$15-20? That seems feasible. But this game, from the design to the translation to the sheer grindiness of it, feel so clunky & rough I suspect this is the developers' first game. NIS America asking $40 full price for this game seems ludicrous, but I was so hungry for more games from NIS I bought it on a whim to try it out.
So what is it? It's basically a Wizardry first-person dungeon-crawler clone from Japan. (The Wizardry series was originally developed in America, but became a cult classic in Japan.) You create your own characters, form a party with them, and delve into dungeons to fight monsters and gather loot. I bought it because the premise sounded interesting (modern-day vehicles disappear into fantasy land, survivors become adventurers) and I wanted a turn-based game to play during streams.
It starts out with you surviving a plane crash and waking up in a dungeon. (The logic of surviving a plane crash and waking up underground is the least of this game's problems.) You immediately enter the Character Creation for your Main Character before you have a chance to fight or test out the battle system; in it, you have to set your stats and class before you actually know what they do. The most frustrating of these was your Age, which determines your starting Life Points and Bonus Points. What do Life Points & Bonus Points actually do? Game doesn't tell you until later, and when it does, surprise! Life Points are utterly meaningless for your Main Character. The optimal strategy is to set your Main Character's age to 70+ years so you get 10 Bonus Points and only 1 Life Point. Your age otherwise doesn't matter at all.
This bent towards min-maxing continues throughout the start. There are 8 classes, and their abilities are so narrow there's an obvious Optimal Attribute Build for them. There are 5 races which just boil down to attributes, which means that every class has an obvious Optimal Race. This gets extremely noticeable when your party members get killed: it takes them several hours of gameplay to recover, which means you need to replace them with another character... which will probably be the same class/race/build. The mere act of making varied characters means half of them aren't optimal, which wouldn't be an issue if the game wasn't so punishing.
It's not consistently difficult, like the Dark Souls series, but this game is in love with the Random Number Generator. Certain spots on the map are Guaranteed Fights, which can either be a laughably easy fight or a brutal, nigh-impossible test based on what's rolled up. If you get the latter, the best response is to Run Away and try again, hoping it rolls up an easier fight. The randomization occurs in the fights as well; everyone's hit chances seem to hover around 30-50%, but when they hit, they often hit hard. Some monsters use multi-attacks, which thanks to the hit rates will either leave a character unscratched or bleeding out on the pavement. Others spend most of their turns barely doing anything, but occasionally unleash a spell that takes out over half your character's health. If he gets unlucky enough to be hit by two simultaneously, down he goes.
The strange spikes in difficulty, from Laughably Easy to Gutwrenchingly Hard, wouldn't be so frustrating if it didn't take your party members several hours to recover. Every time a party member is revived, he loses a Life Point; if he loses all his Life Points, he vanishes forever. You can recover Life Points, but it requires putting them on the bench for several hours of gameplay. Two of my earliest party members immediately got killed down to 1 Life Point on my first trip to a dungeon; they finished recovering their lost Life Points 8 hours later. One of them got killed again while I was doing a test run of a harder dungeon; I won't be able to risk her for another 8 hours. This constant rotation of cookie-cutter characters in and out of the infirmary is infuriating for someone who wants to make a party of unique characters, especially when I've seen it work well in Darkest Dungeon.
Still, there are some interesting aspects of the game. Most of your loot, for instance, comes from marked Ambush Zones, where you choose which caravan to ambush based on the monsters guarding it and the treasure it's carrying, which provides a bit more choice than the usual grind of "kill everything". There's also implied multiple endings, where you can choose powers from each faction and the faction you choose the most powers from determines your ending.
But I find everything else in this game almost too irritating to keep playing it, namely because it hints at some great ideas but utterly falls short in its execution.
Between the slow decline of BRAVE and the mothballing of KiteCo after nearly everyone simultaneously got sick of playing EVE after several years, and Austin's recent QuickLook of MechWarrior Online, I've taken up playing MWO instead of EVE for my "realistic" online gaming fix. Not only am I finding that playing MWO scratches the same itch as EVE, but I am finding it more fun. Both games slant towards realistic gameplay (well, as realistic as spaceships piloted by reincarnating immortals or giant walking tanks can be), but EVE's gameplay is hampered by its adherence to realism.
Being able to bring as many people as possible to any fight causes 90% of the fights in EVE to swing wildly in one side's favor. Since you have to replace any ships lost in combat (which can take hours or even days of grinding), you're also encouraged to avoid any fights you can't win. This is a rough breakdown of fights in EVE:
75% of the time, you don't have a fight at all. A side sees they're vastly outnumbered/outgunned and just refuses to fight.
20% of the time, an enemy gets caught off-guard. Curbstomping ensues. One side is utterly decimated, the other isn't scratched and doesn't even break a sweat.
5% of the time, you actually have a "decent" fight.
Most serious commanders actually try to reduce the number of "decent" fights in favor of curbstompings; in EVE, it's seen as poor tactics if you can't guarantee you'll win a fight before the fight actually starts. After all, exciting fights in EVE cost money, and commanders don't want to waste their coalition's money. This has the downside of making for rather boring fights for the fleet members; most resort to comparing the value of their kills for entertainment in lieu of challenging fights.
The sheer amount of pilots you have to bring for most fights (anywhere from a few dozen for a Faction War skirmish, to 100+ for a NullSec sovereignty war) also means individual pilots have about as much influence on the outcome of a battle as... well, a real-life infantryman. Unless you're one of the commanders, the entire fight boils down to Follow Orders, Go Here, Orbit This, Attack on Command, with an occasional Call for Repairs if you're attacked. It is nearly mindless; a bot could make just as good of a combatant as you would. (The commanders would probably prefer to command bots, too; they wouldn't have to worry about morale, exhaustion, or boredom.) The dirty secret of EVE's big fights is that all of the interesting decisions/choices are in the hands of the 1% of the playerbase: the CEOs, the commanders, and the spies. Everyone else just follows orders.
Meanwhile, fights in MWO are set up like a typical FPS: 12-on-12, evenly-matched sides, no cost for losing a mech. There's faction warfare and outfitting your own mech, similar to EVE, but there's also no reason to avoid a battle, and keeping it set at a low number of players makes every mech vital. There's feints, diversions, misdirection, and bold strikes, same as EVE, but they're played out on the battlefield between individual players instead of behind-the-scenes amidst the corporations and their spies. When I play a match of EVE, I'm actually thinking about our positions on the battlefield and trying to predict where the enemy will be, rather than just following orders like I would in EVE, as a direct result of the "gamey" elements MWO lets into its "realistic" take on mech warfare.
In the last entry, I explained my reason for doing a series covering my replay of FF6 and played through the first hour of the game. We continue with the party reaching South Figaro and continuing into some of the meat of the game...
Part 003: South Figaro
Impressive spritework for the SNES era.
South Figaro is the first real town you visit, and boy is it a doozy. Between the various plot hooks, foreshadowings, and barrels to search, I spent a good half-hour searching through every nook and cranny of the town.
I hate items hidden in mundane barrels. They compel me to search everywhere so I don't miss something good.
The most obvious one is a ninja walking through town just ahead of you. Following him leads to the local bar cafe, where you see him drinking at the counter with a pal.
That's a black dog next to him; hard to make out on gray tiling.Another eventual party member!Ooookay...
You actually don't do anything with Shadow yet, this is just a nice bit of foreshadowing to his eventual joining. Instead, I explore the town, finding a lot of things that aren't explained yet and looting everything that isn't nailed down so I can buy new weapons and armor at the first equipment shops I've seen all game.
Coincidentally, that's where we're traveling next.Doesn't sound suspicious or potentially traitorous at all!Checking behind the bookcase.Bingo.I loot his basement as a fine for potentially-traitorous activity.No idea yet what to do with this.This guy keeps delivering cider to an old man. No idea what to do with this, either.
Eventually I run out of looted money and begin making my way up Mt. Kolts. Although the game never explicitly tells me to go that way, it's the only other path out of here. These fights are noticeably harder, enough that I have to backtrack to South Figaro and rest twice before I finally make it all the way through.
I also bought more Tools for Edgar. This one gasses his enemies to death.Even the random encounters here hit like trains without some level grinding.This is also the first "dungeon" with branching sidepaths and treasure.The whole way up, we're shadowed by... a shadow.
Just before we reach the exit, the shadow blocks it, revealing himself...
He promptly divekicks us for possibly being friends of Sabin and attacks, throwing us into a boss fight that's... actually easier than some of the random encounters here. Just before we finish him off, Sabin jumps into the scene and has an angry chat with Vargas while we watch.
Apparently Vargas and Sabin were both disciples of Duncan. Vargas believes Duncan chose Sabin as his successor instead of him, so he killed his own father. Sabin seems rather horrified by all this, especially since he knows Duncan was going to choose Vargas as his successor, but steels himself to take down his murderous fellow student. At this point, the fight turns into a 1v1 tutorial on how to use Sabin's special Blitzes, which require you to input Street Fighter-esque commands. I break out a few basic Pummels on Vargas and he quickly collapses.
A small conversation ensues after the fight as the Figaro brothers reunite. Sabin volunteers to join them, now that he's no longer training on account of his teacher being dead.
The middle save was just after leaving South Figaro for the first time. The lower save is just after beating Vargas. Even with 2 backtracks, the whole dungeon just took a half-hour.
The Returner hideout is nearby. We reach it and several long dialogues ensue.
I forgot the Returners have this nifty aviator goggles look.Banon, leader of the Returners.Banon likes dramatic analogies. I think he's stretching it a bit too far.
After a small discussion with Banon, Terra is free to wander the Returners' Hideout, talking with her teammates about why she should help the Returners. The game never tells you you need to talk to the Returner next to the exit once you've talked to everyone, so you can head out and tell Banon your decision, which I found rather frustrating after 5 minutes of wandering around, wondering what to do next.
I rebelliously chose No, fully expecting a "But Thou Must" scenario where I had to choose Yes to advance the plot. But surprise surprise, after saying No 3 times, the game actually accepted it, not only changing the next cutscene to account for it but giving me a different reward to boot! I still ended up helping the Returners, but that's a surprising amount of choice for a Final Fantasy game.
I immediately reset the game and chose Yes. I didn't want to be an asshole. Banon immediately holds a meeting to explain his theories on the source of the Empire's Magitek and what he wants to do.
You start on this cutscene if Terra says "No"; the meeting is skipped entirely and a few parts of this cutscene is changed.
As they're talking, a wounded scout arrives with word the Empire's captured South Figaro. Locke volunteers to sneak into South Figaro to undermine the Empire there while the others escape via raft. The raft ride is basically a series of battles with a few choices on which path to take, combined with an "escort mission" to make sure Banon doesn't die. (This is easier than it sounds, since Banon can heal half of the party's HP each turn.) The most memorable aspect of the trip is the introduction of a recurring comic-relief boss...
Iiiiiiiiiiiit's ULTROS THE OCTOPUS!Yikes, even the joke bosses are a challenge.
He quickly withdraws underwater after we do a bit of damage to him, but the crew realizes he's just hiding under the raft.
Thankfully, FF6 doesn't turn into -that- type of game.Sabin immediately dives into the water to pummel an octopus to death.Cue Sabin flying out of the water in the other direction.Edgar seems a tad too joking about his brother being tossed downstream here. I blame the translation.Whoops.
And the scene fades to black, only to reveal...
Yep. The game is giving you 3 different scenarios to play through, and letting you choose which order to tackle them in. Looking back, FF6 did quite a bit of experimenting with how to tell a story in a JRPG, starting with this three-way Choose-Your-Order split and continuing with a few other things later in the game I won't spoil yet. However, the scenarios aren't very balanced; Terra's branch hardly has anything to it, while Sabin's is the meatiest of the bunch. I decide to tackle them from shortest to longest, so I choose Terra's first.
Part 004: A Hop and a Skip to Narshe
After a short continuation of the river rafting, we pop out close to Narshe and enter the town. Trying to enter directly causes the guards to get... rather rough with us.
So we take the secret route Locke told us to remember (remember?). This basically involves retracing our tracks from the beginning of the game, with the added wrinkle of a simple follow-the-light puzzle.
A few minutes later, we reach the house Terra was nursed back to health at, a small dialogue about the Esper ensues, and... we're done.
Told you it was short.
Part 005: Thieving Treasure Hunter
Next up on the docket is Locke, who just has to extricate himself from an Imperial-occupied town...
This involves a lot of the dangling plot hooks we encountered our first time in town... and lot of stripping people naked.
Told you.
A bit of snooping around reveals a hint there's an escape passage out of the Rich Man's house, but unfortunately the only route to that part of town is blocked by a kid with a rather strange requirement for passage...
Fortunately, there's a loudmouthed merchant in a nearby shop...
Geez, Locke, a bit aggressive there...You could technically "kill" him, but the point is to Steal his clothes.
Leaving the merchant battered and apologetic on the floor (would be a tad disturbing if Locke outright murdered him for his clothes). The rest of the trek through South Figaro follows the same pattern: find an Imperial soldier or merchant, beat them up, take their clothes, open up a new path, repeat 2 more times. Eventually you dress up as a merchant (again) to deliver cider to the old man, who offers to open up a secret passage to the Rich Man's House for you... except he doesn't remember the password you need to tell his grandson to get him to open up the passage for you.
There are no hints what the actual password is. You have to guess it. If you get it wrong, the kid kicks your ass (somehow) and tosses you out, minus your clothes. You have to beat up another merchant to steal his clothes and get another shot at it.
Fuck this "puzzle".
I finally choose correctly on my third try (it's "Courage") and pass through the secret tunnel to the Rich Man's House. The Rich Man is too busy lamenting that he sold out his town ("I didn't even need the money!") to notice a suspicious Merchant sneaking behind his bookcase...
In his secret basement (which is also being used as an Imperial HQ), Locke stumbles upon an interesting sight...
This is how they showed someone slugging a prisoner back in the sprite days.Kefka continues to make a good impression.
Locke, being the do-gooding womanizer he is, immediately decides to free Celes, which isn't hard given that the guard on duty falls asleep within seconds of his superior leaving the room.
This seems to be a recurring theme for Locke.Celes mentions the guard has something important on him. The second option is amusing.
The clock key winds up the stopped clock I didn't know what to do with from earlier, opening up yet another secret passage we can use to escape the town. First, though, we explore the secret rooms a bit for equipment for Celes; she starts out with nothing equipped, and while she can still hold her own with her spells, things get rough later if she's still naked.
Once we leave town, it's just a short trek through the same cave we took to reach South Figaro in the first place, but as we try to leave...
This is a pretty easy boss fight, basically a tutorial for Celes's special ability: she can absorb enemies' spells with her blade. It also only works if you have a blade, which means if you didn't pick up a blade for her while escaping, you're pretty screwed.
After the boss fight, Locke's scenario ends, leaving us with the beefiest of the 3...
Part 006: Cross-Country
Sabin ends up crossing half a continent (and most of an ocean) to get to Narshe, easily making his scenario twice as long as the other 2 combined. This is also where Final Fantasy 6 begins growing into its own.
He washes ashore far away from his destination, next to a lone house with a familiar figure nearby...
Uplifting fellow, Shadow is. Regardless, he's now joined the party (albeit temporarily, in his own words). Taking him with you is completely optional, but a few of the upcoming areas are much harder without him. Shadow has 2 special abilities: he can Throw any shuriken you buy for him for high damage, and his dog Interceptor occasionally blocks (and counters) attacks against him.
The house itself doesn't belong to him. Instead, it's home to a crazy old coot who mistakes you for a repairman and occasionally talks about a kid who isn't there.
With Shadow in tow, we make our way east to the Imperial Camp near Doma...
Always a good sign when your mooks like you less than your enemies do.
Here, we're introduced to Doma's one-man army: Cyan.
He makes quite a first impression by slaughtering the enemy commander in 1-on-1 combat, causing the others to flee in terror. His special ability is SwordTechs; the longer he charges it up, the better the SwordTech.
We switch from Cyan back to Sabin, who begins infiltrating the Imperial Camp only to eavesdrop on General Leo.
Leo, unlike Kefka, acts like an honorable soldier who cares about the lives of his men. Which, of course, means he's immediately summoned away so Kefka can wreck havoc.
Wait, didn't Celes mention that Kefka plans to-
...Crap.
Sabin tries to stop him, but Kefka runs away, and while his men keep Sabin and Shadow occupied, he carries out his plan...
...Real talk a moment. I like to gripe that modern Final Fantasies often act "emo", with whiny teenagers complaining about things that either really don't affect them or pale in comparison to the huge problems they should be fretting about.
I don't make that complaint about Final Fantasy 6. Final Fantasy 6 is dark. Just 5 hours in, you get to watch the stoic swordsman utterly break down while his king, wife, and son die before his eyes. I couldn't fault him if he spent a minute collapsed in a heap on the floor, bawling his eyes out.
Instead, he utterly snaps and charges into the Imperial camp, single-handedly trying to murder every Imperial he sees in revenge for his family's country's deaths.
Even when Cyan is having a breakdown, he's badass.
Sabin isn't one to pass up on thrashing Imperials.
What follows is a bit of slapstick involving the machine-inept Cyan accidently doing donuts in the thing before he careens out of control and tramples several Imperial soldiers in the process. Note this is just minutes after we saw his entire family die before his eyes.
This game is stupid. I love this game.
After we fight our way out of the camp, Cyan mentions the only route to Narshe is from a port past the forest to the south. The forest is given the lovely name of... Phantom Forest.
This seems just... lovely.On top of it, Shadow chooses now to leave. (When he leaves is random.)
I spend a few minutes wandering in circles near the Recovery Springs in the forest, grinding out some experience while I practice some of Sabin's other Blitzes. For random encounters, these are pretty nasty: you commonly encounter Ghosts that can either Stop you from taking turns entirely, or occasionally break out a Faery Fire attack that takes out 2/3rds of your max HP. Once I master Sabin's other Blitzes, I continue on through the forest. A short while later, I see a rather... ominous shadow in the distance.
...Is there supposed to be a train here?My thoughts exactly.
PHANTOM. TRAIN.
Other games have Ghost Ships. We have a Phantom Train.
This game is stupid. I love this game.
I thought about explaining myriad small things that happen during this pretty linear dungeon, but I think I'll let the screenshots speak for me.
Yes, it ends with you fighting the train. I promptly Suplexed it.
This game is stupid. I love this game.
Once we beat the train, it cried Uncle and let us get off at the next station. But while we caught our breath there...
The scene ends with no music, the train's whistle fading away, Cyan staring into the distance without saying a word. The game lingers on this for a half-minute before fading to black. After basking in the absurdity of the Phantom Train for a half-hour, it gut-punches you out of nowhere. I forgot how much this scene got to me.
When the game fades back in, you're in the Overworld, on the other side of the forest, like nothing happened.
The only way onward is down.Fights in freefall.
Oh look, another future party member. Unfortunately, he runs off the moment Sabin wakes up, obviously terrified of people who would purposely leap off a waterfall. But as you're wandering through the Veldt, he keeps popping up after fights.
Unfortunately, until you actually get something to feed him, the only way to exit the battle is to Attack him so he leaves, which seemed rather rude. Despite killing numerous giant boards, I didn't find any food until I reached the next town at the end of the Veldt: Mobliz. This is another town with multiple plot hooks, including talk of a crazy old man that tossed his own kid out thinking it was a monster, two lovers making dovey-eyes at each other, an injured soldier trying to a keep a correspondence with his sweetheart back home, and talk of an underwater trench that seems to be the only way out of here.
First things first, though: I buy some Dried Meat and toss it at the kid next time I see him.
It may just be me, but watching 2 sprites hop around the screen imitating a fight is better than seeing the actual fight animated.Sabin was trying to explain something when Gau just started spinning around 'cuz he was bored.
I didn't quite appreciate it my first time playing through FF6 20 years ago, but there's an awful lot of characterization in Gau's rather lengthy introduction. It paints Gau as a mischievous brat and provides some badly-needed humor while quickly establishing a relationship between the 3 characters: Cyan immediately takes a shine to Gau, treating him like an adopted son, while Sabin acts more like an older brother frustrated at Gau's antics. They get a lot of mileage out of it, which they need because the next major characterization for Gau isn't until halfway through the game. In hindsight, it's amazing how much character they can establish even if they don't spend nearly as much time on characterization.
Following Gau's entry into the party, we get a tutorial on how to train Gau to use different monster abilities. He can learn any monster's abilities by encountering them on the Veldt and Leaping among them, which immediately ends the battle and removes Gau from the party. A few fights later, Gau will rejoin you, plus the new Rages he learned from the monsters. It's the kind of system that takes a lot of grinding and experimentation to exploit, but from the few I tried there seems to be a few of them that could be pretty broken.
I promptly spend an hour grinding out new Rages for Gau while I help fund a correspondence between the injured soldier and his sweetheart back home.
On a sidenote, I remember enough of the game's plot from 20 years ago to recognize many of the foreshadowings that have been done in both South Figaro and Moblitz. Color me impressed they inserted several events and references that don't pay off until you're 2/3rds through the game. They're small details I would barely notice on a casual first playthrough, but they're also the type of slow burn you rarely see in RPGs (where most foreshadowing is paid off within an hour, tops).
Anyway, once I'm satisfied I've learned the Rage for every monster currently on the Veldt, I head towards the Serpent Trench to see Gau's shiny treasure, only for him to forget where he buried it.
Grrrr...
What follows is a tileset hunt wherein I step upon nearly every tile of the cave, waiting for one of them to trigger Gau finding the treasure. It takes me 10 minutes on wandering around to stumble upon it.
Surprise surprise, it's the diving apparatus we need to travel safely through the Serpent Trench. Sick of the Veldt by now, we jump in.
Gau's hesitance before jumping in is a nice touch.
The Serpent Trench is much like our rafting down the Lete River: a linear set of encounters interrupted by occasional choices of which direction to go, albeit with a lot more Mode 7.
We eventually wash up on Nimitz's docks. There's not much to do here other than shop, pick up a few tidbits of gossip, and catch a ferry to South Figaro to reach Narshe.
GEE, I HAVE NO IDEA.A short, amusing skit where a dancer tries to flirt with Cyan.
With that, Sabin's route is finally over, and the 3 scenarios merge back into one plot...
Part 007: A Three-Way Brawl
The plot opens on Banon talking with Narshe's Elder when the other groups barge in. (Don't ask how they all managed to arrive at the same time.)
An interesting bit of inter-PC conflict.Kefka continues to ingratiate himself.
With the news that Kefka plans to seize the Esper by force, the party falls back to defend. The opportunity is used to provide a bit more characterization for several of the newcomers...
And then you go straight into the preparations for the battle. It's another 3-party fight, except this time, instead of Locke + 11 moogles, you have 7 PCs against everything Kefka can throw at you, which means some groups will be rather short on people.
Hoooo boy, that's a lot of soldiers.
What follows is basically an extended, all-out brawl as all 3 of my groups get into numerous fights against increasingly difficult enemies. There's hardly any pause between the fights, and sometimes the fights break out one after the other, often making it impossible for me to heal my groups out-of-combat. This causes Terra & Edgar to fall after one fight too many...
...but luckily they just respawn back at the start with 1 HP each. I quickly restore them to full health and send them back to the front lines while my other 2 groups hold the line.
After about 10 minutes of nonstop fighting, the enemy troops quit coming, giving me a chance to send my 3-man group after Kefka himself. After disposing of his bodyguard (another hard fight; I went through a lot of Fenix Downs to revive my PCs here), Kefka himself was a cakewalk.
A solid trouncing later, he flees and the day is won. But when the group goes to check out the Esper...
Well, crud...
Terra turns into... something... and flies off...
Comments
As I played through this part of the game (Sabin's route in particular), I'm struck by how much better their characterization is than I recall. While I remembered the big dramatic moments, the small bits of comedy and slapstick interspersed throughout were forgotten. But they do a lot to make these characters likeable. Even better, they often have the same characters involved in both the drama and the comedy. ZombiePie and I actually touched upon it in a conversation:
Me: "So how emo would you say FF8 is?"
ZombiePie: "That's the thing: FF8 really isn't emo. Squall and Rinoa are the only ones who really act like that... everyone else is comic relief."
He went on to mention that FF8's characters never really changed emotions, either; Squall never did anything funny, and Selphie never did anything somber. ("Well, maybe viewing the destruction of her Garden, but that felt weak.") Which makes it more impressive that FF6's writers were deftly switching between the two, often with the same characters.
And, if it wasn't evident from the Poisoning of Doma, FF6 was often dark in ways I felt later games in the series never really lived up to. Or previous games, for that matter. Sure, FF4 had entire towns burnt to the ground and party members sacrificing themselves to save you, but there was something missing in its approach I can't quite put my finger on. Perhaps the characters looked too squat to really get any emotions out of their sprites, or perhaps the dramatic points were too blunt or flat. And in later Final Fantasies, it feels like the flashy cutscenes and wordy characterization actually detracts from the impact. They're too concerned with being showy, or putting their voice actors to good use, to be concise enough not to dilute the scene. Both the Poisoning of Doma and Cyan watching his family depart on the Phantom Train are rather short scenes, about a minute long and a dozen lines of dialogue each, yet they have a gravitas that feels like a dagger to the gut.
Yet, despite the grief that Cyan goes through, he's rather stoic. Perhaps that's another reason I prefer FF6: it feels like, rather than a bunch of teenagers whining constantly about their lot in life, a group of adults trying to soldier on despite some pretty severe trauma in their lives. It's a subject I'll be visiting again shortly into the next entry, where there's several vignettes that flesh out Locke, Edgar, and Sabin's backstories.
I spent the Xmas week trying to convince ZombiePie to play Final Fantasy 6 next, since it's obviously the best one in the series, only to see him descend into madness after being gifted 9 Final Fantasy games. However, by that time I desperately wanted someone to log a playthrough of FF6. ZombiePie was the obvious choice, but he was busy trying to get out of his straitjacket, and the only other person willing to do such a thing is... me.
You know, I never did actually finish that game...
Introduction: Old School
My introduction to RPGs started with the best magazine offer I've ever seen: subscribe to Nintendo Power and get a free copy of Dragon Warrior.
Ah, that brings back memories... anyway, I never got close to finishing it because it grew boring. However, it introduced me to other RPGs, which I quickly dove into, such as the original Final Fantasy...
...which I never finished, either, because the game was a damn grind to get through. I played numerous RPGs through those years, including Dragon Warrior 2,
Honestly, given this track record, I'm surprised I became a fan of RPGs. Or maybe I was a fan of the first 20 hours of RPGs.
Anyway, Final Fantasy 3 Final Fantasy 6 blew me away when I got it. The graphics crisply showed a grimy world, the plot was good, and the gameplay was engaging.
I quit playing right before the final dungeon.
So close, yet so far.
When Final Fantasy moved over to the Playstation, I didn't follow; I was a Nintendo fanboy through and through. The next Final Fantasy I played was Final Fantasy X,
ohgod
and I quit that soon after I burst out laughing at the romantic pool scene. I decided to give the series another shot with Final Fantasy 12...
killitwithfire
...That didn't go well. I gave up on the Final Fantasy series before Final Fantasy 13 came out... which, I gather, was a good choice. ZombiePie's playthrough of FF8 makes me suspect I didn't really miss out on anything in the Playstation era, and between FF7's rabid fanbase and Square Enix milking it for all it's worth, I doubt I'd touch it with a 10-foot pole now.
My Nostalgia for Final Fantasy 6
Final Fantasy 6 holds a strange spot in the FF series: a magnum opus overshadowed by its "sequel's" popularity. The last FF without 3D graphics and pre-rendered cutscenes. A self-contained story, unburdened by the numerous prequels/sequels/media Square Enix loves making. (Not even FF4 was spared.) The last Final Fantasy game I enjoyed, and one I usually have trouble discussing with fans who came on-board with FF7...
...And now I'm gonna rip off the nostalgia filter and play through the whole damn thing. And rip apart the game I love, if it comes to that. Go me...
How I'll Be Playing It
I have the original cartridge around here somewhere, so it's LEGAL!
I'll be playing a ROM of the original North American release of FF3 on the Windows version of SNES9X. While FF3 has 2 remakes, the Windows one does some... rather horrid mishmashing with the sprites...
Something doesn't seem to quite mesh here...
...while the GBA remake changes the translation to be more faithful to the Japanese version. Normally this would be a good thing, but the original was translated by the legendary Ted Woolsey, who tended to add a... bit of spice to his games.
Part 000: It Begins
Final Fantasy 6 knows how to make a first impression: the title is presented as fiery letters, lightning crackling in the background as an organ plays ominously.
As I start, it launches into some expository text.
That's the whole thing. It takes about 2 minutes. With that, it introduces us to our starting party:
I'm sure two of them looking identical has no correlation to their expected lifespan.Apparently she fried 50 of their men in 3 minutes flat, but no worries...I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
And with that, they set out and the credits begin to roll over some impressive spritework and Mode 7 scrolling.
This was damn impressive, back in the day.
Total Length of Intro: 4 minutes
With that, we're thrown right into the first "dungeon" of the game: the remote mining town of Narshe.
Not only is spritework more detailed than FF4, but Narshe uses some unique assets to boot.
The locals aren't too happy to see us, but our Magitek armor lets us mow through them with relative ease.
This is also the first appearance of Wedge & Vicks/Biggs in the series
Final Fantasy 6 was the second game in the series to use the Active Time Battle system (FF4 was the first), where action meters filled up in real-time and monsters would keep attacking while you were checking your menus to choose a spell. (You could choose to have them Wait instead in the Options, but where's the pressure in that?) Between that, the lack of loadtimes, and a 2-frame victory animation, most battles in FF6 ended rather quickly, within 20-60 seconds. Some of the later games had summons that lasted longer than that.
We quickly reach the first boss of the game: a giant snail that fries you with lightning if you attack its shell. Unfortunately, it also likes hiding in its shell right after you've assigned attack orders, which leads to the occasional mistake...
Nevertheless, we quickly beat it and reach our goal: the frozen Esper. It begins to glow ominously...
I'm sure everything will turn out just fine!Whoops.
Total Time from Start to Here: 15 minutes
One explosion later, the girl wakes up being tended to by an old man, who has removed the Slave Crown that turned her into a magic-using zombie soldier.
Unfortunately, one of the side effects is that most (in)convenient of plot diseases: amnesia!
Luckily, she hasn't forgotten how to fight or blow up things with said magic, which you would assume are more complex to remember than your parents...
Part 001: Mines & Moogles
Unfortunately, the local guards aren't too happy to have a former Empire "soldier" in their midst, so they beat on the door and demand the old man hand her over. Neither Terra nor the old man are too happy about the prospect.
You escape out the back and start making your way through the Narshe mines.
The guards quickly catch up and corner you, though. Fortunately, the ground collapses beneath you, technically escaping them but causing some nasty head-trauma-related nightmares in the meantime.
This is Kefka; he's a gleeful fellow. You'll be seeing a lot more of him soon enough.
Everyone pictured here becomes important to the plot later. Well, except for the soldiers below- they're even more expendable than Wedge & Vicks.
Meanwhile, now that the guards have quit trying to break down his door, the Old Man has called for some help.
Say hello to the 2nd member of our motley crew.
He doesn't like the technical definition of his job.He also doesn't like the damsel in distress.
The old man convinces him to rescue her anyway, then bring her to Figaro to meet the king. Locke manages to track her down via falling down the same hole she fell through, but the guards aren't far behind. Fortunately...
A dozen moogles pop up and decide to help Locke out to introduce the multi-group system. Yes, the same mechanic that gave ZombiePie fits in Ultimecia's castle originated back in FF6! The game decides to work you into it at several points in the game, starting with a simple tactical battle here: just block off every route to Terra with your 3 moogle armies and slowly advance to the boss.
I'm sure the moogle with a unique name doing magic rock dancing won't reappear again later.
I don't recall the first real boss fight in the game kicking my ass this hard. I'm rather shocked at how damned difficult it is! Fortunately, the deceased party is returned to the starting point with 1 HP, giving the Dancing Moogle Group a chance to finish the job.
Yes, I killed him with a frog. This is Volgin's worst nightmare.
No kidding. A half-dozen moogles DIED for you!At least he gives credit where credit is due.Obviously he hasn't read enough stories.
Locke makes a blatant mention to remember how to open the secret passage he just showed you, in case it comes in handy later (hint hint), and with that, you leave within spitting distance of the edge of town.
The obvious next step is to enter a nearby building before leaving the town where all the guards are trying to kill you.
This is where the game teaches you all about the combat system. Yes, you can skip it without realizing it. I don't know if this is better or worse than the mandatory hour-long tutorials nowadays.Unless you're a caster or have ranged weapons, in which case have at it.And they are ASSHOLES.
And with that done, we exit onto the world map for the first time. A bit of wandering around later, the only real place of interest is a castle smack dab in the middle of a desert.
Part 002: STEAMPUNK!
When we visit the castle, apparently they were expecting us, as they invite us in to check things out and meet the king.
...Huh?Alright, alright already...
The king is rather interested in their arrival, so much so he forgets to introduce himself...
Meet EDGAR, future party member and one of my favorite characters in FF6 for... well, you'll see. He mentions Figaro and the Empire are allies, so of course Terra is welcome to rest there for a bit! And he's also interested in her personally, because...
No duh.
With that, you're free to wander around his castle a bit, talking to the residents. Several of them mention the king has a twin brother that left years ago, triggering a quick flashback...
He doesn't look at all like his twin; gee, I wonder if we'll meet him later?Uh, at least Edgar's patient...Don't worry! We're allies!POLITICS!
Eventually, you're supposed to get bored of wandering the castle and talk to Edgar again, when your conversation is interrupted by:
Oh, joy. The cackling, power-hungry pyromaniac from the nightmare. Edgar's just as happy to see him as we are, judging by his angry eyebrows. (Just take my word they're there; the spritework gets a bit blurred in the pictures.)
Kefka wastes no time getting in our good graces.Edgar dishes out the snark in response.
Kefka states he's here just to look for a girl that "stole something of minor importance". Edgar says he hasn't seen her...
He promptly lies to the psycho's face, dismisses him, and withdraws to tell Locke to set Terra up with a room for the night. As Locke shows Terra to her room, he mentions Edgar's alliance with the Empire is a facade to hide his ties to the Returners, a rebellion fighting the Empire.
Locke suggests Terra helps the Returners with her powers, but she's not sure if that's the right thing to do. Later Final Fantasies would probably stretch this indecision to a lengthy conversation, or even a pre-rendered cutscene of her staring forlornly across the landscape. Here, it's a sentence:
The game decides even this is too boring, because in the next scene Kefka has lit the castle on fire.
Such a charmer.
Edgar, having earlier correctly deduced the psychotic clown might be up to no good, leaps from the castle with Locke & Terra onto a trio of escape chocobos.
He promptly orders the castle to submerge.
RETRACT THE TOWERS.DIVE! DIVE!
This is so stupid. I love this game.
Kefka is pissed he's just been one-upped on the insanity, so he sics his Magitek troopers on the trio.
Now, unlike some later Final Fantasies, each character has unique abilities. Terra can use magic, Locke can steal items from enemies, and Edgar...
...uses machine-gun crossbows to riddle all the enemies with bolts. Did I mention he's one of my favorite characters?
Eventually, you'll have Terra use magic in this fight, because it's another damn hard boss fight (I seriously don't remember the early game being this difficult when I played it 2 decades ago), prompting this mid-fight dialogue:
One wink from the pretty lady and both guys are fawning mid-combat. Great priorities here...
It's an interesting, kinda funny nod to the fact magic hasn't been seen in centuries here. (It also implies Locke's a bit dense for not noticing it earlier, although he called her a "witch" earlier, so he had to have known she had magic earlier, but... ugh, maybe I shouldn't think so much about it.)
Anyway, several Cures & Autocrossbolts later, both Magitek soldiers are dead and we're free to run off, leaving Kefka alone in the desert.
And he was never heard from again.
A short dialogue ensues:
I'll chalk up Terra sounding like a child here to the amnesia...Uh, don't you think you're overexaggerating a bit?
Actually, looking over this conversation again, it's vaguely the same kind of melodramatic dialogue that turns me off of later Final Fantasy games. I'm not sure why I tolerate it so much better here. Is it because I like the characters more? Because there's less of it? Or is it because I can just skip ahead to the next piece of dialogue once I'm done reading instead of being forced to listen to bad voice acting in a cutscene I can't skip because I'm afraid of missing something that's actually important?
Regardless, they decide to head through a cave to South Figaro to get to safety, leading to some more nifty Mode 7 chocobo-riding effects and a short dungeon.
Thus I ended my first session of replaying FF6.
Comments
What strikes me most is the snappiness of this game's pace. I've barely played over an hour and I've already explored 2 dungeons, fought 2 bosses, explored a town, met one of the villains, had several large chunks of exposition dropped on me, met 2 new party members, had them characterized, and watched a castle dive into a desert! I'd like to ask ZombiePie what he got accomplished in his first hour of FF8, or recall what happened in my first hour of FF10, because those games feel much... slower. I wonder how many hours it'll take me to finish the whole game.
Compared to the screenshots from the Windows remake, it reminds me of how good the spritework in this game is. Everything seems to fit with each other, and the color palette subtly makes it seem drearier than FF4, which is fitting given some of the places this game goes later. I'll discuss it when I get to it, but this game gets... dark.
My finances for 2015 have been slimmer than ever, preventing me from not only buying an Xbone or PS4, but also from buying most of the great AAA $60 titles that were released. Instead, a lot of my entertainment this year came from Indie games, Good Old Games, and games I previously bought on Early Access that are just now coming out of beta. As much as I would like to have spent enough time & money playing games to make a more comprehensive list, not starving was a higher priority.
However, first I would like the acknowledge the old classics that sated me enough to avoid spending (more) money on entertainment:
Honorable Mentions of Great Games I Spent Copious Amounts of Time Playing This Year That Were Released Years Ago So They Don't Count Towards GotY
It's a rhythm roguelike where you have to react to enemies at 2-3 beats/turns per second. I never thought a game could merge turn-based strategy with real-time reflexes like it does. The kicking soundtrack doesn't hurt, either.
The best sports game I've played in years. Compared to the lofty perspectives of FIFA and Madden, Rocket League is the pickup game of ball in the alley that motivated kids to become pros in the first place. It captures the spirit of the sport.
The act of getting to a moon just means setting a waypoint in other games. In this one, it means learning basic physics and trying a dozen different rocket builds. Kerbal restores the grandeur of space by making it hard to get there in the first place. It also provides lots of ways to get there (and even more ways to fail spectacularly).
If Crypt of the Necrodancer made a typically turn-based genre real-time, then Invisible Inc. made stealth, a typically real-time genre, turn-based. Each turn, you have an infinite amount of time to realize just how screwed you are, regret the decisions that led you to this predicament, and try a desperate ploy to get out of the mess. Consistently nail-biting.
Cradle's a weird mishmash of involuntary transhumanism, Buddhist mythology, and Mongolian landscapes where half the plot is written on notes scattered around the hut you start in. Although the actual gameplay is middling at best and the ending stumbles, the setting's seared into my mind.
This game finally convinced me to buy a Wii U, and I quickly got lost in the casual game design loop of "come up with idea, try to polish it, see how the public likes it". It attaches a 30-year tradition of platforming and fanmade Hells onto an appealing level editor that almost requires no instructions to use. I've made levels in other games before, but they were never Mario levels.
This was the part where I finally understood what everyone was talking about. MH4U is an MMO cut down to just the boss fights, an RPG that demands preparation, a Dark Souls game focused on cooperative play. It also had the best final boss fight of the year for me, a grueling 20-minute brawl that left me collapsed in my chair, catching my breath as the credits rolled.
A visceral showcase of what we want space to be. When you enter warp, your ship's engines rev up a moment before exploding off the starting line. When you slide next to an enemy ship and unload everything you have, the screen fills with beams and blasts. This is a Space Western. The classic Westerns were about conveying a place that had faded into memory. This is about conveying a place we want to travel to.
In this game, a growing population isn't adding money to the coffers. It's adding powder to a keg. It solves citybuilders' issues with endgame difficulty by making your entire populace try to subvert your will at every opportunity, from smuggling in booze to killing snitches to digging escape tunnels. Even when it's stable, it's not stable; if you tried to leave it on overnight to build up funds, you would come back to mass riots and half your prison on fire. Its view of population as "numerous individuals stuck in the same place who don't always get along" is probably the most realistic simulation of human society I've seen in a while, it makes an inmate shanking a snitch to death look cute, and it provokes a bit of thought on some sobering topics.
I've never played an MGS game before. I picked this up after hearing a lot of people who normally don't play MGS recommend it. I'm glad I did. Here's why: MGSV is one of the least pretentious AAA games I've ever played.
Sure, the MGS plot takes itself super-seriously. You know what? A lot of games do. Gears of War, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, GTA, Crysis, the Doom sequels, Homefront, etc. But MGS knows it's a game, and it's meant to be fun, and it doesn't have its head so far up its own ass to deny you some stupid fun. Like shoving a guard off a cliff with an inflatable decoy. Or spinning out a vehicle with a well-placed crap. Or knocking out a boss with a parachuting crate. Or getting a soldier's sanity questioned when he reports a walking cardboard box. Or completely subverting how it expects you to tackle a mission. It is perfectly willing to let you do whatever dumb, impulsive idea you have, and odds are you can successfully pull it off.
In short, thank you, Kojima, for not giving a damn about insisting we pull off an objective a certain way for "maximum dramatic effect". For not taking yourself too seriously. And for making Snake scream "ROCKET PUNCH" when he shoots his robotic fist.
There is one plot twist in gaming I try to avoid spoiling. I had already spoiled it for myself by reading the strategy guide, but the sheer impact of the twist was of such a scale that when I reached that point in the game and experienced it for myself at the wee age of 12, I went down to eat supper with a dazed expression and barely uttered a word. It left an impression that has stuck with me for two decades. And it's not Aerith dying.
While I'm often irritated Final Fantasy 6 (originally FF3 in the US) seems to have been forgotten in favor of Final Fantasy 7 onwards, when I see how much that entry in the series has been milked with sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, and how its plot has been publicized, criticized, and analyzed to death, I'm glad FF6, my favorite game in the series, has managed to stay untouched. Secret. Standalone. No sequel has tried to rip apart its ending's closure, like Chrono Cross did to Chrono Trigger. A new player can still try it on a suggestion and be unaware of the plot awaiting them, one filled with opera, hope, despair, and talking octopi. It was the last 2D Final Fantasy, a transition between the traditional RPG of Final Fantasy 4 and the breakout hit of Final Fantasy 7. It was the last Final Fantasy without rendered cutscenes.
Rendered cutscenes in Final Fantasy games now symbolize excess & bloat, symptoms of a game that occasionally hits some high points but often wastes the player's time getting there. When I tried to summarize the difference between Final Fantasy 6 and later Final Fantasies in one word, I came up with "taut". Lean. The plot moves. The fights are fast. Character customization is honed down to character-specific Abilities and swappable Espers which train spells. Even the optional sidequests don't feel like a diversion, doling out ultimate weapons, characterization, and new (or returning) characters in one swoop. (Final Fantasy 6, similar to Chrono Trigger, feels like it hit the sweet spot for pace and usefulness of optional endgame quests.)
Still... just talking about it like this is awfully vague. It's been nearly 20 years since I last played it; it could be the nostalgia talking. In order to really show my case, and reaffirm to myself it's not just the nostalgia speaking, I would have to replay the game and report on my progress with it. Or, potentially, convince ZombiePie to play it next for me and experience it through a set of new eyes. (One can dream.) If not, perhaps I'll log my playthrough of FF6 as a New Year's project.
In the middle of November, League of Legends released its annual preseason patch, introducing a slew of gameplay tweaks, additions, and revamps. If you have a morbid curiosity over how large it is, the whole list is here, but here's a quick rundown of everything they changed:
Revamped 6 ranged champions to make them more diverse by giving them new passive abilities & new spells.
Redid warding mechanics and support items to limit the number of wards available to each team.
Tweaked the tower mechanics.
Removed 11 items.
Added 7 items.
Introduced a mini-Baron that stays until the real Baron appears. A team that kills the mini-Baron gets a hefty advantage in one lane.
Revamped the pre-game preparation of the Mastery system.
In addition to the numerous patches over the past year, including 5 new champions and 6+ other champion revamps, LoL plays much differently than it did a year ago. It's not a completely different game, but feels like it had an expansion released. And since the LoL team likes to put out major changes to the gameplay between the annual seasons, we've gotten used to this happening yearly.
...Almost like an annual franchise.
While pondering Alex's reviews of the new Madden and WWE games, I realized LoL had just as many changes, if not more, as these full-priced annual sports franchises. Normally I would end my train of thought there, but with Game of the Year awards just around the corner, I returned to the eternal argument of whether a game has to be released in the same year it's nominated GotY for. Before, massive changes to a game either involved an annual release or an expansion, and both of those could be put on a GotY list with no argument. However, ever since free-to-play games appeared, a new iteration model has cropped up where numerous additions, removals, and tweaks continually occur to the game. Without the clean-cuts of expansions or yearly releases, when does a game change enough to be re-evaluated for GotY?
Or should we even worry about such a qualification when we're choosing GotY? If we're still spending most of our gametime playing a game that was released last year, or even 5 years ago, should we include it on our list? Or is the GotY list meant to highlight interesting new games instead of old, comfortable favorites? What do you do when the old, comfortable favorite changes more than the latest annual release?
Creeper World is an RTS* that combines constant explosions with slow, methodical advancement by pitting you against hostile fluid dynamics. Your enemy is the Creeper, a mindless, destructive, viscous fluid that spews endlessly from several nodes, threatening to smother your whole base. You use guns, artillery, and aircraft to disintegrate it before it can. Since Creeper's constantly spawning, your guns are constantly firing, creating a steady front line of destruction. To win, you have to destroy the nodes by pushing the Creeper all the way back to its source.
Goal: Obliterate this whole "ocean".
The end result is a noisy curtain of destruction across a slow, methodical game. Creeper World is all about equilibrium: the Creeper advance ends when your guns destroy it as fast as it can flow in. The only way to succeed is to make enough firepower to push it back, a steady process of building a few extra guns to push the front line back, claiming the now-cleared land to produce more energy, then creating more guns to repeat the process anew. The Creeper doesn't throw any surprises at you mid-game; 30 seconds into the map, you've seen everything it'll do, and you can make a good guess about where it'll flow, where you will fight it, and how to win. After that, it's all about slow, methodical execution.
It's a contradiction of mechanics & presentation that works in the game's favor by making a preparation-heavy game exciting, even when you're advancing inch by bloody inch.
*I could see an argument for this being more akin to a tower defense game than a Starcraft-ish RTS, but I feel the game's different enough from tower defense mechanics to justify being grouped in the broader genre.
I made up a rather long post about my first 8 hours playing this turn-based Slavic survival game, and accidently made it a forum post instead of an actual blog post. In the interests of expanding my audience for it, I'll post a link to it here. Read all my experiences camping amidst skeletons, bone smithys, and failing to talk to trees.
Today a large patch was released for Endless Legend, introducing Steam Workshop support and cheap DLC for new music, quests, heroes, etc. While I'm busy cursing my lack of time to properly finish a match of this, I figure it's time to examine why I keep coming back to this game time & time again, to the point it's become my 2nd-most played 4X strategy game (beaten only by Civ4). The broad reason is that it does enough things different from both 4X games and fantasy games to give it a distinct personality, but I'll dig a bit deeper than that.
The first thing that strikes you, when choosing a race, is how utterly different they are, both from each other and from the standard fantasy tropes. Each race has a schtick which drastically changes how they play, from mobile cities to being restricted to just one city to using Wealth instead of Food to grow population. The "elves" act more like industrial lycanthropes. The "undead" are covered by a hivemind of ravenous sci-fi bugs and a knighthood of animated armors that drain souls to survive. The "dragons" are renowned diplomats and historians. The "humans" are traders who build cities on giant beetles or the stranded remnants of a colony ship that crashed on the planet long ago. The doomsday cult? Follows an indestructible supercomputer that went insane from its isolation and inability to destroy itself.
The colony ship and supercomputer aren't the only sci-fi artifacts in the game. The game is heavily tied into Amplitude's previous sci-fi 4X game, Endless Space, and the more you poke at the seemingly-magical aspects of the game, the more Clarke's Third Law reveals itself. The sheer variety of fauna/flora? Escaped specimens in a genetic testing ground. The spectral wraiths haunting the ruins? Manifestations of ancient AIs. The increasingly-hostile winters? A planetary weather system breaking down from millenia of disrepair. The melding of "magic" and sci-fi justifies the struggle to understand this world. If it was pure magic, you could simply rely on faith in the gods for answers. If it was pure sci-fi, you could study it, break it down, and reverse-engineer it. Instead, you play medieval people picking through the ruins of spacefarers, struggling to comprehend what came before you and why they all died off.
The Winters themselves play a key part in the game's mechanics and feel. As turns progress, the seasons cycle between Summers and Winters. Summers are your typical 4X-building setting, but Winters confer a myriad of penalties that slow down production & movement. The typical response to Winters is to slow down or halt production, have armies huddle in your cities instead of roaming, and try not to starve. As the game progresses, the Winters grow more numerous and worse (forcing civilizations to adapt), and they're revealed to be tied to the eventual destruction of the world, lending the whole game a feeling to trying to thrive on a beautiful-yet-dying world.
I could get into the mechanics of the game, and how they restrict your choices while making them more meaningful (similar to the XCOM remake), but that wouldn't be enough to keep me coming back. But Endless Legend paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of a fantasy world amidst sci-fi ruins that's unlike anything else I've seen in gaming (although some of the later Might & Magic games come close), and I keep coming back to try and unite the world as the Drakken again.
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