Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time review

I mentioned that I had started Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time earlier. Well I didn’t get very far before I quit, just about two or three hours into it. I was on Fire Mountain, for those of you familiar with the game.

Why did I quit?

1. Action RPGs are usually not my thing. When I do play them, I like them to be simple affairs like Rune Factory. The minute I start having to think and plan, I get stressed out and frustrated. FFCC:ET was easy enough that I didn’t get wiped out even once, but it was no fun at all.

2. Magic was next to unusable. First you have to select a particular type of magic on the bottom screen, then press a button and align the circle with the enemy, then let go to cast the magic. What if the enemy won’t stay still? What about all the other enemies whaling away at you at the same time? So it’s much faster to just hack away at random.

3. Your allies are confusing and just get in the way. Jumping all over the place like jackrabbits, falling in the water at random, failing to come to your rescue when you need them the most, doing the same thing over and over regardless of which AI strategy you pick, etc, etc. When I tried to pick stuff up, I’d end up picking them up instead. Sometimes enemy drops would end up on their heads and they’d run all over the room with them. Not to mention your allies are characters you create, so they have no personality or relevance to the story at all. I have no idea why they are with you, unless the final boss sent them to sabotage you. I considered ditching them all, but I didn’t have the confidence to go it alone.

4. Story? What story? It’s been a bunch of fetch quests and dungeon crawls so far. This is my first Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game (apart from My Life as a King), so maybe that’s how they all play out. I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I like it even less when the main character has a dream about an evil character, then meets said evil character, then proceeds to do his bidding without stopping to look at the huge, flashing signs saying “VILLAIN ALERT!” “VILLAIN ALERT!” “VILLAIN ALERT!”

5. I hate the dungeon puzzles. In fact, I hate dungeon puzzles in general, especially ones that involve any form of running or jumping or platforming. This is why I can only love Zelda games from afar, i.e. I get other people to play them while I watch. There were all those crate puzzles and block puzzles and set-this-pot-on-fire puzzles in this game, all the things I hate in one convenient package. It’s a wonder I even got as far as Fire Mountain.

6. I don’t know whether it’s an FFCC:ET flaw, or whether it’s more of me just sucking, but the camera is impossible. I kept falling into holes and crevasses because I couldn’t see properly and the camera wouldn’t let me change the view to a more amenable one.

7. The game world is bland and insipid. I was attracted by the cute characters, but once I got in there, it had no content. One village, one city, massive wasteland and no room for new cities as far as I could see. Having the NPCs change their lines from time to time was a nice touch, but they didn’t have anything interesting to say to begin with, so it makes no difference. Plus you can’t enter their houses and plunder their goods either. What, you don’t trust me? I’m hurt. 🙁

8. The quests suck, plain and simple.

9. I couldn’t get the hang of the armor and weapon system. Let’s see, you buy them, then you equip them for a while, then they level up, then you take them off and turn them into jewels and equip those jewels on your new weapons and armor and repeat the whole process. It sounded complicated and off-putting. Don’t fiddle with the basics too much.

10.You can’t save at any time. There isn’t even a Quick Save function. Once you enter a dungeon, you have to keep going until you’re right before the boss. If you have to save, then you have to go back to town and do so. When you come back, you have to do aalllll those puzzles all over again. That’s close to a dealbreaker for me. I do most of my gaming late at night before bed, and sometimes I get really sleepy. If you won’t let me save anywhere, then either keep my progress in the dungeon or dole out the save points more generously.

In short, it just wasn’t my kind of game. I’m just glad I didn’t end up wasting more time on a game I wouldn’t have liked anyway.

Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (3)

Lia, Rosetta and Natsu, the three heroines

Riddle me this, folks: Can you still call a game ‘bad’ after finishing it three times in a row? I mean, not even Luminous Arc 3 got three full playthroughs, and that was 10 times the game Tactical Guild is. The last game I played thrice in quick succession was Atelier Lina and I wouldn’t dream of even suggesting that Tactical Guild anywhere near it in terms of quality. Yet be that as it may, the truth is I just finished my third TG run. Not only that, but I actually enjoyed it! What is this world coming to?

I’ve always said that a game can’t be that bad if I at least manage to finish it. Well in this case, I’ve done it three times, so this practically qualifies Tactical Guild for Game of the Year! I’m still in shock, so I think it would be therapeutic for me to try and figure out why. Because there’s no denying it is a poor game, that fact is not up for negotiation. If I had to go back a few weeks ago and make the call again, I’d probably tell myself, “Don’t play that game. And don’t eat that potato salad!”

So, reasons, reasons… First of all, I think it’s a testament to my love of tactical/strategy RPGs. There’s a relative scarcity of them on the DS, so I’ve played just about every one I can get my hands on (except Disgaea, more on that someday), so unless TG was flat-out awful it was almost certain to get a chance.

Secondly, as I’ve said before, the three-part story got me interested and kept me interested. Natsu’s story made sense because I had played Rosetta’s story before it, but even without that it was better than Lia’s story. Having played all three parts I still have some questions, especially about Shiki and the Reti-Arts, but getting this much story from a game like this is commendable enough. Oh, and I figured out how to get the “good” and “normal” endings (I think). I accidentally got Guin killed during the final battle, so Natsu used a skill to kill the final boss that also ‘reset’ her memories. So she ends the game as an amnesiac, but takes a liking to Guin anyway and they end up together. Easy girl is easy. The “good” ending had me killing the final boss normally (a different one from the previous 2 routes), and then Natsu and Guin are all over each other with confessions of love and “I’ll protect you forever,” the usual crap. Guin is such a playboy. So any girl at all will do, huh? That’s why you can fall in love with them so easily, huh? Don’t get cocky because you’re a little good-looking.

Aaaaanyway, the third reason I was able to play it so much is because most of the frustrations of the gameplay lessened considerably after the first playthrough. For one thing,  by the time I was halfway through my second run I had made almost all my characters alchemists. This meant I could move and attack at the same time, with devastating effects for my enemies. I also came across the occasional enemy class that was immune to long-distance attacks, which meant my Search and destroy strategy didn’t work all the time. It was nice to have to use my brain for a change. On top of that, I was able to fast-forward early cutscenes and any quest dialogue that I had already seen, so in total my three playthroughs took only 29:43 hours, an average of 10 hours per run. In terms of length, it’s like I played just one regular RPG, which is bearable. And of course I had done all my shopping and equipping by the end of game two, so I didn’t have to deal with the infuriating shopping system. I got some awesome swag from the quests this time round, but they were almost all geared towards non-mages, so I didn’t bother equipping them. Shame, really.

I should also make a correction from my last post. I mentioned that you don’t get to see your characters in their equipment on the field. On the field, this is true. But you do get to see what they’re wearing if you turn battle animations on. It will look something like the screenshot on the right. (Btw, Roy is going to be moving like concrete with all that gear on so don’t dress him like that) Personally I turned animations off ASAP because I just couldn’t stand them. I watch every single animation in Fire Emblem, even on replays, but when it came to TG it was just too annoying. Not only did the monsters have the most dreadful and annoying screams (obviously done by some skinny kid with a cheap microphone) but watching your characters miss attack after attack was hair-rippingly frustrating. Did I tell you about the time I missed four (4!!!) 85% chance hits in a row? What are the odds of that? Plus I almost always used only one attack (Search), so I didn’t need to watch that over and over again. Still the option is available if you really want to see your characters dressed up. The enemies are pretty snazzy dressers as well.

Yet another reason I enjoyed my third playthrough was the scalable difficulty. I mentioned playing my first game on Easy, which was moderately easy. I should have played my second one on Normal, that would have been more fun. But I did play the last one on Hard, and it was great because they scaled all the enemies to my level right from the very first battle. Thanks to that, I got into some genuinely sticky situations from time to time. There was this one quest battle where 5 new enemies spawned every single turn, and they were all three to five levels higher than my party. If the boss hadn’t been kind enough to make his way down so I could kill him, I’d still be fighting them all right now. A bit of challenge is great, even in a game like this. Of course if I had lost the battle, the game would still have gone on as normal, but I tried not to think about that too much.

One more thing I thought was good: the different ways to win a battle. It wasn’t always about killing every enemy on the screen. Sometimes you had to make it to a certain point. Sometimes you had to keep the enemy from making it to that point. Sometimes you had to finish in a set number of turns. Other times you just had to survive that number of turns. There were a few times you had to destroy a certain item. There were battles where you had to kill a certain enemy, or one of three enemies, choose your choice. I remember when I played Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon one of my disappointments was how repetitive your goals were: kill boss, take castle, kill boss, take castle. Variety is the spice of life, and in this particular respect TG had it in spades.

In conclusion, I found plenty to like about Tactical Guild once I’d played a little longer. The fact remains, though, that most people won’t and shouldn’t play it as much as I did. For those people, every negative thing I said about the gameplay will be true: no magic if you move, horrible hit rates, etc. Unless they play Rosetta’s route, the story will make little sense. The characters will be hit-and-miss. The equipment system will be disappointing. The pain will never end. And I don’t have the confidence to tell anyone “Yes, it’s a terrible game, but if you play this terrible game again, maybe you’ll like it!” Even I am not that sadistic. So, so long Tactical Guild! You had some good idea and I got some good hours out of you. Now on to some proper, quality games.

Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (2)

I finished my second playthrough last night! This time I went for Rosetta’s ending. I don’t know whether I got the “good” ending or the “normal” ending, or even how to differentiate between the two, but I was satisfied when it was all over.

Bad budget game Tactical Guild may be, but I really like what they did with the three heroines. It’s not just about different endings; choosing another girl gives you a different story altogether. The final boss on Rosetta’s path was completely different, for one thing. Shiki had a different goal, Floy and Nora suffered different fates. On Lia’s path, Dahl and Natsu both disappeared until the end. Here they both showed up, and Dahl was in your party until the end (for all the good he did, haha), etc. etc.

I was expecting something more like Hector Mode in FE7, with the same story told through another person’s eyes. But here it’s more like picking a different girl changes the fate of the world itself. If you go through all three paths, you’ll get three different alternative histories. I love that, that’s what I call replay value. It’s almost enough to make up for the crappiness of the rest of the game. Almost, but not quite.

And now I really want to play Natsu’s route and see what happens to her. I got to do some different guild quests on my second playthrough, so maybe there’ll be even more the third time round? The Inna sidequest was Rosetta-specific, so Natsu will probably have at least once of her own. The nice thing about quests is that not only do most of them grow into mini-stories but also if you complete them all successfully, the requesters show up at the end of the game and give you nice weapons and armor. The most memorable quest for me was having to help a mad scientist named Franken create the ultimate golem. Instead, he kept creating evil clones of my main character, who tried to kill him and become the real ones. The golem he finally came up with was crazily sarcastic as well. It was hilarious!

So there’s a lot to like about this game if you can see past the horrible gameplay. But I can’t. Why? Why is it so bad? If it was just mediocre or even slightly below average, the branching story and the quests might make up for it, as it is, it’s just…awful. Ninja Studio put all the effort of the game in the wrong places. If they had cut down the story to just one route and made up for it by making Tactical Guild fun to play, that would have been way better. I still haven’t gotten over how they used the same generic sprites with the same colors for both allies and enemies. And the sad thing is, it didn’t have to be that way. On your menu screen when you equip characters, they change their looks depending on what they’re wearing. It’s like Tactics Layer (from the same developer) or Dragon Quest 9. You can customize the look of your characters from head to toe, but! When they appear on the battle field they’re the same old indistinguishable sprites. Work done = 0.

I wish I could say that was the worst thing about equipment in this game. Alas, it is not. The worst thing is buying equipment, because you have no way of telling whether a piece of equipment is good or not until you actually buy it and try to equip it. In most RPGs, when you shop for a new sword, it’s easy to tell what’s better than what. Either more expensive goods are always better, or the game lets you see at a glance what effect it will have on your character. It’s been done so often it’s practically common sense. Alas, common sense is not common to common games like Tactical Guild.

What makes things harder is that weapons/armor have unexpected effects and hidden stats that you aren’t told about. This King’s armor might give, say, 18 DEF and 20 MDF. You recall that your current armor is 15 DEF, 15 MDF. This has got to be better, right? Not so fast. You might take it home to find out that it raises those two stats and lowers every single other one. Or that it’s far too damaging to that all-important Magic Attack stat. What now? In the end I dealt with the problem by saving first, shopping, then reloading if I wasn’t happy with the results. Towards the end of the game I focused solely on magic-raising equipment, and that worked much better. Still a massive waste of time, though.

And I said I enjoyed getting a different story, but it’s not like it was perfect or anything. Rosetta’s story made a moderate amount of sense, and is the one I’d recommend if you’re doing only one playthrough. Lia’s route was downright nonsensical. You just go from place to place chasing Nora, the knight army disappears entirely (when they should be playing a big role), someone who seems to be a villain appears and dies in all of 2 minutes, Rosetta pops up and she’s like “Hi guys! I’m killing these monsters! Okay, done, bye guys!” and so on. Then there’s the fact that Rosetta’s route shows a group of people poised to take over the country, which means that ridding the world of Reti-Arts on Lia’s route (wait, did you even?) has merely delayed the inevitable. Though if fate has been changed then maybe they don’t want to take over anymore? Then where did they go? Hmm.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget the sudden love confession out of nowhere. Guin and Lia had something interesting going on, and it was clear from the second mission that she liked him, so it wasn’t that strange when he confessed to her. Guin and Rosetta on the other hand… ZERO chemistry. They barely coexist, she just mopes and gets in the way. All of a sudden she goes “Btw, I love you! Bye!” Where did that come from? Then Guin says he loves her too. If you had to ask him to explain why, I bet his empty little head would explode. After all that, the thought of Guin confessing his love to Natsu on the route gives me the dry heaves. She looks all of 12 years old! You know, I really will pass on the third playthrough. Yeah…

For my next game, I want to try a cooking game. I just came back from buying more groceries than I could safely carry, and I need to do something with them before they go bad. In particular I bought something called “pork belly”, which is the fattiest, most unhealthy-looking cut of meat I have ever seen in my life. I figure something that bad for you must be delicious, right?

I’ll also keep playing SaGa 3 You can save anywhere in it, so I just play a few minutes every night before I sleep. It’s kind of boring, so it’s perfect sleeping material.

Ghost Trick – I quit

This is probably the fastest I’ve quit a game in a while, but it’s just not fun any more. I’m really interested in the Ghost Trick story, but to get at every bit of story I have to jump through 50 different hoops. Sometimes it’s obvious what to do, and sometimes it’s not. What I really hated what having like 5 seconds to make a certain move. If you missed that time window you’d have to rewind and start again. I really don’t have that much time to spend on a puzzle game. Even a FAQ didn’t help much. Trying to memorize the steps was exhausting, and looking up and down just made my neck tired.

Redoing puzzles was hard on me mentally as well. In the beginning it was like “I’ve gotta save Kamila!” but then after the 4th or 5th time it’s more like “Do I have to?” And that dog Missile was cute at first, but after the 20th time he barked, I wanted to muzzle him and drop him in the fish tank. That made me realize that if I kept playing, I would rapidly end up detesting the characters I was trying to save, and would probably end up hating the game in the end. So I thought it wise to quit early while I still had some love for it.

Luckily the magic of Youtube came to the rescue. What did I ever do without it? Thanks to Youtube, I can sit back and watch some other sucker kind, gentle soul playing the rest of the chapters for me. Of course, what I was really hoping for was a detailed summary of the story, so I wouldn’t have to watch the whole thing, but beggars can’t be choosers. I’m really grateful to the people who put this stuff online. Their suffering means I don’t have to.

Speaking of suffering, I watched someone play the first 16 minutes or so of FFXIII on Youtube the other day. Since I don’t own or plan to buy a 360 or a PS3 it’s not a game I was planning to play, and watching it in action did nothing to change my mind. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but the ‘fantasy’ part has always been a strong selling point of Final Fantasy for me. The other games to date have had middling to high amounts of fantasy but I don’t know what to do with FFXIII‘s Star-Wars-meets-Blade-Runner futuristic setting. Sure I like sci-fi and all, but in my FFs they have to be toned way down. Just as well I wasn’t going to play it anyway, huh? Especially since practically nothing happened in those first 16 minutes. Oh, and the characters were annoying (snap judgments strike again!).

Enough about that, I haven’t been up to much else lately. I gave up trying to get Gold Stars in The Kayou Generation, and I finished all the puzzles in Color Cross except one. I’m also a few hours into Saga 3, which is a decent enough game. I’ve been playing so many time travel games these days, it’s been messing with my enjoyment of other media. I watched a drama a little while ago and when a character died, I didn’t miss a beat: “No problem, they can just go back in time and make it so— Oh @#$%…”

In other news, I’m almost done with my second playthrough of Tactical Guild. I just need a final push of motivation to go wipe the floor with the final boss. Since I don’t have much else going on, I’m thinking of starting a new game as well. I put Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Taisen on my R4 the other day, but then I spent 20 minutes listening to the stupidly catchy opening theme instead of actually playing it. I always loved that song, even though I’ve never actually watched the anime. All right, I’m clearly starting to ramble now. Back to work.

Ghost Trick – First Impressions

I couldn’t sleep last night (in fact I finally got to sleep at 9am) and none of the games I’m currently playing were working out for me, so I decided to try something new. In hindsight, playing something entitled Ghost Trick at 3am in the morning may not have been the brightest idea, but luckily it’s not that creepy. Lux-Pain was creepier, I couldn’t stand that game. I really hate creepy stuff, but Ghost Trick is surprisingly upbeat and even a little funny despite the title. I’m enjoying it.

I haven’t gotten very far though, just started chapter 2. The premise is that you’re someone who just got killed and you have one night to find out whodunnit and why before you vanish in the morning. Somehow you find out that you’ve got special powers that enable your soul to inhabit and operate inanimate objects, so for example you can turn a fan on or roll a tyre, and this helps you save people’s lives and find clues about your life. You press “Ghost” to go into the ghost world and possess something and “Trick’ to use whatever ability that thing has.

It’s an interesting dynamic, but it’s very stressful sometimes. That’s because when you have to save a life, there’s usually an hourglass counting down the minutes until they get snuffed. I see the need for one. There’d be no tension at all if you had all the time in the world to make your move. But I still find it stressful because I’m a laid-back kind of gamer. I don’t like to be rushed in any way (which is part of the reason why I don’t like RTS and Action RPGs). Plus some of the puzzles involve an incredible string of coincidences like those machines… Rube Goldberg machines?… I’ll have to check wiki. Anyway, that thing where one object hits another, which rolls onto another, which startles a mouse so it drops cheese onto a trap, which triggers X, which triggers Y, and then it all works out in the end. It’s great fun and all but I still go “Good grief!” at the end.

In any case, I’m only an hour or two into it, so it’s still fresh and somewhat funny. I like a good whodunnit mystery, and I like the fact that neither the hero nor the villains take themselves too seriously and the dead people don’t come over all weepy and depressed. I’ve got like 4 other games going on right now, but I’ll probably drop FFCC: Echoes of Time and give up the second playthrough of Tactical Guild and possibly pause playing Saga 3 in order to focus on this. It shouldn’t take long.