thing we need to get gamers to rise as one shouting “Death to lootboxes forever!”
We will storm Andrew Wilson’s office and do what must be done. Sic semper praedas.
Seymour’s hair definitely ugly enough to be prime NFT material. Also Seymour would totally be into crypto.
Final Fantasy 6 let you suplex a ghost train and it is still one of the most well remembered scenes in that game. I get it if you never played 6 but the sense of playfulness was baked in there as well!
Yeah. It’s also the only FF to my knowledge where you can have a chainsaw as a weapon. And they weren’t the first. I seem to recall a character in V carrying a spear that was roughly twice his height.
The problem VI and the earlier FF’s suffers from is that the graphics aren’t really up to showing the epic scale of cool weapons. Even the “suplex the ghost train” you mention is a sprite-based cutscene, and it’s mostly a sprite spinning around and then a flash. The later FF’s really got to show off how epic/ridiculous the scale of their crazy weapons was.
The swords have been big pretty much since they could animate them swinging. Given the size of the sprites, in order for the swords to show up and have any visual definition, they had to be comparable in size to the sprites themselves ( if not bigger ).
I also enjoyed in FFVI that when Edgar got the Instant-Death proc on the chainsaw he would put on a Jason-style hockey mask. Just silly and fun.
Right. VII is really where the graphics got good enough to have a clear distinction between “the weapon has to be that big for practical visual purposes” and “the weapon is that big because we think it looks cooler that way.”
FFVI also had the Ultima (Atma) weapon, whose size, and length, depended on the wielder’s HP. At max health, the thing is longer than the character, if your HP is in the double digits, it looks more like a knife.
There’s some historical basis for extremely long spears. See for example Macedonian or later European pikemen. The trouble is that extremely long spears are only a good weapon choice if you are standing next to a lot of other friendly men who are also wielding extremely long spears. They’re not a good choice for a man on his own or a man in a small group of adventurers because they’re ineffective at short ranges. You need those other friendly men with long spears to keep people from getting close to you.
Yeah, you’re allowed to drag that Pike around in D&D while dungeon-crawling, even though that’s a ludicrous image.
Similarly, 3rd edition added the Tower Shield, another armament that makes sense in a military formation but less so climbing up/down cliffs, navigating narrow tunnels, or even just one on one combats. Ironically, in the real world warriors started dispensing with all shields period once armor got up to plate quality and started focusing on two-handed weapons for maximized offense.
Apparently min-maxing is an innate human trait.
I mean, technically those sort of extreme bits of gear like pikes and tower shields are supposed to be very effective… But cost and weight a ton. Just like in real life.
Of course~, those fiddly weight limits and units tend to be the first rule that any D&D group throws in the bin. Typically quickly followed by the copper, silver and platinum coins that make for a much saner-ish economy, but a lot of players find also weird and piddly while gold is exciting and exotic..
I’m not sure I love how oversimplified shields got in 5e, but it’s certainly much easier to keep track of a flat +2 to AC, and it cuts down heavily on the ‘my cut purse totally knows how to use a tower shield!’ nonsense.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen D&D stats for a pike. Even longspear only has 10-foot reach which would make it rather short compared to the larger pikes.
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Weapons#content
When I played a character with a pole-arm, I specifically stated that it was a “longspear”, not a pike.
Barret had a chainsaw as a weapon option in FFVII. Chainsaws (or just saws) were in the Final Fantasy Legends series as well. The first Final Fantasy Legend game had a fun glitch with the Saw, where it’s formula for causing instant death was reversed, meaning the easiest way to kill god was to attack him with a chainsaw.
Nope, sorry, can’t let this go:
It is NOT a cutscene – it is in gameplay during a boss fight, a boss fight, that I might add, can be won in a single action by throwing a phoenix down at it.
And of course the recurring boss Ultros. There’s a rafting section that ends in a fight with an octopus, and then for no reason whatsoever this octopus starts stalking your party and fighting you in places that are less and less suited for an octopus. (Who’s the boss at the top of this mountain? It’s Ultros, the Octopus!)
Ultros is Seymour if Seymour were actually in on the joke.
I was explaining Ultros to my wife once, and she was “I don’t get it”. Granted, it is harder to explain the joke of doing wacky shit just for its own bizarre sake which is sometimes a hallmark of the franchise.
Ultros is one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise. He has it in for your party for no discernible reason since he introduces himself for the first time and seems to consider himself your nemesis, even though your party barely acknowledges his existence and basically going “Oh, not this guy again” whenever he shows up. He’s not even part of the main villains team, he just likes to annoy you every once in a while.
Shamus should really consider playing VI. The game can be very dark, but can also be hilarious.
And this is probably nostalgia speaking, but I’m not a fan of later translations rechristening him as “Orthros”. Sure, it’s probabaly a more faithful translation (like “Biggs” instead of “Vicks”, since the former is a Star Wars reference and the latter means nothing), but I much prefer how the original sounds. It also fits his personality better, as if he had given himself that name because he thought he was “ultra powerful”.
Also, Ultros is finally, ultimately, defeated by a sketch of himself…which proves that he’s an octopus. Which he knew.
Yeah, I think a hell of a lot of the charm of the series – especially the early games – is probably the score, and nostalgia.
Ultros comes back from that one. He’s actually ultimately defeated by… debt collectors, or something. Whatever made him get the job at the Coliseum.
Yeah, this is a case of the original translator missing the mythological reference most likely (similar to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the recurring comic relief bosses from the previous game). To me the worst part isn’t breaking nostalgia as it is the fact that it ruins any later references and callbacks due to a lack of consistency throughout the series; it’s easy to miss that a version of the character in question made an appearance in this game.
Even better: it’s possible that literally none of the characters who first fight him face off against him in his second appearance (if you don’t take Edgar or Sabin to the Opera House). I can only conclude that his “revenge” is against the player.
I can’t speak to FF3/5, since they didn’t release in the US until much, much later, but that sense of playfulness in the series was definitely there in 4/6. You didn’t really get the games until 7, when chocobo racing was introduced, but FF6 had some charming moments, like one of the characters starring in an opera (and you, the player, have to remember the lyrics.)
FF4 didn’t have much in terms of silliness or games. The closest you can get is the various “dancers” you find throughout the world who will regale you with a dance when you talk to them. Oh, that and the “secret club” you can buy a pass into that’s heavily implied to be type of gentlemen’s club.
I don’t know how I feel about this sort of thing in these games. I appreciate the momentary levity they offer, but it’s hard not to feel the tonal disconnect that you’re racing to stop the end of the world, until you stop to take a break to race chocobos or hunt for buried treasure or whatever this game’s side quest is.
And it would be one thing if these side quests were just for fun, but they’re always tied in to the game mechanically. You race all those chocobos to get the most powerful summons in the game. You hunt for treasures because it gives you access to powerful gear and a secret super-boss. You play blitzball so you can win someone’s ultimate weapon. Even if you have no interest in these activities for their own sake, there’s a strong incentive to do them anyway for the rewards. Boo.
Some would say Final Fantasy titles are basically defined by their signature swords.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/08/17/final-fantasy-x1
Hey, Shamioose, not sure if it’s just mobile, or just mobile on iPhones, or me, but I can’t for the life of me insert a proper link on an iPhone into a comment. I add an a tag with a sensible href. Then whatever automagic happens to insert the norel nofollow tags nulls out the actual target of the hyperlink.
The above post would be 10% cooler with a proper hyperlink.
And Yet I must offer a counter to the comic. 9 had ridiculous double bladed staffs that were sort of counted as daggers. It also had Flutes, Rackets, and Forks larger than the Spears.
The Daggers and the double bladed staffs (thief swords per wiki) were used by the party leader, and got increasingly more ridiculous with time, so it definitely fits the pattern.
Were the thief swords shown in any promo art or on the box? Maybe that’s why it could be missed.
I’m curious about this bazaar as it’s been mentioned a few times for being complicated. I’m wondering how it compares to the one in Square’s game Secret of Evermore which required extensive bartering to get anywhere.
The bazaar itself is not that complicated – sell loot and unlock packages. The complicated part is optimizing it. It sounds like a more detailed explanation is coming, so I’ll spare myself the typing, but suffice to say I built a many-tabbed spreadsheet with vlookups galore just for that task. (I was also trying to build a cleaner UI for the multiple tabs, but finished the game before finishing that.)
Bit early, but in 12 it works by you selling the loot you get from enemies (they don’t drop money, only various items) and after selling a certain amount of items (or certain combinations of items) it will unlock some extra goodies to purchase. So it’s kind of like a crafting menu except you have no idea what the recipes are.
And with some incredibly obtuse timing requirements. Something like if you need A and B to get an item X, but you sell A first and A is a component of another item Y, it gets used up making that other item Y and you need to gather those materials and sell them again to get the item you wanted.
Yeah, this is the reason many of us talk about spreadsheets. It’s because of how this bullshit combines with repeatable or overlapping recpies.
As a made up example, say one recipe is 5 Wolf Pelts and 3 Tomato Stalks for a Green Leather Armor, while another recipe is 2 Cockatrice Feathers and a Tomato Stalk for a Protective Bracelet.
* If you have 5 Wolf Pelts, 3 Tomato Stalks, and 2 Cockatrice Feathers, you can just sell all that stuff at once and get both items.
* If you have 5 Wolf Stalks, and 3 Tomato Stalks, you can sell those components and buy the Green Leather Armor. But then when you come back with 2 Cockatrice Feathers, you won’t get the Protective Bracelet, because once you buy the first one it “resets” the Tomato Stalk counter.
* Similarly, say you sell 2 Cockatrice Feathers and a Tomato Stalk and buy the Protective Bracelet. Then if you come back with 5 Wolf Pelts and 2 Tomato Stalks, you won’t have enough for Green Leather armor. It was reset when you bought the Protective Bracelet.
This is largely regarded as a bug, though none of the rereleases bothered to patch it. It also gets worse than this, but I’ll save that one for the one where Rocketeer rants about it.
Actually my list of examples is missing one crucial one:
* You sell 2 Cockatrice Feathers and 4 Tomato Stalks, then buy a Protective Bracelet. Later you sell 5 Wolf Pelts. You still need 3 Tomato Stalks, because that counter was reset.
(and in case it’s not clear, not only does the game not tell you these recipes, it doesn’t tell you the status of any of these counters either, which means the player must manually track them to keep up with them)
That’s some bazaar behavior.
I knew the Evermore bazaar. The Evermore was fun. Sir, this game’s bazaar is no Evermore bazaar. (Old joke)
You had like 30 vendors, most of whom wanted trade goods instead of money. You would have to decide for yourself if the guy selling a whatsit for 30 bags of rice was a better deal than the guy who wanted 3 pots and a chicken for one. With a few pieces of note paper and about half an hour, you could get some useful rare items.
I am agreeing with bobbert and disagreeing with Joshua. Actually, that’s an understatement: Joshua’s description of Secret of Evermore is simply incorrect. That’s not a matter of opinion, but of fact.
In Secret of Evermore the bazaar is present only in one of the game’s four levels, and is a minor and optional section. The player *may* use the system to clever gain access to some genuinely nice upgrades, but it isn’t necessary. It does require a little thought, but mostly that just goes down to figuring out which deals are available. Once you do that, it’s pretty easy to find an efficient path to get what you want.
The trick is that there is an invisible timer once you first gain access to it, and a plot event will occur drawing all the vendors away. This puts some pressure on the player although they will likely be (deliberately) surprised the first time it happens. You can access it later though. It’s a good system that both allows the clever or prepared player to quickly gear up, doesn’t punish “failure” much, and pushes the player along the plot while enhancing the illusion of a living world.
A few nit-picks
*The whole thing is optional, but if you don’t hate yourself, you want some ferryman tokens (admittedly a very simple trade)
*The vendors talk about the timer a great deal “Hey, there are 12minutes left to do business before the meeting”
*There is a 2nd bazaar in world 3, and if you brought some extra trade goods from the first you can get a rare item. However, that whole area feels very unfinished; the game apparently released under sever time-pressure.
I am glad you had fun with the game. The bazaar was probably my favorite part of the game. (well, bazooka-dog was pretty cool, too.)
That’s some pretty loaded discourse. What about my statement was incorrect? All I said was that it required extensive bartering to get anywhere.
I very well could be wrong since it’s been over 25 years, but my main takeaway was that you had to trade something like 5 sheep for 4 beads to then trade for 6 rugs, etc., And after 3-5 trades you eventually ended up with a useful item. The bazaar was an entire mini game to itself as others have said. That is the only claim I made.
I made no claims to how present it was in the game (it’s in only 1 of 4 worlds), nor how required any of the interactions or items were.
And that’s why fungible specie was invented!
I actually liked the weapons and in particular the animations for them. Vossler is a great example – he isn’t wielding that two-handed sword like it’s a dagger. He is using a technique appropriate to how heavy that thing must be.
Of course, I also did basically all my grinding with invisible weapons, so I guess that makes me a hypocrite. Oh well.
The oversized weapons are functional as well: in a low-post environment compared to today’s tech, they allow the player to easily visually identify action and motion.
For Shamus: FF6 is on sale for steam, remastered Sprite version. It’s not difficult or long if you want to see a lot of genre ideas taken about as far as SNES-ers technology could go.
Man, I want Shamus to play that game, but I feel that version will give him the wrong idea. They screwed up the music, the graphics are way too bright and it’s full of bugs. Then again, it’s the easiest version to get, unless he’s cool with paying for this one and then emulating the SNES one to play it better.
Well, if you’re going to emulate, it’d be better to go straight to the GBA port that was done.
But then again, emulators are….interesting… in legal terms.
Right, that’s why I said he should at least buy a copy of the game so he could engage in emulating with a clean conscience.
Oh, wait, doesn’t his wife own a Nintendo Switch? I think the original SNES game might be available in their online subscription. Edit: just checked, it’s not. Boo.
Classic SNES though.
Emulators are legal. Your emulator can’t include any of a console maker’s proprietary software or otherwise infringe on its intellectual property, but the console maker can’t stop you from making one. See Sony vs. Connectix for an example of what happens when they try. If you try to sell an emulator, a console maker might still try to sue you–just look at what happened to Bleem–but as far as I know, no console maker has ever won a such a suit in court.
It’s ROMs that are a legal grey area. Console makers have tried to argue that dumping and distributing ROMs is piracy. I think they’re wrong about the dumping, but I think they might well be right about the distributing.
It’s a distinction without much difference – I think it’s fair to assume that whenever someone is talking about “emulation” they mean “emulators + ROMs”, because, AFAIK, basically nobody uses the former without the latter.
Exactly. Someone making and distributing their own software is prefectly legal, but unless users can make or somehow source their own ROMS, that perfectly legal emulation program they downloaded isn’t really going to be that useful…
I messed around with emulation back in the aughts, before I launched this site. IIRC, I had an emulator on my PC that was able to use Playstation 1 disks. So I didn’t need to download any ROMs.
I also remember that it was janky as hell and not a great playing experience.
There’s also the problem IIRC that some emulators aren’t so much their own guess’n’check’ed emulation , and are themselves using rips of the proprietary software on the console. I don’t really know the details, but if SNES (maybe N64?) and earlier consoles are basically an easily observed set of hardware that just links to the cartridge (which does all the actual thinking of the game), then conceptually those can be emulated without copying software. But anything from Playstation onward, anything that runs a disk or flashcart, is running its own OS, which is of course “proprietary.” And hard copies of the games won’t run without that OS. So I’m pretty sure most/the best modern emulators will all count as “piracy” of the console’s OS itself, since that’s always going to be the most effective starting point- though thinking about it I’m fairly sure I have heard that some have been done without that, for the challenge if nothing else?
I also recall Playstation emulators being janky as hell and well known for it at the time.
It must be possible to make an entirely legal Playstation emulator, because Connectix did it with the Virtual Game Station. Sony tried and failed to kill Virtual Game Station in court. The reason that Virtual Game Station isn’t around today is that Sony ended up settling out of court and paying Connectix to make it go away. The Connectix case established that when you are developing an emulator, you are allowed under fair use to study and reverse-engineer a console’s software in order to figure out how the console works.
So, again, you can’t include proprietary software in your product, but you can absolutely make your own software that replicates its functionality, whether that software is the BIOS, the OS, or what have you. Thus, while I am not an expert on the subject, I am confident that non-infringing emulators for at least some post-Playstation consoles must exist by now.
The operating systems argument would also apply to Windows, yet Wine is still a thing. The OS provides APIs that the game calls. You can’t copy the original implementation of those APIs, but you can provide your own.
Well as I said, I don’t know the details- I used OS as it’s more familiar, but now that BIOS has been mentioned I think that was the specific bit that was called out in the old PS emulator. I don’t deny that it’s possible, it just seems like it must take a ton of effort when for piracy’s sake, what’s one more bit of pirating? But where Wine and Steam OS and such have the drive of the PC game market and people wanting to use their legit purchases, the emulators circle back to who’s getting the ROMs from where and what they would care about the emulator running them. Hence, I presume most emulators would use pirated console code, unless someone’s come up with an even better solution.
They get around that by making the user import their own BIOS, which of course will be a legal backup of the user’s personal Playstation system.
(All the talk of Vagrant Story and FFT got me to go through the hassle of getting a PS1 emulator. And then I got distracted by a different game from my childhood.)
I think you underestimate the number of programmers and emulation enthusiasts willing to work on better solutions. Some people may be into emulation merely for piracy’s sake, but some view it as an end in itself and take it very seriously. None of this is secret, you know. Most emulators have GitHub repositories and developer forums. It’s all very public, to the point where Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft could easily do something about it if they thought that their intellectual property was genuinely being infringed.
In the case of bleem! and the other emulators referenced in those legal cases; there was a brief period where you could buy certain Playstation emulators on store shelves. I think there may have even been a couple cheap ones that were only mean to emulate a small handful of very popular games, as a sort of third-party PC porting job.
You can do that whole thing where one group of people reads the code, and carefully describes how it works to a second group of people who write new code that does that same thing, with the first group never writing code and the second group never seeing the code in question, right? Dunno what it’s called, but pretty sure it was found to be legal.
Reverse engineering. That’s essentially how the PC clone market got started. Various companies (most famously Phoenix Technologies and Compaq) reverse engineered the PC BIOS.
Clean room reverse engineering seems interesting. I’ve never worked on such a project, but I may want to add it to my to-do list… if I can find a decent team to work with and an interesting project to work on.
Clean room design! That’s the term I was looking for (this is actually a reply to tmtvl above, but that post doesn’t have a Reply button on it for me).
It’s amazing how many times FF VI has been ported and re-ported, and every time they screw it up. How hard is it to maintain decent music & graphics and pair it with a good translation?
Typolice:
FFXII was originally directed by Yasumi Matsuno (until he took ill and it was passed over to someone else). His first big hit, Tactics Ogre, was inspired by real-life ethnic conflict (the war in Bosnia in the 90’s) and Final Fantasy Tactics takes inspiration from the War of the Roses. His games definitely lean away from the spikey-haired big-ass sword wielders. It’s a shame that we never got to see and never will know his original vision for this game.
Yeah, Tactics Ogre had a little different tone than Final Fantasy.
In the ending of that game, you are assassinated at your coronation by whichever of the races that you pissed off the most during the game.
In one mission, you are attacked by pirates. In the next, the pirate captain’s pregnant widow charges you with a sword and you must kill her too.
After a different one, where you capture a city, one of your advisors pulls you aside. He informs you that your soldiers have been having their way with the enemy women and asks what, if anything, you would like to do about it. (there are in-games costs and benefits to each possible response)
Welp, this is as good a time as any to rant about the stupid, irritating way FFXIII handles its weapon system. You’re given a basic set of weapons at the start for each character and ocassionally you find new ones that are better. Also, you have the option of upgrading your weapons by slathering with random items you find while playing. Each of this systems on their own would be fine, but they’re mutually exclusive and just don’t work together.
Say you have you basic gunblade equipped, so you decide to upgrade it a bit. Then you find a new gunblade, but since you’ve been upgrading the old one the new one, while having higher basic stats than the old one, is now less powerful. So maybe you want to start upgrading the new one instead. Except that you spent all your items upgrading the old one and you cannot transfer the upgrades. So you have to keep playing with the old one while you gather new materials or you will be underpowered. By the time you get enough items to upgrade the new one so it reaches a better level than the old one you’ll soon be finding a new one and the process will repeat. But of course, you have no way to know this unless you played the game already, so you really can’t plan ahead if it’s your first time and you don’t have a walkthrough in hand.
This whole system is just pointless busywork. They could just keep the upgrade system for the same weapons for the whole game, allow you to scrap the old weapons into lots of new material so you have enough to upgrade the new weapons into more powerful versions or just scrap the whole upgrade system entirely and just give you new weapons as you play (which is the traditional way). But they decided to mix all of these systems together and in the process half-assed them all.
I remember Resident Evil 4 did this, too. I must have wasted a LOT of money upgrading a low-level pistol first time through, only to have the merchant pirate guy turn up with a better gun for sale about three hours later. So on a second playthrough I just kept my money until the best gun became available, and immediately ploughed all my money into upgrades for that.
I GUESS it it’s okay in that I can’t remember the upgrades making that much of a difference, but still – why give me the option to do something like that? At least let me get the resources back…
RE4 was considerably better in that respect, though. For one, it allowed you to sell your upgraded weapons back to the vendor for a high price at any time. Second, weapons of the same kind had different exclusive upgrades (the ones you could get once you upgraded every possible stat on them), so you could get different benefits from each and pick whichever suited your playstyle (for instance, one of the shotguns had an exclusive upgrade that allowed its firepower to be the same regardless of distance, while another shotgun had an exclusive upgrade that gave it an incredibly large magazine of 100 shells).
Furthermore, there’s an extra benefit in upgrading your weapons in that upgrading the capacity would fill the magazine at no extra cost, so for those powerful weapons with scarce ammo you could get an occasional free ammo refill.
Also important, the upgrading system was entirely straightforward. You paid money, you got an upgrade. In FFXIII, as I neglected to mention in my previous comment, you needed to create “combos” with your junk in order to achieve a high enough level to create an upgrade. It was, again, pointless busywork.
I’ll admit, seing if you have pulled off the ff13 rant on each post is one of the elements that keeps me coming back!
It’s the small things really…
To be fair, ranting about everything that game does wrong is the easiest thing in the world. If I had the patience and the incentive I could easily make a series like the one Shamus and Rocketeer are making. Then again, I’d have to play through the game again, if only to get some screenshots and… nope.
The worst part is how pointless it all is, too. If you’re not doing any of the postgame, you could just play the entire game straight through with level 1 gear. It’s not even that difficult.
Recently played through Mass Effect 3 and realized that I hate it there too, but for the opposite reason: once you upgrade one weapon to maximum there’s little incentive to ever get another one. So I didn’t. I’m not sure what design purpose this dual system of “irrevocable weapon upgrades and you regularly find new weapons” is supposed to serve but I’m not seeing it.
It’s interesting that the party can come off as “humorless mopes” because (at least on paper) the party composition is very similar FFX’s:
The Pretty-boy protagonist: Vaan/Tidus
The Ice Queen: Ashe/Lulu
The Stoic Veteran: Basch/Auron
Primary comic-relief: Balthier/Wakka
The Non-human: Fran/Kimarhi
The Genki Girl: Rikku/Penelo
And in both games, there’s basically a trilogy of characters who are the funny ones (Vaan/Penelo/Balthier vs. Tidus/Wakka/Rikku) vs. the rest of the party who are all fairly serious. This game even lampshades the fact that Vaan/Penelo are basically comic relief (first paragraph of this post).
I do think the FFX characters are largely just better than their FFXII equivalents[1]: more depth to them, more reason to be involved in the plot.
And it does matter a lot that the missing character in the above list is Yuna – she’s the core of the FFX party, both narratively and emotionally, and there’s really no analogue for this in FFXII, which I think is why the FFXII party feels so “cobbled together”. Ashe is theoretically the narrative core of the party, but she has much weaker ties to the most of the party than Yuna to hers, and nobody really plays the “emotional core” role that Yuna does.
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I think it also just doesn’t help that the party is so boring mechanically. Thanks to the license board system, the characters are all mechanically interchangeable, and I think the fact they’re mechanically boring may bleed into the narrative a bit to.
[1] Exceptions: I actually prefer Balthier over Wakka. As for Fran vs. Kimarhi… I like Fran and Balthier’s dynamic more than anything Kimarhi has going, but the whole “sexy bunny girl” thing is a big eye-roller, so it’s kind of a wash.
I’m sure the lack of mechanical distinction hurt. The whole of FFX’s combat system gave you very clear characterisation from hyper-competent armour destroying Auron, to fast but not so put together Tidus, calculating Lulu, kind healing Tuna, accurate but not strong Wakka.
I’ve always felt Kimahri’s character was hampered by his mismatched / lacking mechanical identity. Describing FFXII as a team of Kimahris feels about right.
Even if it’s a healing piano, you can’t Tuna piano.
…Wait, did I get that punchline wrong?
BUT YOU CAN FISH A TUNA!
Wait…
Tuna fish in a CAN!
Well you’d better free Prince Albert!
He’s running.
I don’t see any of those parallels, aside from the least interesting ‘non-human’ one. Vaan is more of a Genki Girl than Penelo, gender be damned. Ashe is more of a protagonist than Vaan. Balthier, though witty, is hardly comic relief; I’d fit him closer to the cryptic Auron. Basch and Lulu are a pair grimly determined to prevent a repeat of their earlier failure.
The whole comparison sounds like one of those FiveManBand entries on TVTropes where the writer assumes that since they have five characters (he counted! Twice!) they must fit the trope and starts cramming the characters he’s got into the available slots whether they fit or no.
Vaan and Tidus definitely have a similar feel to me: generally upbeat and energetic but have angst over their closest male relative.
Ashe, despite having Yuna’s narrative importance is definitely pretty similra to Lulu in personality – they both have “Defrosting Ice Queen” listed on their trope pages, and they’re even both cold for basically the same reason – people they lost in the past.
But really the point isn’t that the FFXII party has airtight one-to-one parallels to the FFX party, I’m just trying to point out that it’s also fundamentally not that different in terms of personality type. It has a fairly similar mix of personalities ranging from upbeat (Tidus/Vaan/Penelo/Rikku) to aloof (Auron/Basch) to dour (Ashe/Lulu) to non-existent (Fran/Kimarhi), so it’s interesting that they come across as “humoreless mopes”
Just in case you don’t realize, the spikey thing is a fan. Think old-timey women use it to flirt kind of fan, but all, or mostly, metal. There’s an entire martial art and everything. I kinda really want one to a) fan myself at cons when the ac gives out, and b) for self-defense…
This brings up something I’ve often wondered about: how hard do security guards at conventions have to work checking people’s cosplay props? A lot of said props will literally be weapons, and some cosplayers are really dedicated and make gear out of metal or other materials…
I did some research into this back when I was doing some sword design, and it turns out the answer varies based on both venue and convention and is dictated primarily by what kind of insurance policy they carry. The rule I recall arriving at as a “safe” standard design was no edges thinner than 1/4″ or points smaller than 1″ wide and those points and edges need to be rubber, foam, or some other soft material. Nothing that could be swung as a weapon. Sometimes “peacebound” metal weapons that have been tied into the scabbard are allowed, sometimes not.
I just went and checked at DragonCon’s website. Bladed weapons must be sheathed/cased at all times, projectile weapons must be non-functioning. I know I’ve helped out peacebinding swords/daggers in sheaths for them before…
In my head what I want is like a Renn Faire fan with metal spines (not sharp) and strong fabric. I take public transit there and back, and I’ve actually had cops tell me to get a guy to walk me to the train before as well as having to call the transit cops on the train, so it’s kinda a combo of self-defense and I’d get a ton of use out of it (for fanning purposes). Me in con attire, if this doesn’t work think hoop skirt and Rev War dress
All I remember from the tessenjutsu I’ve done is 80% of techniques being “close fan, hit guy with it.”
Think HL2 Combine Metro Cop going ape on Reginald in the Spoiler Warning episode.
What’s your budget? For strength and weight, you can’t beat titanium. You could shear, 18 sticks (spines) 12″ long out of a 1′ square: https://www.mcmaster.com/9039k16/
Take it to a local sheet metal shop and they can shear the strips and drill/punch the hole for the rivet for $100 or so. They could probably put a lengthwise 5 degree break in it too, for strength. Then you can sew the fabric on yourself, drop a rivet in, and away you go! You could go with steel instead of titanium, since steel is basically free. Downside is it will be three times heavier.