Scout's Day Off

Here it is, my first recorded gaming session, with my roommate Akalron. I'm pretty nervous about this, considering how stupid this video is and how massively flamed I'm going to get on YouTube. In this video, I check out the BeerHeads achievement server, where people pretty much just screw around and do weird stuff. I loathe everything about this video, though. Hopefully, when I decide to start my Minecraft feature, the awkwardness will dissipate.

The Fantasy Never Dies

Jesus, what a stupid name for a blog post.

I'm going to quote this blog's description here and add to it:

Originally my Final Fantasy blog, I shut down this blog for a few months before ultimately realizing I had a lot of fun with it, even though nobody read a single thing. Now, with the world of PC gaming fully open to me with Steam, emulators, FRAPS, and so on, I felt it would be awesome to take this blog and turn it into a general gaming blog.

Unfortunately, I lost the backup copy of this blog, so all of my previous posts are gone. In one way, this is a good thing because these posts featured opinions of mine that I look back on and realize how invalid they were. But for the most part, this sucks because I just had so many awesome things beyond the posts themselves. Thankfully, I've managed to salvage my playthroughs of Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy XII, along with my unfinished playthrough of FFIII. The FFIII playthrough might just get deleted, though, so don't expect that to remain salvaged for long.

Wait, BREAKING NEWS! I found all of my blog posts :D What I figured I'd do is post them before this post so that way this updated information doesn't get buried beneath my old posts.

Okay, now I can carry on with what I originally wanted to say. Going through my previous blog posts, I have one thing to say: MY GOD, ALL THE POSTS ABOUT FFXIII-2.

I guess one of the reasons why I shut this blog down was how much of a failure that game was when it was finally released, after all the damn hype I built up for it. Also, you might notice all these posts about Type-0 being released. Those were written nearly over a year ago. Look now, try as you might, you'll never find any information about whether that game will be released overseas or not. In short, Square Enix is managed by morons, and that greatly contributed to the shutting down of this blog.

As I alluded to in the blog description, I've gained wide access to the opportunities presented by PC gaming. In the case of Final Fantasy, I can now play FFXII and FFX on my computer, because I have finally found an emulator for PS2 games! In general, pretty much every Final Fantasy ever released is accessible to me, but I'm not going to bother with that opportunity that much. With FRAPS, I can make video let's plays of FFXII and FFX, allowing for a kind of entertainment that cannot be achieved through a written playthrough.

However, why limit myself to Final Fantasy? In my opinion, that was why my blog died. Therefore, even though my blog template and design runs on a theme of Final Fantasy, I want to emphasize this new factor of this blog:

I am not solely focusing on Final Fantasy anymore.

So there you have it. What does this mean? This means I will discuss any game. That includes my current library of games, which includes:

• Arma 2: Combined Ops
• Black Mesa (basically a graphical overhaul mod of Half-Life 1)
• Counter-Strike
• Continent of the Ninth Seal
• Day of Defeat
• Day Z
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Garry's Mod
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Left 4 Dead 2
• MicroVolts
• Minecraft
• Portal
• Saints Row: The Third
• Team Fortress 2
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• PlayStation 2 Emulator
• Dr. Muto
• Kingdom Hearts
• Kingdom Hearts Final Mix
• Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories
• Kingdom Hearts 2
• Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy XII
• Nintendo 64 Emulator
• Banjo-Kazooie
• Banjo-Tooie
• Conker's Bad Fur Day
• StarFox 64
• Super Mario 64
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Can't get to work)
• Jet Force Jemini
• And so much more, my god
• GameBoy Advance Emulator
• Metroid: Zero Mission
• Metroid Fusion
• Final Fantasy VI

Whew. You never realize how many games you have until you count them all out. And I still plan to add more games to that library!

Beyond just the games I own, though, I'll still talk about games in the same sense as how I talked about Final Fantasy, by looking through videos and news and concept art and such. So this blog now has no excuse to sit around for long periods of time anymore. In short, I anticipate a very lively blog here, and to celebrate that, I will find a way to upload my first FRAPS video ever in the next post!

Final Fantasy III, for the iPhone!

I managed to find some iTunes gift cards and buy myself FFIII for the iPhone now. I left my DS at home since I didn't see myself using it for anything other than this game (if it were the 3DS, the case would be different). The game is beautiful on the iPhone 4S! Making this a game on the cellphone was such an excellent idea from Square. I read somewhere that there's no Mognet in this game, so supposedly you can get the Onion Knight Job without doing that stupidity. Still, I doubt I am going to have the patience to level up all the way to 99.

Overall, I am really excited to be playing this game again. As the great Blue Highwind said, it's "A wonderfully charming little game about kids who switch Jobs and wander around the world so lovely it doesn't need a plot." Plus, this means I can return to work on my playthrough for this game, though it'll be a while before I can continue since I have some catching up to do. Overall, I'm liking the feel of the game so far. The controls work wonderfully well with this game, and I am looking forward to using it on my dreadful eight hour bus ride.

FFXIII-2 Decision and the Future of Final Fantasy

I have decided not to spend my time playing XIII-2. Since I'm in college now, which is why I haven't been here often, I cannot find the time to play something unless I know it will be worth my time. Final Fantasy XIII-2 appears to be fantastic with the new and improved gameplay, but what about the story? Stories are what makes the Final Fantasy series unique, and unfortunately I have found out too much of this game's story to even wish to play it anymore. It's sick. It's disgusting. I am in shock, I really am. The original game's storyline was confusing, but it made sense and it had a sense of finality. This game's story is demanding that you wait to pay for a whole new game or for DLC, and I refuse to do that.

In Fallout 3, you die in the end as the main character, and you can't do anything after that point. It sounds horrible, but the good thing is that your efforts throughout the game resulted in saving the Wasteland, by purifying the irradiated water throughout America. Sure, you died, your father died, everything seemed like it was over. However, you still know that you completed the game, and that everything in the game's world will now be okay. You don't need to sit around and wait for an expansion.

Now, in another game, like Kingdom Hearts, this would be different, because that game is a series of games that are related to each other. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn't relate to each other, and therefore each game should have a complete story. This is where XIII-2 fails. There is no ending for XIII-2, it was all just a lie. This has me fearing for the storyline of Type-0, because Square wants to make that game into its own spinoff series, and it seems to imply that there won't be a real ending to the game. At least it hasn't been advertised as a game of finality, and they say that the DLC is free, so there shouldn't be a problem for that game. I am keeping my hopes up for Type-0. I honestly must admit that I wasn't expecting XIII-2 to be all fine and perfect, it just seemed a little too good to be true. And where's Lightning? Why isn't she playable?

It's one thing to write an unfinished story. It's another thing to advertise it as a complete product, and what Square did is unforgivable. Maybe it wasn't all of Square, maybe it was just the writer of the story. Hopefully, we won't hear too much from him in the coming future of the series. A lot of people seem to believe that the series has gone to hell just because of one numbered title that has ultimately struggled. Sure, there's FFX-2 and Dissidia that are ultimately real nightmares as well, but they are spin-offs. XIII-2 is a spinoff as well, but it was Square's chance at redemption for the first game's bad gameplay, and since they ruined it, it counts against them. However, again we only have one game here. I cannot stand everyone saying that the series is going to suck forever now and that FFX will be the last decent Final Fantasy they ever release. It pisses me off that FFXII is overlooked and has been released relatively recently in context of the series's lifespan.

It's just one game, guys. Don't give me no nonsense about XIII-2, it still falls under the same production so it classifies as part of FFXIII. We still have Type-0 to check out, and we still have Versus XIII (which will probably be the best of the FFXIII spin-offs given that it's mostly Tetsuya Nomura's doing). FFXIV is another MMO, and I suppose that also has grounds for pissing off fans. It pissed me off, I'll give you all that much. If they were really going to release another Final Fantasy MMO, they could've at least made it several ways different from FFXI. But that's not what's important here. What's important are the numbered titles that you can actually place in your console device and play through without connection to the internet. We have the original five Final Fantasies that were as bland as a stale cracker, but in the end they're ultimately better and more well loved that FFXIII. We have FFVI and FFVII, games that cannot be argued with. Then you have FFVIII, which I hate the living hell out of, but enough people seem to like it. It certainly did not seem to portend that the series was reaching a state of hell. FFIX is loved by a lot of the fans, and I am still longing to check it out. FFX has some... mixed views. People seem to be willing to admit that it was a decent attempt. FFXI doesn't count for being an MMO. And last, there's FFXII, which was one of my best video game experiences ever. A lot of people hate it for no reason; I assume they're just new fans whose first Final Fantasy was FFX (or worse, FFX-2). So maybe Square is being very greedy and disgusting trying to shell out money from the pockets of their customers. Personally, I don't give a damn so long as the game they release is a game I don't play, like FFXI and FFXIV. If they want to make people pay monthly to play an online game, fine, whatever. However, I have to care when they release a game with promises of being great, and then in the end it turns out that I had wasted my money and that I would have to waste more money for the finished product.

I was fine with FFXIII, but that was because it was the game that I needed in a time of despair over whether video games will ever be as good as they used to be (because I was playing all the first person shooters on the Xbox 360, all of which suck minus the Halo series). Anyway, so my point is that this game shouldn't worry people about the future of the series. When you look at FFXIII by itself, you will freak out and think that Square will never be able to get the next Final Fantasy right. However, when you take the game and put it in the grand scale of the series as a whole, it looks nothing more than a small blotch on a beautiful person's skin. For now, I want to see what Versus XIII and Type-0 will be like, and I am sure that they will be better games than FFXIII, allowing for fans to forget about the game and laugh it off as a silly mistake. When FFXV comes around, I am sure things will be different. My guess is that FFXIII's failure is attributed to the division of the company, since they divided into three groups to work on three different games at once (though I really wonder what the hell Nomura's been doing all this time with his group on Versus XIII). Perhaps the next Final Fantasy will have its story written by a different guy. Perhaps there will be different people in charge of the design of the gameplay. It seems pretty likely that that will be the case if the whole company returns to working on the game together and not split up.

I'm sure that, in the end of its run, the Final Fantasy series will feature more good games than bad. Only fourteen numbered titles have been released, and only three (the two MMO's and FFXIII) have turned out to be total wastes of numbers. I am sure that there will be quite a lot more than twenty numbered Final Fantasy titles in the future, regardless of what people think of that right now. So if you are a long-standing fan of this series hyperventilating over its future, calm the hell down. As I said before, ignoring the MMO's, it's just one game. We have a lot of previous titles to fondly reminisce of, and we have plenty of future titles waiting to be conceived. So just calm down, take a deep breath, and pop in FFVI, or FFXII if you are beginning to think that Square's greatness is lost in time. Then, when FFXV is released, we can all forget that FFXIII ever happened.

Now, shut the hell up about Final Fantasy's future. If you are a damn true fan, you would've already had in mind everything that I just said.

What Shinra News Already Said, as well as What They Didn't Say

Okay, so a lot of Final Fantasy XIII-2 stuff has come out, along with even a Game Informer article (I don't remember if it was a review or a preview; it was most likely a preview) on it. I have been gone from this blog for quite a while now, and I do apologize for that. My life has taken a lot of my concerns since I finished FFVI. As a matter of fact, that FFIII playthrough I am working on is going to be put on hold indefinitely. When I can find the time to play that game again, I'll do it and I'll continue the playthrough. But for now, I've been mostly concerned with my college's orientation next week, my violin practice, my work at my city's performing arts center, and so on. Plus, Skyrim came out, and that game is pretty much the best video game that is out these days (Type-0 isn't going to be counted as anything since it isn't in America yet). A lot of my life has been taken by Skyrim already. I never found the time to take a look at what's going on with the series that I love (except for Type-0. I've kept a close eye on that game since my absence. Unfortunately, there was nothing of importance released within the past month, until now). However, if there are actually any Readers out there reading this (I know there aren't, I can see so on my blog's stats. To be honest, this blog is really more for myself than anything), they should already know that this blog isn't going to get updated that much. It says so in the first post that I wrote here.

Anyway, so Shinra News has been flooded with information on FXIII-2. I was going to take a look at Game Informer's article, and then I ignored it because all it was was a look at the game's first few hours of gameplay. I am not going to read that nonsense. On Shinra News, it seems that the culprit of all the XIII-2 articles is some user by the name of FFGirl. While it's nice to see someone who cares about the sequel of the controversial FFXIII, it would be much nicer to see other people who care about the series in general. Nobody has said anything about Type-0's overseas confirmation, and that news is probably a week old already. It does say that on Type-0's wiki page, but it should say it on the news since that is big and important. All I see on Shinra News is stuff about the DLC for the game and the soundtracks and all that. Who cares? Let me go over the news and show you all which articles are important:

(Oh, by the way, I just went to look and now they say that Type-0 has been confirmed for the West. Nice one.)

• Final Fantasy V and VI to Be Released on North America PSN: This informs of a release. Always important.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 North American Collector's Edition Announced: As with the other posts of collector's editions, this is somewhat important because this shows what to expect to get when you pay extra money for the game.
• Game Informer Magazine Spoils Beginning of Final Fantasy XIII-2: This is important because if it wasn't there, I would've read the article and the game's beginning would've been spoiled.
• Official ESRB Rating for Final Fantasy XIII-2: Okay, this really isn't all that important. It's still nice to know, I guess.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 New Artwork and Gameplay: The gameplay demo shown is all that really needs to be seen.
• Final Fantasy XV Could Possibly Be an Action RPG: This is important because this gives readers information from the makers of the game on what to expect from future titles (also, HELLZ YEAH! NO MORE LOADING BARS!)
• New Final Fantasy XIII-2 Special Set to Air in December: This is important for anyone who wants to listen to more information on the game.
• Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII-2 Now Complete: This post informs of a game's progress in development.

And that's about it. Everything else is about screenshots and whatnot. Sure, they may include some tidbits on the gameplay of the game, but other than that, it's just a bunch of pictures to look at. These should be featured somewhere else, in my opinion. I guess it's not too bad to post them in the news, but there needs to be other stuff there like the articles I listed above. I would become a Shinra News reporter, but Blue says to stay away from that wiki and he seems incredibly scarred by it, so I am not going to do it.

I actually don't have too much to say about XIII-2, though. Actually, I don't really feel like talking about that game right away. I am going to run through the Type-0 internet articles and make sure there is nothing of actual importance to talk about. Then I'll go over the Versus XIII stuff, because I think there is some new information out on that game. Then, I will get back to writing about XIII-2.

On Type-0, it is said that there will likely be a sequel to the game. I already knew about this since Square had planned to make a little spinoff series going like Type-1, Type-2 and so on. However, if you didn't know about this, I guess you are now informed on that. Also, there is a second demo out for Type-0, but that's old news as well. I think the second demo might be the same as the first, I am not too sure. As for Versus XIII, there isn't much out other than that the game will have Moogles. Everything else on the interwebs is about XIII-2, so I guess I have no choice but to get back to that game. But first, I need to look at the new articles and videos that have been released on that game.

I'm sorry, I can't find a good video. I keep finding this one where the guy is holding the camera sideways. There was another of a press conference, and the translations were awful. If you want to see it for yourself, here's the two videos. I will admit, the articles that show screenshots of Sunleth Waterscape were impressive. I missed that place; I am going to be so glad to see it again.

Final Fantasy Type-0 Overseas Release Confirmed!

You know what, I don't care if this picture becomes overused. From now
on, this picture will be used every time some good news is released.

So yeah, that's about it really. Here's the link to the article confirming this bit of information. Don't bother going to the Final Fantasy Wiki anymore, they only care about FFXIII-2, which looks great but is nothing compared to this game right here. Did I mention this might be the best Final Fantasy yet?

Since I have some duties to this blog to fulfill, I am going to write about all the buzz going on around XIII-2 shortly.

Type-0 Is on the Rise

What a better way to break the news than Rem's cute face?

Final Fantasy Type-0 sold half a million copies in Japan. If those numbers aren't convincing enough for Square to release the game overseas, then I guess I am going to have to go over there and sit down with them to get them to do it. The game sold 472,253 copies, to be exact, making it the fourteenth best first-week selling game in Japan of all time (I think). Other sites are now putting up the question of how it will do in comparison to sales of other games, but that doesn't seem to matter to much. Famitsu gave it a 39/40; in other words, a near perfect score. I believe that Square is just waiting on fan reception now from the Japanese audience, but what I really think is going on is that Square is just toying with all other audiences. I am sure that they will release this game overseas. There's just too much going on with this game. You have the fact that it's considered almost perfect by Famitsu, you have how it is one of Square's best first-week sellers and ranks up there amongst their top PSP games, you have the fact that the game itself is incredible with the potential of being the best release yet, you have Rem, you have plot spoilers in the game's trailers. Then there are the hundreds of trailers and screenshots that audiences overseas were able to get a hold of. There is even a Game Informer article on the game when nobody even knows if it will ever be released (making it the first game I've ever seen in Game Informer that hasn't been confirmed for a release outside of Japan).

Then again, you have that twitter update from that guy who said he was voicing King. I guess that should give away the whole thing.

Damn it! I hate it when you know that a game like this will be released, yet you still want the developer to certify that certainty. Ugh! SQUARE, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, CONFIRM THE OVERSEAS RELEASE! This is what happens when you tease a manic!