Sorry about missing last week's post. I had to adjust to the new school schedule I have going for me. I'll try to make up for it this post.

I made it to the last boss, Skeith in .Hack//Infection. The last dungeon in the game is a breeze to get through and when you reach the end, you get totally destroyed. I mean the boss battles ramp up the difficulty in the game 10 fold out of no where. This makes grinding worse than normal because you have to grind things that are super weak and easy so you can battle something that seems to be ridiculously leveled. I only tried to fight him once before choosing to go back to grinding. I definitely need to have maximum healing items on myself and my party members. Maybe I'll do some more grunty farming or try to get all of the unlocks in the books of ryu. I want to beat the game soon but I'm not sure how likely it will be since I have a new game on the block.

After much convincing and looking at sale prices, I picked up Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn for the PS3. This is the second (or third if you get technical) MMO in the FF franchise. I'm a total sucker for the series and an MMO seemed like a fun way to fill my time so I loaded it up. It took some doing though, I had to clear a bunch of space off of my PS3 hard drive (Deleted Gran Turismo 5) and bought myself a USB keyboard so I could type in the game.

The game controls very well on the PS3, a feat that I did not believe could be accomplished. It assigns a hot bar to each d-pad and button so you switch hot bars by holding R1. The skills on the hot bars are accessed by holding R2 or L2 and then hitting a d-pad direction or button. It establishes a nice symmetry and feels very intuitive. Switching between targets can be a little strange but mostly it is done by hitting directions on the d-pad while targeting something. The only thing that does not control well is the map. The map is quite difficult to navigate and I often find myself struggling to tell where I need to go. When a quest is in a different area from where you are, they just put it out in this gray blob. It could be that I haven't explored the map a lot yet or it could be the PS3 navigation for the map. I wonder if it's any better on the computer.

I'm hoping to make a white mage character but first I need to level up my conjurer class before I can get the specific job of white mage. It's an interesting system especially since you can freely switch between classes just by changing your weapon. Your level is not an overall number but linked to whatever class you are at the time. Final Fantasy 14 definitely has some different mechanics than the standard MMO and I hope they pay off later in the game. Right now though I am really amused with it. I fully expect most of my gaming time to be with this now. But we shall see! Bravely Default will be coming out soon and I can't wait for it.

For those interested my character is Thail Ashlain, I play on the Ultros server and I am a level 10 conjurer.

Play Safe,

Chemystery