Though posts are about as common as me finishing art LOLOLOLOLOL

xxxHolic, read it a year or two ago, here's the piece I made for it. Finally finished. 

what up

I stream rarely; if I ever do, it's like on the weekend or weekday evenings from 8-10ish pm. Come join me.

Troy, this blog needs more activity.

Anyways, Troy is now an old man! Give it up for the geezer.

He was playing Metroid: Other M and while I had no real interest in the game, it did renew my desire to play Ninja Gaiden Black. After all, Team Ninja developed both games. So, I spent two or so hours redownloading it because I purchased it from XBL before and deleted it to free up space but kept my saves.

Lo and behold, I discover the save files become "damaged" if you put the HDD onto another Xbox machine. Apparently, it ties save files to the physical address of the Xbox and mine was sent in from RROD. Pretty much meant I lost all my progress... and I had completed Mission Mode and was on my Master Ninja playthrough (I think?).

Raging, I went to Amazon to get NG Sigma for the PS3 and ended up also getting Little Big Planet, Killzone 2, and Resident Evil (GC Remake). All for like $70. FOUR "like-new" used games for $70. Good stuff. It was all very compulsive and spontaneous but I think I'll have fun with each. Except Killzone 2. That was probably a mistake but I'll play it and have fun for a short time.

Oh well

weird

Final Fantasy XII was first introduced to me in various magazine previews, and I didn't really care for how the new battle system sounded. I unofficially tried it the first time when a demo came with a game my friend bought and again was not wow'd. For a good while, it was going to be the first FF game that I would completely pass up as I had very little interest in it. Thanks to some motivation from Evan and other sources, I decided to try it out.

The Good

Here are the top 3 things I like about FFXII

3) (Specific) Characters

I'm talking about Balthier and Fran primarily. Balthier just being stylish and Fran being cool but getting the shaft in character development were the only real pieces of the main party I liked. But there were others that I really enjoyed. Cid as a villain was pretty interesting. Various support characters like Vossler and Reddas were awesome. Gabranth was a pretty neat dude, uhh Larsa? was okay too. If I could swap my party for some of these characters, the game woulda been much cooler. Switch out wanna-be air pirate Vaan for real-pirate Reddas, Basch for Gabranth (duh), Penelo for Vossler (no connection), and maybe keep Ashe because she has actual hold in the story. Except swap out her model for that chick who is a part of Reddas's little crew thing. Make her look more like a slut lolz.

2) The World

FFXII takes place in the colorful world of Ivalice which is also fleshed out in the FF Tactics games. This is one of the reason I decided to make this list. I just randomly realized that the locales you visit throughout the game are pretty diverse and interesting. A lot of areas have a veil of mystery and the overall setting is just really awesome to me. There are fairly constrained areas with narrow, twisting turning pathways along with wide open areas full of exploration. There are a few really lame dungeons (*cough* end game, Pharos, Giruvegan) but the rest of the world really shines. It is this and Good Thing 1 that make me consider replaying the game (almost).

1) The Sidequests

Hunts! Espers! Awwwwww good stuff. Granted, some of the sidequests are really boring and dumb (fishing not being fun in a game? cmon). But the feeling of hunting down a mark and defeating it while your characters are massively underpowered is a fantastic feeling. Many require some specific strategies inorder to fell and others have special triggers to even get them to spawn. Maybe because I used a guide but it felt like the hunts weren't much of a chore and more of an extra fun task. Some specific hunts (Gilgamesh) were some of the coolest fights in any FF game. Esper fights were also pretty grand. Most of the Espers have cool designs in appearance and battle. Whether its protecting yourself from a multitude of status ailments or making your levels a specific number to resist overpowered spells, the Esper fights had something neat to bring to the field. Throw in non-mark rare spawns and optional equipment and the (side)quest becomes a done deal. These enjoyment I got from these sidequests harks back to the sides from FFVIII and helped distract me from the main game.

The Bad

That's the good; here's the not-so-good, bad, and flat out shitty.

3) The Battle System

At times, the battle system was really enjoyable for me. I think it was in the first few hours when I didn't have a bunch of gambit slots to make things auto and micro'd more. I could have continued to play like this but it would become more of a chore and a bigger handicap later on. Thus, I embraced the gambit system and the rest of the game became fairly auto-pilot. Yeah.... not that fun. The summoning system was also poorly executed and I only ever summoned the Ifrit-equivalent-dude that one time to unlock a big gate or whatever. Such a poor performance because the summons all seemed kinda neat but there was really no incentive to use them. Maybe I'll explore them a bit more next time. Quickenings/Limits were kinda cool and I definitely exploited them and save states to maximize my damage on hunts I really wasn't supposed to be fighting.

Another iffy point for me in the battle/overall system was the necessity to have characters do everything. I really like to have characters allocated to specific roles ala FFIX but that just doesn't work well for most of XII. Characters need heals, nonsensical weapon/armor proficiencies, and whatnot to get by. This brings me to the grid levelup system which was pretty damn free. At least in FFX and XIII there is incentive/restrictions in place to motivate you to stay with the specific roles for a good portion of the game. In XII, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of diversity. You can choose to make classes but it's too easy not to. Anyways, that's my gripe with it. Like I said, the system worked at times so this point is more of a neutral to neutral-bad aspect of the game, at least for me.

2) Sound

Okay I understand: There was SOO much audio, that they had to compress it all and the voice quality turned out really, really bad. I get it. Doesn't change the fact that they still did it, and it's still bad. I mean, whenever someone talks, it sounds like they are muffled, or there's a lot of background noise. The voice-acting is pretty good; it's just the quality is so bad that I don't want to listen. Also, the other FF's are known, at least to me, for having really memorable tracks and music. I don't remember anything from FFXII in terms of soundtracks. Either that means I have terribad memory, or nothing was that memorable anyway. This doesn't really have to do with the sound, but since this is the first time they used voices and pronounced some things, a lot of the names sound really dumb with how they pronounce them (huge emphasis on HA in Bahamut).

1) Cast and Plot

We have a tie for number 1! Besides the good characters, the rest of the cast was ughhhhhh.... I'm talking about you Vaan and Penelo. What kind of shit is Vaan for a main character? He has 0 relevance in the plot, is a dumb kid trying to be cool, and dresses like a douche. I mean Tidus was pushing it too, but Vaan's outfit goes over the edge for me. People argue that he has takes part in the plot, because his act of infiltrating the castle to pilfer stuff brought Balthier and Ashe to meet and thus catalyzes the rest of the plot. Uhhh yeah that's true but that doesn't make him anymore of a plot device - not an integral element of the plot. There's a huge difference. Even though he makes the effort in some scenes (and fails imo), I can easily say that Vaan is the weakest protagonist I have ever seen. His friend Penelo has even less reason to be there. She literally does NOTHING. Yeah, great Penelo. Go die. She's what? The commoner who brings in different perspective into the story. Not really, what does she ever say that's useful? Maybe I'm just blind but I consider her pretty goddamn useless.

Ashe and Basch are okay at times but still lean towards the negative for me. Ashe acts like a bitch and times - and not just the stuckup, naive princess bitch, like a real bitchy bitch who's out to get it for the rest. I dunno. Basch starts out strong but loses interest reaaaaal fast. And for me, his outfit just doesn't work; it doesn't seem to fit him but whatever. Eventually, he just seems to become a stone giant following the party. And we're not talking stone giant Shale in DA:O.

Then there's the plot. I remember very little of it - it just didn't seem coherent and interesting enough for me to grab my attention and feel like I had an actual stake in the story. I don't recall many specifics and that's a pretty big point for me. To me, story is a huge element for me in RPGs. Playing the entire game and not really caring about the plot is a huge detriment. I think it really failed for me when I was playing through on auto and randomly realized that I was watching a cutscene where Ashe is speaking with spirits/gods/aliens in some conversation. At that point, I was just like: wtf? The ending was also pretty weak in my opinion but lots of games have really poor endings, so it's not a huge deal. Not everything can end like FFIX : (

Anyways, that's my rant. Overall, FFXII is a bad game that I love to hate on but REALLY had a lot of fun with it. The bad ruins the game for me but I'd still play it for the good things. As it stands right now, FFXIII is a much much better game, but I've had more fun with XII. In the end, to me, XII ranks along/slightly below IV in my FF preferences which I know Evan would kill me for.

Playing online is the easiest (though worst) way to play with others. But I always seem to do super shitty and lose to people I shouldn't. Granted, I still lose to people obviously better than me, and that doesn't bother me. It's when I lose to stupid ass scrubs that spam unsafe crap that's made magically safe by the wonders of XBL lag. Yet, it's my gosh darn fault that I can't adapt to these players and play really safe. Good lord.

My game relies too much on flow. I play Cammy and rush people down. That's not to say I don't know how to play defensively, but I have a really hard time forcing myself off an opponent if I'm feeling it - which is a good way to eat a fat shoryuken to the face.

I wish I was good v__v