How to know it’s time to take a break:

  1. You’ve cleared out a post apocalyptic city full of daemons.
  2. You’ve defeated the villain’s pet three headed, fire breathing dog.
  3. You’ve defeated the villain’s Astral ally, with some help from your own.
  4. The game crashes before the post battle auto checkpoint save.
Yep.

Things that could only happen in an RPG game, I’m sure:

Quest x: get a nice leather armour.

Quest y: get a +1 defense rated “revealing” armour.

As if you started with the kind that would be just perfect for an adventure wondering the countryside. Then cut it down until it was basically a leather bra and suspenders.

Aptly by the time the sets were completed, my Miqo’te gladiator went from looking like a knight napping under a tree to a bandit slut in need a whirp.

That said, FF14 in the course of hasa hard day’s questing and several suits of armor: the game has generally shown equipment that looks like something you would want to wear on a battlefield instead of going down the boobplate route; it’s just that I find it amusing that the leather version of boobplate was a +1 to the more conventional armour.

Never given that much mind to such characters but after playing through Y’jhimei‘s Adventurer From Another World quest in FFXV, there’s probably a fair chance someday I’ll be making a character in some MMO and my mind will flash to the Miqo’te from FFIV.

And here I thought, my next character inspiration would probably be inspired by the likes of Naotsugu from Log Horizon.

When it comes to the PC port of FFVIII, I imagine that there’s only two views to take of the train mission. Either its creator was a kind soul for giving you plenty of time, or your mind might flash to Robin Williams’ line in Mrs. Doubtfire about the masochistic bastard who invented high heels, and picturing some game porter with a set of nine inch heels jammed up their butt.

My simple solution to the translation problem:

numeric code -> on screen key map -> actual controller map

Is to configure the game’s keyboard settings to use 1, 2, 3, 4 for the specified actions. Taking advantage of the fact that the game basically requires the same number of buttons the original GameBoy worked with.

While the button miss-ordering is apparently a known issue with the port, I rather hope that the U.S. PlayStation release didn’t have a similar grumble to it, lol.

Rubba dub, dub! Rub that magic lamp and have a long ass, brutual, determined to drag his ass out for a fight until the bring of death and beyond.

After rubbing the lamp it wasn’t long before Zell fell, and Selphie mid battle.  All the GFs fell before Diablos’ mighty gravity area of affect pretty promptly, so I effectively got stuck having to widdle his health down with basic strikes. Blinding him at least limited his ability to spam AoE *and* lunge a fighter to prompt death but didn’t really help with the endless stream of gravity strikes. Losing the healer lead to trading draw-cast-cures and sword strikes, after losing the ability to tag team DPS him between cure cycles. A steady flow based on draw-cast-curing my way to survivle between his area of effect spams.

In the end, expecting to lose my head, a quick scan revealed the drowsy beast was down to about 700 HP. Shouting “WHO DARES, WINS!”, I rather picked my ass off the floor and went back to buisness–working in as many magic strikes as I could.

For better or worse determination doesn’t tend to be my problem in clearing part of a game.

Signs you’ve been playing video games too long

After learning enough of Final Fantasy VIII’s battle system to beat the bastard upon the communications tower, it felt rather rewarding to watch Elvoret go down. In fact I kinda think he was designed for that: because enough force is required to beat your way through Briggs / Wedge / Elvoret that if you’ve just winged it and puttered about, to flatten Elvoret you’ll have to be doing something right or your party will eventually fall.

And then of course once you’ve got him cut down to size: got thirty minutes to reach the extraction point, and a big assed robotic spider whose first encounter makes him invincible until you flee. That just figures. Because after finally having that victory, why not force the player to run like hell and if they’re effective, manage to blow the still-even-more-hit-point-bastard to kingdom come as he chases you to the beaches: or let the attractive Quistis do it with a machine gun ^_o.

Yes. Somehow this follow up just seems appropriate to me. On the flip side it doesn’t take for freaking ever. Like the massive Dungeon Crawl that can occur in Dragon Age: Origins if you decide nope, not killing the little possessed tike, but haven’t helped the Mages with their little cluster fuck…. I seem to remember tackling that castle going from “Eh, should take a break soon” over to “Alright, just how many dungeons was this crawl?”; If memory serves it was three or four depending on how you view the castle, the circle, and the occasional trips to the land of freaky things.

Actually, one of these days I really should revisit DA:O. It was probably the first RPG game that I really got into and enjoyed the ever loving crap out of rather than getting bored after a few hours.

Strange things: when you start running out of Final Fantasy XV content, and start debating between VI, VII, VIII, XIII as a future target.

Maybe this is what I get for skipping out on the entire series as a kid instead of keeping up with it :P.

Before playing #15, I think the closest I ever really got to any of the games was a short demo of one of the side entries during the PlayStation era. A long, long time ago #7 was kind of just there but despite its success wasn’t really popular in the circles I ran with back then. Nor (J)RPGs in general, I suppose.

Fire Support: noun; when a Astral the size of a skyscraper picks you up like an action figure and smites the area from orbit.

I found the dungeon of the old wizard guy a touch unimaginative compared to the first Astral encounter with Titan but I have to admit that the whole nuke the area with his staff thing makes Ramuh rather handy. Especially if one of FFXV’s hunts is carrying on too long, hehehe.

You should be listening to video game soundtracks at work.

Actually this reminds me: I wanted to check out if Google Play Music includes any of the Final Fantasy sound tracks.

I find it curious and appropriate on so many levels that the road trip music in FFXV is pretty much video game music. Usually at work I don’t listen to the kind of tunes you’d find in an RPG. Country, rock, classic, folk, jazz, all sorts of stuff. But I will admit that Dragon Age and Mirror’s Edge sound tracks do show up in my playlists every now and then.