Gyromancer

Gyromancer is one of those games in my steam library that I bought years and years ago but only just got around to finally beating.  I must have bought it in some kind of Steam sale way back when because I can't imagine myself buying a match-3 puzzle game in this day and age. 

Anyway, Gyromancer is a puzzle-RPG game about a dude called Rivel Arday going into a forest in order to stop some evil dude from doing something bad I don't remember.  While each level is sandwiched between cut scenes that involve still images of the characters chatting via text, the story is kind of dumb and isn't really what you are here for anyway.

So a long time ago, back in my younger days when MSN messenger was a thing and I didn't have a job to buy proper games with, Pop Cap was an old website that provided free to play flash games.  One of these games was called Bejewelled.  This game involved swapping two adjacent gems in order to match 3 of the same color and you had to build a certain amount of score in order to progress to the next level.  After I long gave up on Pop Cap they released a variation on Bejewelled known as Bejewlled Twist which was the same game but you would twist a small circle of gems in order to match 3 rather than just pairs.  So take that, add monsters doing battle and a shitty story about a dude in a forest preventing evil and you have Gyromancer.

Monsters battle by having these little gauges that fill up as you match gems and when the gauge is full it drops a sparkly gem on the board, smash the gem and do the damage.  Enemies do their attacks in the same way but on a timer, so if you fail to smash their attack gem in the certain number of turns then they attack you.  Aside from the main game there are little side objectives in each stage and a bunch of bonus shit that you unlock after the first chapter that I never bothered with so I can't comment on that.  But if you like your Bejewelled Twist then Gyromancer has a lot to offer you.

If however you are like me and you don't give too many shits about these kind of puzzle games then it'll be fun at first but quickly start wearing a bit thin.  Cool monsters and a story line are not enough to pull one into the genre of match-3 gem smashing.  I'll be sticking to Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo thank you very much.

What the hell happened to Final Fantasy characters?

I'm starting to think everyone who works in the Square Enix creative departments have massive brain problems....

You'd be forgiven for glancing at the above image and thinking you were looking at a lineup of whatever shitty pop group is popular now in Japan.  Well you'd be very wrong, that is the cast of the upcoming Final Fantasy 15 and just......fuck....what happened to this series?

I want you to think back to Final Fantasy 7, think of the cast in that game and how distinguished they all looked from one another.  You had a dude in purple overalls with a huge sword, a chick with huge tits, a black man with a gun for an arm, a remote control cat robot, a shotgun wielding vampire and others.   Quite a varied group of individuals for that particular adventure.

Now look at the above picture, we have bloke with bad hair x6, Assassins Creed guy, generic old man, chick with straight bangs, 2 more blokes and a blonde girl.  Where the FUCK did all the creativity in the cast go?  I guess it died with the guy who knew how to write halfway decent plot lines.

I remember when Team Fortress 2 came out and I think it was a developer working for Valve that said that you could tell how well a character was designed by how people were able to recognise them by their silhouettes.

I can tell you who all of those characters are just from that above picture, if you did that with FF 15's cast you probably couldn't.  It's the same with FF7, 8, 9, 10, 12 or hell even 13 had better designed characters and that game sucks more than having nails funnelled into your anus.  Final Fantasy 15s cast looks so fucking generic that it just kills any hype that I may have.

Not that I really had any hype, because even though I've heard that it's going to play like Kingdom Hearts that doesn't mean it's going to be saved from the horrible writing that has come with all recent Final Fantasy games.

Unless it's one of the best RPGs ever made, FFXV can suck a dick.  They should just kill this series and make something that won't kill my hype from just the name alone.

Final Fantasy 2

A few days ago I managed to beat Final Fantasy 2 on stream, so with that now off the list I think it's time I talked about it.

Final Fantasy 2 is a piece of shit, I really don't like it, but I can sort of forgive it for being so crap because you really have to take into consideration when it was made and you kind of have to give Square credit for at least trying to do something different.

The problem with Final Fantasy 2 is that it's broken and unless you exploit the ever living hell out of that broken system then the game is unreasonably hard.  The system with FF2 is that your stats go up based on your actions in battle rather than having an overall level.  So attacking will raise strength, getting hit will raise HP and using spells will increase spell mastery and MP etc.

On paper it sounds like a really cool system and I've played games with similar sorts of systems that have been a ton of fun, but here it falls a bit short.  The problem is that playing the game normally is absolutely not enough to prepare you for the fights that you have to overcome.  2 members of my 4 character party had less than 1000 HP by the time I got to the final dungeon and I had been playing normally without running from many battles.

To be effective in Final Fantasy 2 you either have to grind for hours or exploit the ever loving shit out of the broken progression system, but the problem with doing that is that it makes the game WAY to easy and ultimately unfun.

Still, if you're willing to put up with all that shit, then everything else about FF2 isn't so bad.  It has an interesting world to explore and the plot is OK considering that it's an NES game from 1988.  Also the PS1 origins version has a couple of cool looking cut scenes at major turning points in the game that make things a bit more interesting if your the kind of person who played it a bunch when it was 8-Bit.

I'd suggest that everyone play Final Fantasy 2 just to see how Square were at one point willing to do new and interesting things with the series rather than just fall back on stupid anime cliches and awfully written plot lines.  No matter how much I complain about Final Fantasy 2, it's STILL better than 13 by a long shot.

Also as a little update, a couple more donations came in after the stream had finished and over £200 was raised for the Alzheimers Society! Thanks again to everyone who donated during the marathon, the highlights from the stream will be uploaded soon!

Final Fantasy 1 (Origins Version)

I've not played a Final Fantasy game until very recently, the last one I played before my replay of FF1 was XIII when it launched on the PS3.  Hopefully you are aware that I'm doing a stream of every Final Fantasy I own, so it seemed like a good idea to do little mini reviews as I beat them.

Final Fantasy Origins was a 2 disc box that contained both Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy 2 that came out in 2003 for the PS1.  They were basically graphic face lifts for the original NES titles of the same name but they contained a couple of extras like bestiary's and maps and whatnot.

So recently I beat the Origins version of Final Fantasy and I had forgotten just how tough this game really was.  It's so much different from any other Final Fantasy that if you are a modern series veteran you might find that you get your ass kicked by this one a bit.

The plot is really simple, it's about 4 dudes with gems trying to save the world.  There is some shit about time travel but in a game this old it sort of just feels like fluff, especially when its so thin on the ground.  Still, the primitive story telling doesn't prevent the game itself from being fun, and if you're the kind of person like me who complains about modern Final Fantasy being way way too easy, then FF1 is where you want to be.

This game is fucking TOUGH, especially in the early stages.  Your party at the start of the game are extremely weak and quite frankly, ill prepared for what faces them in the early dungeons.  You'll often find yourself in situations where you have to explore a dungeon a bit, work out what to do, flee, recover and come back.  Luckily the dungeons aren't very long so it doesn't feel like too much of a chore but if you're expecting to go in there and just win first time then you have another thing coming.

Once you level up a bit and get yourself some gear and magic though, things become quite easy.  You eventually hit the point where you can just one shot everything and most fights can be solved by just mashing attack after a while.  That is until the final dungeon appears!  The final area consists of a massive dungeon with a boss gauntlet in it that doesn't allow for any between fight recovery.  This is made extra hard by the game using a magic system that involves charges rather than MP, and charges can't be recovered in a dungeon so resource management is vital.  Once you do beat it though, it does feel like you actually accomplished something which is more than most modern Final Fantasy games.

I'm sure with all the remakes and whatnot, most people have played Final Fantasy by now, but if you haven't do go back and give it a go.  If my description makes it sound a bit difficult for you, then there is an easy mode in the Origins version and the Game Boy Advance version has more classic things like mana for spells and I think it has phoenix downs too, which is something the original didn't have.

Soon I'll be streaming Final Fantasy 2 and I'm not really looking foward to it because if my memory is right, it's a steaming pile of shit.  Tune in for that on www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

OK Square Enix, time for you to leave

If you told me 5 or 10 years ago that I would not be hyped for upcoming Final Fantasy titles, then I would have slapped you in the face and called you a filthy liar.  The sad thing is that you would have been totally right.

But then again, I'm not making this post to complain about how Final Fantasy has turned into complete shit, I'm here to talk about how much of a massive gaping arsehole square enix is.  Fairly recently Square Enix published Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman Absolution.  These games have done pretty good, with Hitman Absolution selling around 3.6 million copies world wide according to a thing a read on Destructoid a while back.

But Square Enix has deemed these games failures.  3.6 million copies on Hitman and it's a failure?! A similar figure for Tomb Raider too and THAT'S a failure as well?!  I've not played these games yet so I don't know if they are a load of shit, but that's not the point, they sold a shit ton.

How fucked up must your sales projections be if 3.6 million copies sold on fucking reboots of old franchises counts as failure.  How fucking greedy do you have to be to expect sales figures more than that?! To be perfectly honest with you as well, when developers make a game that nets you 3.6 million sales and you go and say their game was a failure, that's disrespectful and if I was them I'd go find another fucking publisher and tell Square Enix to go shove it up their arse.

But this isn't the worst of it, Square Enix isn't exactly doing a good job with their own games either.  Final Fantasy hasn't been good since 9 really.  10 had some good side quests but the story was complete crap and Tidus may be one of the most annoying "lead" roles in any RPG.  12 wasn't great either but at least it felt like a Final Fantasy but then 13 came along and just shat all over everything.

Square released Final Fantasy XIII 2 in Japan at the end of 2011, and at the start of 2012 everywhere else and it's made about 3 million in sales.  Tomb Raider was released on the 5th March this year and it's already topped that. It's these "failures" that are making you all your money you morons.

So Square, I think it's about time you either start to realise that it's only your western developed stuff which is actually selling OR you can fuck off forever and take your stagnant shitty RPGs with you.  Preferably the latter so I don't have to hear any more shit about Lightning returning for more lack luster auto play anime dogshit.

Deus Ex: Human Defiance?

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a pretty good game, right? 

If you ask me it wasn't as good as the original but it was a huge improvement over Invisible War and I had a lot of fun with that shit.  The only huge problem I had with Human Revolution was that it was just a bit too easy.  The original game was really quite challenging but HR I managed to breeze through on its hardest mode with basically no problem at all.

Anyway, the other day I caught news of Square Enix trademarking the title "Human Defiance" and after doing some digging I learned that this is not good news.  Human Defiance, as far as I and many other gaming websites know, is not a new game but a fucking movie.

Off the top of my head I can't thing of a single good video game movie and I don't think one exists. Why even bother doing this?  Why even bother to sink a load of time and money into making a movie that is more than likely only going to piss off fans and disappoint movie goers.

I hope this information on Human Defiance is wrong, because if this is true, we're in for some bullshit.