by - 0 comments

My #FF Page is Live

I am a terrible #FF person. In case you don’t know, Friday is a special day of the week designated to pay love, respect, and homage to your favorite Twitter followers. If you take the time, it is a great way to reinforce notions of community as well as discover new people.

It takes a lot of work. Unless I want to copy/paste the exact same thing every week, a good series of #FF tweets takes more effort than I put into my entire month’s worth of tweets. Perhaps that is a terrible excuse, but it is the current state of things for me. I do, however, try my best to retweet a lot of #FF tweets. At least I am taking some part in my social-civic duty!

Today, I’ve been working on my Blogroll. It had really lagged behind, especially after my more recent overhaul of Feedly. Since I was already doing that, I decided it would be cool to have a #FF page on hand. That way, I can at least tweet something comprehensive out once a week and not be completely silent on the matter. It isn’t the same, but it is better than nothing.

You can find the new page here. It’s also now an item on the menu at the top of the page. Feel free to test it out a bit, as I did it in one fell swoop, and there may be bugs. I’d also added the Blogroll to it as well so the whole page is pretty expansive. If you are looking for new people to follow or read, it is an excellent start.

It will forever be a work in progress, but at least we’re out of alpha and ready for public view! Enjoy everyone and thank you for your follows and love. I love you too.

by - 2 Comments

Bravely Default, Brave Edition (3DS, 2014)

In order to get everything I want to say about Bravely Default out at once, I decided to write two posts. The Default Edition is spoiler-free. I’ll mostly cover mechanics and general opinion. The second post, the Brave Edition (this one), is spoiler-filled, with a focus on story and other specifics! Again for emphasis, THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. READ ONLY IF YOU ARE BRAVE!

Continue reading →

by - 3 Comments

Bravely Default, Default Edition (3DS, 2014)

In order to get everything I want to say about Bravely Default out at once, I decided to write two posts. The Default Edition (i.e. this one) will be spoiler-free. I’ll mostly cover mechanics and general opinion. The second post, the Brave Edition, will be out later today. It’ll be spoiler-filled and focus a lot more on story and specifics!

Bravely Default is the best JRPG I have played in years. A genre that I grew up with, JRPGs and I haven’t gotten along lately. For the longest time, I couldn’t decide if it was because I have grown up (and thus out of the genre) or if it has gotten stale or evolved away from the reasons I fell in love with it in the first place. Bravely Default proved once and for all that it wasn’t me, it was JRPGs that had become the problem.

Bravely Default is a JRPG in the same vein as classic Final Fantasy games. It is a spiritual successor to a Nintendo DS Final Fantasy that I never played. In classic form, you control a party of four heroes who can switch classes (called jobs), fight in turn-based battles, and are tasked with defending the four crystals of light. It is so standard that it hurts, but the familiarity is welcome since I haven’t played a JRPG quite like it in many years. All the recent entries into the Final Fantasy series have moved further and further away from the series’s roots, a move which has pushed my interest in new Final Fantasy games further away. Like old comfort food, Bravely Default is a return to the past.

The thing I really hate about modern JRPGs that don’t completely shit on the classic formula is how unfriendly, convoluted, and outright annoying they can be. They overload you with menus and characters and exposition. They pile on the grind, but force you to do it at an extremely slow pace. In short, they feel like lumbering relics of the past largely hoping they will achieve innovation by throwing features on top of features.

Bravely Default can be this way at times, as it certainly is not free of grinding, but in other ways, it is the first true modern JRPG. Grinding out levels through long, meaningless battles takes too long? Fast-forward! Turn-based gameplay seem stale and ancient? Let’s add turn hoarding to the mix! Tired of wasting your time walking inside meaningless shops to buy your gear? The door is now the shopkeeper, have fun! The encounter rate getting in your way? Modify it in the settings! Every dungeon is a series of long hallways with zero meaning? TRAPS! (OKAY, this one is a bit of a cop-out since Bravely’s dungeon puzzles are boring, but traps were still pretty cool).

Despite being so generic, Bravely Default manages to feel light and refreshing. It is both new, an homage, and classic all at the same time. It also helps that the Job system has customization on par with Final Fantasy Tactics. There are cool abilities, nice combos, and you can use Passive skills that you’ve unlocked from any class to really customize your character. There are some obviously overpowered Jobs and combinations, but I never stopped wanting to explore and experiment with new builds.

The story is a bit too classic at first, but I really loved how they do deviate from it over the course of the game. Sure, there is some redundancy, but I never stopped having fun. That’s probably due to the game’s characters, which I really enjoyed despite their one-note personalities. I would have loved more characterization across the board, but story has rarely been a strong suit for classic JRPGs. Humor is really about all you can expect.

The humor and artwork are both top notch. I really loved the game’s second city (the one from the demo) which is far more 2D in perspective. The rest of the locales are great, but that one just feels so distinct. It’s safe to say that Bravely Default makes a good case for JRPGs remaining largely 2D and/or hand-drawn experiences. While I wish that didn’t limit the scope of their stories so much, I do sincerely believe Bravely Default looks better than the ultra-slick, ultra high definition recent Final Fantasy games. If they bothered to do anything meaningful with their fully realized 3D characters and 100% voice acting, I might disagree. Bravely Default manages to do just as much with a lot less, and looks beautiful doing it.

The music is also great, though a few tracks do play one too many times.

I beat the game on Hard, playing four roughly 60 hours. I can honestly say it was one of the better sixty hours I have spent gaming this decade. Not only did this game manage to make me feel like a kid again, but it gave me hope as an adult for JRPGs. Some of the problem is how harsh I have been on the genre, so I recognize I do need to lay off of it a bit. Still, I don’t think it can be stated enough how much an achievement Bravely Default turned out to be for me. With minimal tweaking, it has managed to resurrect an entire genre from its stale, generic, overdone past so it can finally compete with its stale, generic, overdone current self. Bravely Default is an easy Game of the Year candidate for me and I plan on buying its sequel as soon as it is released.

Stay tuned for the spoiler-filled follow-up later today, or, if spoilers aren’t your thing, go buy Bravely Default and get to playing already!

by

Guest Blog: Thoughts on Aztec Philosophy | The Archaeology of Tomb Raider

Only on The Archaeology of Tomb Raider, “Guest Blog: Thoughts on Aztec Philosophy”

I have a pretty wide array of interests. In college, I was always more happy to take electives than I was to take courses that “mattered.” That led me to take a lot of classes on religion, history, linguistics, and science. Along with my majors of Philosophy and English, I extracted a lot of knowledge from college that will never add anything to my resume. It does add a lot to the scope of what I feel comfortable writing about, however.

I was especially appreciative of Kelly when she gave me the opportunity to write a post about Aztecs for The Archaeology of Tomb Raider. Though I never got around to any archaeology classes or playing any Tomb Raider games (sorry Kelly, you didn’t ask for my resume before accepting the post!), I am a huge culture whore. Now, that applies as much to modern culture as it does to ancient cultures. People fascinate the hell out of me and you can learn a lot about people from looking at persons that lived in any place at any time.

Now, I am not a scholar or academic. My knowledge of Aztec philosophy and culture is strictly a hobby. Most people don’t take up something like that as a hobby, I admit, but most people are boring, or, nicer put, have yet to be exposed to the rich creativity and fascinating ways of a people normally cited for their cannibalism and human sacrifice.

Here’s your chance to be exposed (and to give me a ton of views so I’ll be begged back to write more)!

Continue to The Archaeology of Tomb Raider …

by - 2 Comments

Banished (PC, 2014)

This was my third tornado ever.

This was the third tornado to ever hit one of my cities!

I bought Banished entirely on a whim. Eri (Healing the Masses) started playing it one night on Steam and the name peaked my interest enough to investigate further. She and I never discussed the game before I purchased it, nor did I read much about it other than the premise and genre. As rare as it is I play them anymore, City Builders are one of my foundational genres. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours endlessly toiling away at my cities in Pharaoh (my all-time favorite). My cousin even played, so whenever he’d come over, we would share notes and I’d show off my half-built pyramids and newly renovated housing districts. Other than some extensive time with the more recent entries of Tropico, I haven’t really touched the genre sense.

Banished appealed to me instantly. It was a City Builder, for one, but it looked like it didn’t inundate me with graphs and menus and other noise. As much as I love having those details available to me, lots of City Builders want to overwhelm you with the depth of their simulation rather than their playability or fun. Without any regard for the fact that I didn’t really have a spare $20 lying around, I bought the game with far less research than I normally would do.

The first couple hours of Banished, I worried I had wasted my money. The game wasn’t especially deep. There are only a couple of industries that you need to juggle and there isn’t much in the way of beautification. Typically, I play more to make a beautiful city than an incredibly well-functioning one. Instead of feeling burned, something kept me involved. More and more, I became entirely engrossed by the games minimalism. It helped that it was relatively bug free and decent looking too.

Forty hours player later, it finally dawned on me that I had spent a couple of days obsessing about the game. I hadn’t stopped to consider how much time I was sinking into it rather than the new Donkey Kong or beta testing MMOs. The thing about Banished is that as meager as it is, it is an immersive experience. It is relatively difficult to maintain a sense of balance – more people means more workers but also a fickle infrastructure further taxed to its limit. The game does a relatively good job of conveying the feelings of a group of pilgrim/pioneer-sorts, banished to a foreign land, to begin society anew.

Though it is obvious that I got my money’s worth, extensive play did validate my early opinions about the game’s shallowness. Sure, it is difficult and I am by no means a master, but outside of disaster, it does get a little boring when the game becomes a repetition of building the same three buildings and slowly expanding over and over. Everytime I reach 100 people and I really start repeating myself, I just quit. Once you’ve assembled the basics a few times, there isn’t much more to strive for unless you are an achievement seeker.

If I were to make one request, it would be a large update that adds building upgrades. The game lacks any technology tree or building upgrades (outside of converting wooden houses to stone ones). It would have been nice to have ways to upgrade current facilities, further customizing my city and lending the game a greater sense of progression. Specialization would be nice, as well. You can somewhat do it, but since the trading system is so random, you cannot reliably use it. You are forced, no matter the location, to do everything or else your city will not last.

Negatives aside, I must reiterate that I played Banished for forty hours. It is a fun game and an indie achievement, as far as I am concerned. I’d buy this game three more times if I could erase ever having bought the recent SimCity game. Banished manages to do a lot more with a lot less (both in game and in its development). Its willingness to leave players to their own devices (no overall goals) as well as provide them ample opportunity to hang themselves (challenging gameplay) make it a standout game for a genre I truly love. Hopefully will see more like it in the future.