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Seyser Koze posted:Leonard... demonstrated interest in tactical considerations. Proactively, no less. Too bad it's a pretty stupid one.
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Jun 8, 2014 04:45
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Elric posted:Why don't they just go into Knight form right away and squish the poor mooks? So basically Inspector Gadget without Penny and Brain?
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Jun 8, 2014 04:46
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HardDisk posted:Too bad it's a pretty stupid one. Baby steps.
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Jun 8, 2014 04:49
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Seyser Koze posted:Leonard... demonstrated interest in tactical considerations. Proactively, no less. Well, he does have those extremely rare moments of intelligence. Like when he figured out the secret to getting the useless Knight Killing Sword. It's too bad what few brain cells he has can't be that friendly more often. Maybe not so many people would die and poo poo would actually get done right if they did.
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Jun 8, 2014 13:11
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The problem with Leonard's stupidity is quite simple, he isn't supposed to be stupid. His stupidity mostly depends on him doing what the story wants rather than what he should have done. Due to the fact that he has an "I win" button, he needs to act extra incompetent during cut-scenes in order for them to play out the way the writer envisioned them. Caesar for the most part escaped that fate, but I suspect it's mainly due to fortunate circumstances. He entered pretty late and the writer wanted to show him off. The rest of the stupidity comes from the writer wanting a princess and commoner type of relationship, but failing to plan on how it's supposed to work out and also not give Leonard any other traits than being in love with Cisna. Characters who are supposed to be stupid, like Joachim from Shadow Hearts Covenant, are usually not a problem. It's when a character has a negative trait that it's not supposed to have that it becomes a problem.
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Jun 8, 2014 13:57
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Crystalgate posted:Characters who are supposed to be stupid, like Joachim from Shadow Hearts Covenant, are usually not a problem. I contend. Joachim isn't stupid. His brain is just set in the wrong videogame genera. He thinks with Superhero, wrestling and Tokusatsu tropes. Unlike the rest of the cast.
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Jun 8, 2014 17:57
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Elric posted:Why don't they just go into Knight form right away and squish the poor mooks? The game wants to be a toku-style show so badly. That's pretty much it.
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Jun 8, 2014 20:20
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 As you can see by the chapter image, this chapter is going to be nothing but non-stop action! Yaaa… No, this one is a mercifully short one today, although it does set up a couple of subplots and give even more character development to the Non-Leonard characters. It also continues the running theme of Leonard being a non-presence in this game by and large.  We begin things right where we left off from the previous chapter, with Leonard and company escorting Miu and Scardigne through the Lost Forrest back to the Farian capital. The Lost Forest is one of a handful of new areas created for the second game. About 80% of the game takes place in areas we’ve already seen before. This is the first of many reasons why Level-5 was able to crank the sequel out so fast after the first game had disappeared into Development Hell for nearly four years. Things tend to go pretty fast when you’re reusing assets unchanged from the last game you made. And I’m talking everything here folks: game engine, locations, enemies, character models, plot elements. The only way White Knight Chronicles II could get any more recycled was if they shipped it in one of those brown paper boxes Disney used to sell copies of Wall-E in to try and cash in on the film’s environmental theme until everyone somehow decided global warming just wasn’t happening any more…  Anyway, here’s more simultaneous new material and recycled material. These little fish enemies are our first new enemy type of the sequel. They’re magic-based enemies and they attack with pretty powerful elemental magic. In large numbers they’re an absolute nightmare to deal with, primarily because they’re incredibly fast and smart and your characters are still slow and stupid even AFTER Level-5 completely revamped the battle system. The green ones are Slypheeds, they’re wind based. The brown ones are Gnomes, they’re fire based. The blue ones are Remoras, they’re water based. And the red ones are Salamanders, they’re fire based. They’re all weak against stabbing physical attacks and against magic attacks from their opposing element.  I don’t really show it off all that well, but the Lost Forest can be very beautiful to look at some times in terms of its construction. It’s the one area of the game were they really made things interesting where it’s not a samey forest. Though I’ll cover that more in a bit once it starts revealing some of its secrets to us…  Not pictured: 30 minutes of tedious running battles to get to the Farian base camp.  That purple fog there on the far right is Magic Bullshit. The Lost Forest is an intertwining maze of corridors that you can generally navigate any way you want. The trouble is, it was designed for the online quests primarily, the part of the game were you’re free to run around and do whatever you want most of the time. But because this is a single player game and we need to rip off Final Fantasy XIII, certain paths are blocked off by these swirling purple barriers in order to sluice you down the path the game wants you to follow. If you try walking into one of these Magic Bullshit barriers, you’ll get a message saying you can’t go this way for reasons and then turn you around to make sure you do not deviate from The Hallway. Ordinarily, that would be okay, but the game sets up the most obtuse, long-way-round routes for you to follow which lead to instances of 30-minute running battles through the forest to get to a part of the map that has five or six shorter routes to it blatantly blocked off.  But enough about this game’s incompetent design. We’ve got Plot to deal with.  As we make it to the Fiarian base camp, we find a familiar face waiting for us.  CUTSCENE: Reunited With Lorias It appears the reports of Ban Lorias’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  Miu: Ban Lorias! You’re alive! Lorias: General, I knew you would keep her safe. Scardigne: Alone, I would have failed, Ban. These people came to our aid.Oh Scardigne, don’t sell yourself short… And don’t hype up Leonard either. Please, god.  An idiot, a troll, a human disinterested shrug, and a broken sycophant. At your service, Ban. Miu: Emissaries from Balandor. Marcell: We come in the name of Her Most Exalted Grace Queen Cisna of Balandor, First of Her Name. We are here under orders to inform you that, and I quote Her Grace: “Your piddly shitass country is mine now. Thanks for playing. Welcome to the Empire of Balandor, now come help me kill Grazel,” end quote. Eldore: Oh, godsdammit, Niles, I thought we discussed this already, I do the talking, not you. Marcell: But I was only— Eldore: Do not make me hit you… again.  Leonard: And by that you mean cookies. Right? Lorias: Beg pardon? Leonard: You’re going to give me cookies, right? For all my hard work. Being a hero and stuff. Lorias: …Is he serious? Yulie: Like an arrow through the head. Lorias: Good gods. Leonard: COOKIES! YAY! CUTSCENE: The Zore Crystals  Lorias: Father Yggdra? Queen Cisna has commanded you to meet with him? Leonard: Yes. Lorias: I would take you to him at once… But it would do no good. Lorias: Nanazel is using a malevolent force known as the Zore Crystal to erode the Father’s ample power. Marcell: The fiend! We’ll show him! Eldore: Zore Crystals… Eldore: Devices that absorb power from the earth and change it to magic. Eldore: I’ve heard of them.Oh, it’s about loving time you explain what something is before we walk face-first into it, eh Maxwell. See, even Eldore gets somewhat better in the sequel. Leonard is still and always will be poo poo, however.  Miu: But what will that do to Father Yggdra?Hopefully kill him so I won’t have to go through the rest of the stupid bullshit he drops on us after we save his sappy rear end.   Lorias: Come and have a look here. Again, I will give it to Level-5's art department, the hand-drawn stuff for this game looks a million times better than anything that actually shows up in-game. This map almost looks like something you’d see on Avatar: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra. It also hints at the gimmick of the Lost Forest…  Lorias: See the way Nanazel has placed these Zore Crystals around Faria’s perimeter? Our hands are tied until these are destroyed.…Ah, you didn’t answer her question there, Lorias. You know, she’s only just the Most Important Person in Faria and Your Future Ruler and all. But whatever, Leonard has more monosyllabic contributions to this chapter to vomit up.  Leonard: We’ll help you. Yulie: Yeah. Lorias: The Knight’s power certainly would make the task easier. Leonard: Dammit. If only we had a Knight. Lorias: What? Miu: B-but… I saw you use it. You saved me with it! Leonard: Wait… I have a Knight? When did that happen? Marcell: Does he… do this often? Yulie: Wait till he REALLY gets going. Lorias: I have a feeling I’m going to regret this, buuuut… Lorias: Very well. Could you start by eliminating these two Zore Crystals here?They even start flashing and ‘BLING!’-ing just to Leonard-proof them.  Eldore: We’d better get moving then.  Lorias: Your team must strike out and destroy the pair of crystals in the north.Good to know. This is one of the reasons why I really like Lorias. Were he anyone else in this game, he’d of asked us to take out all four crystals for him, but because he realizes we’ve just emerged from the purgatory that is the first game of White Knight Chronicles, he steps up to the plate and helps us out by taking out the southern crystals himself. That, and he’s one of the handful of characters in this game that doesn’t have his head up his own rear end. Thank you Ban Lorias, for being a decent person in this cacophony of assholes, morons, posers and whatever the gently caress we’ve decided Shapur is. The thread is grateful to you. Be grateful, DAMMIT!  Oh, what’s that Miu? You’ve got some blatant foreshadowing for us? Okay.  Miu: There is something lurking beneath its metal surface that feels... sinister to me. Leonard: Hah. No worries there. I don’t know the meaning of the word sinister. Eldore: He literally doesn’t. Miu: I have tried to convince myself that I am simply worrying unnecessarily, but the feeling persists...In the time since we arrived at the camp, Miu went back and binge-read through the first half of the LP and now realizes what a truly horrible pestilence has invaded her homeland. There’s no explanation for her suddenly feeling this, by the way. She just does for reasons. Because Akihiro Hino wanted “There’s Something Wrong With The White Knight (other than Leonard)” to be a Thing in this game and doesn’t know how to weave it in with any subtlty.  Oh, and this guy acts as a condensed shop on the outskirts of the camp. You can buy weapons, armour and items off him. He’s still selling the exact same stuff that Johann in Sinca and the random Windwalker on the bridge of the Shahgna were, but hey, we’ve got access to an Items shop now. This would be the point where you’d stock up on Mana Potions to fuel Leonard’s inevitable destructive rampages with the White Knight. Because good god are you ever going to be whipping the White Knight out every five minutes just to get to the drat crystals.  And we’re off…   As you can guess by looking at the party layout in the upper right there, Miu is staying behind at the basecamp while Lorias leads the second prong of the attack in the south, but we’ve still got Scardigne as a guest character for the attack on the northern crystals. We’ve lost the extra firepower Miu adds to the team, but that also means we only have one derpy NPC to babysit now instead of two.  Here’s another new enemy: the Blood Bull. It’s another Jackal pallet swap.  See what I mean about this place being kind of pretty? The compressed images and the fact that it’s night right now aren’t really doing this place justice, but if you play through a mission set here at dusk, this place looks amazing… for a middling cheap-rear end JRPG that walked through several plate glass doors Selena Meyer-style on its way to a release date.  And there on the horizon is our titular Zore Crystal.  CUTSCENE: Attacking the Crystals BOSS BATTLE: Zore Crystals (with commentary by nine-gear crow and Blind Sally) It even gets a Boss Subtitle. Yay. Something about these things always seemed like to me like they were ripping off Final Fantasy XII in some way, but it’s been nearly six years since I last played FFXII. And I’m also apparently one of the few people in existence who actually liked XII.  Eldore: Target the core to destroy it. I want to say he’s temping fate… But this fight is pretty easy.  The Zore Crystal doesn’t have that many moves in its arsenal. It’s weak to impact attacks, but it has a nasty habit of randomly altering is elemental resistances.  On foot the only thing you can target on it initially is the base. You need to hammer away at that until you break a few shards off the actual crystal and the core itself becomes targetable.   You can see one of its resistance changes here.  It will also attack you with a tier 3 or 4 area-of-effect magic attack of the element it’s currently hardened against. I took a couple of +Comet hits throughout this fight, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. When these things start showing up in the post-game missions like Vellgander is when they really start to put the hurt on you.  Once you amass enough AC to unleash the White Knight, however, the fight is pretty much over.  I neglected to point out earlier, but if you start the second game fresh without playing through the first one, the White Knight automatically has Talion and the Argent Shield equipped. So yay continuity, I guess. Whitesteel is still in your inventory, however, if you feel like equipping it for nostalgia’s sake, even though Talion is the better of the two weapons by lightyears. It’s one of the few equipable items that you can’t get rid of, by the way.  With the crystal down to about half health, we can now attack its core.  With the White Knight out, all you need to do is Shield Bash it a couple of times and it folds like a cheap suit.    #WINNING  Yulie: Well, you didn’t kill anyone this time, so that’s a start… And we get back under way through the creepy monster forest on our way to Zore Crystal #2.   And it’s here where the Lost Forest really smacks you in the face with its gimmick.  You see, the Lost Forest is divided into four quadrants: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each quadrant has the aesthetic of a different season, as well as different enemy types based on the obvious elemental parallels. Ice monsters are in the winter area, fire monsters are in the summer area, wind in spring, and earth in autumn. Up till now, the other three areas have been kind of indistinguishable from one another save for different colours of leaves on all the trees. It’s only once you get to winter that you realize what this place’s deal is. At first I thought this was plot-related, and that this part of the map was all dead because the Zore Crystal was sucking up all the Mako energy from the Planet and poo poo and that it would go back to being green again once you took it out, like Mushroom Hill Zone did in Sonic & Knuckles. …But that would have required Level-5 to push the  button, and we ALL know by now how averse they are to doing that when it comes to this game. But hey, they’ve got a new generic monster-training anime out now that looks like it’s ripping off so many things I want to puke, so at least we have that.…How the gently caress did these guys make Professor Layton again?   And here’s another Jackal pallet swap: the Blue Boar.  Also, I apparently lied way back in the boss video with Awahnee in chapter 6 of the first game. You DO encounter one in an actual snowbound environment. Sorry Sally, I misled you. It still looks completely stupid, however, even in its natural environment.  But oh hey, there’s the second Zore Crystal.  Same tactic. Knight up, Shield Bash, watch cutscene.    It’s screenshots like this that almost trick you into thinking this game is dynamic and action-packed. It isn’t.     CUTSCENE: The Next Morning CUTSCENE MUSIC: Ancient Heartbeat ~ Monolouge (Disc 2, Track 22)  Cisna: We’re suddenly too cheap to show any of this to you, so enjoy more of my voice on a black screen, plebs! Cisna apparently recounts events in purple prose. …Was the script localization of this game handled by Christopher Paolini or something?  So everyone with a Y Chromosome gathers around the Magic Meeting Table to discuss what they’re going to do now that the Zore Crystals have been taken out.  Lorias: That should be the last of those wretched Zore Crystals. Eldore: Then you were successful as well? Lorias: Yes. Eldore: Well I’ll be. I’m not used to this level of uninterrupted success. This is new for us. Leonard: So can we meet with Father Yggdra now? Marcell: Um, pardon, Master Leonard, but aren’t we forgetting the matter of… oh, the rest of Ban Nanazel’s army? Leonard: Wait… There’s a BANANA army out there now? Holy— Eldore: Shut up, idiot. The elf wizard is talking. Lorias: You seem to be mistaken, my dear Eldore. I am not a— Eldore: Elf. WIZARD. Lorias: Oh dear…. Lorias: He dwells beyond the town of Faria… Lorias: Within the precincts of the Numenshrine. Scardigne: Just slipping through town presents a large enough challenge.Yeah, it’s too bad we don’t have a super-fast airship or something to get us in there before Nanazel has any time to react or anything, right?  Eldore: Tell me what you know about the enemy forces.  CUTSCENE: Yulie's Reason, Miu's Purpose And so the debate on how we’re actually going to infiltrate Faria proper is carried on just out of earshot of the heir of Faria. Because there’s no reason to involve your future ruler in matters that will affect the future of her nation, right? Eh, Miu’s still in Crippling Anime Character Self-Doubt Trope mode, so it’s probably best not to bother her anyway.  She looks out longingly, wondering what a better written character than anyone at that table would do in this situation.  Luckily for her, a better written character appears! Yulie: What’s wrong, Miu?  Miu: It’s just… I’ve done nothing to help.I’ve seen where you end up, girl. You’re a more helpful character than Leonard ever becomes in this game, and you can take that to the bank.  CUTSCENE MUSIC: Miu’s Theme (Game 2 OST, Track 7) She sighs.   Miu: Yulie? Yulie: Yeah? Miu: What convinced you to fight, Yulie? What’s your reason?Well, I’m glad someone finally asked the obvious question that’s been floating around her character for 90% of the game so far.  Yulie: Good question…She’s at a loss because she can’t say “Leonard’s Penis” in good faith anymore because I’m pretty sure she detests him as a fellow human being right now and is just really good at repressing it.  Yulie: I just sort of fell into this mess. Yulie: And there was that Orren guy too… We had some fun together. I kind of miss him. You know. In the meanwhile, Leonard is frantically gesticulating like he’s making an angry, impassioned argument, while everyone else just stands calmly and watches him. It’s played without words, so it looks like you’re watching him have a temper tantrum.  Yulie: But that doesn’t mean I’m just along for the ride.Keep telling yourself that, girl.  Leonard: We need to charge right in there. Like just run right at them! Marcell: With the Knight? Leonard: What Knight? Marcell: The Incorruptus. The White Knight. You know, the one we’ve been using since we got here? Leonard: Wow, Not-Orren! You have an Incrutis?! That’s amazing! I wish I had one of those. My friend Caesar has one, and he’s so cool with it. Marcell: Beg pardon, Master Leonard, but… Is there a problem with your memory? You seem somewhat— Eldore: Dumb? Marcell: Now that you mention it, Lord Eldore… Leonard: So then we charge in and then I scream out “CISNAAAAAAAA!!!!!” And then I— Marcell: [THWACK] Leonard: OW! Man, what gives?! Marcell: Heavens me! I don’t know what came over me… I just felt the urge to… hit you… when you said Her Grace’s name. Eldore: Welcome back, Niles! Yulie: I know there has to be a purpose for me in all of this. Yulie: My ‘big moment’, you know? Miu: And me? I have a purpose? Yulie: Sure!Must… Resist… Making… Saints Row… Joke… I mean, poo poo, I’ve essentially been escorting The Boss and Kinzie around for the last hour or so. I’m amazed I haven’t cracked yet.  Yulie: A reason is something you have. But a purpose… is something you find.You don’t see it in the screenshot here, but Miu cracks the barest hint of a smile during the fade to black.   CUTSCENE: A Plan of Attack  Lorias: Alright. As we discussed…Because Lorias too knows all about Leonard-proofing his plans.   Lorias: Our primary force will attack head-on to create a diversion. Eldore: And we’ll use that opportunity to enter from the back and free Father Yggdra. Leonard: Works for me.Ya know, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t said a sentence longer than four words since the second game started. …Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Less Leonard is Best Leonard.  Lorias: Then let the operation begin! Lorias: Operation: "gently caress It, Let’s Just Do What the Moron Said" is a go!
 THE LOST FOREST 
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2014 10:03
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nine-gear crow posted:…How the gently caress did these guys make Professor Layton again?  To a casual puzzle amateur dabbler any Layton game looks like WKC2 looks to the people who just finished WKC1. There's also stuff that Level 5 came up with... it's mostly the crap you use a guide for.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:50
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Only 2 episodes in and Marcell is already hitting Leonard for being a idiot. Amazing.
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Jun 13, 2014 13:16
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Didn't some Zelda game do the same thing with a forest that has all four seasons? Oh wait, it was Oracle of Seasons, but you had to change the seasons yourself. Still, pretty close. Shoot the core!
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Jun 13, 2014 14:00
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Hey, looks like we're in that one forest from Secret Of Mana. And that tree in the middle could be the Mana tree. More blatant borrowing?
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Jun 13, 2014 15:18
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I know it's probably supposed to be a duck with ram horns or something but from this angle those are some awfully menacing skull pauldrons Dragias II is sporting.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:24
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Blind Sally posted:Hey, looks like we're in that one forest from Secret Of Mana. And that tree in the middle could be the Mana tree. More blatant borrowing? No, it's clearly the forest from Riviera.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:12
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I liked FFXII as well. 
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Jun 13, 2014 16:58
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No. I refuse to believe Leonard actually did poo poo without killing anyone. I am betting the Zore Crystals need people in someway to work, and if they had been more gentle about it, could have gotten them out without them dying, but because Leonard basically smashed them with his night, they died horribly deaths with their souls being converted into pure magic by the Zore Crystals just before they were destroyed meaning they don't even get to enjoy the afterlife away from Leonard; they are stuck as magical energy in the world, and may very well somehow be made to suffer by Leonard even more.
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Jun 14, 2014 01:43
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nine-gear crow posted:
It begins... 
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Jun 14, 2014 03:11
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Mehuyael posted:Didn't some Zelda game do the same thing with a forest that has all four seasons? Magical season changing areas aren't that uncommon, Riviera had it as the second half of it's second major plot dungeon where you recruit the witch. The entire Grand Line Saga for One piece dealt with an entire region of the world that could have islands that embodies one of the four seasons with all four seasons anyway, Oracle of Seasons is another one and most games generally also have areas who's environmental hat is one extreme of one of the seasons anyway.
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Jun 14, 2014 06:05
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nine-gear crow posted:
I'm kind of surprised that you actually liked Final Fantasy XII, considering that it has many of the same failings of White Knight Chronicles. In fact, to me, Final Fantasy XII is worse because while White Knight Chronicles has bad game mechanics, its a fairly easy game to play through. Final Fantasy XII has heaps of fake difficulty that can add heavy doses of high blood pressure to the brain aneurysm you get from the plot. To begin with, half the cast isn't relevant. Leonard actually accomplished tasks in WKC. Not as competently or frequently as he should have, but he did fight off bad guys and villains with some amount of effectiveness. Vaan, with his fake blond hair and misshapen abs, is practically a non-entity in the game. Just replace "Cisna!" with "I wanna be a sky pirate!" and you've got Vaan's characterization. I don't think Vaan even knew what a sky pirate is, beyond driving a cool ship and getting treasure from "somewhere". Pennelo is like Yulie, except without the charm. I would nickname her "The Ghost", because she almost never speaks a word and most of her appearances are in group shots of the party. She gets almost no screen time and has the singular character trait of being stupid enough to fall for Vann. Fran has got to be Final Fantasy's least subtle attempt at fanservice. She is a bunny girl with a foreign accent that is part of a race that dresses exclusively in skimpy outfits. She is supposed to be Balthier's partner yet he's the one that makes all the plans. She has one cutscene that focuses on her relationship with her village that hints at a backstory but it never goes anywhere, so she is ungracefully shoved into the background. The game uses a license point system to customize your character's armor and abilities. The skill boards start out leaning toward certain roles (i.e. Fran has easier accessibility to black magic). This seems like a pretty good systems until players realize that its easier to kill trash mobs of weak enemies as license points (LP) are governed by the quantity of kills rather than quality. This makes victory in boss fights feel unfulfilled as bosses only give meager LP and no EXP as opposed to monsters that give both. Late in the game, every character will have every good skill and spell, making them all carbon copies of each other with very minute differences in stats. As if that alone did not make combat sound dull and repetitive enough, the developers of this game loved dicking you with in terms of magic. Summons in this game are useless as you will easily outpace them in terms of damage and they devour large amounts of MP to use. Quickenings are quick-time event combinations that are do decent damage but are easy to fail and also large amounts of MP. Did I mention that magic restoring elixirs in this game are limited? I hope you saved some for the fight against Yiazmat. The only way to truly restore MP is either save crystals (which you can't use during battles), walking, or using physical attacks. The latter two only restoring one point per hit/step. Pretty soon, the most efficient way of fighting is using physical attacks and using magic to heal or restore status. This gets stale very quickly considering the massive health bars the developers gave to bosses for some reason. Three hours is not a reasonable time to spend on a boss fight! The most obvious comparison between WKC and FF XII is that giant worlds of empty space. You will backtrack in FF XII and it will sometimes take hours to walk to a new location. The easier alternative is teleport stones that can transport you to previous save crystals but money is very tight in this game as you have to sell monster items to order to obtain money. What's worse is some monster items are necessary for quests and easy to sell by accident. I got locked out of quest for selling an Old Snakeskin and could do nothing but trek on. So either spend hours grinding up items of the same type to sell or be prepared to play a much duller more unattractive version of Journey for the same playtime. Distortion Man fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Jun 15, 2014 |
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Jun 15, 2014 00:29
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meant to put something awhile ago. First instance of this forest I remember in a video game was Secret of Mana for the Super Nintendo. It was even a riddle to figure out how to open the secret door to a temple/boss fight. "Walk the seasons from Spring to Winter, Spring again and we can enter." ...waitaminute...is that the route you had to take through the forest for this pseudo-invasion of Faria?... GODDAMNIT LEVEL5!
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Jun 15, 2014 02:41
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Distortion Man posted:I'm kind of surprised that you actually liked Final Fantasy XII, considering that it has many of the same failings of White Knight Chronicles. In fact, to me, Final Fantasy XII is worse When you ask yourself why companies let games like WKC get made, that right there the answer. People will buy them anyway and justify their purchase because reasons. Don't want to derail the thread but if anyone's interested in seeing Final Fantasy XII, there's a good LP of it by BrainWeasel available on the LP archives. By all means compare it to White Knight Chronicles, but if start thinking WKC is the better game then go see your doctor immediately. Anyway more on topic, the game just started and already "new" enemies are palette swaps? That's just insulting. Did they really charge full price for both of these games? That's enough money to buy one hundred cheeseburgers! Crow, you could be eating one hundred cheeseburgers right now instead of playing White Knight Chronicles. A forest divided into seasons could be an interesting idea in a better game, but from the sound of things it's merely "one elemental section here, another here, etc?" Is there anything more interesting done with the idea, or could they have just made it Fire Land, Ice Land, etc?
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Jun 15, 2014 06:51
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Small problem there champ. that LP is of the Japanese exclusive Zodiac Job rerelease, which fixes most if not all the flaws from the vanilla release as well as adding new balances and tweaks. Over all it's an insanely improved version of the game.
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Jun 15, 2014 08:23
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It's 100% possible in Final Fantasy XII to make a black (black and white and everything else really) mage character and manage his/her MP without much trouble. IIRC, the charge skill, the osmose spell and the license that gives you MP for inflicting magic damage usually suffices and most of the time you can let gambits take care of MP replenishing. The biggest problem for me was the fact that only one spell animation could be displayed at a time due to a bone-headed decision to make spell animations push PS2's limits. I'm not sure exactly how much WKC borrows from FF XII, but what they should have borrowed is the gambits or rather, a variant thereof. Trying to make a smart AI in a game where you can configure your characters in many different ways is a recipe of disaster. It's far better to let the player configure the AI as well. Personally, I'm thinking that the ideal would be a combination of the gambit system and the paradigm system in FF XIII. You can only create four or so "gambits" instead of the massive number in FF XII, but you can create multiple sets of them that you can then switch between depending on situation.
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Jun 15, 2014 08:29
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Rather weird to call the Zore Crystals absorbing power from the earth and converting it to magic. Isn't power from the earth considered magic? Distinguishing "power" from "magic" sounds important but I doubt they'll ever bother to tell us what the difference is. I kind of liked FFXII for the most part, although it felt bland and aimless and I think people were more critical because they'd been waiting like 6 years for the game to come out since X. She has one cutscene that focuses on her relationship with her village that hints at a backstory but it never goes anywhere, so she is ungracefully shoved into the background. Yeah Fran was a disappointment. They try to build up how Fran voluntarily leaving the Wood was such a blasphemous thing, to turn her back on everything her species stood for, what kind of momentous conflict it would bring if she had to return there. ...But no one really gives a poo poo. Just an, "Oh, it's you," reaction and some snubbed noses but that's it.
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Jun 15, 2014 13:57
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Hey, remember this? Mysterious Man: The castle’s raiders are after this. They seek a holy relic known as the Ark, the key to the Incorruptus’s power. Holy relic? Yeah, a real miracle. Being made in a techno country, it is in fact a real miracle of engineering. Of course, combined with mulched babies or something, but I don't see how that makes it any more holy. Eldore should know this, so either he is lying or the game has continuity problems. I dare not guess which one is the case. Also, I bet the Zore crystals had an obvious "OFF" or "REVERSE" switch that Leonard could not find. Instead he decided to smash them. No respect for recycling in that one!
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Jun 15, 2014 17:59
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This is a pretty nice area. Gave me Click-Clock Woods vibes. Kinda outstays its welcome eventually though. Nice-looking I should say, as with most areas it involves a lot of slogging through hordes of enemies.OminousEdge posted:No. I refuse to believe Leonard actually did poo poo without killing anyone. Yeah, you can't see all the trampled woodland creatures Leonard stepped on while he was rushing in to break the shiny thing.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:03
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I love how the idea of Leonard NOT screwing something up and actually succeeding at a given task is so alien to the thread that several people are actively making up excuses for why he actually did gently caress up and we just didn't see. That speaks volumes for this duology, doesn't it?
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Jun 15, 2014 20:24
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Now I want to play FFXII again. 
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Jun 15, 2014 20:43
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Arcade Rabbit posted:I love how the idea of Leonard NOT screwing something up and actually succeeding at a given task is so alien to the thread that several people are actively making up excuses for why he actually did gently caress up and we just didn't see. That speaks volumes for this duology, doesn't it? From what I've seen in this thread and read online, "Leonard" and "competence" don't go in the same sentence normally. I want to know if the game was deliberately written about the "main" character being a complete failure, or that was just an unfortunate turn the writing took to keep the conflict going.
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Jun 15, 2014 20:48
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Geostomp posted:From what I've seen in this thread and read online, "Leonard" and "competence" don't go in the same sentence normally. I want to know if the game was deliberately written about the "main" character being a complete failure, or that was just an unfortunate turn the writing took to keep the conflict going. I think The Death of the Author is very much at play here in regards to Leonard's perceived heroism and competence or lack thereof. I've no doubt that Akihiro Hino set out to write a story about what he intended to be some down-on-his luck shclubby everyman who stumbles into an amazing power/access to individuals of influence in the world and then uses that power and influence to triumph against evil and make the world a better place. See the Red Letter Media "proto-gone-ist" thesis from their Phantom Menace review. What happened is that through either incompetence or miscalculation what was produced was something that, when all of its smaller parts are analyzed in any depth by an outside observer, seem to add up to a story where the hero comes across as an forcefully ignorant failure who seemingly can't do anything right. TL;DR: Audience Interpretation trumps "Authorial Intent" every time. I'd have to say, in all honesty, I think the plot of the first game could have been saved in some way if Leonard actually did manage to rescue Cisna at the Sand Maze Ruins. I'd forgive him for not being able to help Lena, the prospect of her actually getting out alive from that situation was pretty much nill, no matter what theory you want to believe on who/what she really was in that equation. Still, with Cisna in the party as either a guest or an actual playable character you could still have things go the way they do, and maybe even turn the established order on its head by having her lead the party to the next Plot Coupon location so they can scoop it before the Magi do and then have the Magi show up late to the party for a change. It's one seemingly small change that goes a long way towards countermanding the metanarative of Leonard The gently caress Up that has been building in the player's mind since he entered the story to the sound of Rapacci screaming at him for being a gently caress up.
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Jun 17, 2014 03:04
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To me, more than making Leonard look incompetent his cutscene failures made me feel like the author was incompetent: that he could come up with no better way of pushing the plot along than have Leonard completely forget about the person he is supposedly head over heels over repeatedly so she can get re-kidnapped.
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Jun 17, 2014 04:56
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So wait, you're telling me that they deliberately handicapped the single-player dungeons to make more variety in multiplayer? Wow, they must have been betting a lot on the enduring multiplayer.
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Jun 18, 2014 04:21
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Glazius posted:So wait, you're telling me that they deliberately handicapped the single-player dungeons to make more variety in multiplayer? Yep. It's a large part of why the multiplayer, in its time, was so beloved by the game's small yet hardcore fanbase. GeoNet was an active community right up until the last second of the last day before Sony yanked the plug on it last year. And it baffles me too, because everything about it was so goddamn irredeemably grindy. Quest after quest consisting largely of some some combination of "kill x amount of enemy Y" or "go to [MAP COORDINATES HERE] and talk to [OBJECT OR PERSON HERE]" or "kill giant enemy X" and then fight a boss. Ad infinitum. Here, take a look at this, look at the table half way down the page. Those are the GR point requirements for levelling up your Guild Rank, which is the A-1 barrier to everything in the game that you would want to do ideally: binding more powerful weapons, armours and items, creating anything related to the Arc Knight, accessing certain quests online, gently caress even LEVELLING UP IN GENERAL gets locked down to your Guild Rank after you hit level 50-something. And no, your eyes aren't deceiving you, those are million point thresholds between GR levels. The only thing positive I can say about it is that at least your GR point totals are cumulative, so it's not like you need to rack up 9,000,000 points to get to GR 29 and then another 10,000,000 to get to GR 30. (In the Japanese version it goes up to GR 50). Grinding GR was a nightmare because the quickest run:highest payout quest you could do only gave you around 100,000 points per run and still took 20 minutes complete solo if you didn't want to waste time trying to herd cats online and get a party together to help you clear it in 5 minutes. The entire online experience of White Knight Chronicles made me thankful I never got into World of WarCraft or any other MMO game because I caught myself going into an autopilot trance in doing the same poo poo over and over again to make a meaningless number go up just a little bit more on its way to another meaningless number that was till 500,000 whatevers away from another meaningless thing and I walked away from it cold until the day I popped it back in to my PS3 to start recording footage for this LP. The horror.... the horror...
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Jun 18, 2014 04:50
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nine-gear crow posted:Here, take a look at this, look at the table half way down the page. Those are the GR point requirements for levelling up your Guild Rank, which is the A-1 barrier to everything in the game that you would want to do ideally: binding more powerful weapons, armours and items, creating anything related to the Arc Knight, accessing certain quests online, gently caress even LEVELLING UP IN GENERAL gets locked down to your Guild Rank after you hit level 50-something. This times a million. I've hit the post-game and find myself stuck trying to get my GR up because monster drops are tied into that number, and without more GR I can't finish little side quests, etc etc. I agree that it hits a sort of auto-pilot where I pick a quest and just run about, grinding for stuff. I have to wonder why I'm still playing, but I guess its the insane completionist in me, though I'm well aware I'll never be able to finish every quest due to the lack of online support. I've said it before, but thanks again for suffering through this game, and drat you for influencing me to pick it back up.
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Jun 18, 2014 15:22
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If I understood it right, it takes about three and a half hour worth of grinding to get from GR 29 to GR 30. That's bad, but it's nothing unusual as far as MMO's or Diablo inspired games goes. I have seen much worse than that. Getting to level 100 in Diablo II originally toke over a year, that even assuming you're one of the players who can spend more than 5 hours a day on the game. I've never understood why people does that.
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Jun 18, 2014 16:08
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nine-gear crow posted:Grinding GR was a nightmare because the quickest run:highest payout quest you could do only gave you around 100,000 points per run and still took 20 minutes complete solo if you didn't want to waste time trying to herd cats online and get a party together to help you clear it in 5 minutes. It's funny that you say that because GR grinding was the overwhelming majority of my time on WKC2 (especially from GR23 to 30) mostly because the quest of choice for GR grinding was by far the easiest to arrange and I have this weird idea that time spent gaming should be spent actually gaming. The other reason is that the best method of getting a lot of the items you needed, break farming, yields no GR points so after getting the best equipment for your current rank you'd still have a long way to go to the next one. This usually wasn't the case in WKC1 though that was no better as you'd be grinding entire quests for items instead. I still have bad memories of doing Station Attendant 2 more than 100 times. EDIT: Crystalgate posted:If I understood it right, it takes about three and a half hour worth of grinding to get from GR 29 to GR 30. That's definitely not right but I don't remember the numbers involved so I consulted a video of the quest used for GR grinding. The team in the video gets 125000 points and it takes 13 million points to get from GR29 to GR30 so that's 104 runs. At 6 runs an hour that's 17 hours 20 mins. Some runs would take longer because of lower level players or disconnections. Death Zebra fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 17:48
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nine-gear crow posted:
So, if she's Kinzie, and Not!Kara is the boss... does that make Yulie the Shaundi? Is Orren Gat? Leonard is definitely Josh Birk, then. Anyways, that bit of brain spasm out of the way, I'm glad to see Yulie getting more active. Can't wait til she's busting heads properly.
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Jun 18, 2014 18:23
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Death Zebra posted:That's definitely not right but I don't remember the numbers involved so I consulted a video of the quest used for GR grinding. The team in the video gets 125000 points and it takes 13 million points to get from GR29 to GR30 so that's 104 runs. At 6 runs an hour that's 17 hours 20 mins. Some runs would take longer because of lower level players or disconnections. nine-gear crow posted:The only thing positive I can say about it is that at least your GR point totals are cumulative, so it's not like you need to rack up 9,000,000 points to get to GR 29 and then another 10,000,000 to get to GR 30.
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Jun 18, 2014 19:41
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Crystalgate posted:Which is it? Well, if 10+ hours is what it takes, then the needed GP point for rank 29 -> 30 must be 10/13 million respectively. I'm pretty sure GR points are cumulative, but I might be wrong. Since I got my Game Genie, I've never had to grind for GR ever again, so it's been a while since I played a quest with the intention of levelling up. But I wouldn't put it past the game to reset your GR points between levels so you'd need to get 9 million for one level and then get another 10 million for the next level. Because if there's one thing this game wants you to know crystal clear is that is absolutely hates you.
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Jun 18, 2014 20:47
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nine-gear crow posted:But I wouldn't put it past the game to reset your GR points between levels so you'd need to get 9 million for one level and then get another 10 million for the next level. It does reset every time you rank up. It says so on the wiki. It makes more sense since it would otherwise have been possible for me to get from GR26 to GR30 in one day. You're probably thinking of WKC1 where points did accumulate and the total points requirement for the then maximum GR15 was over 54 million.
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Jun 18, 2014 21:37
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