The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Kiss of Death

Haha! Finally Finished Final Fantasy Five!
Man, that game was HUGE, I had no idea. I knew 6 was big, but 4 was pretty short, relatively speaking. I wasn't expecting a 30+ hour adventure for this one.

If only it had been shorter, cos I was getting pretty sick of it near the end. Very much like FF4, this game really gets on your nerves after awhile.
A shame really, cos the system is pretty good. Job systems rule, as I've pointed out before and they're a great added incentive to keep fighting.
The story isn't too interesting, the badguy is totally boring, but the fact that you have three worlds (or perhaps 2.5) to explore keeps it interesting and entertaining.

Things is though, at the time Square seemed to have this policy:
"Don't make your games too enjoyable, otherwise you can't improve on them"
And the latter half of the game is thus filled with frustration at overpowered bosses and really cheap standard enemies. For awhile I thought I was just a couple of levels short or something, and perhaps I needed to level up, but soon I noticed that it wasn't annoying because I suffered too much damage, or didn't deal enough myself (You can easily kill most enemies with one or two of your party-members), it's just that they all have really cheap moves, like instant kills, life shaving, extremely high critical hit rate, 100% counters.
Soon battles just stop being FUN. And with that, the game pretty much stops being fun. Hell, in the final dungeon, you don't even get ANY experience points!
I mean, what the Hell is that!? You're supposed to fight this big ass, bad ass, scary-ass, and in fact general ass Final Boss, who's insanely strong of course, and you can't even walk around to level up first! All you'll get is Ability Points!
I mean....that sucks!

And then there's the encount rate which is pretty much all over the place, going from One-battle-per-step to "Hello, anybody there?". Seems to be dungeon-specific though.
I tell ya, at one point I got SO angry I pressed the eject button of my PS2 (playing the PSX remake), waited REALLY FAR TOO LONG for the game to come out, picked it up and actually flung it across the room! I mean, I ain't never done no such thing in my life, officer! Not with CD games at least.
That's almost as scary as calmly taking your Super Street Fighter II cartridge out of your Super Nintendo, tranquilly going downstairs into the backyard, peacefully getting the Giant Sledgehammer from the tool-shed and start SMASHING away at it like some crazy sonofabitch. Almost though.

So I reached the Final Boss, Ex-Death, and, typically, he has two phases.
The first one is him in his Giant Tree incarnation. Sounds stupid? That's because it IS. But he's not even too hard, you can kill him off without too much trouble. He does have this one really cheap move that petrifies and kills you instantly, and dying doesn't absolve your status ailments, so you have to cure AND heal that character, but he won't use that too much.
No, the fun starts AFTER that, when he morphs into this Giant Monster Thingy called Neo-ExDeath, which seems to be standard operating procedure for Video game Bad guys. Man, I wish I could do that. Someone kicks my ass, I turn into this Enormous Phallic Demon and show them what REAL Hit Points are. Hur Hur.
Anyhoo, he consists of four attackable parts, each with 50000 HP and they can all pretty much kill your entire party with whatever they do.

So I was just about to put down the controller and get my crowbar, I mean, playing until the final boss is theoretically playing the entire game right? I can do that!
But then, I read about this great glitch on gamefaqs! If it is, in fact, a glitch.
I half suspect Square put this in on purpose as some obscure way of nailing the final boss, since it doesn't seem like they fixed it for the remake.
You see, what you do is, you make sure one of your characters becomes a Chemist, learns the "Mix" command ability, then combine a "Maiden's Kiss" (which cures frog status) with "Holy Water" (which cures Zombie status) to create "Kiss of Blessing" (which casts Berserk, Haste and a whole lot of other stuff) use it ON EX-DEATH and he won't be able to morph when you kill him! Ridiculously easy! I was laughing all through the Ending Sequence (25 minutes!)

So at least I finished the game properly now :)

To sum it up, this game has its fair share of faults. They STILL haven't fixed the equipment system, you STILL don't get magic descriptions, it's STILL so annoying that you want to tear off your nails and pour acid on your fingers, but it DOES have a great ability system, huge game with multiple worlds etc. As an RPG, it's definitely not bad. WAY better than FF4, which is kinda like saying winning 10 bucks in a lottery is better than getting ass-raped by a Huge Black Dude. Kinda.
Still, this gets an 8.0 for being good enough, but with too much frustration towards the end.

Fortunately for me, this is were things will start going uphill. Nothing but extremely good FF's from here on out so I think I'm good for a couple of months.

Let the games begin!

Quote of the Week:
"Don't eat with your mouth full!"

posted by Ingen! @ 3:30 PM