Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Review

Hi Guys! Good freaking god it has been a while since I wrote anything on here > <! I haven't forgotten it...its just I had nothing to write about, since I could make a video of it. I come to you with a game franchise that we are all familiar with. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, has been in closed beta for a while and I had the pleasure of testing it out. There might be things that have changed after this is posted, but this is my experience with it.

To start off this review will start right at the beginning and that is character creation. The amount of customization that is allow here is quiet fair. There's nothing extreme like controlling the jaw line or face structure precisely the way you want, but at least your given a few presets.

There are 5 races in the game and they are:

 

 

There's nothing special if you pick a race over another. Where things do matter is when you pick the classes/job.So far we have the classes shown at the bottom, but there is more that will be added later like summoners and shamans of some sort.

 

 

   

After or before...I kinda forgot about now you get to choose the deity that you worship. There will be 2 different deity for every element. The elements stats you see in the description will be your stat resistant to that element. I would have to say it's not a big deal what you choose, but if you do want to be a bit more beefier toward other classes elemental attacks, then you might want to think just for a second before choosing.

After creating your new character and based on what class you pick, you'll get thrown into the world to start your adventure. The only class that is not reasonably close is the marauder class, but other than that the 2 other town you'll spawn in will be a few fields away from each other.

You won't be able to use the mouse a form of click and move and there is no auto routing in the game, but the game gives you a few ways to travel the semi huge maps. The sky ship above will be shown to you in later game play, but is solely used for traveling to the different starting cities. It does come with a ok price and beats teleporting to the city you want yourself. 

 

These large crystal will be found in the main towns and small towns in each map. They are like checkpoints that players can teleport back too. Teleporting does cost a few gils, but if you make a crystal your favorite it should cost less to teleport ( I think).  

 

This smaller crystal can be looked as the same as the bigger one except these are usually found in the main towns. These crystal allow you to teleport within the city, so that you don't have to wander around going from one place to another. Once you find all the smaller crystals in town, it will unlock a new place to warp too as well. 

 And who can forget are loveable chocobo! There is a few places where you can rent these little fellas for a limited time. The chocobo main purpose in the game is for timed traveling from one place to another. What I mean is that it will cost less, I think, than just teleporting yourself to the city, but it requires time to get there. Most of the time it will take you to get from point A to point B using a chocobo is about 3 minutes as far as I have seen, but I assume there are longer times out there. 

The last topic I want to touch on is the battle system. The improvement of the battle system compare to the earlier version of this game is 100% better, but it is still flawed. Depending on the class you pick the animation might seem a little boring. What I really detest about the battle system is still the slowness of it all. Again compare to the first version of this game it is way better and more intuitive, but the same slowness of the battle lingers. When using a skill all the other skills will be on cool down. Now I understand a lot of other games out there follow the same principle especially if your a wizard, but what makes this one worst is that even when the skill is finished you still have to wait for the cool down to go away. 

There are a few other features I'd like to go over. Starting with instances. the instances in FFXIV could use a bit more work on. Especially on how Square Enix decided to put instance quest back to back, instead of spreading it through the game. Another problem is how you access the instance. There is no need for you to actually be at the actual place due to dungeon finder, but the requirement to enter the dungeon should be worked on a bit. All dungeon requires you to have 4 people, but in my opinion we should at least be able to access it with 2 people and have others join in on the way. Granted the dungeon is probably only doable with 4 people I feel that having a little flexibility on how we want to tackle a dungeon should be left up to the party. 

The skills themselves are interesting due to a lot of effects when using certain skills and how skills "combo" with each other. When I say combo I don't literally mean it's the next button you should push, but with my experience with the puglist, some of the skill only work in certain modes and in order to get into that mode you have to use another fighting skills to achieve it. 

The UI is way, way better compare to its earlier form and easier to navigate and understand. I like how they used their FFXIII fonts and UI, since we are more familiar with it and it's appealing to the eyes as well in my opinion. Map wise, the improvements are noticeable, but could use a bit of tweeks to get it right. It was just a fuss that I had to resize my map window every time I wanted to look at it. 

A nice feature that I think most of us forget maybe is that we are able to change are class any time we want, by changing our weapons an going to the correct guilds. You'll start at level one when you change, but you won't lose your levels going back and forth with different classes. 

Crafting wise is a bit of a pain and is overall complicated. In order to craft you have to change your class, which is a bit confusing when I was learning, since I thought crafting was more of a job than a class. The method for crafting materials is also quiet weird. I read from other places that it's more of a mini game in a sense and you'll see why when you start crafting for yourself. There is no way to just craft a huge amount and leave it to do its thing. You have to manually be there and press the skill to craft your item. Along with crafting though you have a chance to not break the item your trying to make and have the option to better the item you're crafting. This all seems vague now, but if your serious about the game, trust me when you begin you'll understand what I am going on about. 

My overall thoughts on the game is that it's nice and interesting, but I still wouldn't pay a monthly subscription for it due to the many things I don't like about it. The main huge one is the battle system. The battle system for me in any game is critical and FFXIV still lacks in it for me. I do have other complaints about the game but those are just little knick picky things that I don't personally like.If the payment of the game was like Guild Wars than I would still give it a chance. 

Ragnarok Online 2: Opening Beta Woes

Finally Ragnarok Online 2 is officially in open beta in the NA region.What came with this opening....TROUBLE! Last week was a nightmare when I got an email telling me I wasn't allowed to play due to where I was....BUT I LIVE IN THE USA!!! How can you deny me my rights to play on the NA servers. I supported ticketed so fast and started to play the waiting game. Luckily they undid deleting my account. This is not the first time Gravity has done this, but I would assume players from other parts of the world are quiet displease hearing that they couldn't play on this server, but lets pray they either change it or you guys get your own servers.

Now to the current problems of the RO2 world. People who participated in the closing beta and probably people who were freshly installing a new Ragnarok Online 2 Client had to sit through hours and literally hours just waiting for the updates to download. What made the waiting game worst was the updater sometime would crash or not update at all, leaving you to cancel and redo the updating.

Now if you can get pass this initial stage, congratulations, but your probably in for the next demise of trying to start the game. If you are one of the unlucky few, the next problem you will face is a error with the hack shield. Now I got an error and I'm not sure if it is the only bug when it comes to the hack shield, but I kept on restarting the game and after a few restart I finally got through to the actual game. Unfortunately not everyone was successful and Ragnarok Online 2 staff are fixing it little by little, but if I had to say how the opening of the game went, then it would be quite crap.

So far they have fixed hopefully the issue of the slow updating, but they are still in the process of fixing the hack shield issue. I have seen people complaining about why the launch of the game was so terrible, considering it was only a week ago that logging in was perfect and didn't need to be messed with.Lets just hope they get this all sorted out soon.

Ragnarok Online 2 - What have they done!

Ragnarok Online is a force to be reckoned with, but what have they done with Ragnarok Online 2? This is Gravity's second attempt to correct what they have done wrong the first time around when creating a 3-D version of their popular game. It's nice to see they gone back to their roots and kept the same classes minus a few like merchant, bards, and dancers. The main concern for the game is actually the playability of it.

Lets start with some basic information. Classes that are included are thief, acolyte, archer, mage, and swordsman. From there they have their normal job class diversion from Ragnarok online except for archers, where your choice is either ranger or beastmaster. The level needed to job change is 25, but by golly it takes a bit to reach it. Crafting in the game was done quite well and isn't over complicated at all and this is coming from a person that avoids crafting due to the complexity. Along with classes your allowed to choose one job and the choice are cook, tailor, blacksmith, and alchemist. On the side note a tip on foods in the game is that eating the food is only allowed when your out of battle. Food in this game are mainly for you to recover HP & SP faster while sitting.

The battle system in this new game is just atrocious. Words can not describe the thinking process that went on when creating it. The problem with the battle system is that it requires your character to always face the monsters in order to attack. Now this isn't to much of a trouble, but when you have to manual position your character to face the monster, now that is where it gets a bit hairy. We currently are flooded with games that are putting plenty of features to make the game enjoyable, but Ragnarok Online takes it to a whole new level and instead takes it all away. It's not hard to get use to moving your character to the correct position, but sure would be a hassle when your spamming a button and your character doesn't do anything because its not facing straight on with the monster. This also discourages us to mob effectively.

The game in general doesn't give off an Ragnarok Online kind of feel, which many fan are sadden by and even disgusted to play it. Comments I've read on the official forums are they should have put the money into making Ragnarok Online better vs trying to make a second game and that the game itself is trash to put it bluntly. Many fan of Ragnarok, including myself, are still playing it due to the fact that it is a Ragnarok product, bur even I'm sadden by the outcome of the game.

I'm looking forward to the opening of this game and when it does come out I'll be sure to make a video that is more in depth and hopefully explains better what I'm ranting on in here. 

Car Game App Galore

Hi all! It won't be long before I start posting again MMO games, but in the mean time I have come across two car game apps that kept me entertained. I'm just going to do a short synopsis of it and maybe put a few hints or two if I have any.

Motor World in my opinion is a fairly new game with constant updates. Made by a group call Oh Bi Bi!, the game revolve around cars. It is one of those waiting games that I hate, but surprisingly I'm not hating on this one. It's probably because I don't feel so addicted to it to the point I'm constantly checking on it. Basically you own your own car factory, build cars, breed car by making cars kiss each other, and may other things. It is quite similar to Pixel People in the way of trying to guess the breeds and trying to produce all 92 cars available in the game. Some hints I can give you:

•  Don't get regular workers, when you have enough money recruit those red engineers and upgrade them. They have more effect on your overall rating than having a lot of noob workers. 
• When you unlock this pink monster looking truck car that will cost you 700 WP and 8,500 gold, this will be your source of good money in my opinion. What I do is make this until I can't make them anymore and put all the options on it and up the price to no demand, so that I won't feel attached to the game. For some of you this might not sound great, but it works for my schedule. Just figure out how you like to play and make the most out of it. 
• When upgrading your engineers, the doughnut that you feed them when they are lying on the floor doesn't contribute to their leveling up. When you go to their profile pages you'll see a bar that when fed with doughnuts will turn pink. This is not their hunger bar, so do not get confuse why you feed him nearly half way and he still fainting from being over worked. 
• Try not to build building in the early stages or try to breed cars when you don't need to cause it will literally eat through your money.
• When you level you will get bonus coins and doughnuts and balloons flying up. Make sure you don't quickly close the screen. In order to get the bonuses you have to touch them and if I'm not mistaken if you pop the balloon you get small extra bonuses. So if you are pretty full on doughnuts before leveling up, use them on upgrading your engineers so that when you level you can refill your doughnut amount.

Real racing 3 really does feel real. Published by EA and developed by FireMonkeys, the game blew all my expectations. Starting with the graphics, it is quite nice for an ipad game, the damages to your car is well represented, and the lighting and environment is nicely detailed. The tracks used in the game are real tracks in the world which to me is awesome and another realistic aspect of the games are the cars. The cars are all real cars in the living world, none of these mumbo jumbo fake names and no NOS. The game also give you options on how much you want the game to control how you drive. For instant if you want no traction control easy just turn it off. Don't want the game handling your steering that's fine too turn that off. Stupid game keeps breaking you early when you don't want to? You can set break off or on low. The game really does feel real and that's what I like about it. It will take you awhile to buy a Bugatti, Lambo, and the likes but you have other awesome cars to choose from while you work towards your goal. 

Hints that I can give about this game aren't many but here it goes: 

• When you start off do not buy the Nissan Silvia. Go with the Ford Focus even if you hate it because the spec on the Focus are just way better than the Silvia when it gets to the later stages of the game.
• Upgrade does make a difference. When I first upgraded my Silvia it didn't seem to look like I was doing better, but on the Focus you notice the difference when you start to race.
• The gold coins that you get from time to time will rack up when your leveling, so use them on those upgrades. Don't use them to speed up the repair process cause that's just a waste and probably shows your getting a bit addicted to the game hahahhaha.  
• When upgrading and repairing your car, you can still race. When you start to service your car then that is when you will have to wait for it to be done before racing again. If your looking at to play one more game before servicing you probably could get a way with a few stats not being at full capacity. 
• If you do happen to either turn traction control and handling off, beware your in for a treat.

That about does it. These are the game lately I've been playing once I get back home from the office. Real Racing 3 can be and probably would be addictive, but with some restraints it shouldn't eat away at your money. People looking for a casual game revolving around cars should give Motor World a try it's not as bad at all and this is coming from a person who hates these type of games. Once again in the next few weeks, I'll be able to start playing MMO games, so I really can't wait! Look out for some good games reviews soon!

Shadow Escaper - Anime Style Temple Run

God it's been a while! I've come today with an app for the iOS and Android. CyberConnect2 has released an anime styled endless running game called Shadow Escaper. Now I've never tried my hands on any running game before this and to be honest I didn't get the fun of it, but what pulled me to this game honestly is  the anime art style. This review might be a little off since I'll be comparing it to Temple Run, which I have never played but heard of it and saw some videos of it, sorry. 

Shadow Escaper comes in 2 mode, survival and the regular game. In survival your main objective is to go as long as you can without dying and your score will then be compare to people online. Where as the regular game is just base on a simple story. You get to pick your character which will be a demon girl or a werewolf boy and you are captured by angels and imprisoned in some horrible cage. Once you start the game, that rickety old cage suddenly brakes and now you're on the run for your freedom. 

Game play wise it is the typical running games, but has different elements such as:

• Enemy, objects, and puddles that needs to be avoided. If you do run over a puddle it's not game over... you just get water splattered onto your screen.
• There are sometimes special token on the field that gives you special effects for a short time like flying, 2x the score, and magnets to collect orbs.
• While you are running for your life, there will be orbs of light that you collect to gain points. Not only does it count for points, but these orbs will give you energy. At the end of each stage you will turn into your monster form and do some devastating damage to those son of a gun angels. Depending on how many orbs you collect, it will determine how "strong" your attack is and in turn effect how much bonus points you'll receive.
• There is a level system where you can upgrade the special effects and increase the points that each orb gives. 
• There are mission that you receive and once completed  you get a item from it. 

As my first time playing such a game it didn't take me long to figure out why some people might be addicted or find it entertaining. Now I didn't get addicted to the game, but while playing it I found that I became very competitive with myself and was trying to pass the level or beating my distances in survival mode. The only con I have about Shadow Escaper, the limited tries during a given time and sometimes the glitch that comes with moving around in the game. CyberConnect2 had implemented a recharge energy over time scheme which is annoying, but other than that give this game a try it's not bad at all. 

CLOSERS - Black Lamb United

Sometimes I think that most online gamers living in the US or anywhere else are living in the wrong place. Korea is no doubt the place to be if your are the type of player that like MMOs. Naddic Games, located in Korea, is in the process of making a great side scrolling fighting MOARPG (multiplayer online action RPG) called CLOSER...hopefully. There's not much known about it, but it is said that they will implement a lot of different forms of PvP, lets hope this is true. From the looks of the trailer it does look like its going to be spectacular.

The story is quiet simple and not complicated, so here goes my short summary of it. The first time you'll never hear me talk about the story of any game. Seoul is under attack by some creatures coming from another dimension, similar to The 3rd Birthday, and conveniently the appearance of these monster allow a small majority of people to gain special physic powers. Well you know where this is heading. The government of course makes use of these people formed an organization to wipe these monsters away and close the dimensional gates, these special people were later called the Closers. Peace came to Seoul and rebuilding the place proceeded. Scientist has a hunch that these gates open due to a singularity in the mysterious power....whatever that means and now has a research team to figure out more about it. Coincidentally this triggers dimensional gates opening all over the world again and this brings us to the current situation that the players will be diving into. You will be playing mainly as high school kids that are in a government group called the Black Lamb.

You are given the choice of 4 different characters to choose from, but from the looks of it there's going to be a 5th character later. They are your typical classes for the most part: Swordsman, Ranger, Caster, and Fighter (fist and leg fighting style). Each of the classes has a designated gender and character associated with it. The background story of each character is quiet funny to say the least which often doesn't happen in MMOs. For a quick run down we have:

 Seha Lee (Swordman) - his mother was one of the first legendary Closers during the first war with the monsters. This made him automatically qualified to be a Closer and is said to have the most potential, but he doesn't care for all of that. What he does care about are his video games and thinks all this special government stuff is an annoyance. He uses a heavy one handed sword it seems and after watching some of his gameplay video I feel like he would be the least fun in playing, but that's just based on first looks.

Seulbi Lee (Caster) - she's an orphan due to the first war with the monsters. Apparently she was chosen for Black Lamb after participating in a training program. Her hard work lead her to be the leader of Black Lamb. Seulbi wields two small daggers and can summon big buses to fall from the sky. Out of everyone her fighting style seems to be the most fun. 

J (Fighter) - J is a veteran when it comes to fighting the dimensional creatures. He is the only one of the 4 to not be a young kid, which is the requirement in joining Black Lamb. He's in charge of getting everyone back to safety if shit hits the roof. Little is known about his past and due to injury sustained in the first war, he's got a lot of medical problems which he takes random medications for. His game play is all about fist and legs. If I had to rank how fun it would be to play him, J would take 3rd place among the 4.

Yuri (Ranger) - Yuri is a normal high school girl who is a kendo champion. Her powers developed later than most kids, since people with special power start to show signs of their power at a very young age. Due to her late developments, she doesn't have complete mastery of her power and uses a specially design arm protectors and fire arms to assist her. Yuri uses both guns and a skinnier sword than Seha to do battle with the enemy. Her skills are said to be really flashy and her movements are very fast which makes Yuri rank 2nd in the fun category.

CLOSER isn't out yet and no confirmed dates are set, but they are aiming to have it done by 2014. Of course the players outside of Korea will have to wait a little more for publishers to pick up the license for it, lets pray someone does. I know it's a bit strange of me to write a review of a game that most people won't be able to play, but I thought it would still be a good game for people to look forwards to, cause I certainly am.

I'll be writing more reviews on games that are foreign in the sense of it's not available to other parts of the world other than the original country. Hopefully you guys will still appreciate the reviews.

Pixel People

Pixel People, released by Chillingo and developed by LambdaMu Games, was released on January 31 and is only available for iOS. The genre of the game would fit in the simulator category, but it doesn't play like a typical simulation games. I'm not really a big fan of these stupid waiting games and collecting certain material to create stuff on facebook and other platforms, but pixel people might almost win my heart over.

The big features of this game includes:

•  Puzzle like feel due to the splicing system. 
• Where as many other games you would typically need a friend to help you do task in the game, Pixel people is solely a one player game. 
• Some building will have special effects that affects the game play a little. 
• You can also get Utopium (the cash item) free within the game if you don't fancy spending real money on them, but do note that it isn't that fast collecting them via game play. 
• No quest are given. It really is a very sandboxy type of game play. 

The main objective of the game is to create your own town if you will, as big, and pretty as you like. The process of doing this is the unique part. You basically start out with a town hall, a clone center, and two "jobs". With these you will go to the clone center and splice these two jobs together to create a new one and this process goes on until you've unlock all the jobs. With each new jobs you create you get a new building to use for building up your town. Now this feature alone I have to say personally is very addictive and you'll get what I mean if you play this game.

There are only two cons that I can think of. One is the long waiting time after you reach a certain level and second is the amount of money needed to upgrade when you reach the higher levels. Currently I'm playing this game at around level 13 and the fashion store that I'm waiting for takes 1 day and 10 hours. If you have the Utopium that's fine, but it's when you don't have them, since your spending it on other stuff, that's when you get the feel of that long waiting game we are so familiar with. The leveling system is not something to be happy about either. The beginning levels you really don't notice it costing a lot, but after a while you start to have the feeling that this is truly a waiting game. Again at level 13 you would have to pay 56M to upgrade. This would normally take maybe 10 hrs of actually game play to achieve, which in real time would expand over a few days.

This game is great fun due to the splicing of the two jobs to create a new ones and some strategy involved in managing your resources. Some of  the jobs are nicely thought out and kind of make sense if you were to mix the two jobs together. Not having stupid quests telling you what you have to do, gives you the sense of freedom that a simulation game should give. The only downside is that darn waiting aspect, but if you have some leisurely time on your hands than why not kill  it with Pixel People.