Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

Ok, so I've had this open in my editor for like three months. It might be a bit incoherent.

So, the game I had been waiting for ever since the ending credits of Final Fantasy XIII-2 finally arrived. I have really liked the XIII series despite its flaws (refreshers: XIII, XIII-2), and I have really really liked Lightning. I was a bit skeptical about having only one player-controlled character in the game. However, that one character would be Light, and the series' developers already had a pretty good streak with game mechanics. As for the story, all I could really hope for was not-a-total-catastrophe. Honestly, with the given premises, you just cannot expect anything more. This is bound to become a long post; after all it's about the conclusion of something I have grown kinda attached to. Not a flawless conclusion by a long shot mind you, but a conclusion nonetheless. I'll start with the game itself and then write some closing thoughts about the trilogy.

1. The world is dying... or is it?

From what information we had earlier, I got the impression that it would be Lightning in a practically dead world. Apparently this is not really the case; for a dying world there sure is a lot of civilization going on. Granted, just in a couple of cities and some rural villages but nevertheless, life goes on, business as usual. There's surprisingly little to indicate that the world is dying. Sure, we are told about how the chaos is going to swallow up everything (which I thought happened at the end of FFXIII-2) and that God will awaken in thirteen days to destroy this world and create a new one. The ticking clock in the UI is ultimately almost the sole indicator that we're running out of time. That aside, this could be any standard issue JRPG world. As a quirk, people have stopped aging which makes them at least 500 years old. There's also the matter of new people not being born.

The lack of enthusiasm in the previous paragraph reflects the problem: the promising theme is underplayed to an extent it might as well not exist. The time pressure, although criticized in many reviews, does work fairly well as a game mechanic. I just didn't feel it. There are multiple problems that cause this - and we'll eventually get to them - but in general the end of the world just isn't present in the world. Another thing is that having lived for over 500 years is not really reflected in the people either. The game treats it mostly like a quirk, and makes jokes about it. I would believe living for 500 years while not getting any older ever leaves a strong impression on people, but nope, the folks you meet could be just regular people from any RPG. Apparently they have been doing the exact same thing for greater part the last 500 years. Apparently children also haven't grown up mentally at all.

If we look at the time limit from a more mechanical perspective though, it does create some dynamics. Throughout the game, Light proceeds main and side quests in four different game areas. Things also do change depending on the time of the day: different monsters are encountered at different times, certain events are timed, some areas have time-limited access etc. Time doesn't run in combat, cutscenes, conversations or menus. Light can also use her newly-acquired divine powers to temporarily freeze time provided she has the Eridium Points (EP) to do so. EP can also be used for teleporting between game areas -  the alternative is taking a train, but that option always consumes time. EP is regained by fighting monsters. It's actually not all that hard to practically gain infinite time, especially on normal (EP rewards are halved on hard). Basically the player just uses Chronostasis (the time freezing ability) constantly while stopping to fight monsters frequently enough to regain lost EP.

Once you get Chronostasis abuse down, the time limit almost entirely disappears from the game. Even on my first playthrough I was able to complete almost every quest in the game, with one exception being a quest that required visiting the NPC on four or five separate days. I discovered this quest so late that I no longer had enough days left. On my second playthrough I followed a guide and completed almost every quest within the first four days. For a game that has thirteen days that's a bit... I dunno, disappointing? On the first playthrough though the mechanic was just fine. Taking care of EP economy and completing quests efficiently were to me more interesting than just casually strolling around places. It's not super easy to regen enough EP by the way, because most small monsters give very little. EP is also useful for healing and using Overclock to defeat bosses (that's a combat time freeze).

2. Yet another quest rant

I wanted to devote an entire section to the most gaping flaw in Lightning Returns: the way the game handles its pacing through main and side quests. I think this is where it shows most that the XIII saga just hasn't been a commercial success, and developers were on a really limited budget. The main quest is divided into five independent quest threads. Each area has its own main quest, and then there's one that kind of spans all four areas. As a structure there's nothing wrong with this. However, the threads are insanely short. Like, really, really short. Most players are likely to blow through the main story content in way less than thirteen game days, which leaves them with only side quests to fill the remaining days. Not cool, Square-Enix, not cool at all. You always have to wait until the last day to finish the game, which just leaves an enormous amount of downtime.

This is made worse by the fact that you cannot continue with sidequests after finishing the game. Everything except Light's stats and equipment resets so on a subsequent playthrough, you get to do every quest again (for a diminished reward; it's worth notice at this point that stats are gained only from completing quests). So, if you actually want to do as much as possible (kind of encouraged by the game), you're stuck with doing sidequests for a long time before you can finish the game. Indeed, most of the game's content is made of sidequests. It's the same disease that is currently plaguing RPGs from every corner of the world - a topic I've been writing about on more than one occasion. As an interesting twist, this time there is actually a plausible plot explanation for doing sidequests. That in itself would be a good thing, were it not for the horrible quality of quests.

The in-game explanation is this: Lightning has to find souls worth saving so that they can be reborn into the new world. Which, as a concept, is actually quite impressive - an entire game could easily be built around just that. It's a cool concept, but the game forgets its own explanation after the very first saved soul. After that, we're off to goofville, running pretty run-of-the-mill errands for whoever has an incredibly dumb problem. Some of the quest givers are pretty much the worst people around, which is in a damn direct contradiction with saving worthy souls. This overall goofiness of side quests is also at odds with the game's theme, and is indeed one of the biggest contributing factors why it just doesn't feel like the world is ending. Doing the quests themselves is pretty decent busywork gaming and kept my ludic side entertained.

The best part about these quests is hearing Light and Hope's comments about how stupid some of these tasks or people are. I guess you could find some kind of interesting metacommentary here. Then again, with all the effort put into these quests - giving some resemblance of personality to the quest givers and voice acting every single line in the game - having even the protagonist comment on their stupidity might not be what you'd want. In fact, most of the quests are so out of character for Light that I just cannot see her partaking any of that crap were it not for her savior duty (which writers conveniently put into the game). Of course in most games sidequests feel just as much out of place and out of character. Most games don't even bother with giving a plausible explanation for doing them, and I'm not sure which is worse. For this reason I find it usually best to leave majority of sidequests for the post-game - the post-game is typically something that is entirely separated from the game's fiction anyway.

Well, people did complain when there were no sidequests in FFXIII. Now we have them by the bucket. Most of the quests are truly just busywork; the only one that requires some strategy is the quest to defeat the toughest monster in the game (no pushover that one).

3. Fight in style

Alright, we've now concluded that the game is horrible. So, how come I enjoyed playing it for about 90 hours total? As with its predecessors, the answer is mostly in its mechanical side. Since we only have one character to control, the system has been pretty heavily revamped. I was actually a bit worried about this initially because there was just no way the combat system and other mechanics from XIII/-2 would work with a single character. Fortunately the developers have done the right thing: the feel is there, but the mechanics have been tailored for a single character. The fancy word of the week is Schemata, which is basically the replacement for Paradigm. Where paradigms were role configurations for a party, Schemata is more like a class configuration. I guess you can also see it as an excuse to dress Light up in different outfits. Either way, let's dive into details.

Light can have three active schemata (I guess the singular was schema, not 100% sure but I'll go with that) that she is able to switch freely between in combat. Freely as in even in the middle of being hit by an attack. Each schema is a combination of a bunch of things. For each schema, its chosen garb defines its base characteristics. All garbs have two attributes: max ATB and initial ATB. The first of these tells how much the garb increases Light's max ATB when using the schema. The latter defines which percentage of the ATB is filled at the start of battle. These are two out of three parameters of the schema's ATB economy and we'll get back to them in a bit. On top of these mandatory attributes, a garb usually has a special ability - these can be anything from simple buffs (like +10% HP) to more complex. Finally a garb can have up to four fixed abilities that cannot be unequipped (and they can have sub-abilities). Most garbs have one or two.

Each schema also has to include a weapon and a shield. Both of these can influence the schema quite heavily, and especially the weapon is at least as important in defining the schema's strengths as the garb is. The shield has less impact and is generally chosen to complement the weapon + garb combination. Each schema also has a head accessory that can have quite huge impact, and a wrist accessory that affects every schema but has less impact. Finally, the ability slots left free by the garb can be filled with abilities from four categories: attacks, magic attacks, debuffs and guards. Each ability slot corresponds with a thumb button. Like garb abilities, these can also have sub-abilities. There's also a system called ability synthesis which I'll leave to a separate section. Finally one ornament can be selected for the schema. These are just cosmetic items and their visual design is generally so awful I never used them. I'll talk about visuals a bit more, but first, more important matters.

If we go over the list, one thing worth notice is that at any time the player can have at most 12 abilities equipped and almost always at least two or three of these are fixed because of the garbs. There are roughly three different archetypes for schemata: physical attacker, magic attacker and utility. Creating one of each is a possible approach and there are advantages to doing this. Most importantly, a lot of weapons come with a preference for either strength or magic. Focusing all physical damage on a schema with a high strength weapon would therefore make a lot of sense. There's also the matter of guarding. Usually there's no need to devote a schema for guarding - even in the most extreme case you'd only want maybe 2 guard skills on a single schema. Especially in the early parts of the game it's advantageous to have a guard ability on every schema, and behind the same button, to make guarding easier in hectic situations.

Assuming we put a guard on every schema, there's nine slots left. These should go towards damage and utility. Most utility spells are situational because enemies tend to have status immunities. There's four elements in the game, and covering all of these is advantageous for obvious reasons. It would be best to cover all four with both magic and physical damage, but that would be a bit greedy. There are dual element spells in the game though, and in some situations they can cover two elements with one ability slot - or they can bite you in the ass. Optimal ability setups are generally contextual. For each of the game's four areas, usually one element can be omitted. For some elements in some areas it's good to have two abilities, on different schemata - one magic, one physical - largely because some enemies can have huge reduction to either magic or physical damage.

My opinion on this is a bit divided. I like the fact that you need to consider ability builds and in general build your schemata so that they complement each other. The downside is that there's a lot of abilities in the game that don't really see any use because by the time all the necessary abilities have been picked, there's no space left for nice-to-have abilities. Take Magnet for instance. It's a good spell for crowd control because it pulls enemies together for easy AoE annihilation. Sadly, large groups of enemies are actually quite rare which makes it a dead ability in most encounters. The speed up in large group encounters isn't that dramatic either, so it just doesn't see use. I didn't find myself using AoE physical attacks too much either, nor did I really use single target magic attacks. Internal imbalance between abilities is of course a very common problem in RPGs but the slot limitation really makes sure that none of situational abilities get used.

There's also a UI problem that really discourages switching ability configurations. The game does allow the player to create reserve schemata and swap them easily. However this feature is pretty much useless because each garb, weapon, shield, accessory and ability can only be equipped on one schema, be it active or inactive. This means that it's only useful for creating completely different schemata and that is almost never the case. It would be far more useful to be able to store variations. This could easily be done by being able to save schemata setups - much like in FFXIII-2 where the player was able to save three different paradigm setups. A lot of the garbs are also highly situational which makes them tiresome to use because of the work involved in editing schemata. It's just more convenient to have a general purpose setup and only switch a few abilities based on which area you're in.

The system is at its best when preparing for bosses. There is no single boss setup that would be good for all of them. Here the limitations actually create an interesting planning exercise because builds can have a lot of impact. Being able to squeeze in one or two extra abilities or even sub-abilities can make a big difference. It also can matter a lot on which schema each ability is placed. For me at least shuffling garbs, weapons, accessories trying to find a solid setup for a boss was fun. This is vastly helped by the fact that there are bosses that are not pushovers. Overall, with a more friendly UI this system would be great. Now it's mostly interesting for bosses only.

4. Active Time Battle - The Game

ATB economy is another factor that heavily influences all schemata choices. Each individual schema has three ATB-related components: maximum ATB, initial ATB and ATB recovery. Each ability costs a certain amount of ATB to use, with stronger abilities costing more. Maximum ATB defines how many abilities the player can cast with the schema. Initial ATB is mostly relevant in short encounters. Having a low initial ATB makes it difficult to fight because the player cannot cast a full combo of spells at the start of battle. It's usually fine to have low initial ATB on one schema and use it to finish off enemies. ATB recovery dictates how quickly the schema will come back online after spending ATB. Some recovery happens when a schema is active, but the recovery rate of inactive schemata is much higher. The basic principle is therefore to spam abilities from one schema until it runs out of ATB and then switch.

This make the system somewhat equivalent to having three characters that take turns. Somewhat, because it really depends on things like ATB recovery. This means that, for example, if you really need to dish out a lot of physical damage continuously, having physical attacks on only one schema doesn't make sense. Kind of throws a wrench into the simple approach of having one magical attack schema and one physical attack schema. Guarding also consumes ATB which means there should at all times be some ATB in reserve on a schema with a guard ability equipped. The overall ATB economy of schemata is really important in the game because running out of ATB often means the player is in deep trouble. In all honesty it mostly just means a fight takes a longer time but... yeah, running out of ATB is annoying. If you remember how stagger works in the previous installments of the trilogy, you probably know why.

The stagger system is mostly the same. While in XIII/-2 stagger power and maintenance depended on roles, in LR each ability has both of these as stats. Generally speaking, abilities with high stagger power have shit maintenance and the other way around. Having to maintain stagger is usually inefficient and I found it better to use abilities with high stagger power almost exclusively. However, when maintenance is very low, running out of ATB before the enemy is staggered pretty much forces the meter back to zero. Likewise, enemies don't stay in stagger state for very long usually, which means having no ATB available for dishing out damage when that happens is also kind of annoying. Having no ATB available for guarding of course gets beyond being annoying to being outright lethal. All in all, ATB economy is a highly important part of the game, especially when planning schemata.

There are some other changes in the stagger system too. Enemies now have varying stagger conditions which is a welcome change. The effects of staggering also vary. Some enemies are disabled for a while, whereas others simply get some bonus debuffs that increase damage taken etc. Staggering also does not seem to be so strongly connected to attack damage. Because the fighting pattern is still the same (i.e. stagger an enemy, then max DPS), it generally makes sense to tune one or two schemata towards staggering power instead of high damage. My usual setup was to have one schema for magic damage/stagger, another devoted to really fast staggering using physical attacks and a third for guarding, physical DPS and debuffing. Most of the fighting is done in the first two schemata and the third one is visited briefly to cast debuffs, guard and finish off staggered enemies. Physical attacks are in general better for pure damage because their animation is shorter.

There are a bunch of other variables that affect ATB economy. Certain subabilities have conditional ATB recovery. For instance one of the most useful garbs in the game boosts the recovery rate of inactive schemata even further. Finally, if you use Overclock (a massive slow for a short time, almost a freeze), you instantly recover full ATB for the Overclock duration and also after it ends. This makes it insanely good for building stagger or dishing out some serious damage. Basically you can spam a full ATB's worth from one schema, then OC for more attacks and then spam another full ATB's worth again. OC costs EP however, and EP is also used for healing - so it needs to be used sparingly. Note that HP is not recovered after battles and Light actually has a very limited inventory for healing items.

Limited availability of healing is indeed another important factor in this game. Long runs without shopping in between have the risk of running out of healing. This is somewhat alleviated by the game's structure as it generally doesn't have long dungeons. I am a fan of limited healing inventory, because it means the threat of damage in every battle is more real.

5. Lightning develops

Character development has taken some interesting turns. Aside from the garb system that was already discussed quite a bit, there definitely are changes. There are no levels or experience points in the game at all. Instead you get stats directly as quest rewards. This is fine, though I have to say that stat changes are rather invisible. The difference will be noticed over a long time, but the impact of a single stat point increase is not noticeable at all. This is pretty usual in JRPGs because the stat range is generally huge and stat math is not transparent. So basically the player just goes with the assumption that more is better. Because all quests can be completed in every run, there are no real choices in raising Light's stats. The more interesting powering up system is ability synthesis.

In a way this system is a watered down version of what we had in Crisis Core - the player collects tons of abilities and can then fuse them together. The fundamental difference is that the process doesn't result in new abilities - instead, the fusion result is a slightly stronger version of the ability. The system is also really simple, because abilities can only by fused with the same ability of the same level. Abilities can only be leveled up with special items, and leveling beyond 3 is limited to NG+. Basically fusing abilities mostly increases damage while leveling up decreases ATB cost on top of increasing damage. The system is grindy as hell, because in order to level up, you first have to fuse an ability to the current level's maximum. Fortunately, abilities always retain the best value in each stat when fused. All in all fusion rules are incredibly simple, and the formula for the ultimate version of an ability is straightforward.

Subabilities add a minor complication on top of the system. Each ability has a range of possible subabilities. The subability of the ability selected first is always preserved, so the inheritance rules are really simple. Although the possibilities of the system are rather lackluster, one thing I like about the ability system is its transparency. This could be the first game in the entire series where damage can actually be calculated from information offered by the game, because each ability's damage value is presented as a multiplier. Which means you just multiply either attack or magic by that, and there's your average damage. Some experimentation is still required to figure out how good animations each attack has though. The biggest problem with the system is the huge amount of abilities the player has to obtain and carry in their limited ability inventory.

There's also a way to level up weapons, shields and accessories but only in NG+. All in all, individual development systems are rather underwhelming in their simplicity. The appeal as we discussed is in constructing schemata. But why garbs cannot be also leveled up?

6. Garbs - or garbage?

The final topic that I feel needs to be addressed is the game's garb design. If we look back at the previous FF game that had characters changing dresses, the visual design was honestly not that great. Like if you compare FFX-2 dresses to actual main dresses of characters in the series, it's fairly obvious not nearly as much effort has been put into them. It's pretty safe to say the same goes for Ligthtning Returns really. Although there are like a hundred or whatever of garbs, most of them are constructed of non-unique parts. It makes the visual design a bit repetitive. It's nice that the player can color customize their garbs, but it's not so nice that the ability to do so is rather inconsistent. Some garbs only allow customization of minor details, way more often than it's justified. I feel that full color customization would have been better, because some of the color schemes are effing disgusting.

However the big question really is: how tasteful are the designs. The answer is: it really varies. Most of the stuff is in the middle ground - not really impressive, but not bad either. There are very few really cool designs, ones that actually fit Light's character well, and then you have your skimpy fan service garbs that are just way out of character. There's also the assortment of highly impractical garbs like full blown gowns, some of which do look good. Impracticality is not much of a bother for me because it's just the way things are in Japanese hero fiction in general. As for skimpiness, in this case it does disturb me because I really feel like Light is a character and I don't think dressing up in fetish catalog inventory is her preference. I mean she's a do-shit type, and I'd expect her to dress in do-shit garbs. This is more or less in line with my previous thoughts.

So there's a bunch of garbs in the game that I look at and go "yeah, I'm not gonna have Light wear that". The upside is, I don't have to because there's enough garbs in the game to choose from. Of course it will be a bit more problematic if the fetish catalog garbs had some highly desirable abilities. For whatever odd reason they actually very rarely do. Another alleviating factor is that of the three garbs in a schemata, only one is used outside battle; and during battle, there's really not much time to be bothered by how Light looks - unless you win a fight with a garb, then it's shown in the victory screen. Most importantly, only one of the garbs is shown in cutscenes. It means that as long as one out of three schemata looks decent enough, it's easy enough to just not really care all that much.

We can of course argue how sexist it is to give the player the power to dress Light up in questionable outfits. I am mostly indifferent to this, although of course I would prefer if all garbs would be a better fit for Light's personality. Of course, my personal interpretation of Light's character is unlikely to match that of other players, who may have different ideas what can be considered a suitable garb. The amount of blatant fetish garbs is actually pretty low, and the rest, I feel, are more up for interpretation. This is something I find a bit tricky in the entire female character clothing debate. Like in this case most outfits look like someone could easily wear them in public. The thing with game characters is that we really don't often know their clothing preferences because - let's be honest here - wardrobe talk is not exactly common in games. This means inappropriateness criticism - outside blatant cases - is always based on an interpretation.

In a way I think the fact that it's a single protagonist game makes things different in the sense that it's more of a roleplaying experience - in contrast, in a typical JRPG the player observes a group of characters. But here, Light is not just Light as she has been written. Instead, the Light on the screen is a mesh of "Light as written" and "me as Light" - this effect is generally stronger in games where the player gets to create their own character, but even with a premade character I still do roleplay that character to an extent. Therefore when choosing outfits for Light, it's not just about what's pleasing to my eye - it's about what I'd feel comfortable wearing if I was Light. So for me personally the ability to choose what she wears is not about objectifying her. Rather, it enhances my ability to get invested in being Light as if she was a character I created. It's also good in the sense that I'm not forced to agree with tasteless clothing choices.

All in all, it is clear that there a certain portion of garbs are pure fan service. At the same time I would argue that majority of garbs are decent in the sense that they're not objectifying. I don't really like most of the garbs, but they don't throw me off either. So yes, the designers do deserve some flak for their decisions, but anything beyond that feels a bit stretching.

Bonus: Final Fantasy XIII the trilogy. 

Spoilers!

I have two lines of though about the entire trilogy. One concerns its story as a whole while the other is more about these games as, well, games. Back when we only had FFXIII it felt a bit odd that Lightning was highlighted as the main protagonist. Sure, she is in the game and does play a role. If you played the game though, it seems to be more about Fang and Vanille. Moreover, in the second game, Light is hardly present. Of course the third game is all her. Another thing about the entire trilogy is that the stories are heavily disconnected - especially the first game. The link between the events of Cocoon and what unravels in FFXIII-2 is extremely weak. All in all the storylines in all games are really pretty weak. In a way there's no storyline for the third game to conclude unless we actually accept that the entire trilogy is all about Lightning.

This actually makes a lot of sense. It's not just that the third game is all Light. It also establishes Light's story as a link between all the games. The reason we feel Light is not really a factor in the first game despite clearly being there, is because of the role she has taken upon herself. She's there to fight, and fight only. In the second game, she does more of the same, for another cause. Who cares about gods, the third game to me is all about Light becoming a person. So in terms of what actually happens in the game, it's pretty underwhelming as a conclusion. As a conclusion to Light's growth story though, I loved it - mostly because I love Light. Somehow the most important story content in the entire game is found on loading screens where Light reflects about her own life. These screens tell a lot more about her than the three games combined.

There's a weird pattern in FF games: the ones with good story have kinda meh mechanics, and then the other way around. FFXIII trilogy is definitely of the "other way around" pattern. I think the biggest problem with the entire trilogy is the fact that the first game didn't please fans. If that game had been done with the design philosophy of Lightning Returns, the entire trilogy could be in a very different shape. I think the poor reception echoes in the sequels. It shows that the money just is not there, especially in LR. Many things in the game scream "budget solution". Likewise, both sequels have incredibly short story content. It's impossible to tell whether better reception would have had an impact, but the fact that the first game botched is pretty damn obvious. So while FFXIII-2 and especially LR provide what people wanted from FFXIII, it's way too late.

Well, I'm one of the people who are happy that, at least, the sequels didn't get cancelled.As far as modern JRPGs go, this trilogy for me is among the better ones. It all really comes back to eclipsing popularity of the entire genre, and the ever-increasing development costs for living room consoles.

Conclusion

Whew. We're finally done here. Lightning Returns leaves a lot to desire for, but overall I'm still happy with the game as it is. The same really goes for the entire trilogy. I feel a lot of good design decisions were made, and I hope SE is not discouraged, and will keep trying out new mechanics when it comes to FFXV.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

A lot of mixed reviews have been floating around the internet about this game and I have considered trying it on a few occasions. Although I expected it to quite mediocre, swords are always a plus. When it came available for free through PS+ in June, I decided to give it a spin. As expected, there was nothing revolutionary about it but nevertheless it was quite enjoyable to play. I'll explain how in just a bit. Let it just be said that this game lacks original ideas and its plot is the usual nonsensical teenage fantasy crap (well, R. A. Salvatore was involved in writing it so no surprises there). I am not above enjoying such plots every now and then but the one in Amalur made less sense than most. Anyway, story, not the point.

1. Busywork gaming

Amalur is the perfect excuse to write about busywork gaming. Unfortunately I have forgotten the source for the term but the concept is interesting. It explains the popularity of a lot of genres including a bunch of Facebook games and of course MMOs. Being an offline MMO, Amalur definitely employs a lot of busywork gaming. The appeal of busywork gaming is in stark contrast to what is usually understood as good game design. It is, roughly, progress without challenge. It is totally stress-free, and more or less comparable to watching television. Although Amalur has some degree of challenge on the highest difficulty, much of the game is about constantly doing some small tasks to improve your character.

As such it is a power trip much like Borderlands, but Amalur offers even less variety and space for creativity. Instead, it offers several different systems of busywork. Sidequests are just the start. As usual, there are a) too many of them and b) they are too boring. They don't really provide much of anything either - most of the rewards are just money and experience. The crafting systems are what actually hold more appeal to them because of their more immediate rewards. Amalur is a game ruled by equipment so it is quite easy to see how crafting your own has high appeal - especially when the crafted equipment is actually better than stuff you can find most of the time.

There are actually three different crafting systems, two of which kind of overlap a bit, and one that is entirely separate (alchemy, for potions obviously). This means a lot of collecting, and that is more or less what the player does all game long. Most found equipment goes into the grinder to see what components drop out. Surprisingly there is no grinding involved because stuff is abundant and naturally encountered while going through quests. As some readers might have noticed, I have mixed opinions about crafting systems. Amalur falls mostly into the light side, because crafting doesn't work with recipes. The outcome is the sum of components used, no mystery involved (well, except alchemy, that works with recipes).

It is indeed the fluidity of systems that make busywork in Amalur strangely relaxing. Basically everything is guaranteed to grant progress, be it experience (levels come with new crafting skills) or components. This is what makes it somewhat different from recipe-based crafting systems where new components are only useful if they are part of a recipe the player wants to make. In Amalur each component creates new crafting options - although they are not always actually useful. Customization also grants a greater sense of ownership over the created piece of equipment - and hey, you can name it too. In contrast, recipe-based systems always feel more like obtaining a piece of equipment in unnecessarily small pieces.

So although I do often bash various games about their busywork aspects, I do indeed enjoy it when it is done correctly. I can even somewhat enjoy large grinding efforts if they are done for a greater purpose. Busywork gaming is, all in all, still guaranteed progress. It is suitable for times when even gaming stress is not particularly welcome. We all do all sorts of meaningless things for the sake of progress in meaningless efforts to take our mind off other things. It is my belief that to work, busywork systems indeed have to guarantee progress. Grinding for items with super low drop rates (F U, Demon's Souls) doesn't fit the bill.

I'll try to find the book section or article I used as the source for this, it is more interesting than my rambling about the subject.

2. Sidequest, man, what happened to you?

Another sidequest rant, yay. They are a freaking plague though, someone has to stop the madness. As a concept the sidequest has existed for god knows how long, but somewhere along the line something happened to it. It has become a bureaucracy of faceless tasks. While some games like Borderlands 2 grant a great deal of personality to their sidequests, the whole thing is now a system. You have your quest log with its completion ratios, milestones and cute little check markers for done quests. Every corner of the world has some helpless or ten in need of your help (while you should be busy saving the world).

I don't have a problem with sidequests as a concept. The problem is their modern "quantity over quality" design philosophy. I would not be surprised to find out that some games have generated sidequests and sadly, those would not be that much worse than what we have now. Every RPG seems to want to provide 100 hours of gameplay, regardless of the length of its main content. The most disturbing thing about this pandemic is the flood of new quest logs entries upon entering every single new area. It's just overwhelming. At first you might try to do all just to be sure, then be on the lookout for ones with nice fat rewards and in the end it's just fuck-all, I want to finish this game.

Some sidequests in Amalur are however reminiscent of better days - which is why I included this section in the first place. Remember Baldur's Gate 2 where most sidequests would actually take you to an entirely new place or in the very least have an actual plot of their own? In comparison, modern sidequests are mere tasks at best. Every now and then though, there are ones that make an effort. Amalur has faction quests, a set for each of the game's six or so factions. Unlike your bread and butter tasks, these quests actually form a side plot of multiple quests. Although the quests themselves are equally bland as the rest, the continuity does go a long way toward creating better experience.

I call for a sidequest reform. If a quest doesn't involve any sort of joy of discovery, be it a side plot or, a new area or an exciting enemy, it should not be in the game. Want to add gameplay hours? Make the quests longer, without increasing their number. I take one long quest any day over ten small ones. Of course we all know that creating new content is expensive, which is why they don't do this. So here's a radical idea: don't have sidequests at all if there's no real budget for them. I know the reply will be "but you don't have to do them!" but there never is any indication how optional they really are. Games set different expectations, but it is usually not implied in any way.

This puts the player in a weird position. In one hand, they want to of course get any advantage they can in form of rewards - but, on the other hand, doing too many sidequests is going to make the main quest a cakewalk. BG2 actually had a good indicator for what is enough: once the player had enough gold to proceed in the main story, they were likely to also have enough levels to have an enjoyable challenge in the main quest. Of course a lot of people probably did most of the quests anyway because, you know, they were actually interesting.What purpose do sidequests serve in your game? Perhaps it is something the player would also like to know.

Another thing to consider is sidequest density. The further in the game the player is, the more likely they are bored to death with repetitive sidequests so maybe new ones shouldn't be popping as frequently. It's easy to say "don't do them", but the fact that they are there, in your quest log, is always nagging you. We don't like unfinished business after all. So consider this: after doing sidequests by the bucket, do players really feel like being showered in even more? The busywork appeal only lasts for so long, and after that there's just the nagging. At first there's the excitement of exploring a new world, and sidequests can be good guides - but this does not last forever. 

It feels like this sidequest business is for RPGs what multiplayer is to other genres. You just have to have it, says the publisher. I don't see anyone bashing a game for not having enough sidequests.

3. Ability trees and combat balance

Although an offline MMO by design, Amalur does have a surprisingly decent combat system. As far as action RPGs go though, it is fairly standard. You have your strikes, blocks, dodges and spells - the latter not too many in number, even when playing a mage. It's not a revolution, but it works. At leats on hard difficulty there's even some challenge. This is created by following the basic principles of stagger and recovery mechanics. Everything has a longish recovery time, which opens a careless player to enemy attacks. Enemy attacks stagger, so the player has to go on defensive mode. All in all, a functional system. Now let's talk about abilities.

I have talked about over-conservative skill design before. In general, it means that the designers have been too afraid of imbalances. The end result is that all abilities in the game are rather unremarkable. I did not fully explore the other two trees of course, but at least the Might tree (for warriors, obviously) had mostly abilities that were truly bland. You have your passive number bonuses and a handful of actives. You won't see the effects of most abilities. One active that is supposed to be crowd control has such a long casting time that it becomes almost useless. Another ability doesn't even work as described (which would have made it useful).

What usually happens though is that there is one ability that outshines everything else. It may sound unremarkable on paper, or it might even be disguised. In this case it was disguised by making it look weak on level 1. You can't actually see the upper levels beforehand, so there is no way of knowing. Actually my alarm bells should have rung though, even with the -50% armor penalty on the first level. You see, the ability makes the player immune to stagger. On highest level, the armor penalty is gone too. Now, stagger immunity is huge. The meaning of stagger (aka hit stun) has been discussed before, but let me remind you.

The biggest threat in games like this is often not the damage from a single attack, but the stagger. Groups of enemies are the most dangerous because they can engage the player in a stagger chain. Since being staggered typically prevents and intercepts attacks, it is a big deal. A huge deal really. Stagger is what gives fighting its dynamic and prevents it from becoming a DPS mashfest. Being immune to stagger is a massive advantage to the point that I still consider poise to be broken in Dark Souls. See, if your attacks cannot stagger the enemy, they lose all of their threat. The opponent has no reason to respect your attacks, and attacking becomes a loser's game.

Poise in Dark Souls had drawbacks and it could have been balanced with more consideration. Too few things in the game punished having high poise, and too many rewarded it. Poise made you slow, because only heavy armor granted it. Being slow was not big enough of a deal in the game but it could have been. Fighting in melee against someone with high poise in online was a game you could only win by not playing. Whenever you attacked, they could also attack and possibly follow up with more while laughing your stagger off. The best way to fight them would have been to wait for their attack and parry it, but they had no reason to attack really. So, basically no one had incentive to attack.

Back to Amalur though. So if poise, which wasn't always full stagger immunity mind you, is broken, how would you think of full stagger immunity with no drawbacks? Okay it had a 20 second duration, but that also is quite a long time. However with two linked abilities, this one became absolutely game-breaking. Here is what you can get on top of full stagger immunity, from the same skill: a chance to reflect damage back to the enemy and a chance to steal health. Not only is the threat of stagger gone, you don't actually need to care about most damage either because your uninterruptable attacks will constantly heal you.  This is honestly so ridiculous that I do not see how it got through playtesting. After obtaining this package the game does become a trivial mashfest.

This ability is so dominating that everything else in the tree becomes redundant. It solves every possible situation in the game, for free (practically at leat - there's a mana cost but you can regen it between fights). Furthermore, there is nothing interesting in the ability tree so it's not like there are even any cool alternative ways to play a fighter. There are no drawbacks, so it is impossible to design around it - anyone with full stagger immunity will be at least as good in every situation as  those without, and often better (in Amalur, always better). As I said I didn't try the other two trees but I somehow doubt their ability to compete with this insanely broken ability. It is simply impossible to die with this ability.

In closing, I want to stress this: never ever give stagger immunity to the player for free. Even if it has a cost, make sure the cost is steep enough, because stagger immunity is very likely to break your game. It's good to throw on some enemies if you want to make them really nasty though. Stagger immunity in a nutshell: Enemies yes, players no.

Conclusion

I did enjoy my trip to Amalur for most of its duration. Although the game is really nothing special, it does have enough appeal and can be rushed quite quickly once it starts to get boring. As far as offline MMO experiences go, it is not bad at all. It's got nice scenery. Very lazy dungeon design though, as I was able to recognize certain "building blocks" that were present in many dungeons, looking exactly the same. Should you play it though? If you don't mind the potential time sink factor, you are probably better off playing a solid MMO for much of the same appeal. Likewise, if you are looking for some good sword and sorcery action, there are the Souls and Witchers. However if you are like me and have actually played most of the important titles already and yearn for some heroic, light adventure then go ahead.

Xenoblade Chronicles

For a JRPG buff there are a lot of reasons to be interested in Xenoblade Chronicles, especially since it's been a while since its release. First and foremost, it has the magical Xeno prefix put there to pay homage to the other Xeno-games: Xenogears and Xenosaga. It has been created by Monolith Studios, who also created Xenosaga and (some of them) were involved in the creation of Xenogears. The reason this prefix carries so much weight is that as far as game plots go, both gears and saga are among the most complex. Particularly Xenosaga, which was originaly planned to run for seven episodes in total. Unfortunately it was cut down to three and it shows quite a bit. The third and final episode does tie together the main plot but leaves a lot of unfinished or hastily finished business in its wake.

Second, Xenoblade promised to honor JRPG traditions - the game has a large world and lots and lots of things to do. It also has epic length as I very recently discovered. Finally, the game has had a massively positive response in both reviews and among the gaming community. The biggest reason that was holding me back from playing it was honestly its platform: the Nintendo Wii. Let me just say that Wii is possibly the biggest disservice to the entire industry ever and a joke at best as a gaming system. Having seen how poorly The Last Story performed on the system I was not very enthusiastic towards experiencing Xenoblade Chronicles. Now that I have laid the game down, I will have to immediately say that this game is not worth all the hype. I will however have to admit that it was, in the end, a good JRPG despite its very slow start.

1. Timescale balance

The first topic therefore is what I think is actually quite a common issue in JRPGs in general: they are almost always more interesting after a good many hours into the game. Not always, but often - usually when this is not true, it is because the latter half of the game is botched horribly. What I mean to say is, these games have a tendency to start slow both story and game mechanics wise. Often the very beginning is actually quite fast storywise because something needs to happen to get things going. After this a lot of games start to falter a bit. Either they fail to introduce anything thrilling for quite a while because the characters are resolving the initial issue (which often is not the really interesting part of the plot - interesting twists later in the story are a norm in this genre).

This is what happens with Xenoblade too. The first half of the game is basically spent traveling from point A to B, through a cavalcade of points in between. For me it simply failed to inspire the sense of an epic journey - something Final Fantasy X did for me - which meant it was literally just a series of new places and rather lame subplots. Perhaps the biggest failing plotwise in Xenoblade was however that for the entire first half of the game you could easily guess what the plot twist would be after the destination was finally reached (it is the same twist I referred to in the earlier post about women in games). In a way it just fails to give the player anything to chew on. One of the major advantages of Xenosaga in particular was that it had the player going "wtf" from almost the beginning. Actually the saga's plot is so complex that the player might still be all "wtf" by the end of it but hey, that's another topic entirely. I like the sense that something bigger is clearly going on.

Another, once again rather common problem in all games that have some kind of character development, is that in the beginning the player has very limited options and therefore mechanics can become really boring. This happens in Xenoblade on massive scale - partly because I think there are some flaws in its combat design - in such a way that the game is not exactly the most thrilling to play for the first twenty or so hours either. Quite honestly if I had made this analysis halfway into the game, you would be reading some serious bashing. At this point I actually was of the opinion that the game is utter crap and massively overhyped. A word of warning: if you want to like this game, be patient enough to actually get to the likeable parts. Unless you like the design which I believe a lot of people do, because it is reminescent of another JRPG title that reviewers liked and I find outrageous.

The bottom line is, way too often JRPGs fail to truly spark any interest in the player for the first few hours - this is strangely forgiven by the time players get to the good parts. However if we stop to consider, some of the worst offenders are not particularly good before the player has put in enough time to have beaten most games in any other genre. That is not good design and it is no wonder the genre is no more massively popular. It also outrageously common to have a certain plotline in the game that requires the player to rummage through several dungeons or other places while nothing really happens to move the game forward. "Now we are prepared to face the villain... almost. We just need you to get four pieces of this ancient relic from opposite corners of the world." that kind of thing. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing happens.

2. The single player MMORPG syndrome

This is what links Xenoblade to one of my least favourite JRPGs I have played: Final Fantasy XII. This syndrome is exactly what the name suggests: the game borrows its tropes and mechanics heavily from massively multiplayer online games and tries to make them work in a single player experience. The problem of course is that they just fail miserably. The gameplay mechanics of MMORPGs are - on average - frigging boring, especially in the beginning when there are very few abilities to use. My guess is that they have been optimized for playing with latency and in general to be playable by people who are not so great with their keyboard+mouse-fu. In case you have somehow missed the World of Warcraft school of fantasy combat, it is built around abilities with cooldowns and aggro mechanics.

We will get to the combat in a sec, but first let's talk about another trope that is ubiquitous in MMORPGs: quests. Lots and lots of quests. So it is in Xenoblade; the amount of quests in this game is simply overwhelming. When there are so many quests, it is immediately clear that almost all of them will be of the simple variety: collect items or kill monsters. As if it wasn't enough to have a massive amount of quests, the game also has one annoying aspect: quests are given by people, and in some clumsy attempt to appear more realistic, the people are not always available. Instead some people are only available during certain hours, sometimes only in certain weather. I could maybe understand people missing from the streets at night but making it also dependent on the exact time of the day is just really frustrating. I was already flooded with quests so this didn't bother me that much, except when I tried to turn in some quests and the recipients were not around.

The game does feature the ability to at least fast-forward the game clock. Still this is just not the way to do things. The game also gives horribly little information about the quests - like for instance what god forsaken hours the quest recipient would be as kind to be available. This is one thing I have always hated about JRPGs: some stuff is hidden in such irrational ways that the only sensible way to go about finding it is using a guide. Usually side quests are particular to the area where you get them, but when they are not, the game sure as hell doesn't bother to give information about where it would be possible to find the required items. The world is very large, and each area contains a huge amount of different enemies, so trying to find things is a massive time sink. Which I ultimately opted not to do.

As stated, the battle system in the game is very MMORPG-inspired. Simplified yes, and somewhat conforming to JRPG tropes, but MMORPG nonetheless. The player controls one character while two other party members are AI-controlled. Characters attack automatically when close enough to a target. They can also use abilities called arts, each of which has its cooldown time. Positioning matters but only slightly: attacking from behind or sides affects how some arts work. Another thing that matters is aggro, which is used to determine who the enemies will be targeting. It's not a bad system, but it is kind of boring. There is not that much strategy involved because the effect times of most abilities are way shorter than their cooldowns. The best single mechanic is the break-topple-daze system that allows enemies to be disabled for a while and take more damage.

The single player MMORPG syndrome is not a collection of aspects, but rather a general feeling. In Xenoblade it is very strong, and I think it is a bit lazy design. The biggest problem with the syndrome is that it is definitely not the combat mechanics that keep people playing MMORPGs. It is mostly the MMO and for some players the RP. The design of the G is actually not that exciting - at least not the combat part. I do know that in some MMORPGs the combat design is actually more exciting (e.g. Guild Wars, Tera) but the basic form seen in World of Warcraft is effing boring. It likely gets better later in the game as it eventually does in Xenoblade. However, over 20 hours is a long time for combat to be not that interesting.

3. Conservative RPG design

The real problem with combat in Xenoblade is not its similarity to MMORPG style but rather all the character development aspects that affect it. Xenoblade has a very conservative character development scheme in which advancement is carefully tied to plot progress. Higher levels in arts become available only when the player discovers manuals. Equipment is gradually upgraded in every area. Even the game's built-in crafting system puts limitations on how high leveled gems the player can produce at a given stage in the game due to the availability of materials. The problem with being so conservative is in the fact that it makes half of the things kind of redundant. The game does not really need scaling equipment because their scaling speed is about the same as character level advancement. This is something I have always had trouble understanding: if equipment is just better numbers, why have equipment in the first place.

Granted, there are pieces of equipment that have fixed games attached to them, which gives them special abilities that are usually slightly better than what is possible to produce at that time using slotted inventory and crafted gems. The gem system is mostly fine, although the crafting itself has unnecessary complexity. I found myself using the same two characters to produce every single gem during my game, and was more than happy with the results. The system probably has more to give but I didn't see any way to "jump ahead of the curve" - so to speak. The choices that really matter are which arts to equip and level up, and which gems to equip in slotted equipment. Skill trees are very simple, and the skills themselves are quite conservative in how much they affect the game.

It is not as bad as, say, The Last Story, but I still felt that my control over how my party fought was not the same level as I would have liked it to be. It is true that Xeno games in general have never been outstanding in this sense, but I do feel that some of the Xenosaga episodes did have more strategical options available. As far as options are concerned there is one factor that I found especially weird: practical party compositions are actually pretty limited. It is good that characters have different strengths and in Xenoblade every character has a quite distinct role. However there are two or three cases where this is simply taken too far: only one character can cast a shield against enemy talent arts; only one character can deal serious magic damage; and only one character is good enough at healing to actually have an impact.

The first and second are borderline fine, because there are not that many enemies where you would require their expertise, but the last one is really horrible. The way the game is designed, there tends to be only one way to fight: the slugfest - outlast your enemies. This topic was earlier discussed in this blog and I concluded that games where the slugfest is the only option are rather weak. In slugfests, when fights get prolonged, it is simply impossible to last very long without a healer. This makes that one character a requirement for any serious fights and with a party consisting of three characters, that only leaves two choices for the player. Granted, getting through bread and butter combat can be done without a healer but for every boss encounter you will need this character. There simply is no other way to reduce incoming damage.

Another problem with this whole conservative approach is that the player simply doesn't get the feeling of being in control in fights. There is simply not enough agency. There are some systems in the game that do increase the sense of agency - they will be discussed shortly. Nevertheless the sense of being in control is simply quite diminished. Although you control a character in real time, there is only so much you can do because none of the arts have really drastic effects. The designers have simply done too good a job of making sure the game is in balance - the result is overbalanced. Although the characters are different, the fighting experience is alarmingly similar with every party composition. The only exception is whether you have a healer or not. Controlling other characters yourself also gives a distinct experience, but the overall strategies remain the same.

Xenoblade does get more interesting around the 30 hour mark but it still is simply not as interesting as many other JRPGs that give a better sense of agency. That, and the mechanic itself is not that satisfying to play, largely due to its MMORPG influences. In lot of JRPGs tactical variance is in fact quite low, but usually the tactics are more satisfying to carry out. Often this is linked to how well skills combo with each other. This is another thing that Xenoblade does not do as much as I could have hoped. Monolith Studios does know how to build more intriguing skill systems into a game as was evidenced by Xenosaga 2 and 3 - they have just chosen not to do so.

4. One meter to rule them all

One central mechanic that the game itself somewhat underemphasizes is the party meter. At first I thought it was a bad idea but once I figured how to manipulate it better the game actually became quite a bit more enjoyable. The meter is more or less the lifeblood of your party because it does a variety of things. The meter has three segments, and most things cost one segment. The things you can do with it are: revive an ally; get revived by an ally (if there are no segments left, you lose the battle when the main character falls); warn an ally about an incoming art (see below); perform a tri-attack which uses all three segments. The fact that you need the same bar for both the combo attack and revival made little sense at first because it made combo attacks very suicidal to perform (lose 3 revives/warnings for a combo? No thanks!).

The warning system is noteworthy. Whenever an enemy art would incapacitate or put a character on very low HP or disable them severely, the player is given a foresight of the incoming attack and (usually) 8 seconds to react (12 if it is a talent art). If the player chooses to warn another party member, they can instantly cast one art with the warned character out of normal sequence. Most importantly, even abilities that are on cooldown can be cast, and casting arts from warning doesn't put them on cooldown. So, basically it is a free cast whenever something bad is about to happen. The player can actually warn both allies for the price of two segments. The system is in no way limited to defensive abilities, it can also be used to get a quick powerful attack in hope that it will kill the enemy. It can even be used to activate buffs that are on cooldown.

It is still slightly unclear to me what factors are involved in raising the meter. Three things raise it: critical hits, triggering special effects of some arts and seemingly random affinity moments. The last is a bit unclear because I did not experience anything that controlled when you get the affinity opportunities in battles. The first two are something that the player can actually build a strategy around by using characters with easy access to high critical chance or arts that have easy-to-trigger special effects and low cooldowns. These things allow the use of tri-attacks actually quite frequently. Furthermore, tri-attacks are usually used to cause a break-topple-dazzle combo which incapacitates an enemy for a moment. The daze can also be refreshed when it wears off (the window is quite short) which means you can follow a tri-attack combo with prolonged knockdown.

My basic setup was often able to fill two segments of an empty party meter during this period of daze. This allowed almost non-stop tri-attacks. Some enemies are immune to it though, because they are immune to break. Some enemies also have a defensive mechanism that makes them return a ton of damage when they are attacked while toppled. This effect can be removed temporarily, but only by one character in the entire game. The tactic is somewhat reminescent of Persona 3 Fes where it was possible to keep an enemy in an infinite knockdown loop but better in the sense that the loop cannot be infinite (I think, I haven't tried too hard). The fact that it doesn't always work also makes other tactics useful. Tri-attacks on the other hand are not very useful if they cannot be used to cause a daze, largely because without that temporary lockdown the player will be left entirely without party meter segments for a while.

Especially towards the end of the game, the party meter played a central role in tougher battles. The battle was then more about keeping the meter high, especially because of the warning system that allowed instant free heals for the whole party whenever someone was about to die. The warning system actually has a strong familiriaty to it - it reminds me of the boost system that was used in Xenosaga. It allowed characters to skip ahead in turn order and enabled both reactive plays and ability combinations to be carried out effectively. I am quite fond of systems like this one that allow the player to mess with the normal turn order. Although Xenoblade doesn't use turns what with being real-time and all, the warning system allows the player to ignore ability cooldowns.

5. World exploration

After playing the game I kind of know why it is held in high regard by many. Undeniably the world is interesting. Civilizations existing on top of two dead titans is a concept you don't see every day. Most importantly, this shows in the game. Look up and somewhere in the distance you can see a motionless metallic face. Environments are quite varied, especially on the starting titan. Most importantly, the local fauna on each area is credible. Enemies of very high levels can be found among the normal residents which makes it feels less like everything has been put there for the player. A similar choice was made in the largest area in Final Fantasy XIII. Like in FFXIII, monsters are visible to the player and can be avoided. Battle also takes place on the world map itself, like in FFXII, and prolonged battles can sometimes be joined by wandering monsters.

Enemies are divided into four categories based on how they get aggressive towards the player. The first category never does, they just exist and will only fight if attacked first; the second uses sight to detect the party; the third uses hearing (shorter range, but 360 degree detection); and the last type is drawn to magic being cast. Because the enemies can flock to battles that have already started, some consideration is required from the player before starting to fight. I have a divided opinion of this system - I find it fine when enemy patrol routes are not too long and it is somewhat predictable when more will join the fight. However in some areas there are flying monsters with monstrous patrol ranges that can just pop into a fight. I did find a rather silly way to deal with battles with too many monsters: hit and run.

Battles end when the player runs far enough, and characters recover their hit points very quickly outside of combat. Monsters also recover their health, but dead ones stay dead for quite a long time. Therefore it is possible to run in, kill one enemy and run away to heal. Rinse and repeat. Reminds me of the very old times with dungeon crawling games like Eye of the Beholder where you could literally run in, hit, and quickly run back (one step) to make any retaliation miss. In Xenoblade this strategy is brought about because escaping is quite easy, especially when all three characters are still alive. Once aggro is off the main character, the player can just run out of combat with no risk at all. Bursting down weaker enemies one by one in this way is an effective tactic but I did find it to be rather tedious. Fortunately it was not needed very often.

Unfortunately, besides monsters there is not much in the world to discover. Collectables are scattered here and there randomly (they also respawn randomly) but the only thing that truly drives the player to explore is the scenery. I have to say that I was quite positively suprised by the game's drawing distance. This made the scenery actually look quite impressive, despite the Wii's lack of visual processing power.

Conclusion

Ultimately the biggest issue I had with Xenoblade Chronicles was that it took so long for the game to truly get started. The first 20 to 30 hours simply were not up to the hype because nothing interesting was going on in the story and battle mechanics were not particularly varied yet. Once the game finally upped the stakes by a few notches I found it to be a solid JRPG. However it wasn't particularly spectacular at any point. Most aspects of the game are "only" good. Characters, plot, mechanics... none were really spectacular. Oh and why is that if there is a silly looking race in the game, they have to behave like idiots too? I can understand why a lot of people liked this game. After all, a lot of people also liked FFXII - which is possibly the worst JRPG I have ever played - and Xenoblade does have a lot of similarities.

Curiously enough, the fact that this game was for Wii did not bother me much at all. After the framerate nightmare of The Last Story I was prepared for much worse, but in fact most of the time Xenoblade ran just fine. It is possible that I would have liked this game more in the past. Now it suffered from rather high expectations and simply did not live up to them. The plot was nowhere near the complexity of other Xeno titles. Characters and dialogue were pretty standard stock, and I found voice acting - both English and Japanese - to be really tired. It was not quite as bad as The Last Story, but quite close. I guess the low budget of Wii development carries over to other aspects of the game too. The seriousness of the plot was also hurt by the fact that armor changed character appearance and at some point in the game the best armor - for a really long time too - was practically underwear.

Xenoblade did in many ways resemble JRPGs of the old times. It is just that it retained some things that could have been left into the past, but most importantly I think most of the modernizations were misses. This trend of likening single player RPGs to MMORPGs is a bad direction to head into. Sadly it is quite prevalent. Stop the madness and start making good single player games dammit.

Borderlands 2

One interesting and sharp contrast between the video games industry and the film industry is that game sequels often surpass the originals. In the movie industry sequels are often obvious cash grabs but in the games industry it is more common for a sequel to raise rather high expectations. The reason for this is relatively straightforward to see: the first game is a risky gamble with a certain budget. Within the confines of a budget and a production time it is not possible to gather the sheer amount of player feedback that is gotten after the game's release. Furthermore if the original sells, the sequel is guaranteed to have a solid budget. Additionally since the concept has been proven, the sequel only needs to enhance it. It almost seems like a lot of games need that second iteration to really shine. Sometimes the second iteration is called "enhanced edition" but in the current market situation, more often than not it is called a "2".

Such is the case with Borderlands, a conceptually very sound and mostly importantly fun game that nevertheless had a bunch of gaping flaws. Uninteresting plot, repetitive scenery/quests and rather colorless character abilities were the three primary complaints about the game. Being a long game, even though it had four different characters, its replay value was quite low. At least for us single player types. Thankfully the game got a load of attention and a sequel was guaranteed. It was indeed one of those games where you could instantly see how much better it can become. Not least because of the DLC quality: 3 out of 4 DLC adventures were significantly better written than the game itself!

1. Goodbye generic side quests

For me this improvement is perhaps the one with the most impact. In the first game, side quests were dull. Your run-of-the-mill MMO stuff: farm or kill things with a an entirely irrelevant text description of why exactly this should be done. Almost none of the side quests in Borderlands 2 are collected from bounty boards and even the ones that are still involve NPC communication throughout the quest. Moreover, side quest assignments range from mildly weird to absurd. This combined with the well-written humorous dialogue during the quests makes most of them just as memorable as the main quest itself - if not more so! On the first play through the game side quests are not done just to obtain rewards - you actually want to experience them in all their wackiness.

The importance of meaningful side quests is often overlooked by game developers. The rationale probably goes something like "people who do side quests do them anyway" which to some extent is likely to be true. Quality does trump quantity here. Advertising that your game contains a thousand quests is a clear signal that these quests are going to be generated and repetitive in nature, done only for the sole purpose of obtaining the reward. Granted, sometimes there is the element of challenge involved too but that seems to be the rare exception. At worst, such games are mere skinner boxes where the player is pressing the lever repeatedly in hope of a reward. I highly prefer the Borderlands 2 way where some quests are rather lenghty and they are fewer in number, but they all form an experience that can actually be called content without feeling cheap.

Of course it takes resources to write quality quests. Each quest in Borderlands 2 has most likely required some effort from an actual writer, and of course from the quest designer. They didn't come out of a spreadsheet. The tough truth about resources and effort in regard to side quests is that if you don't have what it takes to do good ones, how about not doing them at all? Why spend any effort at all into making some ridiculous attempts to make the game longer when you could spend all your limited resources on the core game? Each quest should provide something to the player: real gameplay and/or content. By real gameplay I mean gameplay that is unique to this quest, something that makes the player feel they are actually doing something meaningful or challenging.

Borderlands 2 mostly provides meaning through dialogue content and that is fine. The actions that are taken during side quests are more or less the same stuff that the player keeps doing throughout the game: shoot and loot. That is what we came here for anyway. Another approach that I wholeheartedly approve is the opposite: no dialogue content, just challenge. Post-game dungeons and bosses fall under this category. The connecting factor is that both of these approaches provide meaning to the player. In the Borderlands 2 approach the meaning to the player is to enjoy the more or less insane ramblings of the eccentric NPC cast of the game. Although we may look at this additional story content as a reward for completing the side quest,  I would argue that it is more meaningful to the player to do the side quest because it grants the quest giver more personality.

I care a whole lot about NPC personality. Whether they are believable or not is of no particular consequence as long as it is entertaining to listen to their banter. Because I care, it is also more meaningful for me to complete an assignment for a character. Although them liking me for it is just a piece of code inside the game's logic, the effect persists. Even research shows that humans project a personality on products even when one is not desgined into it, so it is no wonder that products that do have built-in personality can affect emotions. Since the interpersonal context has been made meaningful, there is more motivation to complete the given quest. I could go on about the personality of video game characters for another blog post or two, but we've gotten quite sidetracked already. The conclusion of this rambling is that the side quests in Borderlands 2 are successful because they are written in a way that enhances the quest giver's personality.

2. Dem skill trees

A big issue in the first Borderlands was the inability of skill choices to affect gameplay. Most skills were merely simple buffs that gave a bonus percentage to something - usually damage with one weapon type or another.While this does have some consequence (primarly, which weapons to use) it doesn't really create different styles to play. The fact that skill tree choices do not have a huge effect on gameplay might be seen as positive in more action-oriented genres, but Borderlands has strong RPG roots. And in an RPG, the way you build your character is supposed to have a large impact on how you play the game. It is about creating a character that suits your own play style. If it is not possible to emphasize play style through skill selection, the character is bound to lack identity.

This is actually of particular consequence in more action-oriented games like Borderlands because player skill is a significant factor in choosing a play style. A player who is a great sniper is likely to be more successful with a skill build that emphasizes high, single shot, long range damage even if strictly mathematically a short range assault build would be better. Because the choice of optimal play style is affected by game-independent factors (player ability), there is less inclination towards the infamous cookie-cutter builds that are plaguing a lot of MMOs. Since there is an opportunity to create interesting skill choices even without a completely balanced skill tree, the developers of Borderlands should have felt obligated to do so. It is not a surprise then than one of the most anticipated changes promised for Borderlands 2 was an improved skill system.

On the surface the skill system looks alarmingly similar to its predecessor. Each character has one active special ability and three specialized skill trees which modify stats and the special ability. Again a lot of these skills are numerical increases to some aspect or another. Skill trees are divided into levels, and taking a total of 5 assignments in a tree opens up the next level. There are definitely more skills to choose from though. While there are no additional active skills, there are a whole lot of conditional skills, some of which stack. The important difference is that a lot of skills now do clearly affect play style and that they combo with each other. Another interesting aspect is that since the game is so action-heavy, skills often work differently in use than what they look like on paper. This would be horrible without respecs, so fortunately the game offers an inexpensive way to do so. Now it is actually interesting to experiment with different builds.

Dividing each character's skills into three specific trees is a good solution in at least one sense: for players who do not want to bother with experimenting, it is easy to see which tree to build for a certain play style. At the same time, a more adventurous gamer may find that their build can be improved by taking skills from two separate trees or even all of them. The only limitation is that such a diverse skill build cannot involve any skills very deep in the trees. This might be good for reducing the possibility of overpowered comboes, although during my playthroughs with two different characters I didn't really come up with any. Regardless, one tree is likely to by any build's primary tree which defines the core play style. There are basically 3 hard play styles for each character, creating a total of 12 options (15 with the DLC character). Most importantly, builds now really feel different to play.

3. Apply polish - lots of

The improvements are not huge but together they make for a much stronger game. However it doesn't stop there. Borderlands 2 also has its share of smaller improvements, most of which are tied to giving the game more distinguished character. One of the best ideas is to give different equipment manufacturers their own identity and manufacturer ability. This guarantees that weapons in the game behave in a wider variety of ways than they would with just randomly generated stats. It is different from unique special abilities because after trying one weapon from a manufacturer the player can project how different guns from that manufacturer would be like.Ultimately it is still the hard numbers that define which weapons to use but in case of somewhat equal stats, weapon manufacturer can be a large factor in decision-making.

Another thing I liked is that there is now a lot more variation for what special abilities shields can have. The decision of which shield to choose now has more factors then its sheer stopping power. Many shields have offensive qualities which can be used to counterbalance their weaker protection. The addition of more variation also extends to enemies. On a less game mechanical note, environments are also way more varied. No more endless wasteland; we have snow fields, grass, industrial complexes and towns. Finally, the game has been finished with a lot of care paid to the details. Everything is consistent with the game's slightly disturbed character. This shows in more or less everything, loading screen tips included. Simply put, the entire package is very charming.

The game also has increased challenge built into it in the form of a new game+ and a "raid boss" which I have yet to defeat. The first DLC brought another similar challenge. I'm looking forward to killing them all at some point. Another strong point is the improved co-op play that has been made quite effortless and better supports players who are at different stages of the game.

Conclusions

Borderlands 2 is a prime example of a second iteration that really brings an already functional concept to blossom. It addresses all the flaws of its predecessor in an agreeable manner. It also goes beyond, with more effort put into writing in particular. While predictable, the main plot is enjoyable to follow and, as noted, the side quests have been superbly written. All the strengths of the original have been retained and really the only thing I missed was Lilith's phasewalk ability. Another "problem" with the game is that getting to know all characters does take a lot of time. I have yet to manage this feat but I got a strong feeling that I am not yet done with this game.