Review: Final Fantasy XIII

 

The plot of Final Fantasy makes no sense. I was trying to figure it out the whole way through, watching every cutscene, skimming through the in-game encyclopedia, reading additional material online. I'm still lost. Final Fantasy games are always a hard nut to crack, their worlds existing unto only themselves. In every iteration you are expected to digest an entire new universe of mythos, history, geography, etc. Final Fantasy XIII might just take the cake though. By using similar non-words like Fal'cie and L'cie as names for it's central ideas, it is just inviting confusion. Not necessarily bad, but pair this with the fact that the main characters are a bunch of non-comunicative anime stereotypes and, well, what you end up with is one of the most annoying and nonsensical plots ever to grace a JRPG. And that's saying something for the genre of games that is perhaps best know for it's overwrought, melodramatic, and honestly, loony teenage-angst-meets-the-sci-fi-apocalypse yarns. (Xenosaga anyone?) I don't want to let this be the only sticking point of this review though because it's not all bad.

The battle system in particular, is extremely engaging and well done. It at once, simpler and more complex than any Final Fantasy battle system to come before, and is fast, frenetic and usually satisfying. But the thing is, it had better be good because in this game, it's literally all you do. Gone are the mini-games, sidequests, optional dialogues, villages to explore, etc of previous games. In XIII, its all about battles. You travel down a series of lovely corridors, occasionally picking up loot out of a treasure chest, you run into an enemy and then you battle. Then you sit through a cutscene where these emotionally dysfunctional kids try to figure out whats going on while spouting out a dense jargon peppered with agonizing catchphrases. (Let's create our own destinies you guys!)

I do have to say that this game took me over a year to complete. I played it off and on and that may have made the plot seem even more incoherent than it actually was. I'm saying that for the sake of fairness, but honestly, theres really not anything that made me hungry to keep playing. And it really is a shame, because I was ready to love this game. I really was. I would say up until the half-way point, I was pretty into it. Many RPGs start out restrictive and branch out later into the game. This one, as an intentional design choice, keeps the player exactly where they are supposed to be at all times. Had this game been a cinematic marvel, I wouldn't have even minded. But if you are going to feed us a lousy anime story, don't make that the main course.

6.5 / 10

Review: Alone in the Dark: Inferno

Jeez. I need to stop picking up these crappy old survival horror games in the hopes of finding hidden gems. It so rarely happens. I'll tell you, it sure didn't happen with Alone in the Dark: Inferno. The Inferno edition of the game is the PS3 remake of an Xbox 360 title which was deemed unplayable upon release. I'll need to look up what exactly was changed because the game still seems pretty damn unplayable to me. Of all of the games I've played the whole way through, this one might be the only one that is not technically beatable. Due to glitches that prevent you from progressing, the game is essentially broken. Seemingly aware of this fact, the developers included a feature that allows you to skip to any park of the game like a DVD scene select menu. What. The. Fuck.
So they knew that the game didn't work and just decided to ship it anyway? On the second time it was released? It literally makes no sense. And there are soooo many glitches. Almost every step of the way through this game, I was battling a game engine that worked against me completing what the game was asking me to do. Objectives were unclear and sometimes the necessary elements to complete them did not load correctly or whatever, leading to situations where you have absolutely no idea what to do and no means to do it. The game can be stupidly difficult in this way- it will send you to the last checkpoint because of the game's poor design caused you to die. Get ready to complete the same sequences again and again until you do it the exact way the game wants you to.
What's really upsetting is that believe it or not, there was some real potential here for an awesome survival horror experience and some things work out quite nicely. You can't fault this game for lack of ambition- it tries to do so many things that it ends up feeling unfocused and sloppy, reaching a bit to far into other genres. You have your floaty driving sections, platforming with and camera angles, first person immersion exercises that border on the absurd. The inventory system is the most obvious example of the game's bizarre fixation with first person viewpoint. Essentially a spin off of the Resident-Evil-of-old style limited inventory slots, your weapons, tools and healing supplies are stored in your jacket pockets which you actually navigate through in first person. Crazy right? The combat is an amalgamation of combining materials to make bombs, clunky shooting, and even clunkier melee combat. Wait till you get a load of the melee in this game. It's bananas. While holding down a trigger, you must twirl the thumbstick in the direction you want to swing, taking into account the fact that you need a full swing radius to do any damage. Oh and you will have to solve puzzles in this way too. Good luck! There's quite a few puzzles in this game actually, almost none of which make any logical sense.
It's incredible how good one sequence will play just to be followed up by some momentum killing design errors that bring the whole experience crashing to the ground. The presentation isn't awful per se, for a game it's age (one of the first next gene titles), but when a game seems like it wasn't even tested for bugs before it ships, its hard to appreciate the good qualities. And the story certainly doesn't earn the game any addition points. It's the sort of B-Movie fare you would expect, laughably bad for the most part yet enjoyable enough to keep you sticking with until the end. With some more time in the cooker, this could have been a decent game, but as it stands, it's barely worth the 5(5!) dollars it cost at Gamestop.  4/10

Review: Dead Island

Ghaaaaa… That was miserable. This is the first time in a while I have been so fucking over a video game before completing it… and yet oddly compelled to see it through to the finish. Even though it ended totally predictably and without any twists or new gameplay elements added past the very first couple missions. This game is just idiocy. It's mindlessly running from point A to point B gunning down every thing in your way, watching an absolutely atrocious cut-scene and the rinsing and repeating. Yet, for some reason this mindlessness is palpable to a certain degree. I found this game to be a nice accompaniment to watching tv and listening to podcasts, as it is so mindless and inconsequential that you really only need to uses about 10% of your brain power to make it through. And I seriously wonder how many people actually made it through this one. The presentation quality seems to take a pretty hard dip around the halfway point, and the mission structures become even more banal and annoying than they were before. You will run back and forth between the same locations hundreds of times looking for the next item or switch that will further the absolutely asinine plot. I don't want to give anything away… actually there is nothing to give away. I don't know what happened and could not care less. There's an island, zombie outbreak, you are immune, etc. It's the same tired Zombie conventions you've seen in every movie, game or whatever since the beginning of the zombie craze, a fixation that I am personally bored shitless of. Seriously, no more zombie games for a while guys.
Theres really not much more to say about this time waster of a game. I could pick it apart piece by piece but it would be needlessly dissecting a turd. It's pretty much all turd- all the way through. Certain questions continue to bother me though: why was the premier trailer for the game so damn good? It was emotional, terrifying and seemed to signal something that would take the genre in a new direction that was laced with heartbreaking ethos. Instead the actual cast of the game is a swath of gansta rap cliches- even going so far as to have an awful zombie-themed rap over the ending credits? Why did the cutscenes, which featured atrocious texture pop-in, expressionless faces, and seemingly nonexistent lip-syncing, look worse than pretty much anything I have seen on the precious generation of consoles?! Why does the game impose any real penalty for dying, meaning that you can just go in guns blazing, die on purpose, re-spawn and just do it again until all of the enemies are dead? It totally ruined any sense of fear or dread i might have had. Why did this game last for 25 hours, padded out with a hundred pointless busy-work missions? Why do they set up the ending for a sequel? God no!
    I realize that this game is intended to be played co-operatively. And for stretches of it, I did. It made it a bit more fun, but seemed to increase the occurrence of glitches, frame-rate issues, the game freezing outright, etc. Also, if you join someone else's game, you are simply gaining experience and not progressing your own plot. For someone like me, who was simply trying to power through this mess, that did not work. So, my only option was to just wait and see if people wanted to join in on my game, which only happened 4-5 times.
    Dead Island is a culmination of things that need to go away in the video game industry: mindless shooting, overuse of zombies as a plot device, pointless fetch quests, total lack of any meaningful story, cliche characters, length that seems wildly disproportional to the amount of time you would actually want to play it, a disregard for presentation that is honestly insulting to the completionist gamer,  extremely graphic violence with a lazy context… the list goes on. And yet, it still doesn't descend into the absolute pits of gaming hell. As hypocritical as it sounds, I guess I had a bit of fun. If this was a movie it would be Sci-Fi Channel Original.  4/10