Never played it myself, but I had a friend who told me about what FFXI was/is like, and it sounds kind of nuts.
EDIT: WAIT SHIT I RECOGNIZE THAT GRAPPLING GAME I THINK I HAD THIS DISC???? SHIT THAT GRAPPLING GAME LOOKED SO SICK I WAS MAD THAT IT NEVER CAME OUT STATESIDE
Austin, it's a bummer that you don't have the time to play ffxiv because it's my personal mmo of choice. The only one I've kept playing past free trial time, it's super good.
I don't have a good answer to your question this week, but I just want to thank you for writing this because it touches on a lot of my issues with people claiming that The Force Awakens is just a ripoff of A New Hope.
So many people are quick to say that, since this movie also involves a big explosion, then it's the same. But as a guy in his twenties trying to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do for the rest of my life, a story about a bunch of people trying to live up to (or reject) expectations placed on them by themselves or outside people made this the most enjoyable star wars movie I've seen. Seeing how all the characters felt about the myths and stories that make up the star wars canon, and how they base their actions on them... I dunno. I had a blast watching it, I wanna see it again, and I'm so sick of hearing it get written off.
It's not really one that's stuck with me as much as one that's on my mind since I've been playing it lately:the Revelation Flow system in Rogue Galaxy. Mostly how it doesn't seem to work as intended.
The Revelation Flow is how you unlock skills in the game: if you've unlocked the prerequisite skills, you can put specific items into a new skill in the Revelation Flow. Once a skill gets all the items it needs, it unlocks, and you can use it in battle and start putting items into the newly available skills. In theory, this leads to a loop where you find a new item, and carefully consider which character gets it for which skill. But the skills require exact, specific items, and there's such a wide variety of items used, so the loop actually ends up being find a new item>see if anyone needs it>plop it down wherever it can go.
It would probably work out better if it had a FFXII like system, where there are just points you get, or some other nebulous currency used. But there aren't nearly as many skills available in Rogue Galaxy (at least, per character, everyone has a unique Revelation Flow), so finding items is the only way in which it feels all that interesting.
To be honest, it's just one more flaw in a fairly flawed game. I'm still enjoying it a bunch, probably as much as when I played it when I was like 13 or something, and a lot of the issues seem to stem from the time the game was made. But the Revelation Flow feels like something that's not an issue of the time as much as an idea they couldn't quite make work. I haven't played many other Level 5 games, so I'm a bit curious if similar systems are used in other games.
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