| NOT SO FINAL,
YET
Plenty going on in the house of Norm, so, apologies
for missing the Monday update. Again.
What's doubly ironic is that, BECAUSE of all
that's going on, I have literally nothing interesting to talk about.
The essence of blogging -- nothing to talk about, and talking about it anyway.
Let's get started.
I started playing Final Fantasy XII again --
picking up from where I left off, several months back, and having only the
barest glimmer of a memory as to what the heck was going on. I remembered
a glowing rock, and a lot of annoying fetch quests, and killing sci-fi coyotes.
There, up to speed.
I sure do hate leveling up. Well, let me rephrase
that -- I like leveling up, what I hate is that the game doesn't
have enough content to keep me entertained while I do so. Turn-based battles
are tedious enough, as is, but having to go BACK and KILL and KILL and KILL
the same dumb bats OVER and OVER and OVER just to get to level WHO CARES
so that you can KILL MORE BATS -- thank goodness the Final Fantasy universe
doesn't have a PETA.
I like that the combat in this one is a bit
more visceral than FFs of old -- even though it's still turn-based, you get
to run around while you're fighting, and that at least gives you something
to do other than constantly hammering out the 'attack' command. Sure, I know
people who like to strategize their battles -- and don't get me wrong, I
do, too; it's just that strategizing is fun exactly ONCE. After that, it's
tedious. There's no "Okay, this is the same kind of enemy as the last five
hundred enemies, so do what we just did, again" button. You stop caring if
they're weak against fire or if you need to guard against poison -- you just
go into a numb trance of beating them all to death with a hammer. POUND and
POUND and POUND and POUND until your vision clouds and your ears fill with
a roaring white noise. Cash in, back to the field.
Basically, I'm saying, if you HAVE to make
a turn-based combat RPG, break it up a little. Give the players more than
one way to level up. Make mini-games that give you EXP, funny dialogue during
the field sequences, cutscenes, whatever -- just make it so that your characters
don't NEED to backtrack. Seriously. If it was fun, I wouldn't be complaining
about it.
| Norm's Link-o-th'-Moment: |
| Drew's Script-O-Rama |
| Home of the original, better
"Day of the Dead" script! |
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