THE MOOGLE'S BOOK

The decline of videogames

Been a while since I ranted but today seems like as good a day as any for a comeback. 

ANYWHO, today i ran out of videogames to play and decided to head over to my local blockbuster to see if there was anything fun worth playing. I get there and have a look around and 5 minutes later I walk back out because there is absolutely NOTHING that caught my attention. 

That’s when it hit me, games have taken a nosedive nowadays and have very little going for them other than the fact that they all look very nice and shiny and your character looks super realistic! woot. 

Now, this may just be my over exposure to Zero Punctuation videos (if you dont know what im talking about google it right now.) But I miss games that I could spend hours and hours playing not because I wanted a little trophy that i’ll forget about in a week but because I was enjoying the game so much that I wanted to keep playing just for the joy. 

I feel like there’s no substance to games anymore. FF13, Heavy Rain, COD, Uncharted, they all are games that looked very nice and that I I played through and then beat but once it was over all I thought was “ok, what’s next”

Final Fantasy XIV Doesn’t Have Dark Elves, It Has Duskwight Elezen

thefinalfantasy:

The North American Final Fantasy XIV website has updated with listings for the race-splitting clans, revealing that the English name for Dark Elves is Duskwight Elezen.

We’ve seen the pictures from the Japanese website, but now we’ve got text from the North American one, and I’ll be damned if there won’t be a server filled with Drizzt derivatives once players get their hands on the Duskwight Elezen, the English version of Japan’s Shaders. 

Check out the rest of the article on Kotaku.

I JUST REALIZED…

I haven’t played FFXIII in over a week because I’ve been in Texas for Spring Break. Furthermore, since I haven’t been able to play, I still haven’t beaten the game yet!!! FML x100000. You can all bet that when I get back to Chicago, I’ll be having myself a FINAL FANTASY XIII PLAY ALL-DAY…er, day.

Kupo.

-Alex

How to play the game… or not

Whoa its been a while since the last post. I apologize for that. ANYWAY, this time around I’d like to just talk about how you all actually go about playing an RPG.

I personally have to finish an RPG as fast as I possibly can, from start to finish, with as little time spent training, doing side quests, getting ultimate weapons, etc. Now, I do have a reason for this, a couple to be exact. The first thing is that I absolutely LOVE the difficulty curve this sets up for the way the game plays out (regardless of how I bitch during). With little time improving my characters or their weapons, most times it’s always all I can do just to not die during a boss fight. It’s way too easy to over level for every single boss and hit the attack button all day but honestly, where’s the fun in that. It also kinda makes me feel like I’m actually going through the adventure. Say wheat you like, but when you take time off from a boss and train in an area where sirens are going off and everyone’s running around, you can’t actually immerse yourself when the “emergency” in game can be put off for two hours cause the monsters give great exp.

Aside from just the challenge and immersion, not going for everything at first gives me something to look forward to when I beat the game personally. Once the “I’m going to destroy the world” boss is out of the way, now i can focus all my efforts to make him look like a cakewalk compared to the monster that could destroy you with a single move. 

The reason I post this is because these games ARE called role playing games for a reason. Not everyone goes through the same story the same way and our brains don’t think the same way either. I think it’s always fun to see how someone else went through the story or how they took on a particularly hard boss fight in a completely different way. I love that variety.

-S@M

Future of Kingdom Hearts…OMFG :)

I found this on Wikipedia (and if you don’t believe it just cuz “it’s an unreliable source” well, FORGET IT ABOUT THIS ONCE BECAUSE IT’S KINGDOM HEARTS :D). ENJOY.

Three new Kingdom Hearts games are in development: Kingdom Hearts III along with two other untitled games. The first of the untitled Kingdom Hearts games is expected to be released in 2010, which he mentioned earlier in an interview on Twitter. The game is also expected to focus on Sora as well as another character who has been cited by series director, Tetsuya Nomura, in an interview with Famitsu in February 2010, as being “the center of the series” who was later revealed to be Xehanort. Nomura has previously stated that one of the future games would be connected to 358/2 Days, Coded and Birth by Sleep, and would be more of a main game than a spin-off or sidestory. The game was teased in a secret movie, titled Reconnect. Kingdom Hearts, shown as the secret ending to Birth by Sleep.

The second of the untitled Kingdom Hearts games will be released in 2011 and will focus on multiple main characters. In addition, Kingdom Hearts III is currently in the conceptual stages which would mean that it would be the last to be released out of the three upcoming games, Kingdom Hearts III will also not end the series; only what Nomura calls the “Xehanort Saga” involving Sora’s encounters with the series’ main antagonist Xehanort. He also adds that the series will not continue on with a new protagonist instead “Sora will be the hero till the end”. This release schedule fits with a recent statement series director, Tetsuya Nomura, made in which he said he wanted to release at least one Kingdom Hearts title a year. The upcoming games were revealed during an interview with Nomura in March 2010 which was part of the Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Ultimania, a companion guidebook for Birth by Sleep by Square Enix.

AREN’T YOU EXCITED LIKE I AM??? OMFG I’M GEEKIN’ OUT! I GUESS I SHOULD LET ALL OF YOU KNOW KH IS MY FAVORITE SERIES.

Ahem.

Anyway. You got a little taste of what’s happening in the near future for Sora and the rest of the KH gang. I’ll keep updating as best I can!

Kupo.

-Alex

Status inflicting bosses, there is no death horrible enough

So I was just thinking about something else to rant about when this hit me. If anything annoys me most in a RPG, it is status attacks. Now dont get me wrong, i love inflicting them and getting buffs for myself. Nothing makes me happier when i poison, stop, silence, shell, or protect something. But the opposite is UNBEARABLE, especially when you can’t return the favor to most status inflicting bosses.

To prove my point, lets take a trip into the past, shall we? Who remembers FF5 and FF9. Both of these final fantasys had final bosses who could inflict a ridiculous number of status ailments all at one time, specifically with the notorious “grand cross” spell we all know so well. Now, the use of ribbons or the fact that FF9 let you train a bunch of status blockers did help, but for the casual player, SOMETHING was gonna get you when you saw grand cross pop up.

This brings me to my point. I HATE these bosses because i have no patience to protect against ALL of them in the game. The problem then becomes, i now have to play this boss over and over again until they decide to not inflict frog, and petrify on two characters and then silence and confuse the third (theres a special place in my heart that hates confuse in particular). I like bosses, especially final bosses, to be difficult but when it falls to luck more often than not if i can beat it, the fun is just lost.

-S@M