15 Sub-plots!

With a map finished and 15 sub plots put into effect, we're playing tonight!

Yay!

I know that I'm going to do about 0 of those 15 stories, and none of the stuff that I created will actually be used, but hey, at least I'll be ready and have a lot of stuff together just in case it does happen.

Interview!

Today, while watching over Addison and playing with her, the church called and said that they would like to interview me for their "Communication Specialist" position that I applied for.

The conversation was a little funny because they asked me if they knew where their headquarters were located, and I had to clarify if we were talking about THE headquarters, because then of course I knew where that was.

Turns out, that it's not at the big HQ, but a different one in another part of the valley; but just the thought of being associated with the big building or even doing an interview there made my stomach tighten up and my blood drop to my feet just enough that I had to make sure my voice didn't sound stressed out.

Even if it's not in the big office, here's to me getting a job with the church. If there's one 'company' (and I'll use that term very loosely) that I know won't be going under or having any financial difficulties any time soon, they're on the top of that list.

I do not like it here or there. . .

I hate being done with school.

School kept my brain busy. School kept me wanting to go to sleep, I'm up at 3:00 in the morning, not yawning, not sleepy in the least bit, grinding luck spheres on FFX, and I'm not sleepy. School kept me sleepy. Not having school = I have nothing to get me sleepy.

I think I really need to get writing more now. At least that might help me sleep.

GRINDY GRINDY!

Doing post game stuff in FFX, maxing stats, kicking butt, and taking names. And I just ran into the super grindy section of the entire thing- luck.

The other stats naturally show up throughout the game. It's not too difficult by just running the entire sphere grid to get 100+ strength. In fact, it's sort of impossible doing the basic grid to NOT have 100+ in some stats. But then comes luck. If you're lucky, and you dump every single sphere you can find into one person, you're lucky if your luck stat is somewhere in the 20's.

To put this into context of what that means, here's a basic translation. To change a sphere on the grid (not to even activate it, just to change it) you have to kill a pretty difficult monster even with all of your other stats maxed. If you do a good job killing it, you'll be able to alter two spots in the grid. I need to roughly alter 58 locations on the grid to max out that stat, and with only getting two at a time, that gives me 29 fights that I'm going to need to just alter the grid.

Once the grid is altered, I then need to activate those 58 locations . . . for all 7 characters. That means that I'm going to have to activate them 406 times. Normally, there's a way to 'cheat' your way into activation spheres and get 40 at a time, but not so much for the luck spheres. For those, you have to go one at a time, and if you're lucky 2 at a time. That means, that on top of those previous 29 fights just to change the grid, I'm going to have to do roughly 203 times, if I'm lucky and get perfect drops every single time. Most likely it'll be in the ballpark of 220 times assuming that 10% of the time I get bad drops (and that's thinking super positive).

That gives me 249 fights that I need to somehow speed my way through with no other shortcuts to than just dealing the damage and laying down the hurt. RO style grinding, ACTIVATE!

Starting to Loop Back - The Games I've Played

I've ranted about this game before, and I think we're getting to the point in my review of games that I'm starting to loop back onto games that I've played while writing stuff on this blog. Oh well, it's next on the list, so we're going to do it anyways.

Now, part of the weirdness that is Tales games, you start to expect certain things. Typically there are your summons including gnome and company, and there's typically two worlds. When I say typically, I mean you practically expect those things to show up when you pick up a Tales game, sort of like you expect to find a Chocobo, Shiva and Ifrit in a FF game. Shockingly, this Tales breaks that mold and doesn't stick you with two worlds, summons, and the same old bag of tricks.

This game starts out with some of your main characters as children.

and then goes to when they're all grown up and ready to save the world. The fun part about this, is that although some people see the childhood section as an annoyance, for story telling it's actually a really, REALLY cool move because you get to see why the characters are the way they are when they're grown up. You understand the weird relationship between the brothers when they're older, because you see how weird they are when they're younger. You understand just how awkward it would be when Sophie shows back up because you knew her from the childhood section. As a game, it was a bit annoying to know that whatever I did with my characters during the childhood section had no part in how they were going to be when they were older, it didn't mind how much I leveled or geared up, which was frustrating, but on the story side of things, it was a really, smart move because it gave you the background to the characters and introduced the world without throwing you into it head first expecting you to pick things up as you go. (You know who you are!)

Luckily there was one thing within Graces that was kept from the old template of Tales games, the active fighting. Where FF is turned based and you micro-manage (or at least you should be able to do this in your older FF games, don't get me started about the new bleh that they're doing with their combat system) Tales games allow you to take control of one character, the others are either AI or other players controlling their own character, and then allow you to run around, hit, fight, block, or do whatever else you want in real time. This is actually one of the biggest draws to this game for me, not only do you have a great story, but the combat system is MULTI PLAYER. It's an RPG that you can (and should) play with your friends because AI will never be as great as a person sitting next to you that you can communicate and plan things with.

With the pros out of the way, here come the warnings - if you're looking for super realistic graphics with top of the line character design and a traditional story that doesn't have it's weird quirky moments, then this game is not for you. You're going to run into characters that cast swords out of a gun/staff, that have little anime tear drops and storm clouds over their head when they're feeling certain things, and you're going to run into pink, blue, white, green, and purple hair. It's a very particular art style, and from that, I know that some people don't like it, just be warned of what style they're going, and know what you're getting yourself into when you start the game.

Then comes the fun part, just like all of the other Tales games, in good style, this one comes with a new game + option. I'm always a fan of new game +, always. It can never be a bad thing to do the game all over again, with everything that you ended the game with, just so you can unlock even more stuff and become even stronger so the next time you play, you can do new game ++ and rock the game even harder.

We'll just put it this way - I played the story line of this particular game enough times and became so over leveled that I could start and finish the entire story of this MASSIVE rpg in about six hours. I'm no speed runner, but being able to start to finish this game in a slightly longer gaming session (or two short ones) that's not too bad. I'm sure I could shorten it a bit if I really cared, but like I said, I watch speed running from a distance, there's no chance that I'd actually do it.

Anima

Over the weekend I was working on FFX and getting 100% on it. As part of that you have to min/max EVERY character that there is. The official thing is that you have to take every character through every bit of the sphere grid, but if I'm going to make three characters have max stats and break the game, I might as well drag everyone else along with them.

So, I was doing that, kicking butt at the sphere grinding, getting levels like a boss, and maxing out stats. I was through maxing out strength, and then started to work on defense, when I realized that I hadn't done one of the most basic end game things - getting the final Aeon(s), the Magus Sisters.

As part of doing this you typically have to go through and fight another summoner and beat each of her summons, and traditionally it's supposed to be some tough fights for you to get through because no one likes it when Bahamut is against them. Then I pulled out Anima, one shot each and every one of her summons and the summoning animations were the longest part of the fights because I killed things so quickly.

It was sort of funny that I didn't realize how strong and how over leveled I was until I did that, so part nerd, part life lesson, but you might think that you're behind schedule and think that you're not doing as great as you thought you were, or you just might be dealing with some really, really hard stuff in your life and when you get back to the easy junk you'll blow by it in a minute.

87 Bazillion Guns - The Games I've Played

Yup, it's time to talk about this one.

Now, if you remember right, I really enjoyed the first Borderlands. Part of me was suspicious about them coming out with a second, because I was afraid that they'd take away what made it awesome and just try to make it more generic and appealing to the general audience.

Luckily they didn't do that.

All of the chaos, all of the RPG elements, the nice blend between FPS and RPG, the AMAZING story line, and the top tier writing and voice acting are all still there. Then the best part about it all, unlike the first one which was desert on desert with more desert, #2 decides to let you see some polar ice caps, industrial clean cities, run down cities, and even brings you back to visit your old desert stomping ground from the first game for a brief visit.

The old NPC's are still around and stomping, making their mark on the world, even DLC characters like Moxxi are back with a vengeance, and what's even better is that your PC's from the first game are now NPC's in this game. So all of the stuff that you learned to love from the first game is still there, but now you get to build off of it and see more of what we fell in love in the first game, but with more friends. All of the new characters and new NPC's that are running around only add depth to the game that is well needed and they fit in perfectly. Personally, my favorite character in the game, just because of how she is written and voiced, is Tiny Tina. I would slow down my game play and listen to whatever she had to say whenever she spoke over the radio to me, just because I knew that whatever was going to come out of her mouth was going to be worth listening to.

The best part of this game is easily the side quests. The story is fun, and it's interesting and does some cool things, but it's the side quests that make the game worth playing because it's in those side moments that the writer(s) allowed themselves to have fun and do some crazy, out of the box, hilarious things. The story line is straight laced, and pretty much what you would expect from a FPS game. Here's something that is wrong, go kill the thing that's wrong and fix it to move on to the next area. I mean, typical story line for games doesn't even begin to explain what the general line is. The princess is stuck, let's go save her. Oh no, the big bad thing has part of what we need to save the day, let's go kill it. But then the side quests come and the humor and joy that is Borderlands really starts to shine.

I'm typically not a fan of DLC's and expansions, but again, the DLC's are where the developers had too much fun creating the game and really just enjoyed themselves with all of the references and jokes that they could put into one game. For example, my favorite DLC is where Tiny Tina is a DM for a D&D game with the PC's from the first game. Yes, imagine a psychopathic demolitions expert who is maybe 13 years old, being the DM of a D&D game, and then also imagine people like Brick as her players.

For people that aren't super nerds, and don't get all of the references that they're throwing out, the DLC's are still interesting loot and shoot games, but when you get what they're talking about it just gets funnier and funnier.

Really, I can't say much bad about this game.

There's even new game + with harder enemies and better loot and higher levels that you can gain . . . . and then there's new game ++ where you finish new game + and then everything, no matter which part of the game you're in levels up with you and always gives you a challenge, and should only be played with a group of four players so you can survive long enough to play the game. Yet again with all of the skill trees, all of the different classes, all of the different playthroughs that you can play, Borderlands provides a game that you can dump hundreds of hours in and play differently every time you play it. It's not for everyone because you are running around and blowing people's limbs off in bloody messes in a FPS, but it's at least giving a look at.

Temporal Paradoxes - The Game! - The Games I've Played

Between Darksiders and this game, I cleaned up and did a few other games, and finally finished some of the ones that I started, put a dent into others, and cleaned up some trophies on ones that were only half finished. As part of that list, in that chunk of time I put some serious work into FF XIII because I got FXIII-2 and wanted to be prepared for what was going on, and so that's where we go from here - FXIII- 2

I was supicious about what in the world was going to go on in XIII-2 because the FF series has never done well with sequels and I was afraid it was going to happen again. The story for FFXIII-2 is really messy, and really convoluted, but it basically gets boiled down to this -

Your main character from XIII, Lightning, had a sister that you never really saw, played, or knew much about. She was trapped in a crystal, and that's about all you knew.

In XIII-2 the tables get turned, you play as Lightning's sister, Serah, and Lightning is almost no where to be found throughout the entire game. All of the characters from XIII that are still alive (spoiler some people die at the end of XIII or at least are put in crystal suspension and are no longer able to move) become NPC's and characters that can join your party for brief moments in time.

The story line is this - Lightning has become a diety, or at least a stand in diety, we're not quite sure, and something is going wonky. Serah finds out that time is being broken, and that the time line isn't working like it should so she grabs her stuff and heads out to fix the time line. Meanwhile a random heart throb, Noel shows up, and says he's going to help out.

So those two are running around trying to fix up the time line, and they run into everyone that's worth mentioning from FFXIII just in different time zones in different flavors of trouble. Their goal, make everything work out, so that they can fix the end of the time line where Lightning should be, and get her help with fighting the big bad from the entire story.

Let's not forget that you have a Mog that follows you around, who is also Serah's weapon, and you get to play a bit of Pokemon and collect monsters that you fight against to fight with you in later battles. Just like in 13 you have different classes that you can level up in, and you set your game to fight for you. Serah and Noel can fill all different types of roles, while the monsters are stuck in a single role that they have to fill, and like any good FF game, you can level all of them up (monsters included) until you break the game over your knee and fights become jokes.

The best part of this game is it makes up for everything that 13 was missing and expands on what was already awesome.

Remember how 13 was super linear and you just walked down a bunch of hallways and you won the game? 13-2 is OPEN. You can jump between different times and places with pretty good freedom once you get a bit into the game, and what you choose to do in one location and time can open up entirely new locations and times and even create paradox endings to the game where you don't actually beat the game but you cause something so weird to happen that a different ending has to happen. This gets so out of hand that late into the game (if I remember right, it's after you beat the final boss in main story line) you can actually go back and reset time zones and replay the area so that you can cause more of these paradox endings and make even weirder and weirder things happen.

The high detailed graphics of 13 just keep coming in 13-2, and remember how I complained that in 13 you could see things but never get closer to them or see them from a different angle? Thanks to the slightly more (but not perfect) ability to roam around in the world, you can actually see things in 13-2 from different positions and really get to enjoy the wide spread of graphics.

And then there is the mini-games. There's not many, but compared to 13 which had none, it is a glorious thing that you get back to the golden saucer roots and race the chocobos that you have pokemoned and made friends with.

The story line gets a little convoluted at points, and if you didn't pay perfect attention to 13 (like me) then there are some sections that make no sense at all because you have to try to remember the difference between Fal'ci, la'ci, pluse la'ci, and all of the other things that sound exactly the same, but for the most part it moves past what you had to deal with in 13, and creates a pretty solid line of it's own that has little to do with the first.

For the record, when in doubt, this is how series should go. You take the world, what has happened in it, and then you use some tangential idea or character that showed up maybe once in the first, and then give their story. It's still in the same universe, but Serah's story stretches through thousands of years, passing up where we started in 13, and absolutely demolishing anything that you were used to in 13 and making a new world to play in. It's the same place . . . sort of. . . but the distance that 13 and 13-2 have between each other is enough that if you didn't like 13, 13-2 is a broad enough departure that you can start over again, but close enough together that if you loved 13, then 13-2 is a romp through a section of the world that you never knew about and times that you never even imagined that you love to experience because they tie back, loosely, to the game you know and love.

The only complaint that I have about 13-2 is the fighting system itself. It's not as bad as FF12, and slightly faster than 13, but it's still the auto-pilot forget the game and win system of fighting. Part of the reason that I love to play FF series is because there is some sense of control with fighting. If you run into something that is magic immune you swap over to your fighters and smack it around, but at the same point you can always jump over to your magic users on high defense monsters and nuke them to the ground. You control each character's actions and make sure they do exactly what you want to do when you want them to do it, but then FF13-2 rolls around and you're faced with the auto-pilot mode again. You tell the game roughly what you want it to do (sentile for defense, sabatuer for debufs, medic for healing, and so on and so on) and then the game auto generates what it thinks work best for that class you just said you want it to do. You do have the option to micromanage ONE of your three characters (counting the monsters on the field as one of your characters) but it takes more time than hitting the auto-pilot button because the game doesn't wait for you to make your choices of what you're going to do next. The only thing you really do with battle is set up one paradigm for damage, one paradigm for healing, one for debuffing, and one to increase the damage gauge (yes that's back again from 13), and then you just hit the auto battle button, occasionally switching between your different plans of attack depending on if you're dying, if the enemy is not dying fast enough, or if you filled up the gauge and want to destroy whatever it is that hasn't died yet. It's boring. The action on the screen is impressive as your characters run around and do crazy things, but your involvement in that amazing fight is limited to hitting X to auto fill your battle and occasionally hitting R2 to swap what your team is doing.

All in all, it's a great game, even if you didn't like FF13, 13-2 gives you a new enough take on the world, with enough freedom and interesting story line to make people happy.

Late Night Thoughts

As I read more and more of Midnight's Children, and the more I try to fight it, the story that I want to write, the story that I think is interesting, but won't write because it hits too close to home, is the story of Saleem and his power to hear. I think that it is the most interesting part of the entire story, because that ability and how his family reacts to it, how he feels about it, rings true. What he talks about, how he understands it, how he deals with it as a kid, and how he learns that he must always keep it hidden is truth.

Midnight's Children has made me want to work so hard on Angels or whatever I'm calling it, because he hits on the topic a bit when he's talking about Saleem, but there's a lot missing there and the feelings of going insane, and no one around you believing you, and the only person you have to trust being yourself in a mirror.

I know this makes no sense to you as the reader, and I know I'm being vague, but I'm being intentionally vague, and I don't want to have you understand everything.

Moments

I haven't written on here for a while, because life is getting hectic. Just when I don't want things to go crazy, things go crazy, it's the only way that these sort of things happen. I mean, the only real response that your body should ever have of your THESIS being due is . . . you know . . . sinus infection.

Great fun.

And then, the only thing that should happen at the start of the most important week in the surrounding months for both you and your wife - your car's transmission decides to die. It only makes sense.

I'm just done with this week. I want all of the broken things, all of the sickness, all of the papers, all of the stupid stuff, all of the junk behind me because I can handle one or two of them at a time, I don't want to deal with them all at the same time.

As much as I want to just curl up into a ball and start crying and then fall asleep for the next 5 days, I don't have that much to really worry about with school. With last night's binge session on writing I wrote enough in my thesis that I could turn it in, and then I took care of all of my other classes as well, so right now I'm honestly sitting at a point where I have only one paper that I need to write by Sunday, and it's Tuesday. I have days to work on this paper, and I'm dreading it enough that I want to kick, yell, and scream like a kid throwing a fit in the middle of the candy isle at the store.