screw everything

I can't afford games often but I don't drink and I'm pretty sure it cost less than everyone I know spent on alcohol last night

Japanese PC ports are The Best

This isn't sarcasm I legit love their totally hamfisted disregard for established UX

The options under "File" are "Reboot" and "Quit"

The Graphics menu has all the usual graphics settings (fullscreen, resolution, framerate cap, etc) implemented as dropdowns

Hey @WilliamChyr why'd you expend all that effort on control remapping when you could have just done this

Alright let's get to the good part

Mersenne Twister and various STL stuff. Kinda boring

Menu music is super hype tho

Does Hamauzu actually play the viola or does he just have a really high-quality synth or something? It's in almost everything he composes

Wait whoa this is in japanese with eng subs

Battle results music is the most JRPG thing I've ever heard

Our combat is a byzantine haystack of never-explained overlapping systems but here's a tutorial on how to walk towards a ladder

Okay so apparently this game has a huge outfit customization component, which is AWESOME, but it's got XIII-2's same weirdo noodle anatomy

Like I'm a super huge fan of extensive character customization stuff but Lightning's basically a rectangle with sticks for limbs

Like maybe someone should have pointed out that humans have butts and thighs don't just dead-end into the torso?

The more fanservicey costumes just make it even weirder

ENSORCELLED TOME HYPE

These people are what we refer to as "side quests"

So there's this weird time-limit system that appears to be basically Majora's Mask But Designed By Jerks

Finite number of days before the world ends, can extend the time by completing quests, hitting the end without certain criteria is game over

I haven't hit the game-over point yet but I'm getting the impression it's literally "restart from day 1"

So unlike MM it's not really DESIGNED to be looped multiple times but your chances of doing it right on the first run are slim

Maybe there's a way to reset but retain certain categories of progress that I just haven't gotten to yet

Hope so because otherwise Jerks

One neat system: There are a finite number of monsters in the game. Possible to eradicate entire species; last one left alive becomes a boss

Also monsters left alive grow stronger over time. Prob some tactical element of killing tough enemies early before they get stronger?

Also combat's super weird. Tales-like action combat in instanced arenas, but actions still consume ATB so it's like half gauge-management

Not sure how I feel about that yet. Feels like splitting difference between two fun systems and not really getting the fun part of either

I dunno how much Tri-Ace was involved but maybe it sticks to their tradition of not actually being fun for like the first 15 hours

I guess that's how XIII worked too actually

Going to bed now but: Thus far Lightning Returns feels WAY more polished than XIII-2. Still a bit of that mid-budget JRPG jank but far less

XIII-2 had a few super pretty areas but most of it felt really hastily kitbashed from pieces of the previous game

Also most of the in-engine cutscenes were just ppl standing/walking

LR adds lots of actual one-off animation and it makes a huge difference

Lightning Returns doubles down on this grimy-checkerboard visual motif so hard you'd think Huke was involved

Gonna keep tweeting about this weird final fantasy sequel that no one played bc 90% of my feed is still super depressing

Gotten far enough to have an opinion on the combat system and that opinion is it's not very good

It's a weird thing bc from a design standpoint it's a very CLEVER system, but it's mostly just really irritating to actually play

You've got three characters (technically the same character swapping outfits but whatev) ; each one has four attacks and an ATB gauge

You can configure each one's stats p much to your liking. Attacks can be any of the traditional FF physical/magic, plus a "guard" move

Combat's realtime; push buttons to attack or block, but every action consumes ATB and you can't do anything if the gauge is empty

So you p much just cycle through the three chars burning each of the gauges in turn. They don't synergize much

What makes it frustrating is there's a timing element to everything: timing attacks/blocks perfectly is way more effective

Which is fun in more traditional action combat systems (asscreed etc) but here you're ALSO limited by ATB gauge AND enemy tells suck

bc it's not a real action game so instead of, like, MGR putting a giant red cross on incoming attacks, everything's obscured by particles

and even if you time a block correctly, you're juggling three separate ATB gauges and have to switch to one with enough gauge left TO block

plus there's still a form of XIII's stagger system so like you still need to be keeping high DPS on enemies to do any real damage

So it's this giant knot of overlapping things you need to keep track of COMBINED with reflexy attack timing and blocks

Timing constraints kill the tactical fun of FF's usual exploit-enemy-weaknesses stuff; ATB juggling kills the "action" part of action combat

ALSO: Enemies don't give you XP. They give you drops, which you turn in for quests, which upgrade your stats directly

So you don't get stronger from fights. You get stronger from doing a BUNCH of fights and then going to a town area

So if you're crossing a part of the map that has super tedious enemies, they STAY tedious until you clear the area and get to a town

Couple this with the highest encounter rate I've ever seen in an RPG. Like every six feet an enemy spawns. It's worse than FFVII

Basically it feels like they took Tales' combat and made a bunch of interesting changes that looked clever on paper but kinda suck to play

I am actually enjoying the game. Just, definitely fits the "Sprawling JRPG with zero respect for your time" trope lol

Okay this is some actual garbage design now

The rules are complicated but effectively the only way to restore health is via consumables, and you can only carry like five

so HOW ABOUT A DUNGEON WITH CONSTANT HEALTH DRAIN

WITH A BOSS AT THE END

It's literally unwinnable at present; the solution is "grind more levels" but as mentioned previously, you can't actually do that

bc monsters only drop items, not XP, and you need a town/quest to turn in said items to level up

boss is at the end of multi-hour dungeon

AND the game has the aforementioned time limit system

So the only way out of this is to run back out through the entire dungeon, and just

accept that I wasted roughly 10% of the total time limit accomplishing nothing

So I'll probably hit the Game Over condition in like 15 hrs

THAT IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DESIGN A VIDEO GAME

oh hey here's another crappy bit too since I just ran into whilst trying to get out of this garbage dungeon:

A lot of enemies are basically invulnerable until staggered, and staggering relies on exploiting weaknesses to specific damage types

Only: the attacks you have available depend on how you've configured your outfit stuff, which you can only modify OUTSIDE of battle

So you can end up in a fight that's normally super easy, but since you don't happen to be stacking the attack type you need, it's unkillable

So then your options are reload a save, or run from the fight, except running costs you a nontrivial portion of the game time limit

This is, like, really really basic playtesting stuff here

This is some MMO-level stats/fashion tradeoff

"How can we indicate that this sword is really powerful?"
"Set the vertex color to FF00FF"

This dungeon is full of dogs for no particular reason

Oh man we are SO going to end up killing god at the end of this game

BTW sorry for those of you who followed me for gamedev stuff but like

my feed is still 85% fear/distress rn so this is basically coping

btw that earlier rant about getting effectively trapped in an unwinnable dungeon?

Turns out the game is open-world but there's actually a specific order you're supposed to do the zones in

This order is only communicated via some numbers attached to the quest names on the log screen

a screen which you almost never look at

The rest of the game is structured such that difficulty mostly adapts for whichever region you're in, so the order only matters for dungeons

._______________.

"WITNESS MY MOST POWERFUL FORM!!"

*boss tranforms into exactly the same design but with no shirt*

I hope Troy Baker yells that every time he takes a shower

Fully-mocapped cutscene with custom facial animation and everything but it's just a random NPC? Like low-poly reusable generic face guy

Like a lot of RPGs the cutscenes follow a hierarchy, with the most important ones being fully unique animation, usually mocap etc,

and with "low-priority" scenes (like turning in sidequests to random NPCs) you get talking heads w simple lip poses & some generic gestures

That they put all this effort into one largely-inconsequential conversation makes me wonder if they originally planned to animate way more

The game's already a huge step up from XIII-2, which almost exclusively used the basic "Walk to point A and play back some lip poses" style

There's a character who uses Serah's model, but all her animations are super exaggerated and overdone and the result is really cute?

Like Serah was never particularly cute in the previous game but her expressions were really static. Animation style makes a HUGE difference

This leads to another observation: Games that go for realistic facial animation usually feel flat in comparison to those that exaggerate

Like unless you can afford full-on performance capture (and do it well, which is another issue) a majority of games end up with Bioware Face

Constrast: Saint's Row 3, 4. SUPER overblown, almost cartoonish expressions result in some of the best facial animation I've seen in a game

It's the same principle you see in environment art and lighting tech and color grading etc: accuracy often feels less real than exaggeration

This is probably a really basic observation for actual animation people (which I am def not), but I feel like very few games acknowledge it

In other news Fang hasn't changed clothes in 500 years

I like that both FFXIII sequels' plots are about fixing all the problems caused by the absence of the gods you murdered in the previous game

Flames Parka Lv. 3

This game doesn't use rumble but the controller suddenly started rumbling for no reason and wouldn't stop until I pulled the batteries out

Rapidly approaching Peak JRPG please advise

So this game has a realtime day/night system, and shadows are dynamic, not baked, BUT the shadows don't move with the sun, which is weird

Even weirder: I just realized:
THERE IS NO SUN

Shadows are just cast from some arbitrary point in the sky

I mean the perennial problem of day/night cycles is how to handle the sun position

Just discarding the sun entirely works I guess

But the shadows aren't even baked

They're already USING the tech that would support a moving shadow-casting sun

I'm so confused

wait WHAT

I mean I guess if we're gonna kill god a doctor device would work pretty well

prob has damage break

Sudden moment of self-awareness

Jokes notwithstanding, the FFXIII sequels have actually turned out to have one of the more interesting and coherent plots I've seen in JRPGs

It took me three entire games to even notice it but look at this utterly magnificent selection animation

For gif size I only captured one click but it's all dynamic shadery stuff and thus slightly different every time. No flipbook animation

Okay might be able to finish this ridiculous undertaking tonight

The time limit's actually way more forgiving than it first seemed. P much ran out of stuff to do at this point besides grind trash mobs

Internet says I did enough side stuff to unlock the "true" ending. Secret extra day is a super boring boss-rush dungeon

Okay so I can't fit this into one clever joke tweet but: there's this thing JRPGs do when you approach the ending and LR is totally doing it

There's a very serious cutscene where the protagonists basically restate all of the major revelations of the plot thus far,

while acting like this is surprising new information

like
*entire game*
"Evil Guy wants to absorb everyone's souls and become a god!"

*beginning of last dungeon*
"Evil guy is going to absorb everyone's souls to become a god!"
"But that means... everyone will die!"

Until just now it never occurred to me that this is a thing but it is TOTALLY A THING

No seriously we literally arrived at this conclusion like ten hours ago

why are you freaking out like there's some new urgency here

Oh hey this is rad: Shop before final area sells high-level gear that costs basically all the money I've amassed over the entire game

So you get one final upgrade AND don't have to finish the game with a billion useless gold. Cool!

Okay so: Normally running from a fight or getting KO'd costs you a nontrivial chunk of the game's time limit

HOWEVER: The last dungeon area doesn't appear to have a clock anymore?

I think I can literally skip every fight here with zero consequence

As mentioned above you don't even get XP from enemies so fights only make you stronger via a super roundabout/indirect way

So as near as I can tell the endgame stuff takes an already frustratingly tedious battle system and makes it literally completely pointless?

G A M E D E S I G N

Remember when gamers were complaining about Vanille's "fake Australian accent" and then her voice actress is actually from Australia

Still going through the final area

Last section obv exclusively focuses on combat which is like the actual worst aspect of the game

Fun fact: This game has enemies so obnoxiously designed, you can cheese them with 100% damage immunity and they STILL take 5-10 min to kill

I mean that's not even unusual for the genre actually, but still

blehh

This is a pretty sweet final-boss environment

This game's plot is surprisingly coherent for a JRPG but there still hasn't been a terribly solid reason for why exactly we need to kill god

I mean he's kind of a jerk

I think at this point Lightning's default approach to dealing with problems is to skip trying half-measures & just jump straight to deicide

The whole arc of the XIII games is basically offing progressively more important gods

At this point we've mostly run out of gods to off

lol get owned

So the specific reasons for offing god got clarified a bit at the last minute. Basically he was gonna make a new universe with no free will

Also he was kind of a jerk about it

So the plot's mostly centered around the fact that nearly everyone is dead and you're trying to get everyone to be reborn in a new universe

There's a shot at the end of all of the souls being released into the new world

and visually it's straight-up the lifestream from VII :D

Anyway

Done with Lightning Returns

It's not very good but I enjoyed playing it

Def more fun than reading depressing politics tweets

Also I lost like 10 followers lol

You're all very fortunate that spoiler etiquette will prevent me from spending weeks livetweeting FFXV at you in a few days