A Brief Recap of My Metroid II Speed-Run

First off, I want to explain that my computer is currently being operated on and could possibly be dead. A few weeks ago I spilt soda all over it, and it took a couple of weeks for my dad to finally give me the help I needed to clean up the motherboard. But then, as I was trying to take out the motherboard (you see, I have a MacBook, so taking it out was the most needlessly difficult procedure of my life), I broke the connectors for the fans, which I obviously need if I plan to play any game on my computer. However, now it's been a couple more weeks since that's always how it is with my dad. Today should be the day my dad and his friend fix the fan connectors, but I have some doubt seeing how the weather outside has been pretty bad.

So to ease my boredom (I'm on my Summer break), I've played a few Nintendo games to pass the time. I've been closely watching the news on E3 and Super Smash Bros. 4, which is driving me crazy and man can I not wait for that!

But also, I've returned to what I consider to be my first fandom: my fanwankery over the Metroid series. I'm not as fanwank as I was when I first fell in love with the series, but I still play the Metroid games every so often and my memories of my first experiences with each game hold fond places in my heart. So I decided to revisit some of the games to see if I can pull off all the speed runs and perfections (thank god there's no need to speed run the prime series). Of course, since it's been months since I last played these games, I try to use a guide for what I can't remember, which is annoying as hell having to pause the game every two seconds. I started with Prime 3, but for some reason I stopped at the Pirate Homeworld and haven't found the motivation to continue. I beat Prime Hunters completely, but there's really nothing you get for doing that. So then I wanted to play some classic style 2D Metroid, but I dared not touch Metroid II because, in my opinion, that is the most difficult Metroid game in the series. So I tried to speed run Metroid Fusion, only to fail by going over forty minutes.

So I was bored today, and I honestly don't want to play Super Metroid at all, even though it is a perfect game. I would've played Zero Mission if I still had the game (I have it on my computer though). So I looked at Metroid II, which I literally only played once, and decided I'd give it another go and try to speed run it. Beating the game in three hours is really not that hard, but when you have no idea what you're doing in that game, it is basically impossible.

So of course I used a guide to refresh my memory on how to advance through the game, because otherwise every room looks nearly the same and there are a few "dud" locations which I seriously believe were placed to waste your time. There were also a couple of shortcuts I didn't know of.

I worried about the metroid bosses, because what I remembered of them was simply frustration, but they surprisingly weren't a real problem this time around. Each encounter with a Zeta metroid however did feel like my game was going to end, and then when I faced Omega metroids, I started getting close to dying. Actually, on one Omega, I had little health left because it seemed the programmers either forgot to leave an energy recharge or sadistically did it to see how many Omega metroid fights you could take before breaking the game. I managed to get some energy back, fearing all the time that costed me, and defeat that Omega though. It was a pain because the damn thing would air juggle me and kill me. What? Air juggling in a Metroid game?! Yep, that was exactly what happened. Six times.

Still, I managed to get through it all. I was low on health again at the Queen, since all the normal metroids seemed impossible to avoid, so I had to get another energy recharge. Again, I feared I cost myself a ton of time, but I managed to take down the Queen easily (relative to the damn Zeta/Omega metroids). It was fun blowing her up from the inside with the morph ball, something I didn't think of doing on my first playthrough when I was twelve. The guide of course said to do it, but even without one I would've figured that out thanks to Other M. And this might sound weird, but the baby metroid was so cute! Even already knowing that it exists and that it follows Samus around like if she was her mother, I still found it a sweet touch to a game that has you freaking out every time you see those metroid shells.

I doubted I managed to speed run it successfully, even with the generously-given three hour time frame (as opposed to two in later games, [one in Metroid] plus having to collect every item in them), but as we can see in the picture above, I did it! ^^ Another successfully completed Metroid to add to the list.

Hopefully I'll get my computer back soon. I really want to give my take on E3. I'm already disappointed I can't write all about the ridiculous rumors I've been reading. I mean, I could, but this post alone was already a pain for me to write on my phone.

BioShock Infinite

This is what the game is all about.
Just kidding.

Continuing the praise that this game has endlessly been receiving, here's my BioShock Infinite... not just a review, but experience. Then again, maybe that would be better applied to the let's play videos I'm trying to make, but nonetheless, overall this was a pretty great game. I don't usually enjoy shooters, but I came close to loving this game as much as I fell in love with the Half-Life series.

While BioShock Infinite exists within the BioShock universe, the game's story has little to nothing to do with the first two games. The gameplay is even somewhat different, as BioShock drew on horror elements while Infinite draws on elements of adventure and perhaps fantasy, to an extent. Both are science fiction, but Infinite has more aspects of a fantasy to it, with a city floating in the sky and rifts, referred to ingame as "tears," to alternate dimensions and stuff. It's explained by science, but none of it feels like the full grounding of science in the original BioShock games. Then again, I haven't played the second and I played the first game years ago when it was released, so I probably have little clue as to what I am talking about.

The city itself is starkly different from Rapture. Of course, you can easily see the difference in how Columbia is a city in the sky while Rapture is a city under the sea. There is also a difference in society, as well as what the game draws attention to.

An evolved form of the Ku Klux Klan?

The city of Columbia is established around the mind of Father Comstock, the founder of this city and the "prophet" everyone seems to turn to for guidance, along with a vision he had:

"The seed of the Prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man."

As you explore Columbia, you find this society based on "Christian fundamentalism and worship of America itself," thanks to Blue Highwind for being able to put this into words for me where I would spend hours repeating myself and not saying quite what I mean to say. This city takes the American racial hierarchy and blows it so out of proportion, you can't help but feel uncomfortable as you come across an African American, dressed in stripes and speaking nervously, offering you a soda. Or at the very beginning of the game, when you are given the choice of throwing a baseball at either the interracial couple or at the host of the fair celebrating Columbia's history.

The racism isn't limited to African Americans; it applies to basically every race that isn't White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so the game doesn't fail to acknowledge the racism against the Irish that existed in this country as well. History is blown out of proportion, targeting Native and Chinese Americans at one point and picturing them as evil hordes of monsters, with a robotic George Washington prefacing each exhibit with a rhyming soliloquy.

Even with the terrors of the city's foundation, the environment is still very inviting and lovely with the detail. Straw hats, women with large feathered or flowered hats, men sitting in shoe shining booths, kids smoking cigarettes, red/white/blue colored banners and balloons, and double chaingun toting George Washington killing machines galore in the lively level design of Columbia.

I could go on about the wonderful design and art concept this game boasts, but I want to move on to the gameplay before my readers get bored. Now I know I said the game feels very different from the original BioShock games, but it still retains several elements. Plasmids are now vigors, "magical" abilities that allow you to shoot lightning or summon a literal murder of crows to attack your foes. While each spell has some uniqueness to them, there are several which more or less do the same thing. A lot of these spells stun your foes, leaving them open to a blast from the shotgun. Whenever I found myself in a closed space, I'd throw down a vigor and rush each enemy with a shotgun, blasting them out of my path. I found myself doing this quite often, and I was playing on the Hard difficulty. Of course, this technique didn't carry me through every battle. Every now and then, the game will throw a "hard-hitting" or special enemy at you to switch things up a bit, like a "fireman" clad in iron with a furnace on his back who throws bursts of flame at you, or the featured "handyman," an ape-like half-man half-machine abomination that hits hard and moves fast.

Honestly, the gameplay doesn't go far beyond what it really is: a first person shooter. Shoot and take cover, and you will surpass most of the obstacles in the game. Combine these with vigors and you are well set on taking on nearly every encounter. The challenge is reduced through the game's interesting death system, where you are immediately brought back to life and kept in the same battle. Enemies regain health and you lose some money, but there is no other consequence beyond that than just the annoyance of being in the same fight. There is a gameplay difficulty, "1999 Mode," where if you die with less than a hundred dollars, you are taken to the main menu and you'll have to start from the last checkpoint. However, the difficulty curve skyrockets there, as that game mode isn't meant to provide simple extra challenges.

That said, many gunfights get pretty exciting, especially when the environment utilizes the skyrails. Blue Highwind said that the AI isn't smart enough to use them, and while I cannot say that I experienced many fights on the skyrails myself, there were quite enough for me to believe that the AI can use them properly. Once I got Undertow, a vigor that bends water to either splash enemies back or unleash a tendril that pulls them to you, I encountered an awesome battle against a patriot, two firemen, and many soldiers where I was able to use Elizabeth, the girl that you're with throughout the game, to summon a Tesla Coil from another dimension and use Undertow to bring my enemies to the coil and get fried.

Ah, and this brings me to Elizabeth's powers: she is essentially a human TARDIS. For those unfamiliar with Doctor Who, Elizabeth can basically open tears to other dimensions and other times. This allows her to pull money, ammo, salts (used to fuel your vigors), and health out of thin air, much against what she says at some point in the game. Also, as for the summoning, throughout several battlefields there are tears that reveal objects from alternate dimensions that you can use to your advantage, from machine guns to cover to even a George Washington killing machine. This spices up some firefights and adds a level of fun that would've left me wanting even more out of this game by the end if this feature wasn't included.

Still, as I said, from a gameplay standpoint this is a simple shooter. I said I loved it about as much as I loved the Half-Life series, but the gameplay is nowhere close to being as innovative. So this is where the story comes in and completes the game, giving me the full experience.

I already covered some of the premise here by describing Columbia. The deal is Father Comstock, the "Prophet," is raising his daughter Elizabeth, referred to countless times as "The Lamb," to take his position of power and lead Columbia to destroy the "mountains of man." Without spoiling the game, I'll let you readers get an idea of what that means. Booker, the character you play as, is known as the "False Prophet," who according to Comstock is coming to take Elizabeth and "lead her astray," or keep her from fulfilling the destiny he set for her. Throughout the game, your adventure with Elizabeth reveals to her all the horrors kept hushed in Columbia, which of course reinforces her own desires that conflict with Comstock's. Through this story, Elizabeth develops so wonderfully as a character that it makes me wish to replay the game to see her go from being trapped in a tower without real experience of the world to... um, well to the decisions she makes at the end of the game, which I cannot say without spoiling the whole game.

There's not much to say about Booker. He's come to "find the girl and wash away the debt," to get Elizabeth and deliver her to somebody in New York to whom he owes some "debt." Other characters come in as well, such as the game's mascot, the Songbird, who was created to watch over Elizabeth and ensure she never escapes her tower. You never fight this massive robot bird, but at the end of the game you do share a moment with it during the gameplay that was pretty satisfying if a little anti-climactic. Elizabeth's relationship with the bird isn't too developed in detail, though.

Throughout the game, two snarky British twins, the Letuce Twins, pop up and aid Booker and Elizabeth. The game doesn't give all the details about them, but you can pick up audio logs from them that explain several things about them. They are the ones responsible for the technology that allows Columbia to float in the sky. Honestly, I simply liked them for their quirkiness and such. They finish each other's sentences, they speak in riddles sometimes, and, at one point if you attempt to shoot or hit them, they'll ridicule you for "missing." The bullets actually go right through them, for weird timey-wimey reasons I cannot fully explain without spoiling things.

We also have a Mr. Fink, who created the Songbird and several other machines in the game, most notably many of the enemies that you fight. He's mostly some background comic relief, with his overblown capitalist corporate monopolist persona and such... I cannot get into much detail because he is quite a flat character as well, even with an entire series of levels dedicated to him. But as I said, he's mostly just background comic relief and another antagonist to pose problems for you.

The story is pretty straightforward, you come to find Elizabeth and escape from Columbia and the hands of Comstock. However, an entire section dedicated to a rebellion of sub-ordinate groups draws out the story in the game's middle portion. I didn't really think of this as filler for the story to be longer, though; here we see the rise of an organization that I referred to as the Black Panthers, even though they don't just consist of African Americans. After a few weird trips to alternate dimensions, they become antagonists for seemingly no real reason, so after that point I just became annoyed with them and found myself wondering why I had to deal with them. At the end of the game, the fight comes to Comstock, and once you reach his "house," the story goes off the walls insane: very intense, very confusing, and very memorable. There are discussions all across the Internet trying to decipher what went on in the game's last moments. Just before the climax of the game, the game makes a small return to its roots of horror, and that was a lot of fun, it certainly kept me on the edge of my seat. And somewhere in the game's last moments, where the game goes insane, there's a little something many BioShock fans will appreciate.

At first, I had a hard time making sense of the game's ending, but after some thought and reading several discussions, I came to really appreciate the ending. The story as a whole is great, just some flawed moments every now and then. Elizabeth is the game's centerpiece, drawing much interest to how she develops as a character. Little moments like trying to skip rocks across water to failing at picking up a medicine ball to singing one of the game's recurring songs to a child further brings out the amount of attention the developers gave to her.

So while I was left wanting a little more out of this game at the end of the day, I still enjoyed it throughout and I will probably fondly remember it in the future. Hell, I am already playing the game over again for an achievement/easter egg/screenshot run! Also, on my YouTube channel, I plan to upload a playthrough of this game! So stay tuned for that.

Gameplay: 8

Design: 10 

Story: 9

Sound: 10

Replay: 8

Overall: 9.25

Edit: Added a replay value. Forgot to add that when I initially wrote this.

In Which I Moan About Wanting to Play BioShock

I swear I am going to be the last person on Earth to play BioShock Infinite. I'm trying to do a video playthrough of the game, in my antics to put my YouTube channel out there. Unfortunately, I live in a suite with four people, and the walls are as thin as the walls of a gingerbread house, and the only time I get to play video games is later on at night. I cannot record videos in the common room because everyone is there talking it up and talking about things entirely irrelevant to what is going on, and I just simply cannot have that.

Tonight I was just about to play it; I got a few seconds into the game when my roommate comes in and ruins the night for me. All day, he's been pissing me off so much that I think I'm just going to preach about it on my personal blog, but anyway, because he's here, I can't record a video of me playing the game. I could just play the game, make a video, and do a voice-over later, but I hate thinking of doing that because I want viewers to get exactly what's going through my mind as I play the game. By the time I get a video done, every other major YouTube channel is probably going to be done with it, though, so I don't know why I even bother.

I really feel like writing about my roommate now, so I'm gonna switch on over to my private blog to do so. Before I go, I want to assure you Readers that I really do have things in the works here, including:

• A let's play/review of BioShock Infinite
• A let's play (condensed) of The Longest Journey
• Some snippets of stuff for another Minecraft Country episode
• A match in Garry's Mod where my cousin's friends and I grief people up an RP server's invisible walls. (hopefully)
• A playthrough of Just Cause 2

Things just have been tough, because my main group of friends pretty much have subpar computers that won't allow for them to play anything with me. So trust me, there will be stuff here; I just need to get the opportunities to do them. The circumstances I gave plus school work plus other personal matters are constantly demanding my attention, but hopefully over the Summer, I'll have mostly everything straightened out.

Epic Fail on Elegon

My friend, Latinoxbest, is not a bad gamer when it comes to the thick of things. He's just... off sometimes. Like every time we'd run Elegon, no matter what you do to add to the warnings, he will fall through the floor when Elegon removes it. So we ran it, this being my second time going through Mogu'shan Vaults.

As you see in the video, which I took to record his failure, I screw up as well. However, I kept this video because the chat window was golden.

I've mostly played this game between now and the last post I wrote. I would have more videos and such if my friends would play more Steam games with me. I also guess I've been neglecting news and such, thing is I get tired of that after a while. Also school's been a drag, and even more so than that, I've been engrossed in a personal problem that's kept me from attending to this blog. But I'll try to keep things up this time. When Summer comes along, I can assure you that there will be more activity here.

WoW, Blizzard, Just WoW

At first, I was going to defy the minimal-cursing rule that I have to abide by in order to keep this blog up (note: if you want to write a blog here, you can curse all you want. But for my purposes I have to hold my tongue sometimes). I'm still going to curse a bit, but what I'm going to do originally would've drawn negative attention towards my blog. What I'm about to do might still draw negative attention, but it's the exact negative attention I'm looking for. I really hope people on the Internet see this. I hope somebody from Blizzard sees this. Ready?

BLIZZARD, YOU ARE ALL MASSIVE BLOWHARDS. YOU BLOW SO HARD IT LEAVES PENISES SHRIVELED AND BRITTLE AND WHATEVER.

I'm beyond angry. I'm beyond infuriated. The faun from Pan's Labyrinth was pretty pissed at Ofelia for eating a couple of grapes and waking up the Pale Man. I'm even more pissed than that. Batman in The Dark Knight Rises seemed pretty furious at Bane in their final confrontation. I'm more pissed than that. Donald Duck is pissed in every Disney cartoon. I'm more pissed than that.

My best friend has decided to give World of Warcraft another shot, and he told me he, his cousin, and our friend all got really into it again. I asked if they were playing on a private server, and he told me that they were playing on the original, retail servers of WoW. I remembered those good old days of spending so much of my time on the computer killing things and leveling up and checking out Blood Elves. As much as I try to avoid playing World of Warcraft again, I genuinely miss those days. I don't like what they did with Cataclysm's Edge, and I hate that they included this really silly panda race in Mists of Pandorica or whatever the hell it's called. Still, there's so much more to WoW than those things, and the game is definitely quite an experience. I've tried to replace it with this other game called Continent of the Ninth Seal, but that game has many shortcomings.

I would love to play WoW again, and I will. I'm going to make a trial, not free to play (more on that later) account and make a billion characters and level them up to 20. This should take a good half a year or so. Hopefully by then I will have what's called a disposable income to blow off on this game.

More desperately hopeful than that, maybe I can make enough characters to take however the hell long Blizzard needs to finally switch WoW over to a free to play model. In today's day and age, more and more MMO's are being released with the free to play business model. Valve is probably the cornerstone of success with that model, with Team Fortress 2 showcasing how excellently profitable a free to play game can be with an ingame market. Of course, TF2 was never subscription based. Still, many subscription based MMO's have taken the turn towards free to play. Take The Old Republic, for example. The thing they all have in common is that they all were losing subscribers. WoW is bleeding out, and Blizzard just don't seem to give a damn.

It turns out I didn't make the point I wanted to make on the day I started this post, so I'll get to that point now. Allow me to quote good John Lagrave, WoW's producer.

You know, we looked at it lots, we looked at whether Level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. There's also a lot of things in the game that are special that we want to reserve for our paying customers.

Are you stupid! You're losing paying customers! Who's going to enjoy those "special things" you are "reserving" for paying customers when most of them are gone? Besides that, what good is there in reserving these "special things?" He makes it sound like paying customers are going to lose those "special things" if they decided to make the game free to play, but the thing is, those "special things" are the game itself. When you play up to Level 20, sure, you are experiencing enough of the game to get a feel for what it is. But are you experiencing the whole game? NO! There's nothing "special" about being able to trade with other players. There's nothing "special" about being able to be in a guild. There's nothing "special" about being able to type in all of the chat channels. There's nothing "special" about having more than ten gold. All of these things are available to players Level 20 and below who pay for the game. Is there any difference between them and free to play players, other than restrictions placed on free to play players? Do people Level 20 and below who pay for the game say to themselves, "Man, I really hope Blizzard doesn't allow just anyone to yell, or else I'm going to fell like they went cheap"? NO! So do you think people who pay for features available to them after Level 20 are going to say, "Man, this raid dungeon doesn't feel fun anymore because anyone with Internet access and money to pay for the game alone just ruins that fun." NO! So what the hell is Blizzard's problem?

Well, it's obvious, and I said it before. Blizz don't give a shit. I read an article that said a great point. In today's world, there are three types of business models for MMO's. There are free-to-play models, there are free-to-play models that were at one point subscription based, and then there's World of Warcraft. Blizzard's insistence on keeping the archaic subscription based model is about as ridiculous as Rick Santorum's archaic beliefs of banning contraceptives, placing women in the low aspects of society, discriminating against African-Americans, and so on.

That said, I've decided to pay for WoW again. WHAT? AFTER ALL OF MY COMPLAINING AND WHINING? Yep. There is only one reason why I do so... well, two. First of all, paying for WoW every six months is easily exploitable, in a legal and good way. I don't have a job, yet, so how do I pay for WoW every six months? There are two holidays, one midway through each billing period, allowing me to just afford this game's subscription. So there's that, and there's the longstanding belief I have that Blizzard is going to have to man up, live up to today's world, and move on from archaic stupidity. It's like forcing our government to remain in the Bush years. So I believe WoW will be free to play, and that day may come sooner than anyone would guess. Therefore, I'm going to man up first and pay for the game, show Blizzard that yes, even the biggest crybaby can still be a bigger man than a blowhard. That's my "F you" to Blizzard right there. What are they gonna do? Ban me? Disable my account? Stop making money off me? Or are they going to man up and make the game free to play?

As for my time with WoW itself, it feels wonderful to be back... too wonderful. The last time I played WoW was in Ninth Grade. The last time I played WoW in general was in Eleventh Grade, but that was on a private server. Private servers used to be fun, but now that I've lived with the bugs and the donors and all that jazz, I've decided that playing retail again would be such a warmer and more balanced experience. Plus, I finally get to play scripted dungeons! Scripted dungeons, for some reason, never work on private servers.

So now I got all these things going on. I'm reexperiencing some things while learning so many new things. I stopped playing WoW around the time the Lich King was defeated for the first time. Now, with Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria released, I'm discovering so many exciting new things about the game, even with the stupid looking Pandaren race.

I haven't found much motivation for recording my time in WoW. I do have plenty of screenshots though, and to end this post on a note, I'll post some of those moments for you Readers.

My "montage" of stupid-looking moments with my panda guy, this and following.

Wow, such awful children.

LADY SYLVANAS ^^

My pride and joy, the Feline Familiar (cat on the broomstick) I spent literally twelve hours in total trying to get.

My paladin admiring another paladin's tier armor.

Minecraft Country, Episode 1: Pastoral Symphony and Cats!

Welcome to the start of my Minecraft series, Minecraft Country! Originally, I wanted to just upload a video of the Note Block Studio, but I decided it would fit nicely with everything else I added. No other intro in this series will ever be that long. In this episode, I attend a performance put on by none other than the Minecraft Chunkarmonia, and afterwards I learn the responsibilities and difficulties of owning a cat in Minecraft.

At last, I got it uploaded! Hopefully there will be more to come. I'd like to thank Akalron and JewsofDeath for being a part of the fun.

My Thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII-3 (Lightning Returns)

I really hoped I would put off Final Fantasy for a while so that new Readers and such won't think of this as a Final Fantasy only blog. I really hate thinking of this blog that way, especially considering how lousy Square's been with that franchise these days. Oh well.

Final Fantasy XIII is probably the most troubled game in the entire series. I'm even willing to say it's even more troubled than Final Fantasy XIV, which is an utter nightmare of problems. Still, Square seems to know what they're doing in fixing that abomination of bugs and interface screw ups. With Final Fantasy XIII, however, it's just one stupid issue after the other. As every fan of the series should know by know, Final Fantasy XIII was received horribly for it's ridiculous gameplay. I remember I tried to defend that game when it was the second one I played, and then after going through Final Fantasy III, VI, VII, VIII, X, and XII, I realize now how terrible that game is in the context of the series. FFX actually has the same linear gameplay as FFXIII, but somehow FFXIII somehow takes the linearity and amps it to a point that nobody could even imagine. Somehow, the linearity, while annoying, feels acceptable in FFX. I really have no idea why. I guess it could be because FFXIII has way more and maybe even longer cutscenes. In any case, that really crippled the gameplay. The developers explained that the linearity was meant to coincide with the story, but the story itself really wasn't as gripping or exciting as the others.

I liked the battle system in FFXIII, but that's all it had going for. Square didn't need to make a sequel to the game, but they announced that they would, so it then became a matter of fixing the issues with gameplay. So what happened there? Well, they certainly fixed the gameplay; they made the world widely accessible and their time-travel thing added many possibilities for sidequests and exploration and interactivity with the world and such. It was incredibly wonderful. So how is it that that game managed to fail so hard that I refused to buy it?

DLC. That's the answer to everything wrong with that game, as well as the reason why games these days can end up sucking badly. It's the reason why companies (I'm looking at you, Activision and EA) release games in pieces just for money, to eat away at the gaming community, rather than releasing what I call Gestalt Videogames. What is a Gestalt Videogame? Simply put, it's a video game before DLC was conceived.

I'll certainly bring up that term time and time again, but let's return to Final Fantasy XIII. So in XIII-2, the game ends with your main characters failing. It ends with an ambiguous, "To be continued," as the endgame screen. That is the biggest dick move anyone can pull in anything. If I wrote a short story that said, "To be continued," at the end, I would seriously have to reconsider having Creative Writing as my major. If a movie had a, "To be continued," at the end of the movie, they'd better damn well have at least summed up the main plot of that particular movie. Besides that, you can sort of get away with that in a movie since the audience has a passive role in the events of the movie. In a game, however, gamers are the ones who ultimately control whether the game finishes or not. They are actively engaging with the game to reach some form of closure by the end of its story. When you have someone do that just so that they can die in the end and have to wait for the next thing, you are being a moron. You are pretty much raping the gamer of his experience with your game.

Then, as I said before, a good one hundred and eighty five percent of Final Fantasy XIII-2 consists of DLC. Why bother paying sixty bucks for a game that's just in pieces?

So that ultimately leads me to Lightning Returns. Lightning was my favorite character in FFXIII for being awesome, well designed, well voiced, and well developed as a character. She was able to hold everything together when everyone else aside from Fang was being ridiculous in that game, kind of like how Auron keeps the group's shit together in FFX. The fact that Square has taken that and turned Lightning into a selling point for the FFXIII series just disgusts me in ways I couldn't have imagined. What they did with Lightning is essentially what presumably Activision did Treyarch's division of Call of Duty: they took the best character from World at War, Sergeant Reznov (a.k.a. a Soviet Gary Oldman) and turned him into the reason why you have to buy Black Ops and Black Ops 2. Who does that? Greedy companies who don't care about their games and only focus on what makes money.

So the fact that Square's gone on that road with FFXIII is pretty much the central reason why I try not to have anything to do with that game anymore. But, as much as I hate what they're doing with the game's trilogy, I can't ignore Final Fantasy XIII-3's fine points. I don't really know for sure what they are specifically, beyond making Lighting the sole playable character and increasing interactivity by like tenfold, but from what's shown, they seem like good ideas. But as Blue Highwind had put it, it's not a matter of whether the game will be good anymore. Rather, it's a matter of how Square will manage to screw up the game this time. Blue said he won't play the game unless it gets stellar reviews. I'll probably play it if the gameplay is good, if there's finality to the story, and, most importantly, if somebody says you can play the game without feeling like you were gipped by Square for whoring out the name.

From what I've seen, all I can say is that I like the level/concept designs, but do I really have to say that? Square is known for their detailed worlds and such, even when they are straight lines like Spira or Cocoon. Also, I find it really interesting that the game once again takes place way off in the future, and I would like to see how Square's managed to tie that in with all the characters and such. I also find it interesting that they are writing the game in the vein of Majora's Mask, where you have to compete with time before it runs out. After playing Majora's Mask, I wasn't sure how well that gameplay element could be replicated in another game, but if that isn't criticized too badly in FFXIII-3, I'll look into it.

There's a moderate chance I'll actually get this game. I guess not having played the second one has allowed me to take things into consideration. We'll see what happens when the time comes.