Well Lightning's new costume is certainly proving to be a pain in the backside. Basically I'm making the whole thing from cardboard and papier maches because it's cheap and well, I've just recently finished University with only my part time job to go on. Go me :(
Anywho, this thing is dirivng me nuts. It's not so much the creation, but rather what the bloody thing looks like. I literally have EVERY screenshot of the costume thats been released thus far but god it's hard. I mean the shape of her breastplate and shoulder plates are driving me nuts. Especially the shoulders, they look different in EVERY shot.
I will get it done for Ayacon though. Come hell or high water.
In the meantime here's a shot of her shield to go on. This is how far I am on that. The designs on the front were pretty much guessed at from what I can see of it in various shots. I'm pretty pleased with it though :)
Ah, after the bad review of Ocean Party (my first negative review lol) I’ve decided to go for a game on Facebook that I like. Pet Society. Created by Playfish, it’s essentially a digital pet game. You create your little critter and then visit shops, friends and collect gold to buy nice clothes and items for your pets house. It’s simple, cute and addictive. While there are a lot of games on Facebook like this, Pet Society has been around for a few years now and has some of the nicer designs for your pet. There’s almost an anime feel to some of them which of course means big eyes and cute colours.
Every week brings a new theme to the game meaning there are items to collect and buy, some being limited edition for that week. While the themes themselves vary greatly, generally there’ll be some item in any theme that will interest you. Recently too, the game has started to bring in themes from pop culture such as Disney themes, themes from history and right now Harry Potter themes.
One downside of the new themes, and this is coming from someone who’s been playing this game for about two years now, is that with the introduction of playfish cash (in other words real money to buy pixel items) you’ll find that a lot of the better items tend to be PFC while the standard in game gold gets basic stuff. If you want your pet to actually dress as Harry, Voldemort or Snape, you’ll need to fork over real money, other wise just be content with generic stuff. I mean it’s probably a nice cash cow for the creators, but as a regular player, sometimes you just want a cool item you can afford lol.
The game also has little in game challenges such as trying to collect a full set of items to receive a prize. Visiting friends will sometimes reveal a hidden character called Hideeni who, if clicked, posts a message to your friends walls to allow them to click a link to gain a prize. If you collect all of his items you get an exclusive costume or item. Luckily I have more friends playing Pet Society than Ocean Party which makes this a little easier. But even if you lack active friends, you can always visit the trading forum to find items you may have missed out on. The current currency over there is 999’s (items that sell for 999 gold coins) or 5999’s, a royal carriage that seems to be the done thing for the more expensive items. Plus, while trading on online games is never totally safe, the users at the forum are pretty good at updating their safe trader list and black list to ensure even newbies can trade with relative safety.
I feel a slight deviation is needed from my love of Final Fantasy and here it is. Ocean Party. I’m going to assume that no one has ever heard of this game and believe me that is probably a good thing.
Ocean party is one of the hundreds of games available on Facebook whereby you create your own little aquarium, fill it with fish and then level up by how many fish you sell. Yeah I know, there’s a dozen of these games out there. However I chose to play this little waste of time as it was created by the people over at Gaia Online, a website I do spend quite a bit of time at.
Initially it had a lot going for it. You played the game on Facebook and you could then transfer your experience points gained in the game for cash over on the main Gaia website. It was a pretty solid concept as after all, it was a pretty cute game and meant I could gain gold on Gaia easier than playing Booty grab for hours on end.
But that’s where the praise ends as Gaia withdrew that little hook and left Ocean party as a stand alone game. And that’s pretty much where Ocean party ends. All the time I’ve been playing the game, it has never had any new content added and the ease by which you level up is only made easy if you have friends that play it too. No friends playing it, you get ten fish at anyone time. And believe me, it takes a long time to get to level 50 with just ten fish.
But that is another flaw in the game, you get to level 50and then what? Nothing. Game over. Find another little cheap game to amuse you for ten minutes every day because you can’t actually progress past 50. Not that I’m sure you’d want to because at Level 40, I’ve lost complete interest in it.
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s cute and I love cute things. The designs of the fish are nice and different from other aquarium games and you can tell straight away its based on Gaia Online, but it’s so monotonous. It’s a case of put new fish in tank, feed fish, sell fish, every three days or so. It’s boring. There is a mini game called Scrubbles that you can play, but that lasts for 30 seconds if you’re lucky and again can only be played once for every friend you’ve got hat plays the game. Only got three friends playing? Enjoy playing it for 1.30 minutes because that’s all you’ll get.
Not to mention the game is buggy as hell. So often it’ll tell me I have a full tank with only 6 fish actually in it. Or you’ll try and buy new fish only to find you can’t actually click on the fish in the shop. The answer? Load the game back up. I’m sorry but my computer is not fast at the best of times. I’m not reloading it every time something goes wrong otherwise I’d be at it all day.
Seriously, avoid playing this one. It’s just dull and boring with much better alternatives out there if raising digital fish is your calling.
Well there isn't really anything new to comment on at this point, however I thought I would come on here and simply mention that I'm cosplaying as Lightning this summer. That's right, I am taking Square Enix's favourite heroine and cosplaying her in her snazzy new costume. I mean I LOVE Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII, she's such a cool character, but her costume was over cosplayed before the game even came out and it's not even that awesome a costume. Vanille and Fang have far more interesting costumes despite being boring characters. Well ok, Fang's pretty cool.....Vanille's the worst game character ever created.
Anywho, back to Lightning, I have literally fallen in love with her new costume. It's freaking awesome. So yes, I shall be cosplaying as her. I shall hopefully be the first person in the UK to do so :) My main issue now is that Square Enix aren't exactly sharing the pics of her, so I'm working on what I've got at the moment and taking it from there.
Hopefully it shall look epic :)
And wow.....Thats a whole lot of thigh on show there @_@
And no that title is no exaggeration. My next review I feel should be on Final Fantasy VI. I realise my blog has pretty much become a place for reviews on Final Fantasy but I promise my next review won’t be on the FF series. Cross my heart promise ^_^. If you’ve read my earlier review on Final Fantasy I you will by now understand that I somewhat like the series…..in fact I somewhat like it a lot. Now if there has ever been a game people should play, it’s this one.
Of recent years it seems Final Fantasy VI has sort of become a missing game. People rave about it’s successor VII and III and IV have had remakes onto the DS, but so few people have played this game. As a die hard VII lover, this beats VII hands down. Yes we all know Sephiroth of VII is a brill bad guy, but Kefka in VI does what not even Sephiroth can achieve….but I’ll come to that later.
VI starts off very simply showing a young girl and two soldiers attacking a mining town in these small mecha suits. The girl ends up in a mine and is rescued by our hero Locke. As is pretty standard fare in RPG’s in general, the girl has no idea who she is other than her name is Terra. It quickly becomes to the attention of the player that there is a large empire in this world seeking to take it all over, Locke just happens to be working for a group called the Returners who are fighting against the empire. So let me get this straight so far:
*Girl with no memory *Hero working for underground rebels *Empire seeking to take over the world
At this point it’s all very standard stuff. But then the story seems to just take over and it’s the characters that make this game something completely different.
For a start there are 14 playable characters, the most of any of the games in the main numbered series. And, eventually, all of these can be accessible at once, meaning you can mix and match your party as you wish. Now, 14 characters is a lot for any story, be it in a book, movie or game. I mean look at the car crash movie that is love actually, does anyone actually remember any of the characters stories from that movie other than Hugh Grant was supposedly the PM? No you don’t, and why? Because there’s so many characters in it, you don’t get any time to bond with them as individuals. Does that happen in VI? You can bet your life it doesn’t! Every single character has a fully developed personality, back story and progresses through out the game. Some characters such as Locke, Terra, Edgar and Celes have slightly more developed stories than say Gogo or Strago, but by the end of the game you know exactly why the characters are doing what they are doing. As a testament to how great the character development is, I can still name every single character in your party and tell you details about each one, and I promise you, you will too once you’ve played it. When you compare it to the later game of XII where you only really have 6 characters in the game but don’t really care about any because none of them grow or change or really do a whole lot besides running round the world map, VI does everything correctly. The story is a very familiar one as I have already mentioned with Terra eventually finding out she’s half human and half esper (the summons of this game…and yes VII fans Terra was the magical girl before Aeris was even thought of) and the Empire trying to control magic in the world…a power that the majority of your characters can’t use until a later point in the game meaning you have to plan your party on what strategy’s your employing to progress in the game. But it dos have some really good twists in it, such as bad guys swapping sides and double crosses, while Kefka actually does what other villains fail to do, and takes over the world. Pinky and the Brain eat your hearts out.
The game also has a quite unique idea whereby at times, the large party splits up and you will play several short story sections with only a few characters. This happens early on when Locke steals into a town, Terra and a few other characters are protecting an old man and some of the other characters board a ghost train…yes you heard that correctly, a ghost train.
The game has some wonderful scenes in it, from the aforementioned ghost train scenario to, what is arguably, the best scene out of any Final Fantasy game, the opera scene. There are a million and one reasons why I love this scene so much. For starters the music in it is wonderful. The tune is simply beautiful. But also the character interaction here is really nice. We start to see the blossoming love between Locke and, up till this point, the quite cold hearted Celes. The graphics themselves are none too shabby either, really making full use of the technology available at the time of it’s release. It’s just a very captivating moment.
Which brings me onto the music, the Opera theme, as already mentioned, is simply a delight to listen to, but so is a lot of the music in the game. It’s all done to a lovely high standard with Nobuo Uematsu really out doing himself on them. I’m sure that any VII fans listening to the Opera theme will notice a strong resemblance to a certain tune played as a certain character meets their demise in VII. Not that I’m saying anything of course….but VI came first ^_~
The battle system is pretty standard, working on the ATB system with individual characters having their own unique attacks and abilities such as having Locke being able to steal while Terra can turn into her Esper form.
As already mentioned, the magic is something that originally only two characters can learn. However all characters can learn it eventually by equipping them with magicite and then levelling them up. Depending on what type of magicite they’re equipped with, characters will learn spells and gain statistical bonuses. These spells are learnt through the aquistion of Magic Acquisition Points accrued from most battles.
Despite the battle system being pretty simple and the story initially seeming a little over done, Final Fantasy Vi saves itself with a top class cast of characters and a world that literally sucks you in. As I played through later games, I continually see characters and events that are reminiscent of those from VI, a testament to how good the game actually is as it’s legacy lives on.
Plus once you’ve completed the game, you’re treated to a lovely little CG FMV that recaps over key points in the game. Seriously, after playing through the game for about 60 hours, getting to see my fave characters in CG like this really makes your day. The only downside is that our wonderful hero, Locke is somewhat absent from this….oh and Terra’s gone blonde, but other than that it really is a nice touch and a great treat once you have finished.
What can I say? I'm officially excited over this. My life has suddenly become this epic quest to try and find out as much info about this game as I can. So now I present to you the latest teaser of the new game:
And here are my initial thoughts.
Noel is Hope
Serah's new outfit looks good
Battle system looks the same - this is good, I liked the old one
Old characters that return for deffo are Snow's little team buddies
A new character with a moogle appears though i'm not sure whether it's male or female - I said it looks like a girl, my sister countered with when does that make a different in FF - She said it's wearing a tie, I countered saying the boys practically wear skirts.
Noel is Hope
Chocobo's return - always good
Minions join your team at some point in the way of Gran Pulse something or other
Noel is Hope
Serah has a sword and not some wimpy staff
And did I mention I believe Noel is Hope??? Seriously, he has grey hair that is styled exactly like Hope's....it better be him because then it means Hope is in this game ^_^
So the blog is still alive, despite my obvious absence of late. University is to blame as my final year project damn near killed me. But it’s done now and I can continue with this ^_^
Anywho, today won’t be a review, rather news on the gaming world. I’m sure by now it’s rather obvious that I am in fact a rather big fan of the Final Fantasy franchise. I love it ^_^ And, despite it’s flaws, XIII was a pretty decent game. So imagine my excitement when I discover that they’re making a Final Fantasy XIII-2. Ecstatic doesn’t quite cover it.
So this trailer has been around on the net for a couple of months now and I have to say that Lightning looks pretty kick ass in her new costume:
But today, with E3 just around the corner, I found out some new info and had to share it ^_^ Square Enix have released something akin to the plot of the game with this little extract from their site:
‘Set a few years after Lightning and the others saved Cocoon, some survivors have decided to start over by rebuilding on Gran Pulse. Lightning, however, is nowhere to be found and thought dead by many, but Serah believes otherwise. When her town is suddenly overrun by monsters, a mysterious man named Noel appears to save her. Together, the two set off to find Lightning…’
Can’t say I’m over the moon at hearing that whiny little Serah is now a main character. But I’m hoping they make her to be slightly tougher and lose her annoyingness that drove me mad in the first game. Seriously, she was possibly my least liked character in that game. However I have found some screenshots lurking around the internet and it appears the whiny little madam is actually going to be able to fight, that’s always a plus ^_^
So this Noel guy looks interesting to say the least. He sort of looks like a male Fang if you check out his clothes closely. Yet he’s not the mysterious guy fighting Lightning in the original trailer so it looks like we’ll have a couple of new characters added to the mix. But all I can say is that as long as Hope features and gets with Lightning, I will be one happy fan girl.
Pictures are taken from The Escapist Magazine website.
Pixel Princess will do it’s utmost to keep you up-to-date with info as it’s announced at E3 next week. I have my fingers crossed that this game is going to be good ^_^
