ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

[ping]

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

still galls me that ffx's turnbased system exists only in the game, it's genuinely perfect for trad jrpg combat. annoying!

Oh, absolutely. FFX has its own problems with combat, in particular how random encounters are designed, but the boss battles are the best in the series, as far as I've played it. The ability to execute a plan instead of quickly selecting "ATTACK" because the next character already has their ATB filled makes them so much more fun to play.

I can't really remember any specific Epic Battle from X-2, so it being fairly easy seems likely. The only fight that stuck to my mind was against some superboss in the desert, where I cycled through the Alchemist creating potions and two Dark Knights doing that class's special move for more than a fucking hour.

[Original Alear]

Quote

None of this is explained in-game, and it's poorly documented online, so you're just kind of left wondering why enemies are suddenly so absurdly fast compared to you.

This is like my job suddenly interrupting someone who needs to get something done, telling people that they have to call the office back even though they're scheduled to be available because I have no idea why they're not responding (don't get me wrong, there might be justification for it, I just sometimes don't know what precisely it is). Yes, I think I finally understand...the reason they pay me is so that if someone beats me, there's reward money. I'm not a big fan of FF4 either.

Also did anyone (Nightmare?) ever show you this Integrity?

/

Edited March 1 by Original Alear

[Integrity]

FINAL FANTASY V (SQUARE, 1992)

Finished: 6/3/23. Playtime: 35.8 hours.

Where do you go after Final Fantasy 4? You don't. You go back to Final Fantasy 3, and you make the game that, bluntly, that game was supposed to be. I've long cited Final Fantasy 5 as one of my favorites in the series (I know! Despite ATB!) and I'm thrilled to say that, while it's not a perfect game by any means, it absolutely holds up to my memory... or lack thereof. I've been lying to some of you for years, and some of you for nearly an entire month. I don't think I actually ever finished Final Fantasy 5 Advance. I recognized many things (generally not details) from the first two-thirds of the game, and then everything hit me like it was new. Talking to mates, I'm pretty sure it's because it was. To the best of my reckoning, I think I made it to the Merged World, put the game down for a particularly hellish exam week, and then simply never picked the game back up again for no reason. Happens.

Anyhow, Final Fantasy 5 marks a return to the two core tenets of 3: a breezier, lighter story; and swappable jobs for your mans. There's not terribly much to say about the story of 5, and when you read the discourse about it you pretty rarely see anyone even mention it and literally nobody talk about any NPC from the game besides Exdeath occasionally and, of course, Gilgamesh all the fucking time. There's reasons for all of that. The central characters are charming enough to be memorable but not enough to really be talked about, the plot has its slump periods where it takes too long (particularly in the early second and middle third worlds) and doesn't say too much more than 3's plot with far more words, and Gilgamesh is just as great as his reputation/my memory suggested. As with every film, it could have stood to be about 15% shorter, but the final product is by no means either a flop or a masterpiece. It's solid enough for the gameplay to stand on and pretty much nothing more.

The job system is, as with 3, where the meat of the game's at, and it comes with a very simple and important change: cross-pollination. All except the two endgame jobs have a free slot that can hold any command or passive ability that character has unlocked from any other job. This single, simple addition to the system changes everything. Combinations of abilities from different classes that you feel clever for thinking up suddenly become possible to wrangle, including some truly busted ones. Getting a pool of abilities going for each of your heroes builds a little bit of role-inertia that 3 lacked - you can pivot your squad on a dime, but your bruiser is always going to have the edge at bruising, and your wizard is always going to have the edge at wizarding. Master a job, gain its abilities, and move on to another. Your squad is constantly in a state of flux as you go grab new toys to build a toolbox out of. Combat becomes the proving ground for the ideas that you had in between combats, which is the ideal state for any RPG-adjacent game to be in. It is such a genuinely fucking fantastic system that it's insane that the designers at Square built it at, essentially, the second time of asking.

This even trickles into endgame funneling you into jobs like how 3 did, but in a much more interesting way. Every job has four actions available at all times: Attack, Item, the class's default command ability (e.g. Black Magic or Guard), and the free slot. Freelancer is your Onion Knight-like job that your guys start off in and that you shuffle out of as soon as possible, but it has two unique properties. First, that it doesn't have a default command ability, meaning you are free to equip two abilities from your entire unlocked pool instead of one. Second, that all unlocked passive abilities are automatically equipped for free, and every Mastered job contributes a relevant bonus to stats to the Freelancer. If you've mastered all the mage classes on one guy, that guy will be an incredible wizard as a Freelancer. If you've mastered everything, the Freelancer is a do-anything god. The 22nd and secret job, the Mime, takes this even further - the Mime's only intrinsic ability is Mimic, and you can fill those three extra slots with whatever command or passive abilities your heart could possibly desire, including (or discluding!) Attack and Item. While there's convergence into Freelancer and Mime in the very long run, the path you take to the endgame is going to shape what everyone's individual Freelancers and Mimes will look like to a massive degree. It's, again, a bafflingly intelligently-made system.

Heh. Intelligent system.

It's not all roses, but the non-roses are largely nits to pick. Each job only gets its passives, not command abilities, for free. This is a nothing burger for, like, the wizards, but becomes a huge issue with already-struggling jobs like Beastmaster, which is actually incapable of having all Beastmaster abilities ready to go at the same time. The good news is that this mostly affects the weirder, niche, dare I say crappier jobs; the bad news is that this does hamper variety to no small degree, particularly in the midgame. The second issue, relatedly, is that there were some pretty questionable job balancing decisions, such as Chemist being a whole item-based job that's mastered in no time flat and basically only exists so that one guy can pick up Mix for the two fights it's really good for and use it on another job. Still, if the worst I can say about the system is that "it's not greatly balanced", it's further evidence that it's a pretty damn good system. The only time it sort-of doesn't feel great to interact with is when you want something like Mix or Steal from a job you have no intention of using even in the medium term, and you have to pick a sacrificial hero to gimp for like a half an hour to get it. That's the worst it gets.

Speaking of the worst, let's call back to ATB. Final Fantasy 5 made two incredibly obvious moves and one incredibly cunning move that, all combined, make the game far more palatable to simply play compared to its predecessor. The obvious ones are obvious as hell: spells no longer have charge timers after choosing to cast, making wizards not feel like complete dogshit to use; and the pace of combat (enemies in particular) is slowed down a noticeable amount, making mistakes in action selection far less punishing. The cunning one is one that only hit me long after starting Final Fantasy 5: you only control four guys, instead of five. That doesn't sound like too big a deal, but there's a significant mental load trickling-down that occurs when that's combined with the job system. Rather than wrapping my head around playing Cecil, Porom, Palom, Tellah, and Yang, I'm only playing four guys and I'm choosing how they play, which reduces my cognitive load when someone comes up - I know I only want one wizard, and Lenna is a complete unga-bunga smash-yer-face-in fighter, so I can ignore her turn, etc. I can build the sustainable force that I like to play, rather than making the toolkit forced upon me work. Combined with the slower enemy reaction time, I'm taking fewer actions, making fewer mistakes per action, and being punished less severely for those mistakes. It's a subtle improvement, and the game would be far better served with a good turnbased system like 10's, but as far as ATB goes it isn't an active detriment anymore. I'm still a hater, but I didn't expect to be conceding any ground to it so quickly, and here I am. I can more easily see Mr. Ito's vision for it as a bridge between turn-based and real-time combat now.

And so we come to the achievements. These games are getting bigger, and 5 does not buck the trend. It's got all the vices of 4's achievement list - missable enemies, missable treasures, one-time location visits, rare encounters, the works. To be fair on one account, the game doesn't have anything nearly as rare as the summon/pink tail rarities at the end of 4, but all the others are very comparable. On top of that, 5 adds a few fun achievements, like finding the secret job class and finding the eight pianos all over the world to cement Bartz as a Piano Maestro. There's another level grind one at the end; this one's 50 and I beat the game at 41, so it was a cinch to mop up with x4 experience built into the game. There's one for mastering all jobs, which means mastering all jobs on one character, because one of the jobs is Freelancer, and Freelancer is mastered by mastering all 21 other jobs rather than leveling up itself. Bartz had five jobs mastered when I beat Exdeath, and this one took a few hours of grinding at x4 ability points to mop up.

Finally, we've got a fun and an unfun achievement each that 5 brings to the table that will probably be coming back later. One is to learn all of the newly-minted Blue Magic. Blue Mages, a series staple, learn enemy abilities typically by being subjected to them. This isn't missable, but there's no hints as to where the spells are as far as I'm aware, and some of them are locked behind using a Beastmaster's Control ability to force an enemy to cast them, or are spells on enemies who don't have enough MP natively to cast them without being fed an ether. It's a fun idea, but raw as hell, and later entries would do it much better. The other is, regrettably, postgame superbosses. We're there now. Omega is doable en route to Exdeath, but Shinryu is meant to wipe out even a party who can make it to Exdeath without a contest. Honestly, with The Strat (TM) (a Mime with Time Magic and Mix), Shinryu went down with only a little bit of work after all of my grinding, so it wasn't that bad overall. Still, this is notable as it marks the beginning of what's going to become the superbosses of Spira and Ivalice later, which I'm not at all looking forward to tackling. Burn that bridge when we get to it, though! Sayonara, Final Fantasy 5. You were genuinely fantastic.

[AlexArtsHere]

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

It's not all roses

But it is all Rose Boys! Or is that one of the other games? Everything I know about Final Fantasy can be traced back to PCP University's 4.5 hour video on the series delivered by BestGuyEver.

Anyway, your notes on FFV's job system give me vibes of one of the best parts of Granblue Fantasy, that being the high tier classes which, as opposed to having three innate skills like the lower tiered classes, get one innate skill off the bat, equip any two learned skills from other classes and get to choose one more skill from a pool of three unique to the equipped class upon mastering it. This is all to say that, after reading your post, my strength of my desire to play FFV has gone from "interest" to "appeal".

[Integrity]

5 hours ago, AlexArtsHere said:

Anyway, your notes on FFV's job system give me vibes of one of the best parts of Granblue Fantasy, that being the high tier classes which, as opposed to having three innate skills like the lower tiered classes, get one innate skill off the bat, equip any two learned skills from other classes and get to choose one more skill from a pool of three unique to the equipped class upon mastering it. This is all to say that, after reading your post, my strength of my desire to play FFV has gone from "interest" to "appeal".

ok now i'm interested in granblue fantasy

i think if you (literally you, but also the general 'you') are interested in seeing what classic final fantasy is all about, the best places to start (for the pixel remasters) are probably ff1 or ff5. ff1's breezy and easy to get into and ff5 is the best overall encompassing of Classic-Style Final Fantasy, hitting a sweet spot between having an actual narrative and characters and having a good amount of party customization

Edited March 7 by Integrity

[Integrity]

MEGA MAN 11 (CAPCOM, 2018)

Finished: 8/3/24. Playtime: 30.8 hours.

Good heavens! Mega Man actually does get good only a hundred hours in!

After a long series of 8-bit games, an ill-fated sojourn into the unbelievable future of 1997, and a return to just making games in the vein of the 8-bit games again, the Islamic state of Crapcom finally felt brave enough to take an actual step forward and make a new Mega Man, with new controls and new aesthetics for a modern era. We're all 3D now, and everything controls smooth as butter. Mega Man's got a new toy, the Gear System, letting him activate bullet time or pump more juice into his guns on a shared cooldown timer. The slide and both Rush abilities have dedicated buttons. Biggest of all, your weapons are all accessible via an FPS-style weapon wheel bound to the right stick. It all combines to make a game that's actually, for the first time in all these games, fantastic.

Having an actual set of buttons does so much of the heavy lifting. Hotswapping weapons (now with Mega Man getting entirely new fits rather than just recolors) feels great, and besides one dud, the set of weapons feels good to wield. They erred further towards "boss weapons obliterate trash enemies" rather than the typical "each enemy has a weakness / use the metal saw" from previous games, and it combines for some genuinely thrilling gameplay flow once you get your head around even a few standby weapons and the Gear System, let alone when you're wielding the full arsenal plus both Rush movement abilities. Mega Man 11, played competently, feels like an incredible thunder run in ways that none of the previous games came close to matching.

The stages don't even slouch! There's two proper duds in the set of eight, but the rest generally sit fairly high up in a hypothetical ranking of all the robot master stages of all the Mega Men. Wily 1 has a bit of an insane difficulty spike to it compared to everything before, but it's not a bad stage, just one that expects significantly more mastery of 11's peculiarities than anything before it did at any point. Wily himself is actually a reasonably fun fight, by Wily's standards, and not even the return of the Yellow Devil (again) can really drag the game down. It's just... fun. For most of these Mega Men, I didn't really have fun playing them so much as I found inspecting their designs to be interesting, I gained some satisfaction from getting good at them, and I gained moral superiority from having played them and generating a Take to have Online. Mega Man 11 was actually really very fun.

And it's a good job it was! While previous Mega Men have demanded a single playthrough to clear, my time through Mega Man 11 involved beating the game, root menu to credits, four times in addition to some extracurriculars I'll get into momentarily. First up was, of course, the regular initial clear on Normal, which is actually the third difficulty from four. Second up was a run on Casual, which is the second difficulty, combining a buster-only run of the robot master stages with an achievement to beat the game without using consumables or the shop at all. The difficulties are actually quite interestingly done, with Casual not just adjusting enemy health and damage (it does that too though) but also adding pickups to stages and increasing the number of checkpoints in stages, as well as making your weapon energy refill on death. It's a good look, and it was a fun run.

Third up was a complete bastard to do, but in a very aesthetic way. The Blue Flash requires that the game be beaten in under an hour, but it tracks file time. You can waste a few seconds saving after every stage and create, essentially, a segmented speedrun of the game. My "55 minute" run took me a whole week to put together on its own, drilling stages for hours and planning out my store stops to waste as little time as possible. There's another achievement, relatedly, for beating the game without getting a game over, which may as well be a freebie along with the speedrun. If you die four times, I have no idea how you're making the one hour timer.

Finally, there was a run on Superhero, the fourth difficulty from four. Superhero is a complete motherfucker, making a slew of changes that amount to making it a proper hard mode. Compared to Normal, chaff mobs have doubled health from 1 to 2 but larger enemies (and minibosses) are unchanged, which amounts to not making the game a particular slog to get through while demanding more precision - or higher mastery of the weapons and systems - from you the player. Bosses hit harder and have new attacks, but aren't any chunkier. The biggest change, however, is that enemies will never drop ammo or health, and all static pickups on levels have been removed. Enemies do, however, still drop bolts that you can use at the shop, meaning that your ability to resupply is completely dependent on how many E-, W-, and M-tanks you're willing to buy. I abused the hell out of the shop. I have no regrets.

There's a few challenge achievements that can be done at any point, including in a postgame file that's already beaten Wily. Each stage, including Wily 1 and Wily 2, has a challenge achievement associated with it, which I guess means that I basically played the game through five times. Most of these aren't too bad, like Torch Man's essentially just demanding you one-cycle the stage's miniboss, which I did completely by accident, or Block Man's telling you about the secret use of the Chain Blast to circumvent whole platforming sections. The one outlier is Impact Man's asking you to not get hit by a single instance of the stage's hazard (mini, invincible Impact Men charging at you) before getting to the boss. This one sucked ass. In addition to those, there's a handful of easy ones like breaking 30 enemy guards with charged shots and then killing them that are, for some reason, flagged as (1st Play Only), which means they can't be done in a postgame file. I have no idea why. I cleaned these up with the Casual run.

Finally, after all of this, is the challenge mode. In the vein of previous Men, you have a big series of time attack challenges to pick from, but this time you don't have to interact with it too much. The biggest achievement is for getting five gold medals, which you can do by just picking five bosses or minibosses to dome in under a minute each. The final challenge, Dr. Light's Trial, has an achievement all to itself, and it's a complete motherfucker to slug through. Dr. Light's Trial is a 30-screen gauntlet where 25 of the screens were invented for the trial rather than being pulled from the game as in previous mixes. Screens 10, 20, and 30 are the Yellow Devil, the other boss from Wily 2, and Wily himself, respectively. There are no drops from enemies, there's some brutal platforming, you get zero checkpoints, and your health and weapon energy is carried over from screen to screen with no refills. Screens 11 and 21 are freebies with a large and small health and weapon energy and an extra life each, but the baseline to even be able to tackle this challenge is being able to flawlessly one-cycle the Yellow Devil without taking damage, and that's only getting your foot in the door. You know what, though? I fuckin' went and did it. I think I can claim to be pretty good at Mega Man by now.

[AlexArtsHere]

I can’t say I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Mega Man stan, but I was rather hoping you’d like this one, so I’m glad to see such a glowing review on it. I think the gear system is a pretty terrific way to leave difficulty up to the player in a way that is both dynamic and organic, with the timer-based recharge preventing the ability from becoming abusable without screwing over bad players like me who rely on it a lot by making it possible to run out of uses for a stage.

That said, I only ever did the one run of Mega Man 11 (on normal difficulty, I believe) and don’t even remember all that much of it in hindsight, so the rest of the suite of difficulty options seems really interesting. Will need to replay at some point.

[ping]

I remember that my only real gripe with FF5's job system was how long it would take to really realise your Freelancer plans, so I'm curious - is x4 XP/AP a feature added to the Steam release or did past me just screw up by grinding AP too early? I remember spending a lot of time in some castle's basement because the enemy formations there give a lot more AP than any other at that point of the game.

But I really adore how you work towards your endgame build throughout the game. It's great that mastering the basic classes doesn't become irrelevant when more advanced classes unlock, nor do the advanced classes feel useless because you've already invested into the standard ones, which iirc was a problem in FF3 (although I think that's the FF game that I remember the least about).

 

[Integrity]

6 hours ago, ping said:

It's great that mastering the basic classes doesn't become irrelevant when more advanced classes unlock, nor do the advanced classes feel useless because you've already invested into the standard ones, which iirc was a problem in FF3 (although I think that's the FF game that I remember the least about).

yeah this was VERY much an issue with ff3 - there's literally no reason to be a black mage after magus is unlocked, or arguably any wizard at all besides sage after sage is unlocked, and having been a black mage for those first 45 levels doesn't make you much or any better at being a magus after you get it. it's very frictionless in a way that i think works for ff3 rudimentary systems but is absolutely superseded by the ff5 take on it later

 

6 hours ago, ping said:

I remember that my only real gripe with FF5's job system was how long it would take to really realise your Freelancer plans, so I'm curious - is x4 XP/AP a feature added to the Steam release or did past me just screw up by grinding AP too early? I remember spending a lot of time in some castle's basement because the enemy formations there give a lot more AP than any other at that point of the game.

this is standard for the pixel remasters! all six games have had sprinting and diagonal movement added by default, and all six also have the ability to turn encounters on and off at will and adjust how much gil and xp you get from 0x to 4x. 5 also has the ability to adjust ap gain in the same range. i haven't been using the options except for the postgame achievement grinds, but it's great that they're there - i know wyatt's been playing ff5 for the first time with at least some level of ap boost on because he wants to play around with classes more without grinding too much

e: i just started 6 and it also has the same ap boost option as 5 ftr

Edited March 9 by Integrity

[lenticular]

On 3/7/2024 at 12:00 AM, Integrity said:

Master a job, gain its abilities, and move on to another.

This reminds me of the skill system in FE Awakening and Fates. This is not a good thing.

On 3/7/2024 at 12:00 AM, Integrity said:

The only time it sort-of doesn't feel great to interact with is when you want something like Mix or Steal from a job you have no intention of using even in the medium term, and you have to pick a sacrificial hero to gimp for like a half an hour to get it. That's the worst it gets.

Yeah, that's the one thing that Fire Emblem has never figured out. If you want to pick up some specific skill in FE, you sometimes have to gimp your unit for half the sodding game to get it. It sounds like a much more appealing system if you can just quickly grab what you want and move on.

On 3/7/2024 at 4:10 PM, Integrity said:

i think if you (literally you, but also the general 'you') are interested in seeing what classic final fantasy is all about, the best places to start (for the pixel remasters) are probably ff1 or ff5. ff1's breezy and easy to get into and ff5 is the best overall encompassing of Classic-Style Final Fantasy, hitting a sweet spot between having an actual narrative and characters and having a good amount of party customization

I am sorely tempted. I have been meaning to try at least one of the SNES FF games for years and years at this point, but never got around to it. Either I'll like it, which is good, or I'll have another string in my bow for all my "actually, FF just sucks" hot takes, which is also good. I have way too many games on my plate at the moment, but I think FF5 has earned a spot on my Steam wishlist, at least.

[Integrity]

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

This reminds me of the skill system in FE Awakening and Fates. This is not a good thing.

it's not remotely similar because the "skills" are far more impactful than those and they're hotswappable for situations and situations are designed to reward you for having/choosing them and they fundamentally modify how your guys work and a bunch of other things. you could make a really lame argument that it's similar on a very superficial level, but in every single way that matters it's completely different

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

I have way too many games on my plate at the moment, but I think FF5 has earned a spot on my Steam wishlist, at least.

i have accomplished my truest goal

Edited March 10 by Integrity

[Integrity]

FINAL FANTASY VI (SQUARE, 1994)

Finished: 13/3/24. Playtime: 34.7 hours.

Final Fantasy 6 is a weird beast, reputationally. Time once was, twenty-odd years ago, that the only two opinions one could have about the franchise were that 6 was the best or that 7 was the best, with the occasional weirdo who insisted on 4 or 10. Final Fantasy 7 kind of had a popular backlash due to its absolute prominence, and "not getting" 7 would become kinda vogue for a little while, before the remakes catapulted it back into the public eye. 6, though, never really had a backlash. It's still fairly uncontroversial except among the absolute dweebiest echelons of RPG fans to think it's one of the best JRPGS ever, possibly even the best.

Ike, you say, it's always alarming when you begin a post like this! Yeah. Cards on the table: I still liked Final Fantasy 6, but it was largely despite itself, and I still haven't quite broken down all of why it didn't really work for me.

Let's get started with the single most uncontroversial take of all: the graphical leap from 5 to 6, even with the relatively-normalized Pixel Remaster graphics, is frankly gobsmacking. Final Fantasy 6's environmental spriting is an obscene step forward from the previous SNES games, and is still capable of looking quite pretty. Not always, mind - there's more than enough of the same mountain cave tileset to go around - but the highs are lofty and the lows are only forgettable. Your guys emote more and better and the game uses its environmental interactions and canned animations to accomplish so much more than was done even in 5, which was itself a quantum leap above all four games before it.

Onto the plot, then, and probably my most controversial to balance that out: I don't think it's good. I made a comment in the 4 recap that its story needed to be "more serious and coherent, like 6's" and what I've learned in the last few days is that I was kind of wrong. 6's plot wanders from tonal extreme to tonal extreme like a damn coin flipping in the air. Actual depictions of murdered children are followed immediately, as in a minute later by slapstick physical comedy. You go through a pretty unremarkable dungeon punctuated by another fight against Ultros (I now have a blood feud with 6 for inventing Ultros) to go straight into an active genocide happening. You unleash the Espers on the world, destroying the imperial capital and causing them to sue for peace (it is a ruse, you fool), and when you arrive you're greeted by a time attack minigame to run all around the palace talking to all the soldiers and kicking some of their asses. The World of Ruin keeps its tone more consistent, but that's only the back third of the game. At no point in the World of Balance does Final Fantasy 6 have any idea what to show and what voice to use, so it simply uses all of its voices constantly to holler everything - except for when it doesn't show you your controllable party doing cool things off camera, for some reason. Hell, this tonal inconsistently holds to the end of the entire game, where you're treated to consecutive scenes of all of the magic fading from the world and the party speculating if Terra will simply wither and expire for real, and then Cyan having a senior moment where he cannot figure out how to press a button.

A big chunk of the blame lies on good old Kefka and the Empire in general. I found Kefka to be an utterly uncompelling villain and the game completely fumbled the ball in all of its attempts to set him up as a threat. There is no establishing moment between "funny clown guy who Sabin kicks the shit out of repeatedly" and "everyone quakes at the Kefka Laugh." The Empire, similarly, is represented as such a background entity that when it needs to be an immediate and present threat, like during Gestahl's betrayal, I was never left satisfied feeling like I'd underestimated them or that this was the logical process of events. Even 4, my beloathed, did a better job of setting up its Empire as oppressive and threatening. Even 3 did, and it hardly had one. Then Kefka betrays everyone and blows up the world, but also excises himself from the plot until you take your airship up to fight him in 8-12 hours.

The World of Ruin does have a generally-higher standard behind it, honestly. I liked it quite a bit more. Its problem is more that it's utterly unreactive. Outside of recruiting party members, the world is completely static and you're under absolutely no narrative or actual pressure to get on with it and fight Kefka. The world's in this steady state where Kefka might be destroying it, but he hasn't got about it for the last year, and he shows no signs of it. It's a post-apocalyptic, putting-society-back-together world, but you're neither putting society back together nor scavenging through the ashes, nor is there any opposing force trying to stop you. It's just sort of on you to go out and find all your guys and solve their little crises so that you can get a squad together to go kill Kefka. It almost feels like a bonus epilogue rather than the final third of the game.

One major culprit for all of this is absolutely 6's cast. The non-bonus cast comes in at a whopping 12, and with optionals 14, a figure I'm fairly certain is completely unmatched in the main numbered Final Fantasies. Balancing screentime to any meaningful degree for 12 characters is a massive undertaking at the best of times, let alone writing it onto a Super Famicom cartridge, and Final Fantasy 6 absolutely does not manage it. It doesn't really try, to its credit; there's a core core cast of probably seven guys who constitute 70% of the screentime. The Final Fantasy 4 problem then also rears its head, but worse, in the World of Balance, as you're tugged between characters and groups of characters doing various things before the game has really had a chance to find its footing. 6's pacing would be massively improved in every imaginable way by simply excising Sabin's part of the tri-split, including all the fallout that comes from removing Cyan and Gau from the game. Of course, that part of the story is the only part that does any meaningful Kefka setup at all. The World of Ruin doesn't fall into this trap, but goes whole hog Fire Emblem - any given character is only relevant to the bit where you get them, and for most a bonus scene or two, and for some relevance to recruiting another character. Since you can nominally go challenge Kefka with only Celes, Sabin, Edger, and Setzer, the game very rarely conditionally assumes that any of the rest of the cast is around, leaving them to get generic lines, just to be aboard your boat, or in some cases (Terra's recruitment) to simply not even show up in cutscenes. In the first world, nobody really gets time to breathe because there's too much scene changing and tonal tugging-around; in the second world, nobody really gets time to breathe because almost everybody is "optional". It's such a maddening own goal, and it would have been so easy to simply not commit it.

This carries over into character balance, as well. I'll talk about the gameplay in a moment, but the customization and progression slots in better here. One of 6's most-touted features, and the one I've come around to liking less and less, is the Magicite system. Essentially, in a prototype for what would become Materia and Guardian Forces later, you equip your summons directly to your guys, hot swap at any time, one per guy. Each Magicite confers three things: a once-per-battle summon, a bonus to some growth, and permanently learnable magic based on the Magicite equipped. What this means, in practice, is that everybody you use semi-heavily is continually converging on becoming interchangeable omniwizards. Once you have Ultima, every single member of your party is 20-50 random battles away from being able to cast Ultima, only rate-limited by one person being able to learn it at a time. It's not like you're stopped from teaching the other party members Holy and Flare at the same time, though, those are on other Magicite. By the time you get to the ends of each world, if you've used a semi-consistent party, all of them are able to cast your best- or second-best white and black magics and a whole bevy of support spells. And, since magic is quite strong, and Magicite itself can confer +MAG growths on your less wizardly, this means you're always converging on the point where everyone you've used contributes exactly the same but to a degree impacted only by how much you've used them. Identity washes away in a much shorter long term than it does in the job-based games.

Where does that identity come from, then? Each character is defined by an in-combat gimmick ability (or ability menu). These are absolutely raucously unbalanced. Of your first four guys you pick up, you get nothing (later a super-form), regular old Steal, the ability to put in directional commands for extra physical damage, and the ability to do roughly spell damage to all enemies for free every single turn. The balance only devolves from there, with the game tossing you two different flavors of Blue Mage where one is defined by making everything far more of a pain to learn and being far more unreliable at using the abilities he's gotten, and one of the optional party members having the "bonus" of always being berzerk. Some of these, it should be noted, age far worse than others - Edgar's Tools start out oppressively strong but taper off as you get more options to become merely competitive and then to wash away, but by the time they're washing away, he's become the same omniwizard as everybody else. At every point in the game before the convergence happens, there are incredibly obvious haves and have-nots, lending more credence to the thought that 6 could have benefited deeply from a trimmed-down and more fleshed-out cast.

Let's take that opportunity to move into talking about the mechanical changes 6 makes. I'm still unpacking the systemic ramifications of this, but suffice to say I'm down on the change: ATB bars do not pause while animations are executing anymore. This sounds like a relatively small change, but in context I think it works out to making the game more enjoyable on account of 6 being fairly easy, but a hell of a lot worse fundamentally. The effect on game speed is instant and obvious: instead of playing like a shitty turn-based game, someone's bar is nearly always full and ready to go. Fights more consistently have something happening, be it you selecting options or animations playing out, and that does address one of the issues with ATB I'd complained about in earlier posts. This, however, introduces one major new problem: an action queue.

In the playcalling games, you called out 1-4 actions and the AI did the same with its 1-9 dudes, the order of them was determined based on agility and some noise, and then the 2-13 actions played out in sequence. Straightforward. In 4 and 5, someone's bar filled up, you selected an action to execute, and it executed either immediately (in many cases) or at the end of the current playing animation (in the case of the AI getting a turn between your turn coming up and you selecting an action, or you having multiple actions in a row). This is also pretty straightforward, but a little more complex - you could feasibly "buffer" actions, like if Bartz and Lenna's actions came up together, you could cast Raise with Bartz, swap control to Lenna while the animation is playing and time is frozen, and cast Cura with her on the dead guy knowing that the dead guy would come up and be immediately healed by Lenna before time resumed. In 6, time no longer freezes. Between Raise's animation beginning and you navigating down to Magic on the second guy, the AI may or may not have had a turn come up and may or may not have queued an action. In the best case, everything goes off like it would have in 5. In the worst case, invisibly to you, the AI's turn coincided with Lenna's and it queued a target-all Fira, which is now queued for after Bartz's Raise but before Lenna's Cura that you just confirmed, and you've just removed your ability to respond to it because you cannot cancel Lenna's Cura.

This isn't a subtle issue that you really have to dig deep to find, either; it can manifest as early as the tutorial boss of the game. It's a fixed fight, with you and two goons in mecha suits with colored lasers to shoot, and the boss is a giant snail whose shell is targetable and absorbs lasers and dishes out big counterattacks when hit. As Final Fantasy tutorial bosses are weirdly wont to do, it periodically retracts into its shell to go into counter stance and you have to hold your fire until it comes back out. Makes sense, yeah? So here's the situation: you see your ATB bars, you do not see the enemy's. Terra's, Biggs', and Wedge's turns all come up relatively close to one another. You fire the laser with Terra, she begins the animation, and control swaps to Biggs. Logic dictates: boss is out of his shell, fire the second laser! In actuality, at any point after Terra's laser began, and time did not freeze for the animation, the snail's turn may have come up and he may have selected to retract into his shell. If you press the laser button with Biggs now and the boss has not acted, you will get an extra shot of the laser on the boss. If you press the laser button with Biggs now and the boss has acted, the laser command will go into the action queue after the boss retracts into his shell, causing you to eat tremendous shit. If you do nothing with Biggs, and let the laser animation play out, you concede action economy to the boss, because his ATB bar is charging the whole time and yours are not. If you simply queue all lasers as fast as you can and inshallah, and you go fast enough, you'll probably get them all into the queue in a row, but there's going to be that chance that the boss slid into the middle and you're going to eat some tremendous shit. I'm not speaking hypotheticals, I'm just reciting how my fight went here: in my case, the boss came up between Terra and Biggs, and the resulting counters killed Terra and nearly Wedge while my hands were off the keyboard.

The problem, in my opinion, only compounds in magnitude because there is a way to avoid both of those situations I outlined in the tutorial boss snail fight: you can simply freeze the fight. If, on Biggs' turn with ATB Wait mode on, you select the laser target but hover it instead of confirming, time will be stopped. You can watch Terra's whole laser animation play out, wait to see the next action resolve or not happen because the snail's turn did not come up, and then decide whether to throw out the laser or cancel the order. Essentially, as long as you have a guy ready to act, you can crowbar the game into sort-of working like it used to, slow the game down and let things resolve before deciding how to act. My issue comes up here in that this change to ATB, which serves primarily to speed up fights to make them more interesting to watch, goes further in the direction of destroying tactical depth unless you deliberately take very videogamey actions to slow the game right back down and undo as much of its impact as you can. It's a fix designed exclusively to patch a hole introduced by a system change that already doesn't do enough to earn its own keep. It is, in a word, bad.

It gets worse as the game goes on, too. Remember that whole converging-on-omniwizards thing? Let's say you've got a typical lategame setup of 3-4 guys slinging Ultima/Flare/Holy every turn. If you're on Normal battle speed (or higher, but higher speed does not equate faster animations), any two of those animations will be longer than it takes for your slowest party member's ATB bar to refill from nothing. Speed no longer matters beyond who acts first; we've converged right back to the playcalling days by near-complete accident. Add in late bosses having their own spell lists as well (fuckin' Southern Cross, yipes) with sometimes-long animations, and add in Haste, and you can have a guy's action reliably coming back up before the next guy's action finishes resolving. It becomes action economy gridlock, where battles all play out in turnbased mode, a wizard throwing a spell every action, or where you tacticall reserve a fourth guy to freeze the timer with a dummy action while all your Ultimas resolve, and then unfreeze it while the boss attacks, so you're gaining action economy by slowing the whole system down in a really silly way. I think this aspect of the game would gain a lot more flak from people if not for the simple fact that Final Fantasy 6 is absurdly easy to break open, even by accident, and is a generally (1-3 dungeons aside) really easy entry in the franchise. The cracks don't show if you're not predisposed to look for them.

Weirdly, I still enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy 6 for the most part. It's the worst of the good ones so far, underneath all the odd numbers, but it's still a whole echelon above the other evens. I can't call it a good game or call it a bad game because there's too much game to make a singular judgment call on and not enough cohesion between all its constituent parts. It's a game that I can see being exceptionally impressive in 1994, and I think that there's a reasonable argument that this was the first Most Game that would later spawn Yakuza 5, Resident Evil 6, and Dave the Diver, but looking back on it 15 years later with a relative freshness has really just shown me how tenuously held together the genuinely impressive package is. Melancholic, for sure. I wish I'd liked Final Fantasy 6 more, or I wish I were more confident in exactly why it didn't land as it ought to have, and maybe someday I'll really unpack it. For now, though, oh well.

Onto the other half, shall we. Everything said about previous Final Fantasies holds, but more things are even more missable now. There are single-visit dungeons with treasure and bestiary entries to be missed in both the World of Balance and in the World of Ruin, and clearly a bunch of shit becomes missed if you don't have it when Kefka blows up the world. You can't even be meticulous about it yourself, though, because some shared locations like Figaro have item/treasure entries that are not accessible until the World of Ruin (a problem 5 had, but to a lesser degree), so it's not enough to max places out as you go. As with 5, several of these are in timed sequences you really should have no business dithering around in, including the famous "wait at the end of the world for the timer to run out to save Shadow" nonsense.

The get-alls now include not only Magicite (which is a pain in the ass and is super missable), but include filling out the lists of commands for your command-based guys: Edgar's Tools, Sabin's Blitzes, and Cyan's Bushido. None of these are difficult, and I don't think any of the Tools are missable. The Blitzes are simple (get Sabin to level 42, he's already one of your best guys) and the Bushido just involves doing Cyan's Dreamscape in the World of Ruin, which already has bestiary entries and treasure you need to get anyway. Easy. For your traditional Blue Mage, you have to acquire any 20 of the 26ish Blue Magics in the game, which is not a particularly onerous feat, particularly since he only has to be in the party and to see the spell cast in order to learn it, no longer having to be targeted by it like in 5.

For your other Blue Mage, Gau, the worst, let's talk about the Veldt. Most non-boss enemies that you meet in the game, upon being first defeated, begin to spawn in the Veldt, an island on the world map. Fighting in the Veldt does not give you any experience and is the only way for Gau to learn new abilities. When you get into a random encounter, only on the Veldt, Gau can use Leap to end the fight instantly and leave the party. He'll come back after you fight 1-4 battles without him on the Veldt and rejoin you if you don't kill him because you left autobattle on, and he'll rejoin with the abilities of whatever monsters were present in the fight he ended when he left. Your instant inclination may be to note that this is a huge pain in the ass, particularly because most of them are shit and you cannot rig random encounters to be something he doesn't have; you are correct. The non-Pixel Remaster had an achievement for gathering all two hundred and fifty-three of them, in groups of 1-3, not even being guaranteed to get a fight that has one he needs. The Pixel Remaster, blessedly, only requires getting 50. It's still about 45 too many.

One other thing to highlight that's not particularly long but is absolutely the worst is the Coliseum. The Coliseum is a place you go in the World of Ruin, wager pieces of gear, and there's a table that gets referenced to see what you fight and what the item turns into after the fight. You choose one guy to do the fighting, and the AI takes over until you or the enemy have died. Remember how the convergence is on interchangeable omniwizards? Your guys' scripts are completely randomized. Get ready to enjoy watching Celes cast Reflect on herself, and then Reflect on herself again, Reflecting Reflect to the enemy, and then casting Thundaga on the enemy, Reflecting it back onto herself. Then she'll use Runic, her spell-nullifying ability, four consecutive times against a physical attacker. It's no fun, it sucks even when you're prepared for it, and you have to win any ten battles in it for an achievement. On top of that, there's a bestiary entry you can only access through the Coliseum. If you have the right flavor of hubris, you can also fight a fair number of rare-spawn enemies here if you don't feel like grinding spawn RNG and would rather try grinding action RNG. I did for a few. Always nice to vary the flavor of crap you eat, right?

Speaking of randomness, Setzer! Setzer's unique action in the game is Slots, which... spins slots. The slots are, of course, rigged against you. There is an achievement for getting 7-7-7 on them, killing the enemy party instantly. In previous versions of this game, there have existed various RNG rigs and input pause buffer strats to semi-reliably (with 15-20 minutes of drilling yourself) get to 7-7-7. They do not appear to work in Pixel Remaster by my experience. However, if at all intend to do this game in my footsteps, heed one piece of advice I got from some random Redditor: get this as soon as you leave Vector, the imperial capital, for the first time after escaping the Magitek Research Facility. Make a party of only Setzer and talk to the robot guarding the entrance. He is invincible and will counter all attacks made against him, but Slots is not an attack. Do Slots and press autobattle. The only two outcomes that will stop Setzer from doing the slots over and over again are the one that kills the enemy party and the one that kills your party. I died about twelve times over the course of an hour spamming this. It's fire-and-forget, and if you move too far into the game after it, there's nowhere close to as convenient a way to do it ever again.

Finally, as always, there's the level achievement. They've all had 'em, whether they be reasonable (1) or postgame exp boost grinds (4). This one is far in the camp of the latter. The achievement is for all fourteen party members to hit level 50 (hope you didn't let Shadow die, lol). I finished the game with Edgar, Sabin, and Celes at 46-48, two or three others in the 38-42 range, and most of the rest in the middling to low 30s, with a special shoutout to Gau at 22 after I'd already dragged him through some levels while walking around the overworld. He was 12 when I started the World of Ruin, and does not scale up on his own. With 4x EXP and the Growth Egg (an equippable which itself doubles experience earned), hunting for the last bestiary entry in the Dinosaur Forest with Edgar carrying dualcast Ultima, it only took an hour or so to grind everyone up and for the Brachiosaur to not spawn. After going back to my main team, I had to level Edgar all the way up to the 80s before the bastard spawned, marking the last thing I needed to ice the game. Whew.

And 7 is bigger! I'm in danger.

[AlexArtsHere]

You know the balancing issues are completely circumvented if you upgrade Steal to Insider Trading? Idiot.

Joking aside, there’s certainly a bitterness to watching the scope of missable content creep ever wider in each of these write ups. Maybe it’s my perfectionism speaking but, given that nobody’s just going to know this stuff, it seems like a mechanism to pad playtime at best and a scheme to hawk guides at worst. While your tonguebathing of FF5 piqued my interest in that game, I think my enthusiasm towards the prospect of playing The Good Final Fantasy has been a little dampened. Anyway, I can’t wait until FF9 (presumably, given that’s meant to be the inevitable early-mid-00s “return to the roots” game) when ATB gets shot and left in a ditch.

[Integrity]

10 minutes ago, AlexArtsHere said:

Anyway, I can’t wait until FF9 (presumably, given that’s meant to be the inevitable early-mid-00s “return to the roots” game) when ATB gets shot and left in a ditch.

ah, honey, you're games early. the whole PS1 trilogy (7-8-9) are ATB at its peak, then 10 finally shoots it in the skull, then 10-2 brings it back from the dead for a fun last rodeo. THEN it will be dead.

[Tryhard]

kefka isn't even a character, really. he's a personification of nihilism and no more. I'm not entirely sure how some people hold him up as one of the greatest villains of all time, but they almost always mention "because he wins (kind of)". Which yeah, I guess, but he's only interesting in terms of how he relates to the main themes of the game (that being that nihilism is bad and JRPG friendship is magic and good. which after I typed it out is not very original)

I used to like FF6 a lot more, but honestly I would pass it over for more obscure SNES RPGs these days (which sadly have generally not seen Steam re-releases of course because they don't carry the Final Fantasy name)

[Integrity]

1 hour ago, Tryhard said:

kefka isn't even a character, really. he's a personification of nihilism and no more. I'm not entirely sure how some people hold him up as one of the greatest villains of all time, but they almost always mention "because he wins (kind of)". Which yeah, I guess, but he's only interesting in terms of how he relates to the main themes of the game (that being that nihilism is bad and JRPG friendship is magic and good. which after I typed it out is not very original)

this actually made me think long past my bedtime

kefka, as a character, is really two elements of guy: a representative of the empire and the genocide clown who blows up the world. ff6's core issue is, then, twofold: that the empire doesn't really exist outside of as an enabler of kefka's omnicide, and there is absolutely no real handoff between those two versions of kefka. if the guy who shows up at figaro and the guy who poisons doma had been two different, non-kefka, guys, the plot of ff6 would have almost exactly the same weight that it does. he doesn't really exist within the power structures of the empire, because the empire doesn't really exist. it's only gestahl, leo, and plot-convenient invincible goons to shuffle you to the right parts of the world and not the wrong ones. there's no real oppression to it, and as such he's just a guy who suddenly becomes a god and blows everything up.

so this goes into him "winning" - winning what? i'm not disagreeing with you that it gets held up as kefka winning, because people absolutely do, but he isn't a character as of when he wins. he's just a natural disaster in the SimCity vein. the empire's gone, the clown's gone, his personality's gone, he just regresses to JRPG Nihilism Villain standards. he's no deeper than medeus now, but because you saw him before he became medeus, people hold him up as so nuanced. but the problem is that nothing about him before this led to him blowing up the world; he wanted to become the most powerful, sure, and there's a real point to be made about unintended consequences, but that's a point that needs to be followed up on and it never is. he's just the funny clown who you kick the ass of, and then he becomes impossibly powerful, and then he blows up the world, and then he stops being a character at all. what i'm saying by all this is that kefka is nothing more than a silly elemental evil, which is fine, but ff6bros tend to degrade the story of ff5 for not having a proper villain. who is exdeath, an elemental evil. what is actually the difference between exdeath and kefka? exdeath wins too, he literally collides the worlds and destroys a bunch of both. he gets three montages to a sweet electric guitar of him removing cities you've been to. kefka does an entire fucking biblical flood and most (all?) of the towns you've been to are still there, and why? what did he win? his intention was never communicated as blowing up the world at any point in the entire game before this. he accomplished something big, absolutely, and that is not the same as him achieving his goals.

there's a point to be made about this all happening out of pure spite because of the blow celes deals him in the sequence where he blows up the world. the problem with that, for me, is that sabin literally has to kick the shit out him repeatedly before this, and celes is never portrayed as either narratively or mechanically particularly stronger than anyone else in the party. when kefka is fully powered up, celes deals him such a blow that he tilts into blowing the entire world up out of spite. how is the person who does that the same guy who survived having his ass kicked by sabin three times, while sabin let him walk away every time (a different issue, to be sure)? there is no contiguity between the kefka of figaro/doma and the kefka who blows up the world. there is no kefka who blows up the world. he's lesser than exdeath, a cartoon villain. i have brought myself around to a new mode of thinking during this freeform writing exercise at one in the morning: kefka actually sucks shit. he's actually a terrible villain. the only reason he's well-regarded is because a ton of people online grew up with him, because he came out in that crucial 1994-1999 period where all the GOAT games suspiciously come from, and people don't critically examine media.

i have become radicalized.

[Parrhesia]

mashing the mod action checkmark on the above posts until i can will it into a reddit upvote button

Edited March 15 by Parrhesia

[Integrity]

LIES OF P (NEOWIZ, 2023)

Finished: 19/3/24. Playtime: 48 hours.

"Soulslike" is such a fudgy term. At this point, it can mean anything from "takes on all the trappings of Dark Souls itself" to "has bonfires and is hard" to "Nioh kind of has the same vibes as Dark Souls, right? Soulslike." Many smarter and many dumber people than me have written screeds on whether this is or is not useful as a category of video game, but I'm not here to do that. What I'm here to say is that Lies of P calls itself "soulslike" because it's essentially Dark Souls Gaiden. The team behind it sat down, examined the entirety of Dark Souls, trimmed the fat with exceptional grace, and produced their own product very much in its vein. There's differences, certainly, but of all the heirs to the Fromsoft throne, these are the guys who most fundamentally understood the assignment. Or, at least, put together a game that's most to my visions of what I wanted out of a Dark Souls Gaiden. It feels bad to talk about another game to open up talking about this exceptional one, but the comparisons are genuinely impossible to avoid.

Lies of P puts you in the shoes of the titular P, and he tells lies. The title is not, in any way, joking - though it is a really dumb title. Your romp as Anime Timothee Chalomet through Anime Central European City in pursuit of what it means to be a real boy is butt-ass hard at many points, and I think that difficulty is compounded by the game not really wanting you to play it like it's Dark Souls. You're relatively nimble, with a reasonable but not strong dodge that's really more for recovery and positioning than evading through attacks, though you can do that if you need to. P's more of a guard-focused guy, with a large portion of blocked damage being recoverable on the counterattack and a perfect parry not only blocking all damage if timed well, but conferring the stagger you would have received onto the enemy. Staggering an enemy coats their health bar in white, prompting you to hit them with a charged attack to set up a riposte state for huge damage. That's the crux of P's combat all game long: parry and counterattack, not dodge and punish. There's nits to pick about it, such as many trash enemies having attacks that are far too snappy to reliably get a read on, but where it needs to work is the boss fights - and brother, a lot of these shine. The final boss might be my single favorite fight in a soulslike game, end of story, and the game even manages to make a gank squad boss encounter fun, a task that I've never seen pulled off successfully before.

Much of the credit for this working out so well goes to crisp controls and clear feedback, but the star of the show is actually in P's variety. One of the things that Dark Souls flounders on, in my opinion, is that in trying to establish such a broad range of possible ways to approach combat (swords, big swords, magic, bows, etc.), it really fails to give any meaningful mechanical depth to any particular playstyle. The difference between two guys greatswording their way through Dark Souls is a couple numbers and an R2 that thrusts instead of sweeps and really not much more, and some playstyles like archery are just desperately poorly supported to begin with. On the other end of the Fromspectrum, you get something like Sekiro which puts a lot of mechanical depth into exactly a single playstyle. You're not approaching anything with different kit, you just have to master the deep kit you've got in your hands. I generally prefer this kind of focused approach rather than the do-anything style of the core Souls games, and I'm happiest when you get something like Nioh or Monster Hunter which has a handful of deep and varied kits to master.

P takes an interesting approach to all this in that individual weapons aren't deep, but they are varied. All weapons are one-handed melee weapons of some stripe, including the greatswords and spears. Any given weapon has a set of light, heavy, and charged heavy attacks that seamlessly combo into each other as well as a blade skill and a handle skill that pull from a meter that charges while you fight. Of the thirty-odd weapons to find in the game, there are very few or possibly even no repeated moves, making finding a new weapon a fun treat on its own. What brings this all together is the weapon assembly system. Every one of those thirty-odd weapons can be split into a blade and a handle, and blades and handles can be attached to one another in any combination you can dream up. The handle conveys the moveset, the stat scaling, and the handle skill; the blade conveys the length, the speed, and the damage type, as well as the blade skill. You get penalties if you're using a blade "wrong", like using a hammer head (which is mechanically a blade) for thrusting, or using the point of a spear (which is also mechanically a blade) for smashing, but the game lets you do it if you want to. Really like the Acidic Curved Greatsword's moveset, but don't need the acid damage because you're fighting primarily puppets? Rip that sucker off and put the Greatsword of Fate's blade on to make it a little slower and do a lot more damage. Or, hell, maybe put a greatsword blade on the kukri's handle, because the leaping charged heavy attack on the kukri is really good but you wish it had more oomph to it. Put the heaviest hammer head you can find onto the police baton to tighten up your swings for tight quarters while maintaining some of the damage of the huge hammer. It's an insanely fun system to interact with and never, across the game's entire runtime, loses even a bit of its luster. And we haven't even gotten into the mechanics of P's left arm, which is an upgradeable bag of tricks you can swap in and out at bonfires!

Without getting too into it, the gameplay is also buoyed by the context around it. Lies of P has a solid grasp of how much plot to inject, which is to say slightly more than Dark Souls but never slowing the game down for it. Its relatively small cast of characters are all interesting, well-acted, and fun to be around, with the star of the show being your lantern, Gemini. Gemini comments on your journeys through Krat, giving a bit of personality to your otherwise-stoic avatar and giving you companionship as everything falls apart around you. I love the guy, and I'm not totally sure why. Whoever voiced him absolutely nailed it down. The rest of the cast doesn't slouch, but the game knows it's here as a mechanical showcase first and the plot is gravy - tasty gravy, but still gravy nonetheless. I won't say anything more because I do think it's best experienced fairly cold, but it's not the main draw of the game.

Nothing about the achievement set will be surprising at all if you've examined a Fromsoft game's achievements before. Resolve everyone's sidequests, which are easy to follow in the game itself with no outside help. Gather all the weapons, of which only two are missable; all the boss soul weapons, all of which are missable (you can forge boss souls into either a weapon or an accessory, a nice change); and all of the gestures and records, several of which are missable of both. However, getting all music records requires a sojourn through most of NG+, so there's no need to worry about any of the missables at all. Just go in, vibes forward, cock out, clean up what you can after the final boss, and grab everything you missed on your way through NG+.

Much like with Dark Souls, as well, there are three mutually exclusive achievements for the three endings, which are very clearly structured as The Bad Ending, The Neutral Ending, and The Good Ending. It's so clearly structured that, in the aftermath of the bad ending, an in-universe voiceover all but mocks you for failing to understand the themes of Lies of P. It rules incredibly hard. That said, it is a single-save game, so you will either have the play the game through thrice or do some save trickery to get multiple endings in a single clear. For myself, I wormed my way into the Good Ending on the first playthrough, since the requirements are not at all esoteric - you can handily luck into them just by engaging with the game in the way that it asks you to. On NG+, when I hit the final divergent choice, I saved and quit and turned off cloud save syncing. Boot up the Steam Deck, get the bad ending; boot up the PC, get the neutral ending. Two playthroughs. The game absolutely would have stood up to being played a third time either in NG or in NG++, but I'm pleased with how it shook out this way.

In the end, Lies of P was just a comprehensive package designed for me. Everything about it works. The big stuff like the gameplay loop and the characters all land. The flourishes of level design, non-respawning minibosses and asshole traps and unlockable shortcuts, are almost all well thought out. The little touches, like the way that P's arm horrifically overrevs when opening huge rusted-shut doors or the stupid hipster glasses that you can put on your twink puppet, all glue everything together immaculately. The progression walks perfectly between always-progressing marginal-upgrade Souls and ding!-type MMORPG leveling systems, cribbing the best of both. The complaints I have, an overreliance on two-phase bosses later and the occasional completely horseshit trash mob, wash away in the sea of things I like. Lies of P might not be the game for everyone, but it absolutely was the game for me.

Edited March 19 by Integrity

[Integrity]

fitting that this is number 151, my mew game

[Zapp Branniglenn]

This was the game I feel worst about missing from last year. And I truly admire your restraint in not saying "There are no strings on customization" when talking about Blades and Handles. That takes strength of character I do not possess

[Integrity]

1 minute ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

And I truly admire your restraint in not saying "There are no strings on customization"

fuck me i didn't even think about making shitty puppet puns while writing this. goddammit

[Integrity]

CATS HIDDEN IN GEORGIA (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2024)

Finished: 21/3/24. Playtime: 26 minutes.

Feeling emboldened by my success at the tutorial game, Lies of P, I decided to throw myself straight into the lion's den. That's Tbilisi Georgia, not Atlanta Georgia.

It's neat that there can still be things to think about and analyze while playing little games like these. This is, absolutely, the most ambitious Travellin Cats game so far, but that comes with consequences. The map is a lot larger, noisier, and full of even more non-cats things to click on, which is great for interest, but does represent a relative scope creep from the previous games. I think it will be an interesting tack for him to explore, but it was definitely a little clumsy in Georgia. At its core, though, it's still clicking on cute cats to a chirpy tune for 30 minutes and feeling happy. What's not to like?

A feature that I think flies a little under the radar is that he figured out multiple scrolling levels (as opposed to just selecting zoomed or not zoomed from the menu) controlled via scroll wheel. That's a good thing just on its face, but it actually functions as a difficulty selector to a small degree! These games have had a hint system that takes you to a random point from which there is an unclicked cat on screen. These two systems interact to let you, completely organically, decide how much help you want - zoom all the way out and click the hint bulb, and you're essentially taken to whichever quadrant has a cat; zoom all the way in, and it's a far more reasonable space to search. Interesting how these little interactions can come about, huh?

I'm becoming strongly pilled that anyone who claims to be a "gamer" as part of their identity and doesn't have a stupid little love like clicking cats on a map or playing the Property Brothers match3 game for unreasonable amounts of time is a poser and utterly undeserving of my time.

[Darros]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

I'm becoming strongly pilled that anyone who claims to be a "gamer" as part of their identity and doesn't have a stupid little love like clicking cats on a map or playing the Property Brothers match3 game for unreasonable amounts of time is a poser and utterly undeserving of my time.

counterpoint why would you ever spend your time on someone who identifies as a "gamer"

[Integrity]

real

[Integrity]

6 hours ago, Integrity said:

This is, absolutely, the most ambitious Travellin Cats game so far, but that comes with consequences.

oh my fucking god his dev notes with the release open with

Quote

Welcome to the Dark Souls of Hidden Cat games! 😄

king. i kneel. i kneel eternally.