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Posts Tagged ‘Square-Enix’

06
Mar
2020

Look what I bought Bub! Look at it! Look!

categories: personal, RPGs; word count: 312 words

I ordered Bub the ten-in-one Kingdom Hearts game that is coming out later this month because I found out that they were having a 70% off sale on… wait for it… a bundle that normally sells for $99, and with tax, I got it for just over $30. Friends, I call that one hell of a deal. I didn’t even have to think about that one. In my cart it went, and on our PlayStation 4 it went. Now, that drew attention to the almost chronic problem of us running out of hard drive space on our PlayStation 4, which I am attempting to rectify by way of having ordered an external hard drive to begin to store things on so that we do not have to play the “hard drive shuffle” that we have begun to play. I didn’t get an extremely large one, but I got one that suits our needs.

Meanwhile, switching my Medicaid HMO as a result of needing to keep all of my doctors in network (since one of them changed the hospital that he was affiliated to, which meant that one of the three Medicaid HMOs in my area was one that was… no longer in network with them) has caused me to need to switch the inhaled steroid that I have been on for maintenance to control my asthma to a new one, and this has not been fun. As the saying goes, “this has been widely regarded by the cosmos as a bad move,” or something to that effect. If I “fail” this medication, which I strongly suspect that I will, insurance will cover the medication that I was formerly on. It’s just a matter of getting to the point where my insurance will have seen me as “being on it long enough to have failed it”, will be satisfied with that, and will then let me switch back.

23
Jan
2020

In case anyone is still wondering, yes…

categories: RPGs; word count: 449 words

Lightning Returns continues to annoy me, but I am going to see it to the end.

At some point. I’m not quite sure when that point will be right now, but I will see it to the end.

I suppose one of the biggest annoyances about games like this is that I like to explore and find things on my own time, and having the perpetual annoyance of a literal “Doomsday Clock” there reminding me that I only have so long to complete certain tasks (unless I want to fail the game and have to start all the way over) is literally rushing me around, and at that, forcing me to rely on a walkthrough when I mean, I could have just moseyed on around at my heart’s content… at least until, or unless, I needed one. There’s the fact that I want to see this whole storyline to the end, having liked both Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 as much as I did, even though I liked both of those games for different reasons. But one of the biggest annoyances to me, if not the biggest annoyance, in a game is being forced to do something on someone else’s time, even though Chronostasis does make it a bit easier to… stall things, by literally stalling things (by literally stopping time for relatively short increments, even though you have to “earn” that by killing so many enemies that you have enough EP to stall time, which can be a bit difficult to do at certain points in the game, is this just me?).

Timed missions, I can tolerate. Where nearly the entire game, or the entire game, is timed, not so much.

Maybe I should have mentally prepared myself for this by mentally preparing myself for this.

For the multiple reasons that I have written about, I do intend on finishing this at least once, but I think that is honestly all I am going to give this game. This will probably actually be my least favorite Final Fantasy game for that one reason, and that one reason alone: the Doomsday Clock forcing me to practically rush through the game so as not to mosey on through so slowly that I actually got a Game Over and had to start the entire thing over again because damn it, that is what I like to do in games when you give me the chance, I do like to explore if you let me. And clearly this entire game is structured around not letting you explore because you have a clock constantly reminding you that the world as you know it is going to end in how many days?

02
Jan
2020

The 3rd Birthday

categories: RPGs; word count: 546 words

Parasite Eve was one of the greatest games of the decade, even though it was released in an era where we praised pixelated graphics and regarded them as being some of the absolute best for their time (isn’t it funny how things change over the course of several decades?). It also had one of the best ending songs I’ve ever heard, not to mention some awesome remixes. It really paid homage to the novel that inspired it, and the movie that came out afterward actually wasn’t half bad. Everything that paid homage did so in a great way.

The sequel to it that came out in 1999 was a bit dustier than the original, but when you have something that groundbreaking to live up to, you honestly can’t — or shouldn’t, for that matter — expect it to be as perfect as the title that came before it. But it was still a good game in its own right. The graphics were more polished, the storyline was still decent, and the tweaks that had been made to the battle engine still made for a compelling game that made you want to play all the way through to the end. And just like the game that came before it, the soundtrack was brilliant. The end song doesn’t quite have the punch that “Somnia Memorias” did, but “Gentle Rays” is still an extremely good song in its own right, and you can tell listening to the songs in Parasite Eve II that a lot of time and effort was put into the soundtrack. Things were still good.

Sadly, all I can say that I liked about The 3rd Birthday was the soundtrack. I played it for completion’s sake, having been an enthusiastic fan of Parasite Eve, wanting to finish the series out when I found out that a new game in the franchise was finally coming out. And when I played through it, all I felt like I was getting was fanservice, the “Parasite Eve label” slapped on a game that desperately tried to bring back old-school fans of the franchise to a game with better, newer graphics, a sharp soundtrack, and perhaps the world’s worst plot (seriously, read up on it if you haven’t already played it or spoiled it for yourself… the plot has so many holes it’s practically Swiss cheese, and it is that bad). You can listen to the soundtrack here if you’d like, as to me, that is the only redeeming quality that the game has. It became a shoot ’em up that tried way too hard to pull old-school fans in to the game, which dismayed those who liked the franchise for what it was, and the fanservice was — is, depending on whether you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater at this point — incredibly over the top. For Christ’s sake, the more damage Aya takes during battles, the more holes you see in her clothing, and this is done in so obvious a way that you can tell it was intentionally done. Jesus…

I don’t want any more sequels if this is literally how they are going to be handled. I don’t. Just stop them here.

(And the irony? Because the game’s supposed to be an RPG, that’s the category I put it in.)

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