Dark Ixion and Shiva Fights

Dark Valefore and Dark Ifrit Fights

Fuck An Ice Level

Holy shit Nagoya is fucking cold and I'm going to do what any other self respecting British person does and complain about the weather.  Except if I just did a post about how much I hate the cold weather it wouldn't really fit the whole "Gaming" part of  Identity Gaming so instead I'm going to moan about a type of level in video games I fucking hate with a passion, the ice level!

Now we all know about the sewer level and how much that sucks but that one is fucking obvious.  You step into a sewer and you know from the levels entry point that it's going to be a fucking maze with terrible backtracking, stupid level puzzles and crap enemies.  The ice level though, while generally a giant stinking pile of shit is a bit less obvious because there do exist good ones.  A great example of a highly enjoyable ice stage is the Ice Cap Zone in Sonic 3, an ice level so iconic in gaming that almost everyone and their dog knows the fucking theme for it regardless of if they have played the game or not.

For the most part though, ice levels are only one step above a sewer level when it comes to most games.  It's always a terrible excuse to have a shitty slip-sliding mechanic where the level designer to do their best to slide you into an enemy or a pit for an instant kill.  If it's not that then it's stupid sliding block puzzles where the blocks will fall into pits and never stay where the fuck you want.  Failing that it's stupid crap that involves freezing or defrosting things which usually involves copious amounts of stupid backtracking, the same concept as a level puzzle just with ice instead of levers.

One that's sticking out in my mind right now is the Ice Cavern in Ocarina of Time.  It's strange that this one should stick out so much because in terms of difficulty it's not all that bad.  However, it has all the things I hate about ice areas.  Slippy block puzzles, enemies that screw you with your lack of normal mobility, defrosting puzzles that involve backtracking if you didn't manage your bottles right, the whole shabang.  That and at the end of it you get iron boots, which on the N64 version of that game sucked because switching gear in that game was tedious as all hell although it's an issue the 3DS version does not have.

Another middle finger goes to Final Fantasy 10s Cloister of Trails for Shiva.  The cloisters were more of a mild annoyance than anything else while you solve baby's first RPG puzzle but the Macalania trail is just fucking dumb.  Lots of chances to fuck things up which means you have to reset stuff and getting the destruction sphere in that trail is probably the biggest pain in the dick thing to do in that whole game.  I'd rather spend HOURS grinding master/clear spheres to max stats then do that fucking trail.

Unlike the sewer level, I don't think ice levels should be abolished because like I said before there do exist good ice levels.  Just if you are going to make an ice level, don't be a fucking asshole about it.

Final Fantasy Levelling Is Stupid

With Final Fantasy 15 sort of round the corner I wanted to take a moment about my frustration with the level systems of basically every Final Fantasy from 10 onwards.

This post was first inspired by a news article that my friend link me a long time ago that I have long since lost, if I find it again I'll update the post.  The post outlined some things about how characters would level up and it compared the system to Dark Souls.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this and it's hard to make judgement without knowing all the other systems that the game will have but it still made me think how dumb levels have gotten in Final Fantasy.

All the way up to Final Fantasy 9 each character was kind of locked into a class.  The exception to this rule was Final Fantasy 3 and 5 which had a job system but if you picked a Fighter you better damn well play that character like a Fighter.  Final Fantasy 7 and 8 had ambiguous classes but it was clear who was better at things like sword fighting and who was better at casting spells.

Then Final Fantasy X came along with what seemed like an interesting level up system.  It introduced the Sphere Grid, a giant collection of circles where each one represented a certain statistical boost or ability.  A lot of people disliked the sphere grid but I thought it was OK.  I still have a lot of questions regarding how it works in the context of the game world but I didn't mind it so much.

My problem with the sphere grid is that the idea of a characters class went completely out of the window in the end game.  Every character could just do everything by the end of the game and you didn't even have to work that hard to get to that point.  You could argue the same thing about Final Fantasy 7 but the work you have to put in to achieve that is STUPID high while in FFX in requires very little effort.

FFX-2 was a bit more job based but jobs could be changed on the fly in combat which kind of ruined the whole point of the job system.  FF12 had that stupid license board bullshit and 13 just knocked the turd right out of the bowl with the fucking Crystarium. 

I'm hoping that the class and level system in FF15 will be back on point.  Where a fighter is a fighter, a mage is a mage and a thief is a thief.  The ability to make your characters more versatile is welcome but don't just abandon their entire role in combat so that everyone can do everything.

New Final Fantasy Incentives!

OK! I've been making some good progress on FF6 so it's about time to add some new Final Fantasy themed donation incentives to the blog!

The first isn't entirely new but it's pretty recent and that's a 24 hour session of Final Fantasy 7.  This will be available until a week after I finish Final Fantasy 6 so if you want to see that get your donations in ASAP.  I promise that this time I won't be doing any drinking (unless it's an energy drink) during the Stream so we don't have to worry about me getting drunk and falling asleep again like I did with Euro Truck.

The second is for me to go one entire disc of Final Fantasy 8 and only being allowed to say nice things about it.  I'm sorry FF8 fans, but I fucking hate that game and I could spend a long LOOONG time ragging on it.  However, someone suggested to me that I should offer this as an incentive because 1.  Actual fans of the game might get a kick out of hearing me sing it's praises and 2. It would hurt my soul.  The people who suggest incentives to me are rather sadistic.

The third incentive is a bit hefty at a total of £500 raised to get it but I think it's easily worth that price after doing some research.  I'm referring to a no junction run of Final Fantasy 8 which is a particularly difficult type of challenge for that game.  In case you don't know what I mean, in FF8 you can increase your stats by junctioning spells to them.  Considering the game has monsters that scale in level with you Junctioning is pretty important.  No Junction is exactly what it says on the tin, I'm not allowed to do that at all.  After reading a quick guide on gamefaqs to see if it was even possible, it seems that the game is stupidly hard and the final boss is ALMOST impossible.  If you ever needed an excuse to prolong my suffering, then donate for that.

The final incentive moves away from FF8 and goes into FF10 territory with No Yojimbo.  I promised when this started that I would go after secret bosses and such when playing these games.  In FF10 this includes a number of very challenging fights known as the Dark Aeons and when you kill them you have to content with the games toughest enemy, Penance.  Yojimbo is one of the summon creatures in FF10 but has a weird gimmick where the attack he uses is based on how much you pay him.  One of his attacks, called Zanmato, instantly kills any enemy in the game including Dark Aeons and Penance.  A cheap incentive of £100 in order to disallow me from being a cheap bitch.

If you wish to donate for these or any of the other incentives found on the right hand side of the page, please go do it at this link


https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/identitygaming2

Just so you know, none of the money donated comes anywhere near me and it goes directly to the charity.  BT also don't take any commission on donations so if you donate £10 then £10 will go to the Alzheimer's Society.

Thanks to everyone who have donated so far for supporting me, this website and the Alzheimer's Society, let's keep going!

Boats and Bridges: A Stupid Cliche

Recently I've been playing a lot of Eternal Sonata on the PS3 and there's a little RPG cliche that pisses me off a little more than I think it should.

As you can tell from the title, bridges and boats are quite possible the dumbest cliche in all of RPG history.  It's just a crap excuse for the developer of whatever game to throw some stupid crap enemy at you, split the party or bring the plot to a screeching halt.

Take Eternal Sonata for example

At one point in the game you fight this fat dude called Tuba on a big rickety bridge.  When you win the fight he doesn't just die like every other boss, he decides to suicide himself and smashes the bridge in half sending your party into the depths below.  This is a load of total bollocks because it's just a crap excuse to have your party split up and forces you to use some of the shittier characters for no good reason.

Eternal Sonata isn't the only game that does this but if you see a big ass bridge in an RPG, you can bet your ass some bullshit is going to follow.

However I can't think of so many games with bullshit bridges, but boats are on a whole different level of arse.  Final Fantasy X is a great example of everything wrong with boats in RPGs

This boat is EASILY one of the most boring sections of the whole damn game.  The plot to Final Fantasy X isn't exactly the best written thing on the face of the earth, but it comes to a screeching halt when you get on the S.S. Liki.  You run around and just listen to people chat about stupid shit for about 10 or 15 minutes and you get some crappy cutscene with Tidus trying to put the moves on Yuna and failing in his usual awkward way.

Then, for reasons, Sin (the big bad) just shows up and you have to fight him.  The boss fight isn't even remotely challenging and he can't even really attack you.  He just throws stupid little grasshoppers at you and you have to fend them off while Wakka kills the big fin with a beach ball.  What's even worse is that if you have some time to kill, you can really fuck the rest of the game by farming AP off the little grasshopper things (yes, I know they are called Sin Spawn, shut up)

But every RPG boat section is like this.  You do a bunch of shit on the boat that no one cares about and then you fight some kind of crap aquatic enemy like a giant squid or a big crab or some shit.  If no that, then a ghost ship turns up and you have to run around ANOTHER boring ass boat filled with stupid ghosts and other cliche undead nonsense.

Fuck boats
Fuck big ass bridges
Come up with some new terrible situation for a party to go through.