You know nothing, Clive Rosfield

OK so I just beat FFXVI. I don't feel good.

FFXVI is the reason I bought a PS5 while it was still very scarce. I didn't buy it from a scalper, but I put a lot of effort into buying at MSRP. And well.... The only reason I don't regret the purchase is because I got to play Cyberpunk 2077 on it after Stadia shut down.

There's been a lot of discourse on the game and how it's not a JRPG (and how JRPG is not a thing anymore), but you're here to read my opinion, and I think mine does not align with the general public's.

The short of it is that I will, more likely than not, skip the next roman-numbered entry in the franchise.

For some reason the suits at Square-Enix decided that the only reason people "settled" for turn-based RPGs was because we thought "action" was a technological wonder beyond our console's capacity. It seems that from day one, they were afraid we'd realize there have been action, and action-adventure games in existence since before FFI existed.

Maybe that's why the named it "Final Fantasy". Maybe they thought "That's it, we're finished, players have realized that they don't need a menu to attack. This will be our final game. We can't compete against Double Dragon."

I chose DD for this amusing bit, not only because it was released on the same year as Final Fantasy, but also because it's of the same genre as FFXVI; a beat-em-up.

The game's core gameplay mechanic is repeatedly hitting things with a sword, and occasionally pulling a special move previously withheld by a charge bar or a cooldown timer. Sure, you can squeeze more out of the game if you learn to chain those moves together, but the game does not reward you for it, and every other beat-em-up does it way better anyway. One thing that could have easily made the beat-em-up mechanics more interesting was never given a chance; Just imagine if combat was influenced by status ailments, elemental affinities, and party synergy. Somehow, I failed to notice this during the Morbol (I see now why they renamed the Malboro) fight in the demo.

About the combat mechanics.

Why would I play FFXVI for the combos if Bayonetta 3 still exists? Why, for the same reason fans chose to play Final Fantasy when Double Dragon already existed back in 87! Wait, what? They took that away too? Aw maaaan...

Turns out they took away what made FF special all along! The inspiring fantasy setting, the memorable music, the silly monsters, the strategizing, the battle complexity, the resource management...

Spoilers ahead!

The developers have made no efforts in hiding that their game is a blatant Game of Thrones rip-off. But it's not even a good one. Sure, the game does political intrigue and all that jazz, but the whole thing is rushed towards the franchise's typical deicide plot reveal. You know, when the evil king/emperor guy is revealed to be a puppet of an otherworldly being bent on destroying the world? The thing is that once the game reaches that point the politics have long stopped to matter and are thus quickly forgotten. The game telegraphs this early on, so there's no incentive to engage with the politics and worldbuilding at all. All that matters is getting to Ultima.

About the Game of Thrones fuckery.

The bad GOT influence doesn't stop there. Like the average middle-schooler, the developers assumed "mature" means using foul language and showing skin that doesn't add anything to the game.

One thing that made GOT popular was the death of beloved characters. And while FFXVI makes it a point to explain to the audience that you can't bring back someone from the dead with magic, no one really dies. Everything that Clive loses during the prologue comes back: His dog, his chocobo, his adopted sister/lover, his brothers, his brother's secret servants. The only one who dies for sure is his dad and a handful inconsequential NPCs. Also, hundreds of nameless people.

About halfway through there is another death, this time Cid, but just like before, everyone else (who matters) survives a catastrophe.

I think this would have been a great opportunity to introduce Fire Emblem style permadeath, but that would require being able to take multiple units to battle.

In XVI You only really control Clive. Up to two characters and a dog (but even my kids realized early on that the dog is a gameplay mechanic, not a character) can join you, but they literally disappear into the background.

Now's a good time to remind the audience that this company produced FFXV and FFVII Remake, two excellent action RPGs (you thought I just hated action RPGs, didn't you?) where the protagonist's companions are always part of the action and the story. And before that there was FFXII and FFXIII where players could focus on the main characters while the rest of the party's moved independently while still following your leadership.

There's no gambit, paradigm, or blindside system in place, they just do their thing, adding a negligible bit of damage to battles. You don't get to find better equipment for them. You don't need to heal them. Worse of all, they all get left behind when you get to the final boss. Quite literally every character but Clive is an NPC.

I personally didn't play FF in 1987 because I was too busy playing Double Dragon. I was a child. I wasn't into games that required reading. Somehow Square-Enix thinks we're maturing the other way around, Benjamin Button like.

Now with all the Game of Thrones meets Double Dragon business going on, you'd think there's very little room, for Final fantasy, and you'd be correct. There are only a few vestiges of the franchise left.

Spells? Some NPCs cast them, sure.

Summons? You get "dominants."

A vast world to explore? Kinda. Fast travel is mandatory, and both ignored by the narrative and used as a plot device.

Airships? You get a groan-worthy fakeout.

Cactuars? They're mentioned. Come to think of it, most FF staples are reduced to being mentioned by an NPC or as props that kinda look like one. Like the Black Mage scarecrows and Mid's White Mage doll. An actual FF game making FF references like they don't own the franchise. Sure, they replaced horses with chocobos, that's easy enough, right? Nope, they still call them steeds. Also get ready for dead chocobos and zombie chocobos. Nothing is sacred anymore. There's no cheerful music to make riding a joy either, you only get one chocobo and it has an edgy eyepatch. To be fair, Moogles are reduced to plushies in many modern entries, and I was delighted to see a live one here.

But before I get carried away; No, there is no definite checklist of requirements on what makes a game Final Fantasy. VII went cyberpunk while still feeling like part of the franchise. Then the Ivalice Alliance games made a whole sub-franchise work. Then XV gave you a car and American Express, Coleman and Cup Noodle product placement. Look at other Square-Enix games like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler. They feel FF without being FF.

And that's the thing. XVI feels less FF than non-franchise games, and it all comes around to the two major sins of this game; trying and failing to both be GOT a beat-em-up.

Besides all that, what's up with the stiff motion capture? It's so bad I think the voice actors assumed a stiff monotone speech pattern to match the screen. It's bad when Clive laughs or even tries to sound happy. I have seen more emotive Muppets.

What's up with the silly quick-time events? Why did they suddenly become afraid of long cutscenes?

What's up with the 4-character cap? The 3-Eikon cap? Can't the PS5 handle more?

Fine. I guess some stuff I liked.

The visuals were overall pretty, even knowing they stole the aesthetics from GOT. The flashiness of combat does a great job at hiding how shallow it is (see Morbol note above). I loved Cid as a character. The story was enough to motivate me to finish the game.

I liked the accessibility items, to an extent.

The Ring of Timely Strikes lets me automate the beat-em-up. I used it whenever I knew I had to plow through waves of minions, or traverse large areas with random encounters, and whenever I unlocked new abilities that felt complicated to use but I wanted to see in action. After a while it felt like cheating and I would swap it out for the Ring of Timely Assistance, which only automates Torgal.

I tried the Ring of Timely Focus on for about half of the game, which slows down the game to dodge attacks, because the Ring of Timely Evasion felt like cheating. Then I decided dodging is not something I want from an RPG, so I left Timely Evasion on until I finished the game. It allowed me to focus on watching the cooldowns and gauges, and afforded me the luxury of being occasionally distracted, a major selling point for turn-based games. Also, it made the Ring of Timely Healing unnecessary, freeing up an equipment slot.

What would be perfect (I have it on good authority that everyone at Square-Enix subscribes to Downcast, you guys can have this for free, it should be easy to patch). Would be a ring (let's call it Ring of Martial Mastery) that automated Clive's weapon attacks and positioning, but still left the eikonic special moves to the player, much like FFVII Remake did.

In the meantime, I have the ultimate FF machine, the Nintendo Switch. I can just go to the eshop and grab a remastered copy of pretty much every game in the series until XII. I think I'll grab XII as a palate cleanser.

Neither dungeons nor dragons

I’ve been a TTRPG enthusiast for more than 10 years now. I’ve tried many different systems and have even tried my hand in designing my own.

D&D was one of those games I played with different groups under different circumstances. Starting with 3rd edition (well, 3.5), then 4th, Pathfinder, and then 5th.

A trend I failed to notice at first was that the burden of buying the thick books and learning them was always assumed to be on the Dungeon Master. Players learned by doing whatever the DM told them, and sometimes borrowing (or pirating) the books.

This led to very authoritarian tables where everything the DM said was law. And any questioning of this authority would be punished in-game and at the table. The DM held the secrets of the game, and often they would place a physical barrier at the table to ensure this was clear. They had a story they wanted to tell, and they didn’t want the players to get any delusions of grandeur, so the first unwritten rule is that the rules only apply when the DM likes them. Of course, this adversarial relationship cultivated some resentment. I’ve watched games devolve into a competition of who gets to cheat the most in order to have a sense of agency.

I don’t want to talk about the toxic players, but I don’t want to seem like I’m ignoring the problem. Sure, I’ve met kind DMs, whom I still regard as friends, but I’ve cut ties with much more people. The truth remains that the game attracts some shitty people.

I saw how the community does a great job at highlighting the positive aspects of the hobby. And as I tried to learn more about the game the internet influencers made me feel I was playing the game wrong. There was only one way to find out.

So, about a year ago I decided to give D&D a chance. I wanted to read the books and learn the rules. I wanted to help new players learn the ropes without the influence of the jaded gatekeepers. Without the maze of third-party content, half-baked house rules, and habits held from previous editions. And I most certainly tried.

That’s when I learned the game, by itself, is unplayable. The Dungeon Master’s guide provides very specific and detailed rules for some things and leaves other things to the imagination. The game mechanics are fine tuned for a certain type of experience (mostly boardgame-like dungeon looting), but the game invites you to engage in open-world adventures with lots of character interactions. The game encourages DMs to make the game their own, but also burdens them with decades of lore. It’s a jumbled mess of archaic wargaming and modern roleplay. The reader is presented with pages upon pages of detailed game mechanics, followed by “or just do whatever, it’s just a game, tee hee!” quips.

Here’s the thing: They don’t have any incentive to polish or complete the game. D&D is to tabletop role-playing games what Google is to web search, so consumers don’t know about the thousands of well-thought-out games. On the other hand, they have an many incentives for keeping things vague. For starters, they don’t want to enrage the toxic fandom they’ve cultivated. As the saying goes, “nerds hate change.”

The result is that modern D&D is not a game, it’s a vibe, a tradition, a mood.

For players, it’s something they, or someone they know (or saw on TV) has been doing for 30 years.

For DMs, it’s something handed down to them by their dad, or a friend their dad’s age, along with a binder full of house-rules, a thumb drive full of dubious PDFs, a handful of miniatures, and the assurance that they’ll get to do whatever they want, and they’ll get free pizza in return.

Every revision of the game comes with neat ideas for players, and less resources for DMs. It’s a catalog with neat pictures of cool characters doing awesome things. It’s not marketed towards DMs, even though they do most of the spending.

That’s because DMs don’t need convincing; the toxic DMs get a captive audience and a weekly power trip, and the kind ones get a chance to please their friends, and a vast majority are just pressured into DMing.

It’s all a scam. They rely mostly on word-of-mouth, influencers, and product placement to make people want to join this lifestyle. New books published every so often entice old players to return by promising cool new features and more powerful characters. These players need DMs. These DMs need to cough up the money to buy the content the players want. 

The publisher doesn’t care if it’s an abusive DM, a reluctant DM, or a cheerful DM They don’t care what those DMs struggle with, if they play by the rules, or what third-party tools they must explore to make their shit game playable. It doesn’t matter as long as they consume, and that makes for a bad community, and a bad gaming experience.

D&D is to tabletop RPGs what Monopoly is to bard games: It’s the one everyone things of first, it’s the one people who don’t know better prefer to play, they keep coming up with stupid gimmicks, one player must do extra work, it’s not fun, people often end up arguing, and adding house rules usually makes things worse.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably expect some advice from me. How about don’t play D&D? If you must, don’t ask anyone to DM it, do it yourself and see what it’s like. If you’re an experienced DM… Why? There’re better games out there! Show some self-respect!

Stadia's she goes

Hey! Guys, have you heard of Stadia? It's really neat!

Sure, it's not better than your next-gen console or your PC worth thousands... wait, you don't have one? Then read on! You can play next gen games without spending a penny on hardware! As long as you have a stable internet connection, that is.

You just buy the game (digitally, of course) and you can play it on any computer! Even an old Chromebook! You can use almost any old controller you have lying around, or keyboard+mouse for some games! The software is available immediately without downloads or updates.

They even have some free to play games right now that you can try, in case you're not sure your internet connection can handle it! All free!

Sure, they'll have you sign up for a free trial of the premium service, which enables 4K video for a handful of games, and unlimited access to a decent library of games... but you don't have to renew if you don't find any value in it! I didn't!

Additionally you can buy a controller that connects to the service via Wi-Fi so you can play on your TV with a Chromecast Ultra. It's like a console, but a lot cheaper!

I'm telling you, you can't afford not to try it. It's the future of gaming, if anything you should check it out just to be a part of history. I used it to play Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day without owning a gaming PC or current-gen console and I loved the experience. 

Here's a referral link, if you happen to sign up for pro I get a free month or pro too.

They have a bunch of neat features that they plan on sharing soon, too. Cloud gaming stuff that consoles or PC simply can't do.

There's only one problem. Google is absolutely screwing the pooch with this one. They are pulling a Wii U.

The Wii U failed because people failed to see its potential. People didn't understand it, therefore people didn't see a reason to try it. It didn't sell well, therefore the company had no incentive to invest in software, accessories, or updates, so they announced a discontinuation, and people started acting like their console will quite literally stop working immediately.

Google has made the launch of the service as confusing as possible. They tried to appeal to the audience that already owns a better system, and left those who could benefit from the system in the dark. To make things worse they recently announced they would close their first-party studio and the media saw this as a call to abandon ship.

Google needs to snap out of it and fire their marketing team before it's too late to break out of that cycle.  I seriously doubt Google will just pull the plug and move on because this is a paid service tied to paid digital and physical products.

Worst case scenario, they just stop investing in it until a reasonable time has passed and they can justify pulling the plug on paying users without much scandal. In the meantime all we can do is throw our support behind it, hoping Google resumes investing and we may soon see what it's really capable of. At any rate, the service is already good, and any software you buy there today will be available to you until you're done with it.

Whenever the games industry tries something new, the hardcore gamer hive mind decides they hate it and soon enough it dies from lack of support from the core audience. But I believe Stadia is a great option for the casual gamers who want to try out all the hot new games but don't want to invest in hardware. It's also a great option for anyone who wants to try one game in particular without committing to a piece of hardware that would just gather dust after they're done with it. The convenience of it all cannot be understated.

If you're the kind of nerd who wants physical copies of thousands of games on a shelf to show off in the background of your unboxing youtube videos, Stadia may not be for you. But if you have streamed more movies than you physically own, you should reconsider. Don't worry, you don't have to throw away your entire game collection for it to work.

If we want the technology to advance, and for games to catch up, we must at least participate in the process. If you've already invested in superior hardware, at least keep it in mind next time a friend or relative asks you whether they should get a PS5 or Xbox, because if they're asking, Stadia is probably a better fit for them. There's no excuse when the service is free to try. Unless you're a hater.

Update

My last post on this blog was roughly four years and a half ago.

I stopped blogging because life kept happening. Also because I felt blogging was irrelevant, since I could just share my opinions on social media for the same audience. Besides, there's no way to compete with youtube vloggers and twitch streamers, anyway.

But I've been feeling downcast the last few days and there's some stuff I want to get on my chest. I think this is the right platform for that. Bonus points if anyone actually reads it (drop a comment if you want to absolutely make my day).

Four and a half years ago the 3DS was halfway through it's life-cycle, the Wii U still had potential, and he Nintendo switch was still code-named NX. Feels like forever ago.

If you're reading this it's likely because you were subscribed, so there's no point in telling you to stay tuned, but please do!

Pokemon Go: Approach With Caution.

So here's my game review: it's a free game, just get it and check it out, it's a lot of fun! Delete it if you don't like it. It's riddled with glitches and connectivity issues, and needs a lot of balancing, but that should be taken care of soon. That's it.

But before you do, here are some words of caution. A few years ago I wrote a piece about Ingress, and most of it also applies to Pokémon GO. Please check it out for context.

You will never be the very best.

This is not a game of skill. It's a game of mindless grinding. Walk, swipe, repeat. Niantic made a point not to alienate Pokemon Noobs (like me) and it works. The game gives you each Pokemon's stats and even assembles the ideal team for every battle. Just tap the screen.

You can also purchase boosts via micro-transactions. Also, location is key. Some players literally live and work around "pokestops" while others have to drive for hours to the nearest one.

It is pretty obvious that at the game progresses and gains popularity, there will be more premium content. You will have to visit specific stores, or buy certain products to stay ahead. Some of these stores or products may not exist in your town, city, or country.

What this means for you is that there will always be a kid with more free time, more money, and more nearby locations. No matter how hard you try. Effort is meaningless in this game.

If you decide you still want to play, you will have to fight the urge to put effort into the game. To spend gas money driving around. To spend cash in poke-coins. To trash talk other teams. To plan strategies. To walk more. You will not be rewarded for your effort, you will only have a constant feeling that you must try harder. I've seen cars speeding from stop to stop late at night in my neighborhood, screeching to a halt wherever a pokemon spawns. They seem frantic, desperate to gain an edge. Niantic is banking on this frustration do drive players to buy boosts with real money.

Uber knows you're more likely to pay more for your ride when your battery is running low. Niantic knows you're more likely to buy pokeballs if they make a rare pokemon spawn next to you when you have none.

I explained this to my wife yesterday morning and we both laughed, a few hours later she sent me a screenshot today to show off her in-game progress without knowing that screen also shows the amount of coins she had bought. A rare pokemon was there and she was fresh outta pokeballs. We're on a budget, and even though five bucks won't break us, it feels like a lot given the worthlessness of what was purchased. Once I realized this I knew I had to stop. The desire to one-up everybody else is strong even among the closest of friends, friendship be damned.

With enough maturity the game can be played casually. If you can manage this, the game is fun. Unless you're playing all by yourself while surrounded by friends...

You picked the wrong team.

In order to play the game competitively you need backup. Going solo will result in immediate defeat.

Just like in ingress, the game is not about "leading" every gym, but about leading as many as possible. It is far easier to bring down an enemy gym than to build one up for your team, and this makes sense because otherwise things would seldom change. But the scale tips so hard on the side of destruction that you can literally see gyms switching colors a few times per minute on busy areas. It all feels so pointless.

If you decide to play be sure to ask your friends what team they are, and pick the one most popular among them. Failing to do so will result in unfriendly competition, You simply will not be able to play together. If your friends are on an opposing team, everything yo do will hurt them, and vice versa.

So, you are on your friends team. When you get to work or school, it may be dominated by another team. Or your entire town, even. the team mechanic is divisive no matter how you see it.

I convinced a few family members to play, even though soon enough someone else would. But for some reason they all chose team valor, even though they knew I was team Mystic. So we can't even play as a family. If I chose to go on a trip with them, we simply wouldn't be able to make much progress, because we'd be competing. If all of us put in the effort to conquer a gym in a secluded location (hoping it lasts), only some of us will be rewarded for the trip. We can't all claim it. It's them or me now. And I simply do not want to be in that situation, so I thought I'd quit and deleted the app...

It's not easy to quit.

So I guess I can't do that. The addiction has settled in my family, and they want me to play along some more. Somehow not wanting to continue this cycle of pointless competition makes me a jerk.

I guess we'll have to have a family talk on how to approach this before things go sour. I suggest you do the same with your family and or circle of friends. Set some rules, some honor code, and figure out whats to do when you get to a distant gym and everyone wants to claim it, I still haven't.