When worlds collide.

Download: Produced 2014.11.16

Lusipurr, SiliconNooB, and Mel discuss Vagrant Story at length, and pass judgement on one of the great ideological debates from the past: Gameplay vs. Story. And, in advance of Thanksgiving, Puritans receive a well-deserved sledging from all parties.

[Pictured]: The Halloween Face-Pack free DLC.

Assassin’s Creed Unity Is Even More Cinematic Than Initially Thought

Roughly a month ago an anonymous Ubisoft employee sent out a company email stressing the fact that Assassin’s Creed Unity would be the most optimised game thus far seen on eighth generation consoles, and that the graphical refinement of the title was much superior to the late September release of Shadow of Mordor:

“By the amount of content and NPCs in the game, from someone who witnessed optimization for lots of Ubisoft games in the past, this is crazily optimized for such a young generation of consoles. This really is about to define a next gen like no other game before. Mordor has next gen system and gameplay, but not graphics like Unity does. The proof comes in that game being cross gen.”

With this week’s release of Assassin’s Creed Unity one is very happy to report that said Ubisoft employee has been completely vindicated in their claims, and that the game itself is a polished and innovative next-gen gem like no other!

Everyone knows that in terms of cinematic presentation the lower the framerate is, the more filmic the experience will be, and to this end the Assassin’s Creed Unity team has hit it out of the park. The developers initially indicated that they wished to avoid immersion-breaking 60fps gameplay by targeting a 30fps refresh-rate – a framerate which largely approximates the film medium’s 24 frames-per-second gold standard. Well, as it turns out Ubisoft were able to greatly exceed their initial framerate goals by managing to hit the 24fps cinematic sweet spot for the Xbox One version of Assassin’s Creed Unity, while the PS4 version of the game runs at an even more cinematic 20 frames of animation per second throughout much of the ordeal experience! This is actually quite ideal, as the more hectic the action surrounding the player grows, the more cinematic the framerate becomes, allowing plenty of time for players to react to the enemy’s attacks.

It is not only in terms of presentation that Ubisoft has managed to improve upon the Assassin’s Creed formula, as they have also been able to freshen the experience up in three significant ways, and in so doing have managed to fix three lingering flaws inherent to the Assassin’s Creed formula. One of the biggest longterm problems facing an annual series like Assassin’s Creed is that it becomes prohibitively difficult to overhaul gameplay systems in any significant way. Because of this gamers quickly become overly familiar with a list of gameplay beats and tropes which quickly become expected, and thus passe. Assassin’s Creed Unity solves this diabolic problem in genius fashion by adding invisible walls, teleporting NPCs, and random falling traps to the franchise, thus injecting the element of surprise and some much-needed mystery into otherwise familiar proceedings. Gamers will have to negotiate their way around buildings they cannot see, dodge NPCs which randomly appear in their path while escaping guards, and pre-empt the placement of randomly distributed falling traps which will send players plummeting down an otherworldly abyss.

The second problem faced by the Assassin’s Creed series is the advent of ‘let’s play’ Youtube videos, and the fact that it is not action-adventure sandbox titles which tend to play well on this kind of video format, but rather horror games. ‘Let’s play’ videos are a proven source of free advertising for video game software, and if any game publisher worth their salt wishes to have one of the masters of the genre like PewDiePie scream incoherently at their title in ten minute bursts, then they will have to provide some horror-themed content to engage their refined intellect. To this end Ubisoft has created the Halloween Face-Pack free DLC for early adopters who purchase the game in its first month of release. The Halloween Face-Pack initiates a random chance of transforming characters into hideous Lovecraftian beasts during cutscenes, thus giving the game plenty of mileage on the Youtubes!

Finally, a third persistent flaw which has bedeviled the Assassin’s Creed series since its initial conception [if one just completely ignores the existence of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation] is its misogynistic lack of female assassin’s with which to smash the patriarchy. Assassin’s Creed Unity initially caught a lot of flack in this regard, yet it would appear that Ubisoft has once again gone above and beyond with their peerless gender representation by featuring the gaming world’s first completely gender-fluid NPCs. This is to say that women are able to randomly transform into men, and men into women. Ubisoft truly is a developer of the twenty-first century.

Thank you, based Ubisoft!

Ubisoft Lead the Way With the World’s Best Ever Review Embargo

With such a special game as Assassin’s Creed Unity to surprise and delight the masses, many were perplexed as to why Ubisoft were reluctant to trumpet the game’s interesting features at their earliest possible convenience. While the game effectively went on sale at 00:01 of November 11 – the game’s day of release – Ubisoft’s review embargo agreements nevertheless stipulated that reviews were not to be published before 12:00 that day, some twelve hours after the game went on sale. In the wake of such speculation, Ubisoft’s initial explanation for this curiosity was rather unconvincing:

“Having the online elements available and having populated worlds is essential to creating a representative and complete experience for reviewers. Achieving this prior to launch is incredibly complex, which is why some games are being reviewed much closer–or as was the case with Destiny, even after–the game launches.”

It would seem passing strange to imagine for a moment that review embargo conditions which were required for Bungie’s always-online multiplayer shooter Destiny would also be required for Ubisoft’s predominantly single-player Assassin’s Creed game simply because it features a throwaway multiplayer mode. No, that cannot truly be what Ubisoft were really thinking.

If one considers all available information then the real explanation for Ubisoft’s intentions is actually laughably simple and infinitely more consumer-friendly. For months now gamers have been locked in existential struggle with a corrupt gaming press. It has been revealed that the majority of game blogs are wont to collude with one another in their coverage, hold game coverage ransom to lewd sexual favours, and are on a constant look-out to punish games which feature sexy female protagonists or no female protagonists at all. Ubisoft were not looking to pull a fast one over on gamers by disallowing critical coverage until midday of the game’s release, instead they were indicating that they have heard gamers loud and clear, and fully intend to stand in Unity with us in not supporting the corrupt game journalists either!

Kingdom Hearts: The victim of one man’s mental infirmity?

Nomura Is Losing It

When attempting to get to the bottom of just what happened to the gameplay of Final Fantasy XV, or discerning quite why the Kingdom Hearts series has devolved into such meandering dreck, one name that is almost certain to crop up is that of Square Enix visual kei mascot, Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura found his way to prominence initially by creating character and monster designs for the Final Fantasy series on the Super Nintendo, and would then go on to garner much in the way of celebrity by creating the now famous anime-inspired character designs for Squaresoft’s landmark title, Final Fantasy VII. Nomura quickly compounded that success with the commercially successful launch of the Kingdom Hearts series, with which his name has become synonymous – somewhere along the way however there is the sense that something went wrong for the guy. The original Kingdom Hearts game [for all its many flaws] presented a story and atmosphere which was charming and magical. It also happened to be simplicity itself. The gaming world can probably thank Disney for this initial success, as Nomura has noted with frustration on many occasions that they would knock back brilliant ideas of his, such as Sora being a chainsaw-wielding furry. Much like an oriental George Lucas, it would seem that success was able to cement Nomura’s creative control over the franchise, and the series has been suffering ever since.

That being the case, one may well ask what has driven the man to steer the Kingdom Hearts series increasingly off-course, and what served as his initial kernel of inspiration when drawing up the plans for the game that would become Final Fantasy XV? His answer: burning anger!

“I am a person more on the dark side like Xehanort and co., I harness the burning anger in my heart into what I create. Kingdom Hearts III’s current development explodes very much in this sense. When I think about it, I had an explosive mindset when I made the first Kingdom Hearts as well.”

Quite whether this anger has always been a factor in his game design, or whether he is just impotently smouldering with rage since being turfed from the directorship of Final Fantasy XV is something we will likely never know. What does seem apparent however, is the fact that Nomura does not seem at all well, which may explain why several of the projects under his supervision have been allowed to drift without firm direction, not least of which is Final Fantasy XV. As for the Kingdom Hearts series, the complete lack of any kind of narrative resolution which has contributed to increasingly muddy storytelling can likely be attributed to the way that Nomura views himself in relation to Sora:

“Each time, it’s a battle with Sora and co. who are the exact opposite of myself, it’s been over 10 years and yet we haven’t reached a conclusion. In Kingdom Hearts III as well, I am scheming many challenges that Sora and his friends must overcome, because I myself cannot lose either. And in preparation for the great battle that lies ahead, we have this one book that looks back on their entire journey. Thus when I look back at all the material, I feel that fever again. Fans who will continue the journey so far alongside Sora and his friends will also recall their own feverish enthusiasm. With that passion, we will not lose to darkness, and Sora’s journey will continue onwards.”

“I am scheming many challenges that Sora and his friends must overcome, because I myself cannot lose either.“; “Sora’s journey will continue onwards.” – it sounds as if Nomura’s approach to the Kingdom Hearts series is to simply keep the narrative in a static holding pattern to perpetuate the series, while at the same time adding in buckets of additional story-threads with each installment in order to churn out more content. Then again, Nomura’s failures as a director may simply be due to the fact that by his own admission he does not really play games, and so this baffling interview may just be so much explosive verbal diarrhea.

A modern take on dungeon crawling.

Download: Produced 2014.11.09

Lusipurr, SiliconNooB, and Mel take a break from the addictive podcast Card Game side quest and focus instead upon the podcast’s dungeon crawler block puzzle aspects. Lusi and Mel power up an ancient communication device, but SN fails to hear its call.

From the Cinematic Production of Interview with the Vampire

Download: Produced 2014.10.26

Confronted by a ledger sheet full of maths and sums, Lusipurr readies his slide rule and delivers some Consumer Advice, and SiliconNooB takes a holiday from inebriation to present more of the inane burblings that are symptomatic of Ubisoft’s Verbal Ebola.

Box Art (N.A. Version)

In the last year of the twentieth century, a Japanese developer hight SquareSoft published a game which sought to improve upon the political world-building that had been on display in their acclaimed 1997 release, Final Fantasy Tactics. To all but the most optimistic of observers, such a goal seemed to verge upon the impossible: Tactics had seen the creation of an world entire: not only a mythos, but social, political, cultural, and religious systems had all been constructed along historical lines, displaying divergences, developments, and shifts in cultural memory. The result was a game that not only provided a deep and compelling fantasy world full of knowledge to be uncovered and revealed, but also a setting which seemed to exist in a human reality: where history, and our conceptions of it, are shaped by long dureé structural forces in which we necessarily participate, and through which we are unknowingly shaped.

Nevertheless, in the year 2000, SquareSoft had the confidence to try and improve upon their recently-displayed mastery of realistic political fantasy world-building. Vagrant Story is the result: a game which, for all intents and purposes, plunges even more quickly and more deeply into a world of political factionalism and double-crossing machination, beneath and behind which a far darker menace lies. For, when the malevolence of man is combined with a fearsome power, it threatens the the world itself.

Battle System

Released to critical acclaim both in Japan and abroad, the consensus is that Vagrant Story is one of the most finely polished exercises in world-building and game design which the industry has yet seen. With a translation by Alexander O. Smith described, at the time, as “unprecedented”, the story is delivered with a literary polish that would still be impressive today, let alone during the PlayStation era. In addition, the soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto (a Final Fantasy Tactics veteran) establishes an atmosphere which is unnervingly chilling. And, the artwork of Hiroshi Minagawa and Akihiko Yoshida also follows on from Final Fantasy Tactics, firmly establishing a mode of artistic representation that would become a staple of SquareSoft–and later, SquareEnix–fantasy productions, seen in Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIV.

Now available on the PlayStation Network as a PSOne Classic, Vagrant Story is an affordable title which every role-playing game enthusiast should experience. We hope that you will join with us in our playthrough over the next four weeks, using this post to discuss and share experiences, frustrations, and observations about your place in the game: whether you have time to complete it, or only play a little, share your thoughts with us. A selection of the best comments from each week will be included in our Podcast.

We look forward to playing, and discussing, Vagrant Story with you!

Easter! Bunnies! Rainbows!

Download: Produced 2014.04.20

Lusipurr is distraught when he reads on the internet that there is no such thing as the Easter Bunny, but SiliconNooB is on hand to reassure him to the contrary, doling out both intoxicating libations and saccharine fairy-tales with generous abandon.

Back to the future!

Square Enix Claims to Be Returning to a Focus On Serious JRPG Development

What a frustrating company. Over the course of the seventh generation Square Enix lost its soul, and it has only been obvious to every individual possessed of a working brain that they have been barking up entirely the wrong tree with their efforts to create games with a global appeal. Throughout the fourth, fifth, and sixth generations Square Enix established themselves as a global household name – not because they made a consciously focus-tested global product, but rather because they made a uniquely Japanese product which held global appeal. Just imagine if Hiyo Miyazaki had decided that he needed to strip his films of Japanese culture and references in order to appeal to a global market, one imagines that his efforts would be met with middling results, much like Square Enix’s results throughout the seventh generation! It was as though one day out of the blue Square Enix just decided to junk an approach that had been working very well for them right up to that point. Instead of their making the games that gamers demonstrably bought up in large quantities from them, they instead decided to make a product with “global appeal” – which is a problem when the entirety of their knowledge of the outside world can best be summed up with a crude clip-art slide depicting cats, money, and large men with cigars.

Now if they are to be believed [and that is a big ‘if’], Square Enix are set to return to making serious ‘heavy’ JRPGs. The reason one harbours some doubts in this respect is because Square Enix seems to change corporate direction on a quarterly basis and is certainly not beyond a little PR BS-ing in their relations with the media, thus the proof will be in the eating. At any rate, if this change of heart results in more titles like Bravely Default then so much the better. Speaking to Nikkei Trendy, Square Enix’s new president, Yosuke Matsuda, revealed the company’s proposed turn-around:

“Not just limited to games for smartphone or console, but we do have some global titles lined up. However, regardless of whether they’re for smartphone or console, there’s a difficult element to developing global titles, so we’ll be making them without focusing too much on the ‘global’ aspect.

Due to having split [the development mindset] according to regions around the world, we weren’t able to see this clearly up until now, but fans of JRPGs are really spread around the world, through the means of various networks, the latest information that is announced in Japan is instantaneously being spread across fans throughout the world. Whether it’s North America, Europe, or South America. There really isn’t much of a gap [in the relay of information].”

Could Square Enix really be about to junk this business strategy?

During the interview Matsuda also identified this mass market approach as being to blame for the poor sales of Hitman: Absolution, and signalled that their Eidos properties would be making a return to a focus on the core gamer:

“The development team for Hitman: Absolution really struggled in this regard. They implemented a vast amount of ‘elements for the mass’ instead of for the core fans, as a way to try getting as many new players possible. It was a strategy to gain mass appeal. However, what makes the Hitman series good is its appeal to core gamers, and many fans felt the lack of focus in that regard, which ended up making it struggle in sales.

So, as for the AAA titles we’re currently developing for series, we basically want to go back to their roots and focus on the core audience, while working hard on content that can have fans say things like ‘this is the Hitman, we know’. I believe that is the best way for our development studios to display their strengths.”

It is certainly true that Hitman: Absolution had a very poor critical reception because of the degree to which it dumbed down Hitman formula, yet the claim that the game sold poorly because of this is a very odd comment to make, mostly due to the fact that it is not at all true. Matsuda has been holding aloft Bravely Default‘s strong sales of 810,000 copies sold as evidence that the company should return to focusing on JRPGs, yet looks at Hitman: Absolution‘s 3.62 million copies sold as evidence that the game under-sold. If the game did not sell enough copies to justify its existence then that is a problem of budgeting, not a problem of sales performance. A Hitman title was never going to perform much better than Absolution did. The modest success of Bravely Default can seem more meaningful by contrast because the game did not cost the world to make. This is a lesson that Square Enix should have learned from the success of Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana series on the DS and Wii. Hannah Montana [2.65m], Hannah Montana: Music Jam [1.55m], and Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour [1.38m] certainly did not sell as many copies as Hitman: Absolution, yet profits stood to be much higher on account of the fact that not very much money was likely spent on developing the games themselves.

If Square Enix remain true to their word then one will be most delighted, however they must be prepared to put in the hard yards in order to reclaim their stake in the JRPG genre. The JRPG industry was originally a niche genre until Squaresoft themselves almost single-handedly transformed it into a mass market proposition. That is no longer true, and even very high quality JRPGs will these days struggle to reach a million units sold, so it will not simply be a case of Square Enix pouring tens of millions of dollars into a project, slapping their name on the case, and selling several million units [as was the case for Xenogears and Chrono Cross. The key here will be for them to greenlight lots of smaller high quality JRPGs like Bravely Default that only have to sell five hundred thousand copies in order to turn a tidy profit, while they work their way back up to the big stuff – that way they will have money coming in between their major releases in the Final Fantasy series.

Coming to a PS4 near you!

Activision To Switch to PS4 As Lead COD Platform

Phil Spencer takes the reins as head of Xbox [and its other assorted multi-media endeavours] this week, directly under the watch of his division boss, Stephen Elop. The appointment would seem to come at a bad time for the company if the rumours are to be believed, as it appears that Activision are gearing up to make the announcement that the PS4 is now the lead platform for all things Call of Duty. With the Call of Duty franchise always being so closely tied to the Xbox brand for the past seven years, the magnitude of this announcement really cannot be overstated. It would be very easy for Lusireaders to dismiss this prospect due to a lack of direct relevance, but the Call of Duty IP is a massive force in entertainment, and such an announcement will bolster the PS4 userbase by a significant amount. This rumour comes by way of industry insider, Famous Mortimer [Pete Dodd], so, as always, take it with a grain of salt until it can be confirmed by Miley Cyrus:

“I’m not ready to jump on the XB1 is doomed train yet. Titanfall, or really any game, can turn the fortunes, but as of now – yes, good start but valid concerns. The PS4 is above and beyond all projections and publishers are re-calibrating to this. I heard that Activision is going to make a public announcement about COD changing to the PS4 as lead platform. I have no idea if this means DLC (I assume MS locked that down for multiple years) but COD was a XBOX 360 game that happened to be on the ps3 last gen. That will be a hugely symbolic move… and don’t discount what that means to the masses.

Also, don’t sleep on inFamous. It will be very, very, close to Titanfall XB1 this month. Sony is also doing far more digital sales than MS so far (which is a weird switch from the middle of last gen).”

Activision picking the PS4 as lead development console certainly would not be a surprising turn of events, given that almost every studio has already adopted it as their default tradeshow demonstration platform, owing to its superior processing capabilities. Hearteningly, we have even begun to see PS4 versions of games receiving exclusive features which are presumably not possible to impliment on Microsoft’s platform, such as Metal Gear Solid V‘s realtime weather and lighting model on the PS4 which contrasts favourably to the static skybox utilised for the Xbone version of the game.

Meanwhile, some developers are acting a little cagier regarding their game’s technical performance, with Ubisoft’s Colin Graham providing some less than convincing assurances that both console versions of Watch Dogs look about the same:

Gamepur: “Ubisoft are showing ps4 footages of Watch Dogs, what about xbox one? will we ever see watch dogs running on xbox one?”

Colin Graham: “I don’t know. It really doesn’t look different though. The two versions are identical in almost every way.”

Gamepurr: “is it identical in technical aspect as well like resolution, fps and other factors?”

Colin Graham: “on the technical side i cannot say, i just don’t know. Sorry. To me they look the same.”

Colin Graham: “i really don’t know, sorry.”

It looks like that is 720p confirmed! In all fairness to Colin Graham though, it is entirely possible that the resolution of the Xbone version of Watch Dogs has not been pinned down yet, seeing as the Xbone clearly is not the lead platform.

Resolution was certainly not this game’s only point of differentiation.

Misrepresented Interview Gives Brief Flicker of Hope to Xboners

It must be an odd existence being an Xboner. What many older Lusireaders may find difficult to appreciate is that many gamers have grown up on Xbox, and have never known a time when their console of choice has been less powerful than its Playstation counterpart. Sure, the argument can be made that the PS3 was technically a more powerful console than the Xbox 360, but in order for this advantage to manifest a game would have to be developed exclusively for the PS3’s unique Cell architecture, otherwise it was just a console with a comparatively weak GPU. One can only imagine that it is this state of affairs that has lead many to invent fantastical notions about mystical Xbone secret sauce components that will be able to level the playing field with the PS4. It is the existence of these sorts of people that made Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning’s comments to Xbox Achievements this week somewhat unhelpful.

“So I would say, months ago, there was a wider gap. Part of it was the development systems,” [he explained, before going on to say that it was common to hear devs complaining that getting assets onto Xbox One took “twice as long” as PS4.]

“We’re hearing and seeing that that curve is getting closer. I think at the end of the day when people maximize both systems, they’re each powerful enough[…] They’re in that class of when you watch the basketball, you’re going to be like, ‘Is that TV? Or is that a game?’

For us, we aren’t taxing it that heavy, like I say it’s not Battlefield, for us, we don’t really see that we’ll have performance problems on either and we’ll be able to get what we want, with very dynamic looking lighting, particle effects, etc.”

That is great, only according to one of Lanning’s collaborators, Just Add Water CEO Stuart Gilray, Lanning has been taken out of context in order to make it sound like the technical performance of both machines has begun to narrow, when actually what Lanning was getting at was that between the improvements made to Xbone development software and the reality of escalating game budgets, he believes that going forward we will see the differences in multiplatform releases narrow some:

“Actually that is NOT what he said. I spoke to Lorne afterwards and what he meant when speaking to that guy was that budgets, schedules and perceivable differences would narrow, NOT that the Xbox One performance is improving to align with PS4, that is just physically impossible. The PS4 has MORE COMPUTE units, and faster memory and a whole bunch of things, that would make that physically impossible to happen.”

Put like that Lanning’s views seem eminently more sensible. Part of the reason for the shaky start to the Xbone’s software library [above and beyond hardware differences] has been the Xbone’s poor development software which presented developers with delays as they waited to see any changes implemented in the game code. This seems to have been remedied. If Microsoft could just find a way to help developers to fit a 1080p framebuffer inside the Xbone’s 32mb of fast eSRAM, then the perceptible differences between multiplatform releases could potentially narrow to the point of insignificance despite the PS4’s superior performance. Of course one is inclined to disagree that this will happen quite to the degree that Lanning appears to, as one has tended to note that if a console manufacturer provides an easy to use resource then it will almost inevitably be used, especially if it belongs to the more popular platform. Nonetheless, eliminating the 1080p divide would go a significant way to leveling the eighth generation playing field – though whether that is even possible for more demanding games is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus, in her wisdom, has decided to remain aloof from this sordid matter.

Worry not, Akihiko Yoshida is set to return for the sequel.

Akihiko Yoshida Leaves Square Enix

As another year passes, yet another iconic Square Enix talent flees the sinking and rudderless vessel – all while Tetsuya Nomura, Motomu Toriyama, and Yoshinori Kitase consolidate their influence over all things Final Fantasy. This week Akihiko Yoshida announced his departure from Square Enix through a personal message within an artbook accompanying the release of Bravely Default: For the Sequel, a Japanese re-release of the international version of Bravely Default, which also launches in PAL territories this week.

“This is a personal message of mine, but I’d like to say thank you for all the support these past 18 years. I have decided to leave Square Enix, but I believe our relationship will continue going on.

Akihiko Yoshida”

Yoshida first came to prominence for his art direction and character design work at Enix [by way of Quest] under Yasumi Matsuno, which saw his involvement with Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. He then joined Squaresoft where, once again under Matsuno, he was heavily associated with the Final Fantasy brand, predominantly for his work on the Ivalice sub-series. His notable works while at Squaresoft/Square Enix include: Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIV [both vanilla and A Realm Reborn], and Bravely Default.

As Yoshida mentions in his departure message, he still intends to be party to future collaborations with Square Enix, and indeed has already been confirmed to be reprising his duties for Bravely Second, the sequel to Bravely Default. This is heartening, but at the same time we have all seen that when Square Enix staff leave the company to go freelance it tends to result in less future Square Enix work for them, and on smaller projects too. This ultimately means less of an influence over the future direction of the Final Fantasy series. At any rate, one wonders what ultimately led Yoshida to make his decision to leave the company. In fervent anticipation for the release of Bravely Default, one likes to think that it was his experience of working with a smaller group of people on a creative passion-project which led to Akihiko Yosida’s desire to step away from the corporate banality of modern day Square Enix.

Apparently this picture is sufficient to make most any Xbot rock hard upon viewing.

Pornhub Reveals the Viewing Proclivities of Gamers

Quite why anyone would use their console of choice as a means to peruse hardcore pornography when a computer or even a smartphone would be vastly preferable is beyond the ken of this particular news hack, yet apparently it is a big thing, as evidenced by Pornhub’s early official support of the PS4.

According to Pornhub, their console traffic has a lower bounce rate than regular traffic; meaning that console users tend to view more pages and stay for a longer duration. This may have something to do with the relative ease of browsing for content via PC, and the luxury of being able to open up many concurrent tabs; then again, perhaps console owners, by their nature, are just massively creepy pervs.

Surprisingly, despite the relatively parity between PS3 and 360 sales, the PS3 accounts for 55% of Pornhub’s console traffic to 360’s 39% [with Wii bringing up the rear with 6%]. It is not quite clear what has led to this apparent disparity between console user-bases – perhaps PS3 owners are just naturally pervy people, or perhaps Americans are less inclined to view pornography than are Asians and Europeans. Alternately, perhaps this apparent disparity is merely the result of the Xbox 360s artificial install-base, as individuals who buy second and third replacement 360s are viewed as unique users rather than return customers.

While the 55% figure might paint PS3 users as creepy perverts, it is important to note that the most popular pornography genre for PS3 and PS4 owners is the relatively conservative ‘MILF’ category, which contrasts starkly with the 360’s favoured ‘Teen’ category, and the Wii’s favoured ‘Hentai’ category [consolidating the Wii’s position as the Wiiaboo console of choice]. Further, out of the PS3, PS4, 360, and Wii, Nintendo users were the only demography to exhibit an interest in the ‘Big Dick’ genre [bringing up the rear indeed!].

I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost!

Activision Blames Console Transition for Poor COD Sales

Call of Duty: Ghosts is easily the best selling launch title on both PS4 and Xbone, it has also achieved sales figures on the PS3 and 360 that would make any other publisher green with envy – yet these sales also represent a precipitous halving of Call of Duty‘s retail fortunes. Game reviewers have often been far softer judges of Call of Duty‘s annualised laziness than have gamers in general, yet Call of Duty: Ghosts‘ lack of innovation proved to be too much for even some longtime Call of Duty apologists like Jim Sterling, and they turned on the game. In contrast to the mid-80s to low-90s Metacritic scores to which the series is accustomed, Call of Duty: Ghosts only managed to score in the mid-70s, a first for the series. This [and quite possibly word of mouth] has led to a sharp decline in series sales, from 24.4 million worldwide with Call of Duty: Black Ops II to 10.9 million worldwide with Call of Duty: Ghosts. In all fairness, Call of Duty: Black Ops II has obviously been on the market for a lot longer than Call of Duty: Ghosts, but then in all fairness the vast majority of Call of Duty purchases have always come from its first two weeks on sale.

According to Activision the poor sales result of Call of Duty: Ghosts has nothing to do with the perceived quality of the title, nor Call of Duty series fatigue in general, but rather it has occured due to the changeover of console generations, which obviously impacts Call of Duty sales because of [?].

“We’ve been pretty transparent all year that we think, because of the challenges of the console transition year, that that was likely in the short-term. I think it would be a mistake to conflate the challenges of the console transition year with any indications about the health of the franchise.

It’s also clear to me that the critical response doesn’t always mirror the fans’ appreciation of a game. We actually do read the critics’ comments and take them into consideration during our creative process, but we just can’t measure ourselves by that yardstick alone.”

Critical response may not always mirror fan appreciation of a game, yet in this instance it appears that fan appreciation of Call of Duty: Ghosts has mirrored its retail performance. It is all very well to cite some intangible, unprovable quantity as being to blame for the fact than the iterative milking of Call of Duty has finally caught up with the series, but then one would love to know how Activision are able to reconcile the record-breaking launch of Grand Theft Auto V which was released a scant handful of weeks ago, and went on to sell a cool 25.94 million units across two gaming platforms.

From a time when things were Golden.

In Memoriam: A Farewell to Atlus

Goodbye, Atlus.

Western gamers have had a good run with your interesting, oddball games that were often localised in a competent and timely fashion; but all good things must end eventually. One shall endeavour to look away as the last kernel of your being is sorely abused to make browser and smartphone games, and one will not turn back as bloody-minded Atlus fanboys swear until they are blue in the face that Atlus games are just as good as they ever were; because there is something a tad morbid about dwelling upon what might have been – should have been – even as you are spread wide and thrust open like a common Capcom catamite.

You chose Sega – not us – and it would be pointless to fruitlessly fool one’s self into thinking that our relationship is the same now as it was before; pointless and sad. You first allowed yourself to become subsumed by Index Holdings, before being completely devoured by an exploitative Sega Sammy who was just looking for a good time. Now you will fester away like the gravid payload of a defiled Russian doll until there is nothing left of you but your intellectual properties – and what will be left once you trade away those final meager favours? What will be left for us?

Sure, your affairs will appear to be well in hand during the outset of this new union, but when things begin to decline, they will do so swiftly – and everybody will suddenly wonder where you went, but by then it will be too late. One saw your epitaph today, and it read:

“The Company believes that transfer of Index’s operations to Sega will create synergies, on the grounds that the deal will enable the Company to:

(3) maximize the value of acquired IPs by effectively deploying them in the Pachislot and Pachinko Machines segment, Amusement Machine Sales and Amusement Center Operations segments.”

Nowhere in all that does Sega pledge to do right by you, or to help you raise and nurture your content. Sega is only after one thing – the giddy thrills of cheap exploitation; and so you will be gussied up provocatively for the titillation of shallow strangers, while your pachinko slots are filled up with sordid and soiled currency.

One must now take his leave, and so be spared the pain of searching for recognition in heavy-lidded eyes that now stare blankly, uncomprehending and foreign. One will not be there to observe as your once familiar [now swollen and dirty] form waddles to and fro tending to deformed bastard children, swaddled in the garb of Persona and Shin Megami Tensei. Your place is with Sega now. We will always have P4.

Sincerely, Lusipurr.com.

Exciting news – but one cannot properly believe until it is legitimately confirmed.

Sony’s Yoshida seemingly Confirms Type-0 Release

After last week’s announcement of Final Fantasy Agito seemingly put paid to the eventual release of Final Fantasy Type-0 [along with traditional Square Enix console games in general], this week has seen some slightly more promising news on this front. After first announcing that Final Fantasy Agito will definitely be localised for the West, director Hajime Tabata subsequently stated that, as a companion piece to Final Fantasy Agito, he still hopes to see Final Fantasy Type-0 released for Western audiences via PSN. A near complete Western localisation for the game already exists, and while final approval for the game’s release has yet to be given, it is nevertheless “definitely in the final stages of planning“.

All of Tabata’s words would essentially count for nothing by themselves, as false hope is an integral part of the Square Enix disappointment cycle, yet these words in particular were given a great deal of extra weight through the insinuations of Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida over Twitter. Yoshida chose to retweet a Eurogamer tweet stating: “Final Fantasy: Agito “will definitely be localised”. Square Enix wants to bring Type-0 to the West via PSN“. When a Twitter-follower subsequently stated “Shuhei. you are the freaking best.“, Yoshida replied “great news, is not it? :D“. There is an outside possibility that Yoshida is promoting this news because Final Fantasy Agito is coming to Playstation Mobile, yet a significantly more likely explanation is that he highlighted the Eurogamer Tweet because he knows that a PSN release of Final Fantasy Type-0 is all but a done deal.

Interestingly, this is the second Square Enix game this year that has seemingly required one of the console manufacturers to intervene before Square Enix was willing to countenance a Western release – and neither Final Fantasy Type-0 nor Bravely Default are anything approaching niche titles. It would appear that 2013 sees Square Enix in a position not dissimilar to the one that Squaresoft was in at the start of the PS1 era; relying on the largesse of others to see many of their games localised. It is sad but also fitting that Square Enix’s muddled seventh generation efforts have served to wipe out the previous decade of inroads the company made with respect to Western markets.

There is 50% more PS4!

1080p – 900p = 180p

This week Edge Online has been in touch with sources from within multiplatform developers in order to provide a more complete picture as to what the Xbone’s weaker processing and RAM capabilities might mean for the next generation of multiplatform development. The PS4’s memory performance is thought to be 40-50% faster, while its GPU is generally held by developers to be about 50% faster than that of the Xbone, although, to be fair, this figure appears to be taken from a time before the Xbone received a slight overclock a couple of weeks ago. What this performance deficit currently means for multiplatform games is that at present developers are finding that running unoptimised code from either console tends to result in a 1080p resolution and thirty frames-per-second on PS4, and a 900p [1600×900] resolution and twenty-odd frames-per-second on Xbone. One refreshingly undiplomatic developer even bluntly stated that: “Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM“.

Other developers opted to damn Microsoft’s recent console tweaks with faint praise:

“The clock speed update is not significant, it does not change things that much. Of course, something is better than nothing.”

While still other developers have seen their way to outlining scenarios wherein Microsoft’s Xbone may even excel:

“Let’s say you are using procedural generation or raytracing via parametric surfaces – that is, using a lot of memory writes and not much texturing or ALU – Xbox One will be likely be faster.”

That is great news for Xbone games that do not plan on making use of textures!

In a piece of completely unrelated news, it was this week confirmed by Microsoft that Xbone exclusives Ryse and Killer Instinct will run at 900p@30 and 720p@60 respectively. Ryse had been previously confirmed to be a native 1080p game, so this very recent about-face appears to indicate that the scope of the project outstripped the Xbone’s meager capabilities. Meanwhile, it is also thought that Capcom’s Dead Rising 3 runs at a [completely unconfirmed] variable 1080p resolution, meaning that the game runs at 1080p where it can, but drops resolution when the Xbone is unable to keep up. Worry not though, Xbone aficionados, because in the words of Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg: “Xbox One upscales all titles to 1080p & they look amazing!“

Chrono Trigger North American Box Art

In March of 1995, Japanese gamers were treated to the release of a new franchise from Square. Developed by a dream team including greats like Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Akira Toriyama, Chrono Trigger hit the ground running, winning plaudits and praise from every corner of the Japanese game industry. The first two million copies of the game were delivered to Japanese retailers in the first two months–at the time, a practically unheard-of sale rate for a JRPG. Across the seas in furthest America, people took notice. The swift localisation and August 1995 release of Chrono Trigger in North America was met with enormous success. Subsequent re-releases on the PlayStation and Nintendo DS were also very well received, posting chart-topping sales figures each in their turn. The PlayStation release of Chrono Trigger remains a best-selling PlayStation Network ‘Classic’ title more than a decade after its initial disc-based release, and several years into its digital availability.

The Currents of Time are dangerous.

In 2013, the success of Chrono Trigger is on par with other Super Nintendo-era greats such as Final Fantasy VI. Routinely featuring in historical “top ten” and “best of” lists, it came in second place (against Final Fantasy VII) in the first-ever GameFAQs “video game battle”, and it was last year named by GamesRadar as the greatest JRPG of all time. Re-released and ported to a variety of systems, it has continued to sell well despite its wide availability on the internet, having surpassed three and a half million copies sold. The DS version was one of the most well-received titles for that system–a remake which is still held up as an example of precisely how to correctly re-release classic 16-bit JRPGs.

The game opens with the titular protagonist, Chrono, waking up in his hometown in the Kingdom of Guardia. The year is A.D. 1000 and a Millennial Fair is about to take place. Chrono’s friend Lucca–an inventor–has built a matter transporter with the assistance of her father, Taban. It is this device which sets events into motion. Chrono’s fortuitous meeting with a young woman named Marle is the catalyst for an adventure which will span not merely the breadth of the world, but the very length of time itself.

Chrono Trigger Cosplay, by DeviantArt user Risachantag

All areas of Chrono Triggers‘s presentation have been praised since its release nearly a score of years ago. The music is widely considered to be one of the greatest soundtracks ever written for a video game. The graphics represent the pinnacle of sprite-based design; the DS version especially is renowned for its beautiful presentation, including the anime cut scenes from the PlayStation version, and an updated interface which makes use of the second DS screen for menus, freeing the top screen to display an unfettered view of Chrono Trigger’s colourful and detailed environments.

Use the comment thread below to discuss your approach to the game, challenges you have faced, tactics you are employing, and what you are getting out of your playthrough. Do you feel that the presentation of Chrono Trigger has held up since its release in 1995? Are there aspects of the game that you would change, or that you would hold up as an example for modern game developers to emulate? How has your experience with other RPGs released after Chrono Trigger changed your impressions of the game? Do you have any stories about your first experience? Tell us in the comments!

The aim in this playthrough is to complete the entirety of the game in four weeks. For our fourth and final week, we invite users to finish the game. However, feel free to join in, even if you are behind on the playthrough. Anyone and everyone is invited to participate, regardless of game format, speed of play, or familiarity with the series. Tell your friends!

Without further adieu, it is our very great pleasure to invite you now to join the Lusipurr.com staff members, guests, and readers as we return to the sunny days of the Guardia Millennial Fair in Peaceful Days: A Chrono Trigger Playthrough!

A true return to form!

Final Fantasy Tactics Set to Return In All But Substance

It would not be inappropriate for the Lusipurr.com community to this week come together in celebration of one of Lusipurr’s favourite video game titles receiving a long awaited sequel – that is to say that the Final Fantasy Tactics series is set to return with the release of Final Fantasy Tactics S! Final Fantasy Tactics was originally released into North America in 1998, and was widely hailed by gamers and critics alike. It marked the auteur Yasumi Matsuno’s first project under Squaresoft, which he followed up with the highly acclaimed titles: Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII.

Final Fantasy Tactics S is currently being developed by Mobage, a maker of social games for mobile phones, and is set to release as a freemium title on iOS and Android. The game is said to feature both single-player and social content, though it is not yet known whether Mobage will seek to recreate some semblance of the traditional Final Fantasy Tactics gameplay formula, or simply opt to turn it into an electronic card game like most of their other titles. A Western release has not yet been confirmed, but Square Enix has never been known to hold back on releasing their quality titles to the English-speaking peoples.

In other Final Fantasy news for the week, a wide number of predominantly business-centric news sources have been reporting on some Final Fantasy Versus XIII rumours which serve to clarify some older rumours that Lusipurr.com has reported on. We had previously relayed rumours that Final Fantasy Versus XIII had been met with huge delays on account of it being transitioned into a first generation PS4 title some two years ago. Nothing has happened to change this – yet it is now being reported that the PS3 version of the game has not been cancelled, and that Square Enix plans to release both versions of the game. Thus owners of Sony’s seventh generation home console will not have to purchase new hardware in order to play this long-promised PS3 title.

A question that should be asked of management.

Nintendo’s Fundamentals Are Fundamentally Unsound

Nintendo have released their full yearly sales report for the fiscal year ending on March 31st, 2013 – and it has been far from glowing. After posting their first financial loss in thirty years back in 2012 [to the tune of 43 billion Yen], Nintendo has this week revealed that they have returned to Net and Ordinary profitability in 2013 [presumably on the strength of the weakened Yen] – though they only achieved Net profitability to the tune of 7.09 billion yen [71.3 million dollars] when they had initially forecast an ambitious [and one might say presumptive] 20 billion Yen profit [which was lowered to 14 billion Yen earlier in the year]. Similarly, Ordinary income had been predicted to reach 35 billion Yen, was later lowered to 20 billion Yen, but ultimately ended up coming in at 10.4 billion Yen.

Despite this turn-around in their fortunes, Nintendo has still recorded an operating loss of 36 billion yen [366 million dollars], which can be defined as a loss recorded when considering only a company’s operating income verses its operating expenditures, while ignoring any interest accrued during this period [i.e. mitigating terms of trade due to Yen fluctuations] and non-liquid assets. Nintendo had initially forecast a 35 billion Yen Operating profit, before revising this figure down to a 20 billion Yen Operating loss earlier in the year, which still served to undervalue their ultimate Operating shortfall by some 16 billion Yen. Ergo Nintendo has achieved mixed but largely positive results on the financial front, yet their hardware performance tells a different story entirely.

Nintendo had previously predicted that they would sell 5.5 million units of the Wii U by the end of the financial year, yet earlier this year they revised this estimate down to 4 million. As predicted by Lusipurr.com, Nintendo’s Wii U failed to even hit this lowered mark, selling only 3.45 million units. Tellingly, the Wii U has only sold 390,000 units since Christmas. Similarly, Nintendo had initially forecast Wii U software sales of 24 million; this figure was later lowered to 16 million, yet the Wii U was ultimately only able to shift 13.42 million games.

Sales of the 3DS are a brighter mark on Nintendo’s ledger, but even they constitute something of a mixed bag. Continuing its drubbing of the PS Vita, the 3DS sold 13.95 million units of hardware and 49.61 million units of software, both of which are increases over the 3DS’ performance last year – yet this is largely based on the system’s popularity in Japan. The 3DS’ proportional percentage share of market sales in the US and Europe are also up in relation to last year, yet the actual number of hardware units sold in both territories is actually drastically down year-on-year. Moreover, the DS’ third year on the market saw sales of 23.56 million units, which is almost twice that of the 3DS. To put things into perspective: at this point in the DS’ lifecycle it had sold 45 million units of hardware, while the 3DS has only sold 31 million units of hardware. On the other hand, perhaps this is still a fairly spectacular result given that the DS did not have to contend with the smartphone gaming boom.

Nintendo still predicts that 9 million units of Wii U hardware and 18 million units of 3DS hardware will be sold over the course of the next financial year – perhaps they are mistaking hardware projections for software projections? At any rate, Nintendo had best have one hell of an E3 up their sleeve if they wish to turn around the fortunes of the Wii U! [Note: LOL!]

And Reggie has made damn sure of it!

Iwata Becomes CEO of NoA

It seems obvious that Nintendo management [much like Square Enix] has had their collective heads in the clouds when it came to devising their dazzlingly optimistic best-case-scenario profit expectations, yet if there is one aspect of their business which is a disproportional liability to the business as a whole, it is Nintendo of America – the underperforming wing of Nintendo located in what should be their biggest market.

It is hard to imagine a console distributor cultivating a poorer start for their new machine than NoA was able to do for their Wii U. The Wii experienced much initial success with the banal casual market before casuals and their wallets fled to smartphone gaming. To this end NoA’s actions took on almost antagonistic overtones when dealing with the products coming out of their Japanese headquarters, with NoA now famously refusing to publish Nintendo games such as Fatal Frame 4, Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower – the latter three of which were already translated by NoE, and were available at a time when the Wii’s release schedule was a desolate wasteland.

Fast-forward to the launch of Nintendo’s Wii U [being marketed by NoA as a non-core casual machine], and everything that we here at Lusipurr.com said would happen as a result of the estrangement of core gamers, is now happening to the Wii U. Casual gamers have made the [seemingly permanent] switch to phones and tablets, but even if this was not the case; casuals are not early adopters of game technology – they only flock out to buy such machines when they are already viewed as a hot fad. The Wii U is not a hot fad, and the hardcore gamers who can usually be relied upon as the early adopters to underpin a new system’s launch have been in short supply for Nintendo’s new box. Without access to Apple’s vast casual market, the faux portable Wii U’s only ostensible target demographic appears to be families with young children – and even then the Wii U has to compete with Nintendo’s own 3DS, which will inevitably prove to be losing battle on account of it not being a properly portable system.

To combat Nintendo’s negative market outlook Satoru Iwata, the President and CEO of Nintendo Co., Ltd, has now been made the CEO of Nintendo of America [replacing Tatsumi Kimishima], so as to have more direct involvement with this stagnating arm of Nintendo’s empire through setting its big picture market strategy. Reggie Fils-Aime retains his role as President and COO of NoA, meaning he is still responsible for the daily running of Nintendo’s American operations, but will now be directly answerable to Iwata, who will presumably be more assertive than his predecessor.

It is unknown whether the anti-core and anti-Japanese policies previously enacted by NoA were the work of Kimishima or Fils-Aime, yet jumping on the casual fad to the exclusion of all else, while remaining doggedly blind to the reality of long-term profitability seems to be a uniquely American business attribute. Thus we can probably attribute this short-term strategy to Reggie. If that is the case, then it would seem that Iwata has been sent to reign-in Fils-Aime – an interpretation that is supported by Iwata’s recent pledge to see that more Japanese software is localised, which comes off as a thinly-veiled rebuke of previous NoA policy.

When attempting to diagnose the Wii U’s challenges at American retail, Shigeru Miyamoto has pointed to the fact that the system “doesn’t have that ‘looking-fun’ element to it“. Meanwhile Iwata has identified two key reasons that the Wii U has not been able to maintain post-launch momentum. Firstly, because of NoA’s inability to effectively communicate to consumers that the Wii U is a new console [in the loosest possible terms] rather than a mere Wii peripheral – this is problem which Lusipurr.com identified prior to launch. And secondly because of Nintendo’s own inability to provide enough in the way of strong first party launch titles to attract consumers. Iwata does not plan on cutting the Wii U’s ridiculously high price tag any time soon.

What can I do for you?

Square Enix Sweetens the Pot For Final Fantasy X Re-Release

When an HD remaster of Final Fantasy X was initially announced for the PS3 and PS Vita it was an occaision for much excitement, but also for bafflement at the fact that Final Fantasy X was the only game announced for the package. The convention for such things tends to be that two or more games are released as part of a HD package [or at least this is the case on the PS3], as anything less would not warrant full-pricing. Many people chalked the initial announcement up to being typical Square Enix hubris, yet happily it has been this week revealed that Square Enix plan to make good on a value-packed Final Fantasy X re-release, at least in so far as the PS3 is concerned.

The PS3 version of Final Fantasy X HD will feature the international version of Final Fantasy X-2 as part of the package. The PS Vita is also set to receive both games, yet they are to be sold separately on account of the Vita’s maximum physical gamecards holding just 4GB of data at present. That said, it would be very much appreciated if Square Enix’s Vita pricing reflected the decreased value proposition offered by the games being sold individually.

While Square Enix initially stated that the game would be a simple upscaled remaster, it has been this week revealed that the game will be something more than this. New game screen shots have been released this week which depict entirely new character models, with both higher polygon counts and vastly improved hair and textures. This should remedy the occurrence of very poor LoD character models which were in evidence during some of the original game’s cutscenes.

In terms of new content for North American gamers, the international version of Final Fantasy X features the ‘Expert Sphere Grid’, along with the Dark Aeon and Penance boss battles. Meanwhile, the international version of Final Fantasy X-2 features additional dress spheres along with the eighty-floor ‘final mission’ dungeon. In one final point of interest, the release of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 this week revealed the inclusion of scenes from Kingdom Hearts II, Birth by Sleep, and Coded during the game’s ending credits, indicating that a Kingdom Hearts 2.5 might be in the offing. This means that a HD collection featuring Final Fantasy XII and Revenant Wings might not be beyond the realms of possibility, since Square Enix appears to be geared towards HD re-releases at present.

Somehow, Microsoft seem to be working towards providing a worse value-proposition than the Wii U.

New Xbox Durango Console To Block Used Games

The documentation for Microsoft’s Durango development kit was leaked onto VGleaks this week, and it indicates that the console intends to utilise some of the least consumer-friendly DRM practices available. The Durango is unable to play software directly from the game-disk; instead, every game will have to be installed to the hard-drive before it will become playable. Presumably this process will in some way render the original game-disc unusable, so as not to allow software to be installed on multiple consoles [unless the disc is still required as a means of authentication, like with many PC games]. This measure becomes increasingly problematic when one factors in reports that state that the base model of the Durango will ship with a hard-drive that is only capable of storing five hundred gigabytes of data, allowing for just ten full sized games to be stored at a time. To top all this off, the Xbox Durango will require an always-on internet connection, because that worked out so well for SimCity.

The first thing to note about this leak is that the information present is likely many months old, and may not reflect the final state of the Durango Console. The second thing to note about the leak is that if the information pans out and holds true up to release, then the next Xbox stands to be completely decimated by the PS4. Console gaming used to be about convenience, yet these last five years have seen it become in many ways more cumbersome than PC gaming. At any rate, if the Durango does opt to go down this dark path, then Microsoft can expect to see its market-share dwindle to a small demography of Microsoft enthusiasts largely focused in and around North America.

[Pictured]: Garriott.

Richard Garriott Claims To Be the World’s Only Good Game Designer

This week Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott [of Tabula Rasa fame] has claimed that he and Chris Roberts are the world’s only good game designers, on account of the fact that the role tends to be filled by people who are unqualified to perform any other role. Garriott asserts that this leads to them adopting a lazy approach to game design, where they will tend to iterate rather than innovate.

“Other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I’ve met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I’m not saying that because I think I’m so brilliant. What I’m saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there’s a reason why: we’re leaning on a lot of designers who get that job because they’re not qualified for the other jobs, rather than that they are really strongly qualified as a designer.”

“It’s really hard to go to school to be a good designer. Every designer that I work with – all throughout life – I think, frankly, is lazy. They go to make one or two changes to a game they otherwise love versus really sit down and rethink, ‘How can I really move the needle here?'”

One hopes for Garriott’s sake that this was a moment of stunning hyperbole as opposed to a sincerely held belief, as, the dire state of the industry not withstanding, he is still a game design minnow in a pond full of very large fish. The implications of Garriott’s suggestion appears to be that he is possessed of the belief that he is somehow a better game designer than studio’s like Valve and Arkane, and yet here he is having to launch a Kickstarter in order to get his next game funded – because there are precious few dolts who would wish to play another Tabula Rasa.

Less than two million sold across three platforms!

Since the explosion of butthurt that came from the fact that Rayman Legends would be delayed to allow a simultaneous multi-platform release many people have begun to wonder if this is the fate for all third-party exclusives. This week, I will take a look at not only the current state of exclusive games, but also at what makes this generation so much different from the earlier generations.

Console exclusives during the days of the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis were what built up the majority of the respective consoles’ libraries. Very rarely during that time did we see games that were released on both systems. The games that did hit both systems were usually either arcade ports, sports games or movie tie-in games. The real crazy thing about some of these dual platform games was that they were not fundamentally the same. This was not simply a case of a game having superior graphics on one system, but rather some games having completely different experiences depending on which system they were played on.

During the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation days exclusives still played a major role. At the onset of this generation, Nintendo lost an important ally in Squaresoft. Squaresoft was an absolute monster when it came to developing great SNES exclusive titles, but they left Nintendo due to Nintendo’s wish to stick with a cartridge based format. Squaresoft once again was a monster when it came to developing exclusive titles, bringing the PlayStation a fair share of exclusive hits. Nintendo had their own share of exclusives however many of them were this was around the time that Nintendo consoles developed the image of having lousy third-party support.

Ten years ago, the PC version of RE would have been released months after the console version.

The release of the Xbox brought new things to the console wars. For one, it meant that there was finally a viable third company to compete against Sony and Nintendo, especially since Sega had quickly faded away. The Xbox did not have a large library of exclusive titles, and with ports to PC factored in, that number shrinks even further. Many third-party developers viewed the Xbox as a good destination for titles that they had originally been developing solely for the PlayStation 2. Around 2004, about 3 years after the release of the Xbox, publishers began to release their Xbox versions of games along with the PlayStation 2 versions.

The current line-up of consoles bears a good deal of resemblance to the last generation when it comes to console exclusives. Nintendo and Sony still have their first party support, while Microsoft thrived for some time with very few top rated exclusives. Microsoft introduced a concept with the advent of timed-exclusive DLC. Although the game itself was not an exclusive title, the fact that DLC would not be available for some time led to some gamers purchasing the title for the Xbox 360 as opposed to the PC or PlayStation 3. Today, ports to PC have become a more common occurrence. In the past, games like DmC and Resident Evil 6 would not appear anywhere near a PC, but the desire to maximize initial profits has led these games being released side-by-side their console counterparts.

Due to utterly horrible motion controls, as well as the under-powered hardware, ports to the Wii are often a shell of their other console releases. The Wii, as with all Nintendo systems, became known for its first party games, mainly because they featured our childhood heroes. On the other hand, where the PlayStation 3 has received spectacular third-party support, the Wii has very few top quality third-party exclusives, and fewer that sold well. To me the difference seems to come from the mentality of the two companies. Nintendo does not seem to care about their third-party exclusives, something they have been accused of for years. Sony, however, appears to understand how important these exclusives are. A game like Ni no Kuni did not face the same difficulties making its way to North America that Xenoblade Chronicles did.

Wii do not care about Rayman!

For me, the argument about console exclusives is dependent on which console is under discussion. Exclusives, whether they be first-party or third-party, do not seem to be a huge priority to Microsoft, now or in the future. Sony and Nintendo both support their exclusive games, but to different degrees. Nintendo has yet to release a statement regarding the Rayman Legends issue. Perhaps they knew that Ubisoft was leaning away from the game being exclusive because of lagging sales of the Wii U, or maybe it just did not bother them that much because it is not a first-party title. In the end, third-party console exclusives are not dead yet. Rayman Legends is hardly a triple A caliber title, no matter what Wii U owners thought a month ago. Sony, however, keeps their exclusives in-house by purchasing the studios that created their top titles. I can see this generation repeating itself with the next consoles in terms of exclusives, but what are your thoughts?

Gather ’round children and I will tell you the story of the four warriors of light.

Story, in varying degrees, has been a part of video games since the 1980’s. In the past, a gamer had to turn to the RPG genre to experience a deep storyline. Now, in the age of high-capacity optical media, multi-million dollar development costs, and large development teams, story is quickly becoming a larger part of nearly all game genres. Story development, when done properly, contributes substantially to game. When done wrong, it can be a huge detriment to one’s desire to see a game through to the end.

When gaming was in its infancy, developers focused their limited resources on a stable and fun experience. Storylines of the 8-bit generation were told mainly through the manual, setting up the game’s foundation and allowing the player to take the reins from there. RPGs also had some story told in the manual, however nearly all of it was to build a foundation for the game itself to continue from. Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy are two examples of NES RPGs that helped set the stage to show other developers that video games could be a viable medium for story-telling. Another aspect of early gaming was that it was seen more as a pastime for young children. Due to this most games featured an almost cartoon-style story, such as Mario having to rescue the princess and Doctor Robotnik kidnapping all of the forest animals.

The 16-bit generation brought more examples of both sides of the story-telling coin. Platformers and RPGs dominated the major titles of this era, especially on the SNES. Games such as Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, Mega Man X, and Donkey Kong Country had the majority of their story told in their respective manuals, while featuring bits of dialogue during gameplay to continue the story. RPGs, on the other hand, continued to show how well a video game can tell a story. Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger both joined deep gameplay with an engaging storyline, while Earthbound and Super Mario RPG brought humor to the genre while still developing the story throughout the gameplay experience.

50% More Story than X3!

The fifth (N64 and PSX) and sixth (PS2, GCN, Xbox) generation of consoles brought some of the largest steps in the evolution of video games as a story-telling medium. The switch to optical media meant developers had much more data space to work with. Cut scenes rapidly became the item of choice to fill up that extra space, with RPGs being some of the first to use them extensively. Soon, however, cut scenes were present in nearly every genre. Even Mega Man X4 had voice-acted cut scenes. With the addition of cut scenes, more money spent on development, and a rapidly increasing fan base, story was tacked on where it was not necessary . Furthermore, this era would begin to have many developers move to more mature storylines to keep up with a maturing (and expanding) fan base.

The aforementioned eras, especially the sixth generation, had some of the first examples of story being injected into games that did not need it. I had no problem playing through the 8- and 16-bit Mega Man games, but the story in the PSX and PS2 games really wore me down. I play Mega Man to blast away eight robot masters and steal their weapons, not to get bogged down in a bad (and boring) storyline. This trend has worsened in the current generation.

With the current generation of consoles I find that it is becoming common for developers to feel the need to bog down games with an in-dept story when there is no need for one. Many games today feature a dialogue-heavy story. A dialogue-heavy story is not always a bad thing, but many games that have a story shoved in as an after thought do not have sufficiently decent writing to carry it. Another element that is popular this generation is the WRPG approach of “branching” stories. Many WRPGs purport to have epic, choose-your-own-adventure style storylines. However many of these storylines end up being overrated rather than epic. The Mass Effect trilogy being a prime example of this.

In the end, video games have experienced quite an evolution in both story-telling methods and the stories themselves. Games now are focusing evermore on story, even when one is not needed. Mature storylines–which were uncommon during the early eras of gaming–are more common, especially in the first-person shooter genre. With the next generation coming up fast, we could be on the edge of another evolution of story-telling in gaming. What are your thoughts on the current state of story-telling in games, where it has come from, and where it could end up?

Happy CHRISTMAS from Lusipurr.com!

Produced 2012.12.23

Lusipurr, SiliconNooB, and Imitanis simply cannot stop oppressing the poor, unfortunate people of the world. Their imperialist, dogmatic, patriarchial attitudes are rightly punished when their holiday is struck from the calendar. So… happy Saturnalia!

o/~ Oh, my hero…

Produced 2012.12.09

On the last day of the third England v. India test in Calcutta, Lusipurr, SiliconNooB, Deimosion, and Blitzmage lay bets on when the final run will come. Lusipurr discusses how to read books, Mega Man games are covered, and apparently there’s a feature?

Come, my pretty! I have a van full of Call of Duty for you!

Produced 2012.12.02

Whilst Lusipurr exhausts himself by preparing for the lead in ‘Being Ignatius Reilly’, Peter Molyneux’s protege launches a Kickstarter that goes for a duck. Unfortunately for SiliconNooB, the Australian test side performs just as poorly as Molyneux II.

Final Fantasy VI

In the Autumn of 1994, gamers across North America eagerly awaited the latest installment of the Final Fantasy series. With the surprise disappointment that was the non-release of Final Fantasy V, English-speaking JRPG fans had been waiting three years for a follow up to the 1991 release of Final Fantasy IV. Amongst the many people eagerly awaiting their copy was young(!) Lusipurr.

When, on October 11, 1994, Final Fantasy VI was released, it was met with critical and universal acclaim. Shortages of SNES games were unusual–but shortages of JRPGs were even more so. Yet copies of Final Fantasy VI were hard to find, with many retailers finding themselves in the then-curious position of needing to fulfill demand for a video game that did not feature Mario. Backorders stretched well into the following year thanks to a spirited holiday season. The game made the evening news. It was perhaps the first time in history that a JRPG gained the attention of the North American mainstream press.

Terra Branford

Eighteen years later, in 2012, the success of Final Fantasy VI has become the renown of Final Fantasy VI. Routinely featuring in historical “top ten” and “best of” lists, it was this year named by IGN as the number one RPG of all time. Re-released and ported to a variety of systems, it has continued to sell well despite its wide availability on the internet, having surpassed three and a half million copies sold. An announced DS remake was one of the most widely anticipated titles for that system, and when the project was placed on hold, questions were immediately asked about the 3DS instead. To this day, Final Fantasy VI continues to generate headlines. It is simply one of the most beloved games ever made.

Charting the history of a war which will reshape the face of the globe, Final Fantasy VI is ostensibly the story of Terra Branford, the daughter of a human and an esper, whose natural gift for magic attracts the undesireable attention of Gestahl, the emperor of a militarised and technologically-advanced kingdom. Gestahl’s lead researcher, Cid, has devised a means of extracting magical power from espers. This power is used to create magical machines and to give magical power to human beings. With magic at their control, and the military in the command of fearless and valiant generals, the empire of Gestahl seems unstoppable. One by one, the kingdoms and city-states of the world fall against its undaunted might.

Kefka Palazzo

As the story opens, a mind-controlled Terra and two soldiers are approaching the colliery town of Narshe where yet another esper has been found. But, the empire’s desire for the esper’s power backfires when the creature, frozen in a block of ice, dispatches the soldiers and breaks the mind-control, freeing Terra from the enslavement of Kefka Palazzo, one of Gestahl’s closest advisors. Her flight is aided by members of the Returners, a resistance organisation which seeks to enlist the assistance of espers in their fight against the empire. Kefka and the entire empire of Gestahl follows in pursuit, intent on regaining their magic-using secret weapon before she turns her power–and vengeance–upon her former captors.

The story follows Terra and her friends as they seek to overthrow the power of Gestahl, Kefka, and those who would seek to use might to enslave the people of the world. Along their way they will be joined by knights, generals, artists, gamblers, and TREASURE HUNTERS, all of whom have their own reasons for resisting the empire’s hegemony. Together, they will face down not only a militarised, magically-armed force, but also a power beyond their comprehension–a power which seeks to rule the entire world as a God enthroned, dispensing death from above without cause or remorse.

Only by uniting and together bravely resisting evil can Terra hope to find salvation for the world and peace for her own, torn soul. Embodying the hopes and prayers of humans and espers alike, the heroes must overcome their own personal struggles before, united, they can defeat the seemingly omnipotent powers which oppose them.

Character Ensemble

All areas of Final Fantasy VI‘s presentation have been praised since its release nearly a score of years ago. The music (composed by Nobuo Uematsu) is widely considered to be one of the greatest soundtracks ever written for a video game. Its orchestral arrangement–Final Fantasy VI Grand Finale–is still routinely used as an example of the finest in gaming music. The graphics, highly sophisticated for a JRPG of the time, employed numerous cutting-edge technologies: Mode 7 scaling, sampled effects, and highly-detailed environments, some of which are digital renderings of hand-drawn artwork.

Use the comment thread below to discuss your approach to the game, challenges you have faced, tactics you are employing, and what you are getting out of your playthrough. Do you feel that the presentation of Final Fantasy VI has held up since its release in 1994? Are there aspects of the game that you would change, or that you would hold up as an example for modern game developers to emulate? How has your experience with other RPGs released after Final Fantasy VI changed your impressions of the game? Do you have any stories about your first experience? Tell us all about it and join in our discussion below!

The aim in this playthrough is to complete the entirety of the game in four weeks. For the fourth and final week, the goal is to finish the game. Feel free to join in, even if you are behind on the playthrough. Anyone and everyone is invited to participate, regardless of game format, speed of play, or familiarity with the series. Tell your friends!

Without further adieu, it is our very great pleasure to invite you now to join the Lusipurr.com staff members, guests, and readers as we return to the snowy, northern plains in Christmas in Narshe: A Final Fantasy VI Playthrough!

Peter “I Believe” Molyneux

Produced 2012.11.25

Lusipurr and SiliconNooB prepare for the upcoming Final Fantasy VI playthrough with news stories about Peter ‘Crocodile Tears’ Molyneux, the Australian and English Cricket teams take a number of wickets, and Levy Pants adopts a newly bellicose demeanour.

This will never happen in HD. brb weeping

Square Enix Confirm That a Final Fantasy VII Remake Will Never Happen

Square Enix’s bait and switch Final Fantasy VII remake routine is one of the oldest dances in the world of gaming. An awkward PR shuffle whereby one of the senior Final Fantasy staff will offer just enough of a taste to get fanboys wildly salivating, before withdrawing at the last minute, leaving everyone blue. In recent years it has been a rather common occurrence to have Yoshinori Kitase claim to be looking into the project, only to have Motomu Toriyama proclaim several weeks later that rendering a town in HD would take at least a hundred years to achieve – well, it would seem that such hijinks may have finally come to an end this week, with Yoichi Wada stating in front of a room full of investors that Square Enix will never produce a Final Fantasy VII remake.

Yoichi Wada declared an end to Final Fantasy VII remake speculation in no uncertain terms, stating: “we’ll make a Final Fantasy VII remake once we’ve made a Final Fantasy game that exceeds the quality of FFVII.” Not only is this a tacit acknowledgement of how far the Final Fantasy brand has fallen (an admission that is as shocking as it is obvious), but it is also confirmation that fanboys can pack up their tents and go home, because Final Fantasy VII will never get a HD remake. Wada did not stop there however, as he went on to explicitly state that Square Enix at present is not producing games to the standard of Final Fantasy VII, and that if they were to release a remake of Final Fantasy VII right now, then the Final Fantasy series would be finished thereafter.

It is really quite difficult to understand how Square Enix could get to this point; haunted by the success of a fifteen-year-old game which the publisher seemingly views as both their solitary lifeline as well as their eventual destroyer. This is a company that has been allowed to capitalise on their successes for far longer than they should have, and thus are tormented by a legacy of prestige that they cannot possibly hope to live up to. At any rate, one is well pleased that Yoichi Wada has taken the potential butchering of Final Fantasy VII off the table – it can remain on PSN where it belongs, pristine, as a memento of better times in the studio’s history.

Lusipurr.

Nintendo to Release a 3DS XL Just for Lusipurr

Nintendo have this week announced the July/August release of a 3DS XL system, only a fortnight too late to save their dreadful E3 conference. The larger handheld system will feature a modest increase to battery life, up from the original 3 hours to a whopping 3.5 hours. The system will also feature enhanced chunky start, select, and home buttons, remedying a terrible design flaw of the original model. Meanwhile, the size of both screens has been increased by around ninety percent, from 3.53 and 3.02 inches to 4.88 and 4.18 inches, making the top screen almost as large as that of the PS Vita.

It must be stated however, that the composition of the new system is not without its criticisms. While it has been confirmed that the system will ship with a charger in America, Australia, and New Zealand, Nintendo has come to the incomprehensible decision to sell the 3DS XL without an A/C charger in both Japan and Europe – because goodness knows that the ability to actually use the system is an optional extra. One imagines that a penny pinching Nintendo is pursuing this policy within any market that they legally can; Capitalism ho!

Another point of criticism for the new handheld is the fact that everyone had assumed that the 3DS’ first hardware revision would see the addition of a second circle pad, alleviating the need for Nintendo’s frankly hideous Circle Pad Pro ashtray attachment. The fact that Nintendo have refused to accommodate market expectations is all the more baffling given the surfeit of additional surface area available to the 3DS XL. Nintendo’s failure to include a second circle pad may in fact indicate that Nintendo’s ashtray will be the next in a long line of peripherals that Nintendo has abandoned. Some people may chalk this conspicuous absence up to a frugal Nintendo pinching pennies yet again, but one is utterly convinced that this is an omission of pure contempt towards a market which deigns tell Nintendo what to do with Nintendo consoles.

How does I handle criticism?

Reggie Blasts His Critics

If gamers do have complaints regarding Nintendo’s handling of the 3DS XL, then perhaps Reggie Fils-Aime is not the best person to broach them with – or at least that was the take away message from the spray that he levelled at gamers this week for not getting excited at the prospect of more Wii Fit. Reggie went so far as to suggest that gamers are incapable of telling the difference between amazing software and mediocre drivel on the basis that they ignore ‘amazing’ multi-million selling software like Wii Fit. Reggie does not seem to understand that the Wii Fit audience all bought an iPad. They do not reside in these parts anymore, and they certainly do not comment on game blogs.

Reggie shrilly chastised potential consumers thusly: “One of the things that, on one hand, I love and, on the other hand, that troubles tremendously about not only our fanbase but the gaming community at large is that, whenever you show information, the perspective is: ‘thank you, but give me more’. I mean it is insatiable.

For years this community has been asking, ‘Where’s Pikmin? Where’s Pikmin? We give them Pikmin. And then they say: ‘What else?’ For years this community has said: ‘Dammit Reggie, when you launch, you better launch with a Mario game’. So we launch with a Mario game, and they say, ‘So, what’s more?’

I have heard people say, ‘You know, you’ve got these fantastic franchises, beyond what you’re doing in Smash Bros, isn’t there a way to leverage all those franchises?’ So we create Nintendo Land and they say: ‘Ho-hum. Give me more.’ It’s an interesting challenge.

When we show a game like Brain Age or when we show a game like Nintendogs, what’s the fan-based community reaction? ‘Ho-hum.’ Until it sells millions of copies. When we showed Wii Fit on stage.. go back and read your blogs, what was the reaction?

It’s the question of, as a gamer, ‘Is this for me and something I can get excited about?’ And Wii Fit did not get that reaction. And yet 43-million copies around the world, it’s a phenomenon. And so I would argue that the gaming community actually is unable to differentiate between a phenomenon and something that is ‘ho-hum’.”

There Reggie goes equating units sold with quality, and assuming that what is popular among post-menopausal Women should also be a sure fire hit within the gaming community at large. As far as Nintendo franchises go, the revival of Pikmin was only ever really going to satisfy a large niche – though there are certainly worse things Nintendo could have done to launch a new system. New Super Mario Bros. U for its part looks to replicate an experience that will be available to 3DS owners later this year in the form of New Super Mario Bros. 2. Meanwhile, Nintendo Land is an assortment of mini-games, and all the titles mentioned thereafter are dire bilge. It really goes to show just how out of touch Fils-Aime is that he has to wonder why consumers keep asking him what else there is to sell them on Nintendo’s positively arcane Wii U.

Farewell old friend!

Hiromichi Tanaka Leaves Square Enix

This inevitability has been a long time in coming. The producer overseeing the ill-fated original incarnation of Final Fantasy XIV, Hiromichi Tanaka, has this week left the company that he has called home for well over two decades. The long-time Square producer cites ill-health for his departure, yet it does not take much in the way of imagination to picture him sitting in an empty office for the past year twiddling his thumbs as he waits for the non-compete clause in his contract to lapse – much like Hironobu Sakaguchi’s final days at the company.

While his post-millennial tenure under Square Enix did not bring him much in the way of distinction, it is perhaps better that we remember his contributions to gaming during the halcyon days of Squaresoft. Tanaka pulled game design duties on the first three Final Fantasy games, before moving to distinguish himself by designing the concept and scenario for Secret of Mana, which he then produced – Tanaka would go on to direct 1995’s ambitious sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3. It is for 1998’s Xenogears and 1999’s love-it-or-hate-it epic Chrono Cross that Tanaka is perhaps most likely to be remembered by contemporary gamers, as he acted as producer for both titles, and as battle planner and battle system designer respectively. Hiromichi Tanaka has cited his return to game design as being one of the motivating factors for his split with Square Enix, one can only hope that, like Hironobu Sackaguchi before him, he is able to rise from the ashes.

The original Final Fantasy, with its relatively flexible party compositions, is a popular game for challenges.

In an average Final Fantasy playthrough, one can expect two major roadblocks. The first of these, the Marsh Cave, is a relatively long dungeon with enemies that are significantly tougher than many of those the player has faced up to that point. The other roadblock is the notorious Ice Cave, which is long and has enemies with instant-death attacks. A solo Black Belt faces roadblocks of his own. The first and surprisingly the toughest of these is the very beginning of the game. The Black Belt class in the original Final Fantasy has horrendous damage output early in the game, and relies upon level gains for usefulness perhaps more than any other class in the game. This, combined with my stubborn refusal to use any form of weapon in the game besides punching, meant that fighting imps outside of Coneria wound up being the most difficult part of the playthrough. Remarkably, the game became easier and easier the further along I got. The nine pirates fought in Provoka also proved tough, since a Black Belt has to take them out one at a time. Still, the Black Belt solo is frequently ranked among the easier Final Fantasy solos, and for good reason. In single-enemy fights, the Black Belt utterly dominated; boss fights were never even really a threat.

Much like Zell, the Black Belt needs only his fists.

Another reason why the Black Belt solo wound up becoming easy was items. The Defense sword, with its ability to stack RUSE, meant that my Black Belt took no damage from physical attacks after a few turns of combat. The Heal helmet combined with the huge heap of healing items I could afford meant that HP was never really an issue, and the Zeus gauntlet allowed for multi-target damage. For kicks and giggles, I decided to grind to 50, the level cap, before taking on the final dungeon. This proved a hilariously brilliant idea, because of the Black Belt’s damage scaling. A level-capped Black Belt is essentially guaranteed to do over one thousand damage with his physical attack. Since no enemy besides Chaos has more than a thousand HP, this meant my max-level Black Belt could one-shot every single enemy besides the final boss, which took a whopping two attacks to bring down. The conclusion I reached as a result of this solo stomp-through is that every single non-challenge run party I bring through the original Final Fantasy will have a Black Belt/Monk in it. I forget the exact numbers, but after about level twenty or so (22 if I am not mistaken), Black Belt has the highest damage output in the game and even a fully-equipped Knight cannot keep up. The gap only grows larger, with a max-level Black Belt or Master having the aforementioned four-digit attacking capabilities.

So it turned out that solo Black Belt was actually a far, far easier run than I had expected. I doubt I will ever take on one of the more extreme solo, non-class change challenges in Final Fantasy, I will leave the solo White Mage and solo Thief runs to people who are far more dedicated and insane than I am. Join me next week, readers, where I will share some of my Pokemon-related challenge run exploits with you all. Until then, I am Daniel “Deimosion” Flink and I approve this article. Before I leave, however, I would like to take the time to extend congratulations to Lusipurr and Ashley, who will be married in but a few days now. Congratulations, Lusipurr and Thea, and I hope your wedding, honeymoon, and marriage are all excellent!

Exclusive Cid Artwork from the upcoming Final Fantasy VIII

Produced 2012.04.22

Digging back into the mists of time, Lusipurr uses his Chrono Trigger to uncover a podcast from the early days of the internet, predating Lusipurr.com, broadband, both the PlayStation3 and PlayStation2, the iPod and iPhone, and the word ‘podcast’ itself!

What this screenshot fails to capture is just how damn long it takes that ''little money'' to scroll across the screen.

Released for the original PlayStation in June 1997 in Japan and January 1998 in North America, Final Fantasy Tactics took the Final Fantasy model and the Tactics Ogre gameplay style and blended the two with great success. Tactics utilizes a job system that draws much from Final Fantasy V, though new jobs are unlocked by leveling old ones rather than by story progression. The story of Final Fantasy Tactics also deviates from the series’ formula; the focus is far more on the politics and people of Ivalice (the world in which the game is set) than on the fantastic elements typically explored by Final Fantasy main series entries. Final Fantasy Tactics tells the story of Ramza Beoulve, the youngest member of a long line of nobility, and his role in “The War of the Lions”. Ramza, his generic companions, and several special characters find themselves caught straight in the middle of scheming from several political groups as war overtakes Ivalice. Final Fantasy Tactics was not quite the commercial success the other entries on the PlayStation were, but among fans of the series, Tactics often holds just as special a place as most of the main Final Fantasy entries and, despite being an extremely easy game, is certainly an experience of the same caliber as the main series games.

I had a good feeling, too. This is not the way.

Spurred on by the popularity of Final Fantasy Tactics among fans of the main series, Square Enix released a follow-up game, also set in Ivalice, this time for the Game Boy Advance. Released in 2003, the aptly named Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, while set in Ivalice, does not share any areas with its predecessor and adds several new races, many of which would see use in Final Fantasy XII. The star of Tactics Advance is a young Ramza-look-a-like named Marche Radiuju who along with his friends is sucked out of his ordinary school life and thrust into the fantasy world where the vast majority of the game takes place. After meeting a Moogle named Montblanc and taking over a clan of warriors, Marche then heads off on a quest to find his way back home, though his friends are much less receptive to the idea of returning to their unhappy home lives. The gameplay in Tactics Advance is a blend of the original Final Fantasy Tactics using an ability learning system from Final Fantasy IX, with one noteworthy addition. A frequently maligned law system within the game bans certain actions, elements, or behaviors during battles, with characters being penalized or even arrested and jailed for breaking these laws. Naturally, the A.I. almost never breaks the law, and bosses are immune to most of the penalties anyway. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was significantly less well-received than its predecessor; the law system was often cited as being unnecessarily restrictive. Additionally, the storyline was something of a mess, and the largely unlikable cast of characters made playing the game a less pleasant experience than the first Tactics.

Teach us how to Blitz!

Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, Square Enix’s follow-up to Tactics Advance, saw release on the Nintendo DS on October 2007 for Japan and June 2008 worldwide. Tactics A2 follows Luso Clemens, another schoolchild sucked into another different area of Ivalice, and his adventures throughout the Jylland region. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 uses the same weapon-based ability learning as its GBA counterpart, with similar requirements for unlocking new jobs for characters. The law system makes an unwelcome return, but is refined significantly. Rather than heavy penalty for disobeying the law and no real reward for obeying them, Tactics A2 rewards players for following the laws and will never remove someone from combat for simply casting “Fire”. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 was as a result generally more well-received than its predecessor; the game provided in many peoples’ experiences a much more refined and interesting experience than the lackluster GBA attempt. This reviewer must admit to never having played Tactics A2, so giving editorialized commentary proves somewhat difficult. Still, speaking to people who have played all three of the Tactics sub-series generally shows that the DS entry is a much better game than its disappointing GBA predecessor.

The history of the Final Fantasy Tactics games is a relatively short one. With only three entries as of April 2012, and no future games announced, there does not appear to be much future for Final Fantasy Tactics outside of horribly overpriced iOS ports. Still, for fans of SRPGs and the Final Fantasy main series games, these three games fill a unique niche among the dwindling JRPG crowd. What do you have to say about the Tactics games, readers? Have any of you played all three games? I have only personally played the first two, so I would like to hear from gamers who have played all of them. Even if you haven’t readers, comment and let me know what you think about Tactics and about Final Fantasy spinoffs in general! I look forward to discussing these games with you, my dear readers.

Chocobo!

Produced 2011.11.06

Vicks teaches us about raccoons, SiliconNooB bundles up the Vita, and Lusipurr dates Faris, Celes, and Kid. Also, Vicks lusts for a chocolate cocoa-bo, whilst SiliconNooB and Lusipurr chastise her for her insane Marylandese pronunciation.

''Yuna! It's your kids, Yuna!''

Final Fantasy X brought the series to the sixth generation of gaming consoles in July of 2001. Released in December 2001 in North America, Final Fantasy X was notably the first game in the series to feature voice acting; receptions to the voices were mixed to say the least. All awkward laughter aside, Final Fantasy X‘s voice acting revolutionized the series’ storytelling mechanisms. Final Fantasy X tells the story of Tidus, a young superstar athlete from the futuristic city-state of Zanarkand and the misadventure he finds himself caught in when Zanarkand is destroyed by the giant whale-like beast known only as Sin. Final Fantasy X features a relatively small cast of misfit characters centered around Yuna, a summoner seeking to destroy Sin. Final Fantasy X is frequently criticized for its extreme linearity; there is little exploration and backtracking until the end of the game, and the game’s environments are very straightforward. Final Fantasy X notably did away with a traditional leveling system, making it the first entry in the series since Final Fantasy II not to use levels and experience. Final Fantasy X instead uses a “Sphere Grid” for progression. By earning an experience point equivalent through battles, players advance characters through nodes to increase stats and learn abilities. Each character begins the game locked into a section of the grid, but by unlocking lock nodes, the player can take characters through any path on the grid. Final Fantasy X uses a “Conditional Turn-Based” battle system; battles are turn based, but turns are traded back and forth among characters and enemies in a less rigid fashion than in early JRPG battle systems.

Purple haze, all in my brain...

Final Fantasy X saw mixed receptions, though not so mixed as its successor. In a hugely controversial turn for the series, Final Fantasy XI was made as an MMORPG for the PlayStation 2, PC, and eventually, the Xbox 360. Released first on the PS2 in Japan in 2002, then on the PC in North America and Japan in late 2003 before coming to North American PS2’s in 2004, Final Fantasy XI was the series’ first foray into online gaming. Final Fantasy XI takes players into the world of Vana’diel, a massive fantasy world full of places to explore and storylines to uncover. The many Final Fantasy XI expansions create a large, deep story for players to discover and many quests to complete. Choosing from among five races and three nations, players initially create a character with one of the six traditional Final Fantasy jobs before potentially unlocking new jobs as the game progresses. Final Fantasy XI used an interesting take on the job system; upon reaching level 18, characters could unlock a subjob, which could then be paired with their main job to allow for greater character variety. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy XI was not a solo-friendly experience; accomplishing anything of note required a group of players teaming up together. Final Fantasy XI is still online and going strong, with new content regularly being added to the game.

Darth Va-er, a Judge Magister at work.

Rounding off the PlayStation 2 Final Fantasy era is Final Fantasy XII. Released in March 2006 in Japan and October 2006 in America, Final Fantasy XII clearly took influences from the MMORPG nature of its predecessor. Set in the world of Ivalice, Final Fantasy XII is a massive game with a large, open world to explore and a heavily MMO-influenced battle system. In addition to gaining levels traditionally, characters in XII can also be advanced in the “License Board”, a square-based grid that enables characters to use weapons, armors, accessories, magic, and other abilities. The License Board allowed an unprecedented level of character customization, but also removed the uniqueness of each character’s fighting abilities. Final Fantasy XII, rather than having a character-based plot, used large-scale political events to tell its story. At times, the plot of Final Fantasy XII feels like a steampunk adaptation of George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise; the influence of the Star Wars series on Final Fantasy has never been clearer. Final Fantasy XII was well-received, and many gamers consider it to be a refining and fixing of the less desirable elements of Final Fantasy XI.

Sadly, for many gamers, the PS2 Final Fantasy games simply could not capture the magic of the SNES and PS1 entries. Still, most of the PS2 Final Fantasy entries were well-received, and the series continued to live on into another generation of gaming consoles. What do you think, readers? Are the PS2 Final Fantasy games just as worthy of praise as their predecessors? Or were the SNES and PS1 games just better? Let me know what you think in the comments, my dear readers!