[gamebabble] FFTA2's Clan Cataclysm. Say it three times fast!
If you don't care about games, or about FFT in particular, move on along, no big thing. If you do, here's my FFTA2 party.

Preeeeeesenting: The Mostly-Law-Abiding Clan Cataclysm!

Humes
Luso: Soldier, Paladin, Fighter, etc. General melee.
Adele: she was a Ninja until I learned Ninja's dirty secret... far from being cool, Ninja mostly stink. I got a minor spoiler from the guide book that she receives a character-specific class through a quest, so she'll be general melee until then.
Haryld: Archer/Hunter. He has no more abilities to learn currently unless he wants to be a mage or yet another general melee, which makes me sad.
Kiegan: Illusionist/White Mage. I really, really wish we had some more WHM spells, and he's working on his last ILU spell unless we get some more gear.

Bangaa
Cid the pseudo-Bangaa: I'm hoping to make him a Master Monk once that comes available.  Until then, he's (ho-hum) yet another general melee.  White Monk is another job we're short on abilities for.
Dermot: Cannoneer.  What a fun class!  I haven't yet decided what his subclass will be.
Noah:  Templar/Bishop.  I had one of these in FFTA and used him like crazy.  He's my mage-shutdown champ, and has some healing and offensive magic on his sub.

Moogles
Kyrie:  the vaguely-disenfranchised Moogle Knight who is currently working his way toward a Juggler sub.
Zak:  Fusiler/Flintlock.  He has a very similar role to Dermot's, but it's always nice to have two snipers.

NuMou
Ihsan:  Illusionist/Black Mage.  Takes some time to wind up, but his punch is very nice.
Garret:  Time Mage/Black Mage.  Mostly use him as a Haste machine, but he also does well at polishing off weakened clumps of enemies.

Viera
Yidi:  general mage, having a decent suite of abilities in Red Mage, and odds and ends in White Mage and Elementalist.  Green Mage is a nice sub for whatever else she is currently doing.  Currently has the tallest MVP trophy.
Camelo:  upcoming Sniper/Assassin.  There are a few tiers of prereqs for her to get through, but she's getting there.

Seeq
Evert:  Ranger.

Gria
Nadia:  Raptor.

Evert and Nadia showed up late, and at 15 members, my party is feeling overfull.  But we'll see what we can do for them.  I appreciate that new clanners arrive fully-leveled with respect to everyone else, but having one or two abilities at the 35-hour mark means those two will be dead weight for awhile.

All that aside, we have a great variety of short-, mid-, long- superlong- and infinite-range attacks, with debuffs up into the superlong range.  Interestingly, the greater an attack's damage at long+ range, the longer it takes to charge up, or if it's at short range it often has a <50% chance to hit.  Coincidence, or no?

Anyway, that's my crew.  More details to come when it's review time!

(Comment on this)

[gamebabble] Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Wii)
It's been awhile since I wrote one of these reviews, probably because it's been awhile since I finished an RPG.  I'm not really up for going into this level of essay with platformers. Anyhow...

( More after the break!Collapse )

(1 Comment |Comment on this)

[gamebabble] Queued up
This is mostly to throw my quite-aged review of Skies of Arcadia Legends out of the RSS feed, but it's also a snapshot of what I'm psyched to play in my Backloggery as of January 1.  Subject to change without notice.  Happy New Year!

RPG/Strategy

Final Fantasy Tactics:  War of the Lions--I started playing this before the holiday trip, and predictably got excited about it.  It's one of my favorite games ever, after all!  Going to play through without using Orlandeau this time, and change up my core group to include a Samurai and Summoner. 

Romancing Saga or Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter--we obtained a PS2 from a co-worker who was going to (gasp!) recycle his, so now have a near-new replacement for our poor ailing 8-year-old model.  These are both somewhat off the well-beaten RPG path.

Lost Odyssey--another one I started before the holidays and all their craziness.  Its attempts at "literariness" (??) were falling flat with me, but I was enjoying it otherwise.  I was especially surprised at how much I liked Jansen as opposed to Kaim.

Dragon Quest VIII--(edited in) Ever since I played DQIV, I've wanted to pick this one back up.  It loses some enthusiasm points for being a 60-hour plus game, but taken in small doses, games like this are quite manageable, as long as you're not uptight about finishing them in a week.  I managed to finish FFTA in a couple months, and it was an 80-hour game.

Action/Adventure/Platformer

The theme of this section is:  animal heroes!

Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction--playing the first couple of levels for grins made this jump straight to the top of the queue.

Sly Cooper & the Thievius Raccoonus--I got Sly 2 as a gift from Itchy this Christmas.  I was enjoying the first one a lot, but never finished it, so I'm looking forward to replaying it.

Donkey Kong Country 2:  Diddy's Kong Quest--the enthusiasm for this game may be just vibes I caught from watching the Backloggery stream, but whatever!  This was a favorite game back in the days I only had access to consoles at my friend's house.  It kicked my butt a lot.  There's a big yellow vertical stripe on the loading screens, which worries me, but the game itself plays fine.

Ape Escape 3--this has been a Fortune Cookie game for months now.  Maybe I'll just drop this cookie and open a new one the next time I'm floundering around deciding what to play.

(Comment on this)

[gamebabble] Skies of Arcadia Legends (GC)
Story

Teenagers Vyse (M) and Aika (F) have been living peacefully with the pirate band "The Blue Rogues" since they were born. One day, they save a young woman, Fina, who's being pursued by the wicked Valuan Empire. Fina's been tasked by her homeland, the Silvite society, to recover the Crystals of Elemental Power from the world below, but the Valuans want those crystals for themselves. When the Valuans discover that Fina is with the Blue Rogues, they attack the Blue Rogues' base. ( More after the break!Collapse )

(Comment on this)

[gamebabble] Munch's Oddysee (XBox)

Story

Gabbits are amphibious creatures who mostly lived in the sea (they can’t walk very well) and have been fished almost to extinction by the greedy Glukkons. Munch is the last of the Gabbits, and has been captured by the Glukkons for scientific experimentation. They’ve put an electrical plate on his head by the time he escapes the lab.

( More after the break!Collapse )

Current Mood: game-y

(Comment on this)

[gamebabble] Dragon Quest IV (DS)
Time Taken Till Ending: 045:13 (1)
Battles: 1161
Monsters Defeated: 3124
Total Gold from Battles: 146864
Victories: 1156
Times Wiped Out : 0 (2)
Times Fled: 4
Maximum Damage in One Hit: 366
Clear Level: 36 Lv.

Title: Anti-Resurrectionist (3)

(1) Twice as long as most people I've seen post these stats.
(2) You don't "game over" when you wipe out, but I could never watch it and turned the DS off. :D
(3) I have a feeling this is connected with (2). I had a pretty good laugh when I saw it!

( If seeing this hasn't made you flee in terror or boredom, read on!Collapse )

(2 Comments |Comment on this)

Final Fantasy Tactics. Uninitiated, run after the first two paragraphs.
It seems the old attention span is what it usually is, focused intensively on what's up now, forgetting what might've been catching the ol' interest last week or a couple of days ago. Later I remember what's been neglected, going "Aw damn!" and turning back to it. Thus the return to the LJ after a couple of enthusiastic initial posts and absolute neglect thereafter.

Is it selfishness, or just the way my mind works? It's not until I sit to write today that I even wonder about it.

On to gamer-geek stuff.

General: I mentioned in an email to my brothers that playing Final Fantasy Tactics again was like visiting an old friend. I'm still basking in that strange sensation. Analyze it too much and it gets boring, so roll with it, and enjoy the heck out of moving little sprite-blobs around on grid maps for another fifty or sixty hours, and try to keep track of what really is an amazing (and sometimes useless) info-dump of character names, places, and situations. But that's part of the whole "thing" too, trying to remember plot details and make sense of a translation that, in itself, is not in clear English.

I am uncannily moved by those sprite-blobs sometimes, but I think their movements are handled better in FFT than they are in most other RPGs. Or maybe the music is just that good. Or, maybe, just maybe, I'm biased in its favor.

Fights: A battle, "Dorter Trade City," that gave me endless troubles on the first couple times I played the game was a breeze this time. Well, it was a breeze the second try, and that was better than I could say a couple years ago where I was just about to give up playing entirely 'til I read a strategy guide.

I game-overed when the only character with the "Phoenix Down" ability at the time bit it, and my main character died too, and there was quite a bit of battle to go yet. Whoops.

My Party: The party has one "Wizard" (why not keep the class "Black Mage"?) who dominated XP earnings after I changed her class, even over the main character "Rosewood II" (I am a weensy bit predictable when I name characters in videogames) whom I am trying to get to earn a full suite of Squire abilities for no real reason except that they'll be helpful in the battle against Wiegraf twenty-plus hours down the line. Hey, there's nothing wrong with planning ahead!

Other than that Wizard I've got a small cadre of undeveloped squires and chemists, seven of 'em*. There are a couple of troops still floundering around at second level where everyone else is at fourth or higher, but I want the whole mess of them to learn a good number of basic abilities, and level up once or twice, before sending them off into other jobs. Or to their dooms in story battles.

* Two women with high Faith (Wizard included), two with high Brave. Two men with high Faith, two with high Brave. No way am I going to try and develop twelve or thirteen troops this time out, since eight seems more than sufficient especially since you never send more than five out into battle anyway. More on this general subject momentarily.

Etc: But damn, I'm having a great time with this game. Maybe I'll actually finish it this time. Knowing that the experience will be fresh, even in places that I've played three times now, makes me less reluctant to end things and find out how Delita became a "hero" and what happened to "Rosewood II." Generally speaking I've guessed/assumed R II's fate won't be happy, and maybe that's part of the not-finishing thing. Or maybe not. It's not like I don't have a history of not completing games, and it's also not like I shy from a non-pointless "unhappy ending." Videogame narrative, well let's get real, lots of narrative, thrives on killing the final boss and saving the world. It's nice to deal with something that doesn't ride in those ruts.

Aside from FFT I've been playing Diablo II with my brothers on Sundays for an hour and a half or so, and more on my own during the week. Diablo is quite a different game from FFT, and the constant fiddling you have to do with characters in FFT made me impatient for awhile until I got back into the flow of the game. "Can we stop with this ability-learning, equipment-switching fooferaw and start killing some stuff?"

So... do you reset when you know you're doomed, or do you play through to the bitter end even when you know you're toast, and what does that say about you? I'm a "reset" person.

Current Mood: nostalgic...or something.

(3 Comments |Comment on this)