Thrilleville: Off the Rails

Yet another demo from XBox Live. I'm going to say this right now, I didn't even give this game a chance. The only good thing I liked about it was the Stunt bike mini game, and it was too short. This game seems like it's trying to be a graphically superior version of Roller Coaster Tycoon. I cannot recommend this, as I don't think this game will be better than the demo.

Facebreaker

I decided to pick up a few demos off of XBox Live. The first I picked up was Civilization Revolution.
The next gave I've grabbed was Facebreakers. It's a cartoonish boxing game that reminds me a lot of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. The Demo doesn't offer much to do other than practice or one round of boxing. Either way, it is kind of fun. I say kind of because you can't really get much of a feel for the game with just one round.

To fight that single round of boxing, you have your choice of five different characters (two of which are default 'Create a Characters') and two locations to fight. I still haven't actually gotten three knockdowns in one round, but I wasn't really trying. But the boxing is fairly simple, and easy to do. From this demo, it seems that every match will be won by whomever is the best button masher. There isn't much strategy to it.

I'm nto sure if I can recommend this game or not. The demo doesn't offer much, and it just seems like it would have very repetitive. Unless this game has an amazing story, or at least a funny one, I can't see this game as being very good. This might be something that I have to rent and revist.

Final Fantasy Tactics

The game starts off with you running guard duty for a princess. Apparently, you suck ass at this kind of thing and she gets kidnapped by someone you think you know. This causes you to have a flashback, and that's basically what the entire first chapter (of four) is all about. After your little flashback, you resume the game at the start of Chapter two.

It's kind of hard to tell what this game is more about, religion or politics, or both. I'm kind of leaning towards both, since they really kind of go hand in hand. I really don't want to reveal more of the plot, because that could possibly lead to spoilers, and I just can't do that. About all I can say is that you lead epic battles, and that there is a lot of betrayal and dark dealings afoot. Complete paraphrasing of the back of the CD case.

There are 19 different jobs to choose from, each having their own abilities. Depending on which job you choose, dictates what abilities you have. There are several slots where you can choose which abilities that you've learned to have equipped. For example, you could have the Job Black Mage, which would give you access to all spells you've learned as a Black Mage, and you could set Time Mage abilities, so you'd also have all spells you've learned as a Time Mage. The combinations are endless.

The battles are pretty straight forward. You're given an objective (defeat all enemies, protect so and so, don't die, find the needle in the hay stack, etc) and you must complete it. When you defeat an enemy, either a crystal or a treasure chest will spawn. If the enemy was a monster, the crystal will replenish your HP and MP. If the enemy was a human, you have a chance to learn a skill that they had if you didn't already have it. The treasure chest is self explainatory.

With each action in battle, you gain experience points and job points. Experience points go towards raising your level. Every 100 and you get a level up. Depending on your level versus your enemy's level, your experience will vary.

You use job points to purchase abilities for that specific job. Depending on your job level (1-8), is how many job points you will get per action. While XP is only earned on the character that performed the action, JP from an action is gained by every character you have deployed. Every other character recieves a fraction of the job points for the job of the character who used an action.

For example. You have an Archer and a Squire deployed. The Squire uses the ability Yell. Both the Archer and the Squire recieve job points for the Squire job. The Squire would recieve more, since he used the ability. My hint for this is to have multiple characters with the same job deployed at once to maximize abilities learned across the jobs.

If, during the course of battle, one of your characters dies, you have three turns to raise him/her form the dead. As I stated before, if you do not, they will turn into either a crystal or a treasure chest. You would do this by either casting Raise or using a Phoenix Down.

Not every character you have has to be a human. In fact, you can recruit animals. The easiest one to get is a chocobo (giant chicken like bird). During one battle, you have the choice to save one. If you do, he joins you. If you have a Mediator, you can use them to convince animals to join you. When you have an animal as part of your group, they will occasionally lay an egg and multiply, causing you to have multiple animals. I, personally, do not like animals since they're pretty limited with what they can do. I normally keep the chocobo around (he's just so damn cute!) and dismiss any eggs he creates.

One thing about the game that I didn't realize my first time around is that all enemies level with you. That's right, there's no reason at all to level your characters any. When you enter a battle (with the exception of forced battles) every enemy is the same level as your highest levelled character. Meaning if you have one character who's level 50, and every other character is level 30, your enemies will be level 50. While this can be nice to catch those other characters up, I find it more of an annoyance.

On one board (I forget which one off hand, I know it when I see it) I have found a trap that delevels you. This trap will be there no matter what (as all squares with special attributes assigned to them are). Whenever I feel that mobs are getting a little out of hand, I'll head to this board, kill off all but one enemy, weaken that enemy, and just start delevelling my party to a managable level. I won't delevel them too far, I still want to be able to kill the last guy. This strategy works out great for me, and has allowed me to start mastering all jobs on Ramza easily and efficiently.

This is quite possibly my favorite Final Fantasy game out of the Playstation series (VII - XII). Even though I've been playing Final Fantasy XI for five years, I still love Tactics more. The story is great, the game play is great, the replay value is very high. The only thing that I disliked about the game was the ending. With that aside, I highly recommend this game to anyone who has not played it yet. If you haven't played this game, WHY THE HELL NOT!

Update

Oh, how my dreams and aspirations are killed by my own reluctancy to break away from Final Fantasy XI. Right now I'd like to update the games that I'm currently playing. On the DS, I have Final Fantasy IV. I have a feeling I'm going to burn straight through this. On the XBox 360, I have Blue Dragon. I'll be switching back to this when I'm done with FF4. Since I can't pull myself away from FFXI, I've decided that I'm going to bounce back and forth between meritting and levelling a new job to 75, rather than my busy work of just chatting with people and doing Campaign.

Why is this a good thing? For those of you who have never played FFXI, you can't do a whole lot by yourself in the game. If you've played any other FF game, you'd come to expect this. How people are surprised by this when they first pick up the game, is beyond me. Since I'm lazy and don't build my own parties of six people, I throw up my party flag and wait for someone to send me an invite. Depending on time of day, number of people on, and how many other people are out XPing, you can wait from five minutes to five hours waiting for a party.

Since my Warrior is only 56 now (I'll probably have an update for FF this week) and I don't like meritting on my party magnet (Bard) I've decided that in my down time, I'm going to pick off the list of games in my backlog. As I mentioned previously, FFIV and Blue Dragon are the first two on that list. After those, I'm probably going to move back to Professor Layton and Tactics A2 (like I mentioned in my opening post).

If I wait too long, I'll be redoing Chrono Trigger for the DS, since Squenix has stated they have added new content. I'd also like to finish up Final Fantasy 3 some day. Lunar DS is another one that's high on my list. But before I touch Lunar, I'd really like to beat Vay, which I probably haven't played in two years. So hopefully I either kick my FFXI habit, or I get long days without parties.

Oh, before posting this, I did a quickie of Civ Revolution. So you'll see that after this. :)

Civilization Revolution

It's the middle of the week, I was bored, and decided to pick up a demo on Xbox live. I've decided since I don't have much content, I'm going to add a quickie. Civilization Revolution plays exactly like all of the previous ones I've played (Civ 2, Civ 2 Test of Time, and Civ 3), but it looks soo much prettier. The demo was rather small. it seemed that it was limited to about 20 or so turns (I didn't count). You can only choose from two races to start off with (The Romans or the Egyptians), and your tech tree is severly limited. It's a Demo, so I'm not going to be picky about all of that.

The game looked, and played great. I was a little iffy about playing with the controller after using a keyboard to play the game for so long, but it worked great. The interface wasn't what I was used to, but it felt right. The units were much larger on screen then they had been in previous versions, either that, or they just look bigger on a 37" TV rather than a 19" monitor. Either way, they were large and easy to distiguish what they were.

I didn't get to play it long enough to see if my gripes about Civ 3 were fixed. I'm a purist when it comes to Civilization. I reguard Civ 2 as the best one. I didn't like how they messed with the Wonders with 3. I'm not sure if they were changed for 4 or Civ Rev, but I imagine they hold the same powers as 3.

While that's more of an annoyance for me, others might see it as game balancing. I mean, building the Great Wall in Civ 2 meant that every city had a town wall, and no one could declare war on you. The United Nations did the same thing. Some may see that as over powered, since it was possible to build the United Nations before the Great Wall went out of effect (by anyone researching electricity), but I see it as historically correct. China built the Great Wall to keep Mongolia out. For the most part, it worked. Why shouldn't it work in 3? I remember other wonders losing some of their powers, but that was the one that annoyed me the most.

Even with that, I still highly recommend the game. It looks great, it plays great, and can keep you entertained for hours. And the best part of the game, it never plays the same way twice. If you're into turn based strategy that will keep you entertained for hours, play this game. I would get it, if I didn't already have a large backlog of games.

Chrono Trigger

BEST GAME EVER MADE

Yes, it's a bold statement. This is the game that I compare all other games to. Sure, the graphics are outdated, but who cares! A game doesn't need lifelike graphics to be good. It needs a story and great gameplay, and this game achieves both with flying colors. It also has very high replay value. Something you don't really see in new games these days.

This game is about Chrono and his friend Lucca who end up travelling through time with a girl Marle whom they meet at the Millennium Fair, a fair celebrating the new millennium (the year is 1000 AD). During their travels through time, they meet several new friends and try to stop evil from taking over at several points in time.

With each friend you pick up, you can adjust your party of three to different configurations depending on what's required for your current objective. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and when combined with certain characters, they can combine attacks for more powerful attacks. For instance, if you combine Marle and Lucca, you have several magic attacks. Marle and Chrono have attacks where she will imbue his sword with magical power, same with Lucca and Chrono.

There are a few times where your actions in the past influence actions in the future. Each time you get something new for doing these, and they help the story along nicely. For example, one quest requires an item to be in direct sunlight for many years. To achieve this, you would drop this item in the past, then pick it up in the future.

Another nice feature of the game is that you get a different ending depending on when you beat the game. Even losing to the last boss gives you a different ending! I believe there are a total of 13 different endings, although I'm sure I've counted more. Either way, I've gotten every one of them.

To achieve these multiple endings, the game has a feature called New Game+. What it does is starts out a new game, with your levels, stats, and items from a previous save game. this feature is opened up the first time you beat the game. From here, you can start over and begin beating the game during different time periods.

This game does everything right, and nothing wrong. I mean, the only bad thing anyone can say about it is that you play as a silent protagonist. Anyone who looks at that as a bad thing, is an idiot. The game is more about the actions of everyone, how they interact with each other, not about the dialogue of the main character.

There is nothing bad I can say about this game. Like I've said previously, this is the game I base my opinion of other games on. If I had to use an arbitrary 1-10 rating for this game, I would take a hint from Spinal Tap, and this is an 11. Nintendo Power is full of shit to rate this as #5 in a top 20 list of SNES games. This is far ahead of Zelda.

If you can find a copy of this, PLAY IT. Whether it be the original SNES, the PSX version, or even the new DS version, play it. You will not regret it.

Whoops

I just found out something not so fun. Apparently, when I save something as a Draft it saves the date oh when I started writing it. When I post that draft, it uses that date as the post date. So when I published my latest review, Secret of Mana, it used the date I wrote it on as the posting date, not the date I actually posted it. I have a feeling this will become very annoying, very fast.

Secret of Mana

Ahh yes. A timeless classic by Squaresoft. This is a game about a boy who pulls the Mystical sword out of the clumpy stone. Now that I think about it, everytime I've played this game, I should have named the main character Arthur. I mean, pull a sword out of the stone, become the king of England, smite evil isn't a very far stretch from pull the sword out of the stone, become the hero of Mana, smite evil.

Any hero worth his while doesn't travel alone. In Secret of Mana, you're joined by a fiesty girl and a mischievous sprite, both of which you name. This is one of the rare times you will find an RPG that is multiplayer. With the multi-tap (which is packaged with Super Bomberman) you can play with up to two friends (assuming you have any!).

Each character has their own strengths. The boy is the strongest weapon user. The girl uses healing magic. The sprite uses damaging magic. You find the weapons from defeating bosses or finding them, you get your magic by rescuing spirits.

Game play for this game is your typical Zelda like overhead hack and slash with RPG elements (skill up weapons/magic, level up characters). The higher your weapon's level, the higher you can charge it. Charged attacks look fancy and do more damage. Same thing goes with magic. The higher your skill is in that particular magic, the more damage it will do.

For all of the things this game does well, great game play, great story, great music, it does have a few faults. For one, there's no real reason to level any more than one weapon per character. Sure, you sometimes have to break out the whip to travel across gaps, or break out the sword or axe to cut down some poles or something, but you can just equip them on the sprite and girl and switch to them when needed. Because if you're using anything other than the spear on the boy, you're an idiot. Personally, I used the spear on the boy, whip on the girl, and the javelin on the sprite. Switched to the axe or sword as needed.

Another thing while nice and convenient was very annoying is that you can kill most bosses before they can get one attack in. Once the sprite has his first spell, you can pretty much spell lock anything. If you're playing three player at a boss fight, whoever is the sprite should log out. The another person take control via the X menu. Cast your spell. As soon as the elemental disappears, hit X again. If you did it right, the sprite menu should come up in color. If it's greyed out, you didn't hit it fast enough. Select your next spell, and repeat. Pretty much, each spell will hit in succession and the damage will add up. Stop when you think you've killed it. If you haven't, repeat.

With this previous fault in mind, it leads the last one. If you can kill bosses in one hit, there's no real reason to level the girl's magic aside from the one that has the spells that heal you. There's no reason to level up her other magic, because quite frankly, you really only need to use it on bosses, and they're dead with one hit. On the same note, there's no real reason to charge up your weapons to anything past 100%. It takes time to do it, and you walk slow while you're charging and when it's charged. You'd pretty much also use this on boss fights. I do admit, there's a few times I would use it in the last area, but after I levelled up a bit, there was no reason to do so.

Do these faults break the game? Hell no! This is easily one of my five favorite games on the SNES, and top 10 overall. If you really think about it, the flaws really aren't flaws at all. You can actually play around them. My last play through, I worked around them with the exception of the one hit kills. I didn't feel like subjecting myself to long battles that can be easily finished in under a minute. Overall, get this game if you can. Highly recommended.