» JRPG

I haven’t been updating my blog for a while, nothing game related at least. That’s because I have been spending most of my play time on Final Fantasy 13. One of the most anticipated games of 2010 and for many years. So far I have invested more than 50 hours of my life to this game. Then after reading comments from other gamers about how Square Enix got rid of towns and no more experience points to gain screwed the whole series up. Are the changes really that bad?

To be honest, it took some time to get used to, specially the new battle system. Though its still time-based, you can only control one character now and if that character dies its game over. What’s new is something called Paradigm Shift which allows you to setup the role for each of the 3 team members. Some gamers mentioned this system introduced a lot more button mashing than before. I actually disagree, I think its actually less button mashing since you can’t even control the other two characters.

I thought getting rid of the towns was a bad idea too, you don’t have a spot to purchase your equipments and items anymore. In FF13 you will be doing your shopping through the save point as well as upgrading/dismantling your weapons. I found this new feature works quite well and I don’t really miss the fact that towns are gone, well mostly. What you call towns are now nothing but part of the linear path you have to go through. Dialogue pops up when you walk near NPCs, be it in text and just audio without popup subtitles.

I also disagree with the fact that the abscence of experience points eliminated level grinding. We have the CP points, similar to those from Final Fantasy 12. You can still grind or harvest more CP points and max out all your characters roles. Just a different name but the grinding is definitely still there. Though what I don’t like about Final Fantasy 13 is the fact that you really can’t grind much until late in the game, I’ve started my real griding in the second last chapters. There was no point getting your characters to the top because the first half of the game was relatively easy.

Another thing I missed is traveling by air, there are so many airships shown during the cut scenes and full CG scenes but we never get to fly one like we used to.

Anyway, overall I think this game is still well worth the full price. Just because a few of the classic features are gone doesn’t mean it will be a bad game. Though its not perfect, Final Fantasy 13 is still an AAA game in my book.

ps I love Fang. Not only is she the strongest of all, physically, she also looks good. She’s like a combination of Asian, European and American. Yea basically all races combined. Yes, she is hot. There I said it!

I’ve been eyeing on this game for a long time, the English version is finally available. Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman is a JRPG style strategy game with 2D sprites. The heavily pixelated characters certainly bring back a lot of old school memories.

The “main” objective of the game is pretty simple, all you have to do is defeat the hero or heroes in every stage that venture into your dungeon. That sounds pretty simple right? But things are as straight forward as we progress to more difficult levels. This game really puts heavy emphasis on “food chain”. Basically the monsters you create needs something called nutrients in order to grow stronger and stay alive (as their health diminshes as time goes by). Another way of growing stronger and staying alive is to devour weaker monsters. This is where the game gets a bit more complex to manage because you cannot just create a huge army and think you can beat the levels, you also have to manage your nutrients and monsters.

Some monsters are better suit for physical attacks, while on the other hand some are for magical attacks. So obviously when you are up against heroes that have strong physical resistence, you will want to create monsters that are strong in magic attacks. I am still trying to get a hang of this “monster-nutrient” managment. You can also create “runes” out of undug blocks which you can summon demos upon. They are relatively more powerful, the more spirit type monster (more below) they consume the more powerful they get. They also give defense bonus to all other monsters as long as they are within the dungeon.

So that’s your objective(s), how do you fail the level? If your overlord gets captured by the heroes and successfully and literally, in a funny way, dragged out of the dungeon then its game over. But you don’t have to give up right away when the heroes found your overlord because you can still kill the heroes as long as they are still in the dungeon. Another obvious tip/hint to prevent your overlord from being dragged away is to position your overlord as deep down the dungeon as possible, again pretty common sense.

You are given a number of digs that you can do to build your dungeon, you can only dig blocks that are adjacent to blocks that have already been dug. There are also blocks that have greenish things in them, those are the nutrients. You can dig up these blocks and get your most basic slime monster will absorb and release nutrients as they navigate through the dungeon. So which brings yet another point, you really have to plan ahead and dig paths that can maximize the number of times these slimes visit each of these blocks with nutrients in them. As these blocks absorb back more nutrients, they will allow you to dig up stronger monsters. These slimies will also turn into flowers and when they blossom, they will pop out more slimies, a good way to mulitiply!

Slimes are for nutrients, there is also mana in this game and the corresponding monster type is the spirit. They pretty much act the same except its for storing/releasing mana. You get to dig these “spirit” blocks after wizard class heroes have cast spells inside your dungeon and these spells get absorbed back into the earth, or the undug blocks.

After finishing each level, you have the option to invest your “dig power” to upgrade your monsters and/or you can choose to keep them and carry them over to your next level. There are also treasure chests lying inside undug blocks as well and so far I’ve got a few skeletons to help out.

In terms of graphics, I can’t stop loving its 2D style graphics. Nothing fancy but suits this type of games. Music is pretty good as well, again nothing fancy but good enough. If you are into managing dungons, into JRPG (or just RPG) and you like to be evil for once, then I highly recommend Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman to you!

8.5/10

Normally when you play any RPG games, it will take more than 10 hours assuming you do some level grinding as well as some side missions. Yuusha 30, a JRPG that will be released in May in Japanese is basically a JRPG that will last only 30 seconds before you have to head back to any village to heal up, purchase items etc. You might think, what the hell? I don’t blame you but after watching this trailer, I just fell in love with it right away.

I mean I have never seen such crazy level grinding before, leveling up multiple times within 30 seconds is insanely fast! I guess I should call it speed leveling instead of level grinding. And that’s exactly why I’m so drawn to this game, CRAZY FAST style game play. Also the classic heavy old-school pixelated graphics brings a lot of memories back.

I’m getting the Japanese version when it comes out since the game is so simple, in a good way, there is no need to wait for the North American version. Its simple enough for me to play and navigate through different menus.

Boy, I can’t wait to do some speed level grinding!

Also check out this hilarious Japanese commercial, its the real life version of the game, it ran over 30 seconds, oh times up! I can’t get enough of all these crazy and hilarious Japanese commercials!