A look back at: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Happy Halloween y'all. Finally, this one is finished, I spent a ton of time on FFTA to the point of never bothering with any other game otherwise despite all my work hours and all and I think in all honesty, despite the many moments of exhaustion, it paid off.

You remember when Wiegraf says stuff about a penalty for breaking the law is a fine, then it's for the working class? You can expect something like that here. Somewhat. But a little more than that. FFTA does do well with most of the mechanics of the Playstation game, but boldly goes in a direction that was sure to cause controversy, this law system. In my playthrough, I chose to go through it without ever getting a single lawbreaking card ever, and I managed to do it, but it was super tough of course. Maybe not in the beginning, most FF games walk you through things, but soon you have three laws and you need to shuffle your units with their classes and what they do and maybe have a few antilaw cards (thank god for these) in order to even damage enemies. Or just engage in the risky Jagds where no laws are not allowed. The laws do piss me off many times. How is anyone supposed to do anything if "Fight" is outlawed? Yeah, sure units have special abilities, but sometimes using Fight is a good way to go, especially if you got Double Sword for a unit. What about Dmg2 Animal, preventing any units from damaging monsters? You can see where this is going, and it means that I have to either have the right antilaw to get around it, or shuffle on the world map until the day no longer has the idiotic law.

Speaking of world map, the fact that this game breaks the fourth wall with how they talk about Final Fantasy the game series is funny, and then you can just place locations where you want after plot missions, which is an interesting way to put things. Everything is driven by missions, the dispatch ones being the most annoying due to so many factors. Does my dispatch have the right stats or job to proceed? How many days, fights, or enemies are required before they come back? What time frame do I need to figure out before the mission reappears? Does the mission reappear at all? And most importantly, why are so many mission-item-requiring missions become available WELL BEFORE the mission items themselves are available? You gotta chain these things sometimes, and it's ridiculous.

Thankfully, the game isn't trying to make me hate it that much. Waiting for something to happen isn't an excuse unless it's really egregious, and since you can accept multiple missions, that's always great. Meanwhile, the shops are nice, getting abilities was a prime thing for me to do at all times to make the best of my characters, and there's great synergy with all the races so that none really stand out above the rest. The story itself is, essentially speaking, resetting a warped story or rather a warped world, and most everything Marche does ends up getting him in trouble. Not as much as Ramza in the first game, but he has a lot of convincing to do. Do I enjoy this? I'm glad to have experienced it, and it has a ton of replay value due to its good customization and being a FF title. It will make you hate laws though.

A look back at: Digimon World 4

Not happy. At all.

Not only is this a hack-and-slash RPG, and I don't like the former style of gameplay, but it's not balanced for just a single player. You have a standard experience system, easy to understand, but you basically have to kill, kill, kill and it takes a long time to get to the next level. Good news about level gains is that they restore all HP and MP, perhaps this game's only saving grace. But for those unlucky peeps like myself who are playing single player, the big issue is just how easy it is to get swarmed in levels, especially those who keep spawning in in Zelda-like rooms that lock you in. Some may like it but in the end it will become tedious. Techs and grinding them up are quite important as much as regular grinding, and equipping the right weapons or mods on your Digimon are also important. Only one shot weapon, several blade or blunt weapons, hey I would rather just use the special abilities that Digimon would have, you know? Feels a lot better that way. This game also is basically impossible to do low-level from what I can also notice.

Only four levels, and the enemies and dungeons can prove to be annoying, especially the further you go. It seemed like before I could enter the third world I had to get a Digivolution, and having to do at least two sidequests to get two Digivolutions, one of which involves cleaning house in one particular dungeon in a TIME LIMIT with about 279 foes, isn't that great. Later dungeons are just filled with traps and lock-in rooms, and my experience with lock-ins in Zelda or Doom have taught me they don't have any fun value the more there are.

And then we get to the main thing, the enemies. Starting out in Death Valley, things aren't bad. Bosses are challenging to start, enemies are simple mooks. But hey, one feature this game has a TON of blocking, and enemies can be known to block multiple times and easily counter back. Block rates shouldn't be the high. Dry Land's got the constantly blocking Mummymons and Tyrannomons who have a very broken flame attack. Venom Jungle's Tortomon love to use a spin attack when they are invulnerable and their breath attack comes far too quickly. And then Machine Pit, dear god. Inferimon and their multiplying, and the Raremon have a poison shield and can stop your movement. Did I mention that the poison effect in this game seems to never wear off? And then there's some bosses that are just ridiculous, probably Lucemon is the most tedious, not tough, just annoying when it comes to finally being able to hit. This has nearly all the elements of things that I outright hate, and will be one of my lowest ranked games, at least considering that I had to play this in singleplayer. If we had more characters (heck, even computer-controlled allies would be fine) on your side, this game would have been a whole lot more fun.

A look back at: Pokemon Kanlara Ultimate

Yep, it seems that nowadays I finish both an RPG review and a ROM hack around the same time. And what a disappointing summer before I head back to the workplace all things considered, I didn't get nearly as much done as I was vouching to do. But I am proud to say that Kanlara Ultimate wasn't a bad hack at all. New region, new storyline, plenty of Pokemon options, good sidequests, it was overall all very enjoyable. My team included Swampert, Blaziken, Gardevoir, Aegislash (in shield form, this line has the Tyrogue evolution mechanic), and Magnezone. The last member basically was different the whole way through, with Cradily for the midgame, then Armaldo before the league, then Demon Tyranitar for the league itself, then Lucario for the postgame.

The Demon forms were interesting but I didn't really use them much. Liked the concept of elite trainers using them at least, so that's that. Yes, amplified stats, nastier moves, and all. I ended up using Demon Tyranitar and researching about the remaining demon forms, even the ones that weren't in the library. But there is a bit of misinformation, Demon type doesn't resist the other types at all. In other words, a Demon/Water Demon Gyarados is still weak to Electric and Grass. Demon itself doesn't resist anything and is weak to itself, while as an attacking type it is resisted by both Fairy and Steel and neutral to everything else. At least the type and the forms are limited to specific Gen-2 mons, so they didn't go too overboard with things.

And I guess I'll appreciate the plot of yet again Team Rocket doing bad stuff, going as far as to conquer the Pokemon League and to use mind control. And heck, that postgame creepy village stuff made for cool sidequests, I don't know if it is all finished, cause you can still build reputation with the Forsaken by buying more goodies. As far as Pokemon go, the only ones in the dex I could not get are: Unown (the only one I couldn't see), and the other two Kanto starters (for example, you pick Charmander and you can never get Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or their evolved forms). All other mons are available in some form or another.

I will go ahead and link the walkthrough I used to go through Kanlara Ultimate. It's Allen's walkthrough, not mine this time, and it is fairly good, though there are some things that are missing which I'll outline:

1. I fought Brock instead of Misty in that special Battle Boat in Sunside City. I'm guessing this is based on gender.

2. May's teams. These correspond to the Kanto starter you pick near the beginning. Allen must've picked Squirtle which explains why May would have Wailord, Camerupt, and Sceptile by the end. But I picked Charmander and found Camerupt, Breloom, and Swampert at that point.

3. Raikou. This is just in the Power Plant after beating the League and was hinted at previously. It's in the NE room.

4. Deathweed and Tomb Ashe in the Cursed Isle sidequests, when you harvest them you actually have a bit of RNG here, getting from 1-3 of whichever you find. So you can savestate abuse to always get 3 if you need.

5. There's a third quest from the bazaar guy in Cursed Isle after delivering him Tomb Ashe. He gives you an Empty Vial if you don't have one, and you can bring it to the Lost Cemetary, go to the NW water area, fill it, battle a random ghost, and give it back to finish his experiment and gain a new item.

6. The Wilds. When you win TMs from the trainers there you actually get 10 of each.

7. Mimikyu. Had to look it up, was the last thing I got. Talk to a guy in the SW building in Kaji City who asks if it's daytime/nighttime, answer nighttime, then enter Haunted Mansion, go to NW room with TV, inspect TV, then talk to capped Pikachu which is the Mimikyu encounter.

8. Not nearly as important but there are other tombstones you can enter with the Cemetary Key aside from Sinner's Tomb, all are empty rooms and are marked as Underground Tomb. Data states that Unown can be found in these but using Sweet Scent/running around finds zero encounters.

A look back at: Digimon World 3

Really wished my summer wasn't spent on so much grinding and understanding game mechanics where all the games in the franchise are all different. At least with Digimon World 3 the gameplay resembled a lot of mainline Pokemon, and I've already been playing quite a few of those hacks at this point. Still, for the last Playstation 1 title of Digimon World, it delivered in what it could. Premises were established, with the nice spice of variety being given out as needed. The one-on-one Pokemon-esque battles can be appreciated albeit with necessary grinding. And a lot of it. Plenty of beef gate moments were frustrating to deal with but I invested the time I could. There's even gyms again for stat training. And while I do say the Digivolutions can be complex, I didn't have nearly as much trouble implementing what was desired.

TRADING CARD GAMES! I will be 100% honest, I am not a fan of any of these games due to complicated mechanics involving all of them, it took me a couple of weeks to even fully understand Final Fantasy 8's Triple Triad, and to this day I still don't understand 9's Tetra Master. So what makes you think I'm gonna like the somewhat required card game here? What makes you think I'll know when battling a rival tamer means with Digimon or with the cards? And then there's the fact you want to win to get the best of card decks, and don't even get me STARTED on the fact that a draw is a loss. This card game's mechanics were only slightly easier to pick up on than others, but I still hate trading card games.

As for the plot, I actually kinda liked it. Being trapped in the online world, realizing that the guy the government wants is a good guy, being a part of a resistance movement, it's an overused plot line but it still holds up. The bait-and-switch villains were kind of dumb but it's actually hard to notice how bad they were when you get sidetracked by other things in the meantime. But the terrifying concepts of stuff spilling over into the real world with a juggernaut (Destromon) wanting to level areas, as well as trying to do everything before everyone gets turned into Oinkmon made for a nice storyline overall.

A look back at: Digimon World 2

Whew, put a ton of hours into this, and I did take nearly a month to finally finish it and well I'm not too happy with things. Even the gameplay time maxed out at 99:59 and I'm 100% certain that I took longer.

It's great that Digimon World as a series tries different approaches to gameplay, with the first combining virtual pet with RPG elements which was relatively lukewarm. This game goes for the Mystery Dungeon-esque route, combined with traditional turn-based gameplay and a little dice of that convincing Digimon to join a la Pokemon. Of course, things aren't going to be perfect. The battles in this game are really sluggish to go through. You can certainly not have too much trouble with them, particularly with good strategies, but each attack takes a long time to go from one to the next, and seeing "Attack Missed" is annoying since you don't get to see what happens. Oh yeah, and this goes by the "first Final Fantasy" targeting mechanic, you defeat one Digimon and another that targeted it will always miss the target. So yeah, battles, slow-paced but still requires some strategy.

And then the whole navigating randomized dungeons. I'm okay with this on the whole due to being familiar with some mechanics already. What I'm not okay is the amount of preparation needed for many places you'll be going to. You won't know for sure if you need to have the right equipment to tackle electrical fences, landmines, or bugs that you won't see unless you pressed X for what's in front of you, and it can cost a dungeon run and force you to head back. And just so we're clear, you can only hold so much in your tank for supplies, so even treasure chests can become not useful later on. Early game is the worst at this due to having a measly 8 spaces in your inventory. Sure, it gets better, but that's early game hell for you.

The Digivolution system is also hard for me to even describe, though better than the last game thankfully. I hated the fact that some Digimon essentially cap out, and had to be spliced with other Digimon as something that starts weak, yes, this means of course you have to train new guys up at your own pace, and this adds to the overall time spent and exhaustion I felt at the end of it all. Was it worth it? Eh, I've done this kind of thing lots of times, so probably not. And then this game's plot is really just "get assigned mission, battle boss at end of dungeon, rinse, repeat". Not much in things until the Blood Knights start being invaders and some truths get revealed at the very end of things.

All of this really does amount to an RPG that is so not worth it...but then you get the music, and it's kickass. Seriously, this is some good, good music. Technological, of course, but it keeps the adrenaline working. Early dungeons sound tame, but things get much better. All battle themes are great, the main one is repetitive but not bad, and the boss themes are really gone. The soundtrack saved this game from being worse than mediocre.

A look back at: Touhoumon Cirno

And here's something that isn't involving Pokemon but has Touhou characters as the Pokemon, with a handful as the trainers. Really interesting. Of course, this little version here actually doesn't change the base game of Pokemon Ruby apart from those things. My final team was LFlandre (Fire/Dark), LSuwako (Water/Ground), EHatate (Psychic/Flying), LYuyuko (Ghost), LSakuya (Ice/Steel), and EShou (Electric/Rock). Some may recognize the names but why do they have L and E in front of them? You'll see. And by the way, have an EXTENSIVE GUIDE, one with the Touhoumons listed, new moves, abilities, a brief walkthrough, and trainer info all in one.

So the Touhoumon are interesting, and I'm glad they retain their overall name and status as specific Touhou characters as they evolve so to speak. I guess C is for Chibi, then you have the normal, non-prefix character, then E (dunno what this means) as the more advanced form. Some alternate forms exist, some characters have L when they level to Lv75, I assume it stands for legendary? Some have F, or EA, or SS (I assume this is swimsuit cause they all look like they wear swimsuits), A (angel), DE (demon), you get the idea. Some of the alternate forms do require stones to evolve.

Well really the Touhoumon are all I can really discuss for this hack as the base game and the plot remains totally the same. There's a few design differences in some cases, like Route 2 (Route 102) looking entirely different, and the Trick House now requiring Waterfall to access and seeming largely post-game as the trainers there all are unique. But as usual, there are still flaws with the game and I'll list them below. Unordered this time.

- There are still mentions of Pokemon in the game despite the Touhoumon replacing them.

- The rival character in dialogue still mentions Brendan/May instead of becoming Renko/Merry.

- Cut is, sadly, a necessary HM. This is mitigated however by the fact that it now is a 100% accurate Steel type move. And you know what? Some types got changes to their viability, like Ice resisting Ground, Rock not being weak to Water or Ground, and Steel just being surprisingly good; sure it's not resistant to Grass or Psychic but it gained a lot of good moves and is now super effective against Dark. This is handy for Ghost/Dark types who now have a weakness in Steel.

- The north side of Route 15 is off-limits completely. Why? No reason to have an invisible wall where I can surf.

- For that matter, you can't head to Route 26 via Route 24 and vice versa. To get to Route 26 you have to enter from Route 27, which I don't like.

- Several fixed encounter Pokemon, like the Wynaut egg, Castform, invisible Kecleons, and the legendaries will seem a bit awkward given the forms that they have when you encounter them. And a bit underwhelming when you find out that DERemilia is the Rayquaza encounter, especially if you ALREADY got a DERemilia!

- There are Z variants of Touhou, but for some weird reason they're all in the Transport Ship (Abandoned Ship) as fishing encounters. Trying to catch these glitches the game. Vocaloid characters are also present as fishing encounters in Lunar Falls' (Meteor Falls) first floor but they also are messed up. The whole thing seems awkward.

- At times, Slateport's PokeMart freezes the game. I did save and reload and can access the mart then but after a while it doesn't seem as usable.

- Yes, you can buy evolutionary stones at certain places, but my biggest issue of all is the Sun Stone. You can get it early at Petalburg, it costs a hefty P9000 at that point, but due to the way Petalburg's mart works, after some time (I assume after the fourth badge), one item is no longer sold, and that item ends up being the Sun Stone. After that, there's only one other Sun Stone in the game to get in Mossdeep City, and no you can't farm the Solrock replacement for Sun Stones cause it's not catchable in the wild here. And then yes, there are plenty of alternate forms that require the Sun Stone. Kind of bad when you want to try the A forms of Touhoumon and have to farm money early before the Sun Stone becomes permanently gone.

Even with these flaws though, I can easily appreciate this entire game for what it contains. No new plot, but it's not necessary. Touhoumon are interesting and also helping out are the increases in difficulty that don't go too far. Almost every one of them is accessible, but I did a lot of data mining to find out some things just aren't programmed to appear or will glitch the game.

A look back at: Digimon World

What a tiring game. And for the Playstation and for a one-disc game, this is surprisingly impressive. It takes a lot to figure out what to do in this game and even then there are still areas of the game which even guides have yet to figure out. Man, did it really take years to figure out the Digivolution? Because that certainly was a core mechanic that I feel this game really should have done better. Anyways, yeah, Digimon World, this is my first foray into this small series and I plan to play more, but this first game is easily the most unique.

As unique as it is, it takes a ton of balancing in order to just beat the game, and even far more to complete it. I don't think I'm gonna try that latter half. See, you have one Digimon as your pet, you gotta take it to training, feed it, have it battle, and have it go potty. All while balancing what appears to be general RPG navigation and other mechanics. Well, apart from the battles, which ends up being another key point as in the beginning their entirely AI controlled. I've never really been a fan of "letting things play out" with little in the way of influencing the battle, and I would argue that there should be more commands available early instead of when you can increase their Brains stat. With AI control, you're bound to see your or enemy Digimon just run around, determine whether or not to block attacks, or use the right techniques you want, and what could have been a short battle ends up much longer. Battling is necessary for extra skills and for stat increases of course, but then you gotta deal with that and getting the RIGHT stats up for Digivolving, all the virtual pet stuff I mentioned earlier, oh, did I mention that Digimons can lose their lifespan and start completely anew? Yeah, they can.

And all this while you try to rebuild a town. I actually like this mechanic a lot, reminds me of the Suikoden games and recruiting people for your castle. Except for a fleeting moment where a Greymon can ambush you outside the main house, which can be unwinnable if you just have a rookie Digimon at the moment. Definitely not fun. Of course, time-based events are at play, meaning there is quite a lot of waiting, but having to combine that with training the Digimon makes it quite easy to miss the event you were hoping to trigger. But hey, I hear the other Digimon games have significantly different gameplay, and I do applaud the many things to do, even if they take up most of the game that the plot of this game doesn't really take off.