The Story Continues

Back at university now, and all moved in to my new house. Access to the computer is restored. Trying to keep this blog up to date to help focus my attention somewhat.

My last blog was essentially a love letter to the fine humans at SuperGiant Games, so it's safe to say I've been having withdrawal symptoms from Bastion. As per the norm, my XBox is not with me, so unless I decide to buy it on Steam (which I probably won't) I can't play it for a while. It's probably the first time I've really wanted to play a game through more than twice, and it's not even an achievement driven thing. I revel in the world that Bastion creates, so just being there and experiencing it is more enjoyable than some entire games I've played.


The Final Fantasy series and I have a rocky relationship. I played through quite a lot of FF7 when I was younger. I really enjoyed FF9, so much so that it's properly my favourite of the lot. FFX was just plain weird and personally, where the series lost its way. The earlier Final Fantasy games always appealed to me more. The battle systems were far simpler, making them more intuitive. In the old games, a glance at the screen told you essentially what moves were at your disposal. Now, it involves Paradigm Shifts, Chain Gauges and something called Stagger Mode, which I don't think I really want to understand.

Onwards to the point I'm trying to make. Over the summer, I've been playing the original Final Fantasy, or more accurately, the Dawn of Souls re-release on my iPod. It's actually quite amazing. If you look at the reviews of FF13, the general consensus was that the game took far too long to get going. Not only were there several cut scenes to get through to the actual gameplay, you then had to push on through past lengthy tutorial. Dawn of Souls avoids this by having a thirty second cut-scene, and then you are off. Straight into the big wide world. There is very little plot other than "Go to dungeon, beat boss, go to next dungeon" and it's that simplistic design which really allows you to enjoy the game. Don't get me wrong, I love story in games, my previous post clearly shows that. It's far too often, however, that you see games bogged down in too much narrative.

The game itself isn't too long and I found myself beating the plot dungeons at quite a pace. A lot of my playtime has now been sunk into battling the bonus dungeons that were added in to the remake. Unfortunately, I found myself a list of all the superweapons and bosses in the game and now have devoted a portion of life to obtaining and maiming them all respectively. My party is already pretty souped up, it's now just a case of getting down to those nasty lower tier bosses and killing them as fast as possible. It's always fun when they wipe out three quarters of your party in a single hit.

So, that's Final Fantasy; Dawn of Souls for you. It's often said that "Less is more" And in this case, it couldn't be more true.

See y'all next time.