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Tonight I watched the endings of two Square Enix games: Final Fantasy XII and Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. I don’t consider them finished yet, per se: I’m still enough of a completist to need to hunt down all optional baddies, see all extra scenes and get all summons/characters, although these days I don’t need to track down every last item. First was Final Fantasy XII, which pleasantly surprised me. I hadn’t heard many positive things, I didn’t immediately like the realistic aesthetic, the floating lines of the battle system, or the way the dialogue and mood were imitative of Lord of the Rings, which at first felt pompous and hollow. My expectations were totally surpassed, then, and I think this is my favourite Square Enix game since Final Fantasy VII, a game I played so much in my early teens that I earnestly believe I saw every single possible line of badly-translated dialogue on the three discs. Yes, I even preferred it to the overly easy and ultimately lazily-plotted Final Fantasy IX. In a world linked to that of Final Fantasy Tactics in a somewhat indefinite way, the Arcadian Empire has conquered the land of Dalmasca, subjugating its people. While Arcadia turns its attentions to the other superpower of the world, the Rozarian Empire, a young Dalmascan princess is attempting to organise a resistance movement. She finds help in the unlikely form of street urchin Vaan and sky pirate Balthier, but the Empire is watching her closely. It is all very grandiloquent and fanciful and quite possibly what would happen if you forced the universes of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars together, but that rather suits a Final Fantasy title, where magical swords and flying machines are never far apart. The archaic language soon becomes charming, especially when more cynical characters appear, and the story, while having to rely on some daft macguffins and one really tedious jaunt into a repetitive crystal dungeon with no map, was compelling and kept me engaged. I loved the character designs, and Squeenix really outdid themselves making attractive character designs in a realistic game. Everyone looked like a film star or model (and cleverly sat between Asian and white), and all the different accents for different regions were a nice touch, coupled with high-quality voice acting. Vaan in particular was very pretty – although not as pretty as his brother Reks! At times the gambits and spells like reverse made things too easy and as usual the final battles are a walkover if you’ve levelled a lot. I felt the peak of the story came too hurriedly, and it was a shame some characters were left underdeveloped – it gets very obvious in RPGs, but I do like it when each character has a side-quest of their own detailing their pasts: that’s how you get to know characters, and the likes of Penelo just never seemed fleshed-out. I enjoyed the game enough, though, to most certainly want to get Revenant Wings, the DS sequel.
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days was also more than I expected it to be. In truth, I think I was underestimating what the DS was capable of, and expected something little better than a GBA game, probably because of The World Ends With You. In fact, an impressive game engine was devised and this mid-quel was surprisingly deep and satisfying. However, I went into it expecting one big fundamental problem with the scenario, and that’s what I got. Throughout Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II we are constantly told nobodies are little more than shells, their heartlessness meaning they are incapable of emotion, feeling, significance. This game, in telling the story of Roxas’ time with Organization XIII, strives to emphasise the human qualities of nobodies (and things even less than nobodies) and encourages us to feel sympathy for them. But if they are effectively real people and have lives that ought to be treasured, what Sora does to them is murderous, chilling and can’t be excused with simple self-defence. This game changes the implications of what it means to beat bosses in previous games, and Sora should be one screwed-up puppy when he comes to confront the real ethics of the situation, rather than believing what DiZ tells him. Sure, some of the Organization are cardboard psychopaths, but others really don’t deserve to be murdered by a kid with a key. Honestly, I don’t think Organization XIII have ever been a good idea, and the series has gone downhill the more the focus has been upon them. I find it hard to believe all these people have the ‘strong will’ necessary to become nobodies, yet not a single other person since Xenahort’s experiments has. Seriously, if you only have to be as strong-willed as Demyx, how hard can it be? It also still feels like a lot of awkward plotting was wrangled just so that the flashy hidden cutscene at the end of KH1 makes sense. Anyway, while creating this conundrum, the game does flesh out a lot of the characters making up the rostrum of thirteen. I went into the game not liking any of them, but it did manage to make me care a lot more for Roxas, soften slightly to Axel (without actually liking him) and…well, no-one’s as surprised as I am but I now think that Xigbar is awesome, in that grizzly, sharp-tongued, Kenpachi-from-Bleach badass sort of way. I wasn’t at all looking forward to a game about Roxas, with that annoying grid system on the back of his head, but sweet touches like his diary and his hoarding of an ice cream stick through almost the whole game made him a whole lot cuter than that cringe-inducing trying-to-be-hip opening part of KH2. And Xion was far from a throwaway character, the inevitability of her fate less melodramatic than melancholy, and her earnestness and bravery won points from me. And the game, surprisingly enough, played much like a PS2 title, only rarely struggling to render things onscreen. There was a lot of depth to the control system, especially with multiple characters available in the mission mode, and while some might find panels tedious I enjoyed fiddling with mine. The flying stages were horrible and fiddly, though, one boss on that stage very frustrating indeed with some dodgy collision detection going on, and once again it was way too easy – this time I was wise enough to play it on Proud mode, and still found it nowhere near challenging enough. Even the Dustflier, which I was informed was incredibly hard, was very simple to beat, just laborious because of its huge amount of health. It only had four attacks! Given that Sephiroth in KH1 genuinely was a real challenge (and Xemnas/Unknown in Final Mix looks extremely difficult), I hoped there’d be something more taxing here. I’ll keep playing, though, until I can use Sora for missions, but I’m more interested in Birth By Sleep.
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music |
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‘The House of the Rising Sun’, The Animals |
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cheerful
amused
impressed
calm
chipper
thoughtful
geeky
better
mischievous