What next?

I finally finished off FFXIII for the full 1k over the weekend. It clocked in at about 96 hours give or take - which may well be a few hours short as I remember reloading a few sections without saving when I was farming for gil and items.

Overall I enjoyed the game for what it was, but it really did not feel like a traditional FF game to me. It also annoyed me that all of the sidequests were little more than a series of battles against enemies that you had long since grown tired of. Even the final mark mission was not as tough as I had hoped, and my party made short work of the opposition to net me most of the points I was missing.

The lure of RPG games to me has always been the story and levelling up elements, but in this case it was only the levelling up that really kept me hooked. As once you hit post game then the story is non-existant and you are pretty much tasked with running around various areas to beat up on the Mark mission targets and grind enough money/components in order to acquire every accessory and weapon. Hardly the stuff of RPG legend.

The most positive legacy from the game is that I really want to delve into another JRPG fairly soon, although I do still have to go back to Fallout: NV at some point too. The most likely candidate at the moment is Eternal Sonata, as that game has been on my shelf for an age now (I bought it day one) so could do with some love. Plus, the fact it is meant to be gorgeous to look at and fun to play is no hardship either.

In other news I spent a fun 10 hours over the course of a few days playing through the online portion of Front Mission Evolved. You do need four players to start a game, but luckily Mechahertz and I had two consoles each and two copies of the game each too. So that cut down on the time required dramatically. With the ultimate goal being to get to rank 70 we settled into grinding out the kills in order to rack up the 179k worth of XP needed.

People often say that boosting is a form of cheating and disrupts geniune players, but I can honestly say that we barely ran into ANYONE as we played Front Mission. The online is truly dead and out of all the games we played, we probably only saw another four or five people online in total. To be honest I played the game online legit when it first launched and it was just as bad back then. I know that EA have come out and said publicly that online gaming is the future for ALL games, but I really do not think this is the case. There are some titles that will never thrive online and developers need to start realising that.

After that was done, well nearly I still have a bunch of collectibles to find throughout single player, I then moved back to Harry Potter. Seeing as it is a rental (and my wife wants to get Zumba for Kinect next, ugh) then I figured I should finish it off. I managed to blitz through my second playthrough in just a few hours and find the last set of items that I had missed first time around. I now only have my Easy difficulty completion to do and that will be another completion onto the heap. Yay me!

I think achievements have certainly made me play games differently in one respect as, back in the day, I would never play a game more than once no matter how good it was. Whereas now I will play it until the points are all mine - is that commitment or just OCD?

You be the judge.........