Hmmm, X-2...I held back from playing it back when it was released as I never quite felt drawn to it's style, at least what I was seeing and hearing during the time. I came to play it only after I got the X/X2 HD Remaster. I'm rather luckwarm towards it to be honest, don't hate it nor love it; granted the battle system is nice but for the rest I felt there was a lot of potential to do something better and more in sycn, as far as tone goes, with the original game.
Last edited by Egami; 02-23-2015 at 01:10 PM.
Originally Posted by Loony BoB
I actually wasn't going to play it either. Instead, I bought FFXI and attempted to install it on my PC so I could play it with 56k dial-up internet. Before I even got to attempt that horrible idea, the game wouldn't actually install; once I had to switch discs, the second disc started spinning wildly in the CD-Rom drive. So I returned it and said, well, I'll give X-2 a shot. Then once I started playing it I was just like :jawdrop:
Also, we should have a jawdrop smiley.
Like this.
eek2.gif
Last edited by metagloria; 02-23-2015 at 03:43 PM.
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
We used to have one but it was only used once or twice. Probably still on the server somewhere.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
Pod D, another weird one...a couple of really, really great games in here though.
General Themes: Four RPGs from various eras – the bright, playful Eternal Sonata; black sheep Final Fantasy II; dark, complex Xenogears; and open, action-filled Dragon's Dogma. If you're just looking for fun, there's another Layton title (Miracle Mask) or the amazing and trendsetting Super Mario Kart. If you're up for an adventure, Tomba! is one of the most delightful PS1 platformers. But the real legends here – pun intended – are...
Marquee Matchup: Mega Man Legends vs. Sonic & Knuckles. One took a classic platforming series to its ultimate 2D conclusion, another shattered the realm of 2D and brought its hero into three glorious dimensions in a Zelda-meets-Metroid romp for the ages.
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
Oh Xenogears and Mario Kart!
I have to try and finish Dragon's Dogma...have it on my PS3 with the expansion and all but got derailed with other games.
Go Eternal Sonata!
I'll begin with the clear outcasts of the group. Tomba! is a game I don't actually own, but a friend and I played it together one summer over a decade ago. It's a really unique 2d platformer with levels that "turn" in a kinda-3d way, lots of exploration and secrets to discover, and we had a good time adventuring and learning all of that stuff. But aside from that it's not super memorable. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask is another Layton game, the most recent one on this list, and gets its unique character by vacillating between present time and flashbacks to Layton's youth. The story is really engrossing, the flashback puzzle-dungeons are a nice addition, and overall this may be the strongest Layton entry – certainly very close with Unwound Future.
Final Fantasy II is my least favorite of the FF series, but it still has so much charm. It has far and away the best story of the NES generation, great music, and one of the most interesting overworlds – which is set up as a single landmass! But it also has self-flagellation, magic grinding, and atrocious dungeon design. The better Square product on this list is Xenogears, a cult-classic PS1 RPG with a fascinating and complex storyline. While the gameplay is a little draggy, the sequencing is sometimes disorienting, and the inclusion of platforming elements is a bit awkward, the characters are great, the gears add an interesting dimension, and that story is among the best in gaming history. This could've been a true all-time RPG titan were it not for the totally botched second disc, which was clearly intended to be fully fleshed out. Never in any other game – especially not one so dungeon-oriented at times – have I seen a game literally warp you to the final chamber of a dungeon where the MacGuffin rests just to narrate "We went to place X and got thing Y..." It literally shifts completely from a game to a movie in the latter part, and while the emphasis on story (and the added clarity) is refreshing, the gear-shift (hehe) is jarring and ultimately drags the game down immensely.
On the newer side, we have the very JRPG Eternal Sonata and the very WRPG Dragon's Dogma (which I am currently in the process of completing). Both of these are a lot of fun, but not at the pinnacle of their genre. Eternal Sonata has good combat, great characters, and engaging story, but ends up feeling somehow empty – despite having a good time playing it, I remember terribly little about it – and the conclusion of the story is way out of left field and confusing. Dragon's Dogma is one of only three WRPGs I've played, and it doesn't do any one thing excellently. The combat is good, with a broad skill system and job classes (though I wish there were a bit more cross-class ability carryover), but the selection of enemies is pretty limited. The world seems immense at first, but it doesn't take terribly long to reach every corner of it – it's not half as large as Skyrim, and made artificially larger by the slowness of foot travel. The number and quality of dungeons is incredibly low for a game of this scope. Unless it blows me away going forward, I don't see it as a classic.
Now for some real classics. Super Mario Kart for the SNES was one of those Nintendo masterstrokes that changed gaming forever, basically inventing the kart racing genre and spawning a side-franchise currently eight titles deep. This is the only one on my list though because it is the best. Later Mario Karts got all weird and overcomplicated; let's stick with simple courses, red shells, fun battle modes, and classic courses. It's a great game! But at the end of the day, it's a kart racer, and that can't hold a candle to the amazing action of Sonic & Knuckles, the pinnacle of the Sonic series. With eight levels, including the unimpeachable Lava Reef zone, and the addition of Knuckles the gliding echidna as a playable character, this game sucked up a major chunk of my childhood. It's hard to judge this game just by itself, because it also featured lock-on capability with Sonic 3 (where you could play through all 14 combined levels together) and Sonic 2 (where you play that game as Knuckles). All of those things are awesome. But even just on its own, it's awesome.
With all that praise heaped on Sonic & Knuckles, we move on to Mega Man Legends.
...
......
You ever have one of those games that you love so irrationally you can't even talk about it with coherent sentences? That's me and Mega Man Legends. I love this game SO MUCH and I try to tell my friends about it and I just come off like crazy cat lady. It's like Zelda, except better than any Zelda game. It takes place on this island with a massive intertwined network of underground ruins that are progressively revealed and connected as the game progresses. The story and voice acting are spectacular (characters with real voices! are you listening, Zelda franchise???). The setting is sublime. It's loaded with weapon upgrades, interesting sidequests, and creative and memorable bosses. It's got a little bit of a difficulty curve (I quit at the Feldynaught for over six months my first time!), but once you master it, it's smooth as butter. The only bad thing I could possibly say about it is that it's short – by doing every possible thing in the game, you could stretch it out to about 20 hours, but you could also totally speedrun it in under 2 (I did it in 2:18 – and think I can do better! I was rusty!). This is one of the handful of games I can play by muscle memory. I can beat the final boss without taking damage. But none of that explains why it's so good guys it's seriously so good.
FINAL RANKINGS: POD DD1. Mega Man Legends
D2. Sonic & Knuckles
D3. Xenogears
D4. Super Mario Kart
D5. Eternal Sonata
D6. Dragon's Dogma
D7. Final Fantasy II
D8. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
D9. Tomba!
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
Heh, now that you mention it...I remember Tomba! from playing the demo disc back when I first got the PSX and was waiting for my copy of VII to arrive. One of the guys at the store gave it to me for free when I bought the system there. I think I spent about a week playing that and the disc of demos the Playstation came with while waiting.
It's been so long since I last played FF II that I barely remember any of it. It always seems as if III is the worst of the NES era by consensus, not sure if I'd find either worst than XIII (which is my least favorite FF game at the moment). Will need to try and revisit them someday. I found Dragon's Dogma very hit and miss, some of the combat mechanics are nice and I like how things change at night but overall it felt a bit "chorish" to play through and there is a lot of going through the same areas over and over again. The map isn't as big as it seem as first as you noted and soon you'll find that there really isn't much to it. I also didn't like armor/clothing selection much, never felt like I could look badass as I can in other western RPGs and while you have plenty of options to tweak your character's appearance I found it annoying that most of the time what you see while you are creating/customising the character is not quite what you get in game.
Good points, and I got distracted and also forgot to mention the pain-in-the-butt inventory limits. About 20 hours in it started morphing into Inventory Management: The Game aka "What can I drop/shove onto a pawn to get myself 0.01 under 40 pounds?" I've sort of learned that I carry too many curatives, though. That criticism said, I do really appreciate how you can upgrade using items directly from storage instead of having to go get them out and put into your character inventory first – that would be an absolute nightmare, so good on them for circumventing that.
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
Here's a pod that I'm actually really, really excited about. Time for the fifth entry in our list!
General Themes: Big-name RPGs here, folks. Two-thirds of the maligned XIII trilogy, the gorgeous Ni no Kuni, and the extraordinary Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. A couple of beloved Mega Man titles appear, pitting classic 8-bit Mega Man against his 16-bit cousin. Plus three handheld titles, including two of the greatest games available for the 3DS.
Marquee Matchup: Neither one is going to win the Pod, but the matchup of interest is clearly XIII-2 going against XIII-3. Which of these incredibly different sequels will come out on top? Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, please share your thoughts on these games! Especially if you want to weigh in on XIII-2 vs. LR or MM2 vs. MMX.
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
Thoughts on XIII-2 and LR, eh? Personally I think the entire XIII saga is a massive disappointment and XIII itself is my least favorite FF title (more on it here). XIII-2 and LR sought to fix or backtrack on the huge missteps that SE took with XIII but really all they tried to do and didn't quite achieve was to kind of dial things back to what we had in XII which XIII had scrapped for no justifiable reason. Which is why I feel that XV looks so far like what SE should have followed up XII with as opposed to what we got in XIII.
So, XIII-2 gave you a bit more freedom to jump around the different areas, gave you a bit more to do than just running forward in narrow corridors fighting monsters, included npcs, made some adjustments to the battle system such as you being gable to change the party leader (which XII had already implemented years before and XIII took away for no reason), etc. But it still inherited a lot of the things that made XIII bad and added a few of it's own bad things along the way. I did like Caius as a villain tho.
LR gave you a more open world feel (again in response to criticism and the demand for such among gamers and again which XII had already done years before and XIII took away for no reason) and more customisation with it's schema system; but then it mitigates against the exploration of said world with it's time limit/mechanic making you feel rushed and cutting you off from certain areas at different times of the day. It also has what is perhaps the most annoying aspect in a FF game done no less by who is probably the most annoying character in FF history: Hope. I hate games that treat me as if I am too stupid to figure things out or as if I have a ridiculously short attention span. Hope is nearly always pointing out the obvious or is constantly reminding you of things you already know and he does this over and over again to the point where it becomes annoying and distracting. I already KNOW I will be teleported back at 6:00, I KNOW there is a ladder there I can use or that I only need another number for the passcode, so pretty please...with sugar on top...shut the hell up. It is as if the game doesn't trusts the capability of the player to figure things out on his own and goes out of it's way to hand hold you in a rather abrasive manner. It is really distracting and immersion breaking.
Anyway, while I do like both games more than XIII, that isn't saying much, really...hopefully we have seen the last of Motomu Toriyama's directional efforts on FF titles.
I love Star Ocean 3.
Between MMX and MM2, I am in the vast minority here but I don't especially LIKE MM2, while MMX is one of the best in the X series, soooo . . . I like X a lot more than 2.
I'm interested to see how the new Zelda game I haven't played is going to do
Let's knock off the Layton title first. It's the third one you've seen in this list, but the first game in the Layton series. As such, it's charming, but also lacks some of the pleasant refinements that entered the series as it went on. It's not my least favorite Layton game, but it's at the bottom of this very stacked pod. Just above it is the delightful, if eventually nightmarishly repetitive, Theatrhythm. I regret that I haven't played Curtain Call, as I'm 100% sure it's an even better game, but I'm only judging the original. I have no other experience with rhythm games (except Michael Jackson: The Experience for Wii, which, brb moving that to #1 on this list because Michael Jackson), but there is no bigger fan of FF music than myself, so I knew I'd be into it. I sank many hours into getting much rhythmia, and enjoyed it for a while until my sole purpose in life became to acquire every single dark note. Not worth it. (I think I had about 60 unique ones.) I played it a ton until one day I just stopped; that's kind of my experience with every Square-Enix handheld title. Speaking of handhelds...but nah, let me save that one for a bit later.
Instead, let's have the Mega Man conversation. Mega Man 2 is legendary – both for its innovation (first game with eight robot masters, the three special items) and its difficulty (omg you guys that dragon, and also the room where you're completely screwed if you didn't save your Crash Bombs what the heck). I appreciate that difficulty...but I don't really enjoy it. I'd rather play a game with the Mega Buster available, or even roll the dice with Mega Man 3 as far as the early titles go. In contrast, Mega Man X juiced up the traditional platformer for the SNES, spawning its own franchise that in some ways endured longer than the original (until the recent throwback titles, 9 and 10). I never owned Mega Man X, and still don't, but have admired it from afar and gotten some experience playing it recently. Even with my limited exposure, that experience combined with its legacy makes me comfortable putting it above MM2.
As for the RPGs in this pod, I highly recommend them all, but have the most reservations about Ni no Kuni. It's a brilliant and unique story with breathtaking graphics, a fantastically fleshed-out world, and good old-fashioned monster capturing. But the combat is painful at times, greatly limiting player control and supplementing it with less-than-desirable AI. With a bit more action and some way to better set up support characters' skills (has the world learned nothing from FFXII?), this could be a much more lovable game. Sometimes the fetch quests get a bit tedious until you have a decent way to fast travel (namely, a dragon you can fly on!), but the world is so richly explorable that it doesn't get old. The final boss is insane, though. I never beat it.
At the other end of the spectrum, Star Ocean 3 is a game I have zero reservations about. It holds my unofficial record for most hours played in a single week (56, between Christmas and New Year's back in, oh...2005? 2006?), and my friend's undisputed record because I watched him beat the game in 84 hours of playtime over six days when we lived together for a year. That doesn't explain why the game is great, but a game has to be of a certain caliber to suck people in like that. Let's start with the single best soundtrack ever put to a video game, combined with gorgeous sound mixing that balances the voice acting and music to a degree I've never heard in any other game. Next, amazingly fun combat, and I swear if I hear one more person complain about MP death I'm going to do unkind things to them until they scream "Glory to Airyglyph!" Yes, you die if your MP hits zero in this game. You know how much that happens to me? About once per playthrough. Get over it, folks. What else? Oh, how about a freaking awesome storyline that takes a couple of dramatic and unexpected turns. Could there be more space exploration in a game called "Star Ocean"? You could make that argument. But I actually really enjoy the way it plays out. The locations are diverse and gorgeous, and this was the first game I'd ever played with rewards for map completion. (However, they weren't very generous with the exposure window, leaving you with a random 0.1% missed until you ran around the edge of the area another time or two.) I have nothing bad to say about this game, and now I want to play it and I can't. Thanks a lot, forums.
Now, let's turn our attention to two games that tried to course-correct some of the perceived and loudly vocalized missteps of Final Fantasy XIII. XIII-2 kept the basic combat system intact, but expanded and simplified the leveling up process, added monster capturing, and completely blew apart the linear sequencing by provided a massive universe of open areas loaded with quests and plenty of player choices. I thought these improvements were fantastic, and enjoyed XIII-2 a lot more than XIII, as it retained the basic strengths of the game while at the same time giving us a full-game experience roughly comparable to the openness of Gran Pulse. Sure, the areas were disconnected, both spatially and temporally, but they fit together smoothly, and the story weaved through this spacetime fabric was truly one for the ages. In contrast to the just-there, little-understood prerogative of Barthandelus in XIII, XIII-2 gave us an all-time foil of a villain in Caius; in contrast to the arcane lore of fal'Cie, it told a tragic tale of a young seeress named Yeul. It also made Hope not a miserable brat. I didn't like the game's treatment of Snow (cold and distant) or Lightning (absent, apart from the cover), but Serah and Noel were captivating enough as protagonists.
So like I said, XIII-2 tried to polish and refine XIII into something a bit better. Lightning Returns absolutely demolished that paradigm and presented a completely distinct gaming experience. Combat changed from a party with paradigms to Lightning alone with schema customizable with different attacks and defense, and from traditional RPG style to a more active hybrid system. It was such a huge left turn and took a lot of getting used to, but it's incredibly addictive and could easily be the foundation of a future FF main title. The other truly jarring change was the introduction of the infamous countdown clock, which gives you 13 days (and not even that at first, you have to do quests to extend the time you have) to complete your various tasks. This mechanic, like MP Death in Star Ocean 3, gets a terrible rap relative to how minor it is – it really doesn't detract from the game at all. I was scared of it too. Trust me, it's fine. And speaking of tasks, wow did they ever cater to the sidequest crowd with this baby. Where XIII-2 gave you slightly more open areas, a looser sequence, and several more quests, Lightning Returns gave you GIGANTIC areas, virtually no sequencing (well, four independently sequenced areas), and a bajillion quests. In fact, quests were so integrated into this game that they actually served as the game's growth system! There was no formal leveling up, just stat boosts from quest completion. There's a lot more to say about this game, like how it brought back and utilized the whole cast of XIII, plus introduced Lumina as a lighthearted contrast to callous Lightning, plus enemy extinction...it was a bold, devil-may-care move for Square-Enix, and it paid off. This game is absolutely wonderful, and is the only game I've ever played that I started a New Game Plus immediately after completing for the first time. Yep, I gave this game two straight complete run-throughs, and loved every minute of it.
Lastly, I didn't forget my promise to come back to the newest title in the historic Zelda franchise, A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS. This little gem plays like an enhanced remake of A Link to the Past, with some very interesting changes like tool rental/purchase replacing the time-tested sequence of Temple X giving a key item that will grant access to Temple X+1. The story is fun, and the challenge level is tough without often being frustrating. There are plenty of things to do on the side, like finding the 100 Maiamais. There are loads of player-friendly characteristics, such as the map being divided into sections to make Maiamai location easier. And unlike a lot of handheld games (*coughbysquarecough*), it doesn't get old and boring as its goes on. Despite being a handheld title, this is one of the most entertaining entries in the whole Zelda series. This game could very well stake its claim as the finest 3DS game available.
FINAL RANKINGS: POD E
E1. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
E2. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
E3. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
E4. Final Fantasy XIII-2
E5. Mega Man X
E6. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
E7. Mega Man 2
E8. Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy
E9. Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Last edited by metagloria; 03-02-2015 at 06:12 PM.
I'm discussing my 108, er, 111 favorite games of all time in THIS THREAD so go check it out and join the conversation!
I still need to try the new Zelda game
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