Small Final Fantasy 14 update this weekend. I’m starting to get caught back up on all the stuff that’s happened over the last year and a half. The main story is caught up, the normal raids are cleared, the normal trials content are almost cleared. I haven’t touched alliance raids yet, but plan to do so before too much longer. Word has it that they’re based on Nier: Automata, which I enjoyed the hell out of back in 2017.

Come to think of it, 2017 was an interesting year all around – Persona 5, Nier: Automata, the Stormblood expansion (although in hindsight it seems to have been less well-received than Heavensward or Shadowbringers), Breath of the Wild were all worthwhile time investments. Went back to Japan for the first time in seven years; had a mini-college reunion for a few weeks over the summer with one of the Australians; found my footing at the job I’d taken after moving out here, which I’m still at five years later. Sometimes everything just hits on all cylinders, right?

Anyways, here’s some more gameplay footage. The nice thing about being late to the content is that the player base is largely already familiar with everything, so I can focus more on studying the environment and the patterns and less on scrambling to keep people vertical. That’s quite a contrast to the last video I posted where I mentioned I literally had to save the attempt myself. Not that I don’t mind being ahead of the curve, but sometimes half a workload is better than a full workload. The interesting thing about this encounter is that the boss actually stores attacks up for execution a minute or two later while also running through everything else it’s going to run through. I’m continually impressed/amused that Square-Enix has been able to keep churning out interesting ideas for raid content after all these years.

One more note about this video; it seems the PS5 records things at 1080p and 60FPS. The quality is quite nice, I like it.

I’m back to playing Final Fantasy 14 again after over a year and a half off. When I quit (again) back in October-ish of 2019, Shadowbringers was still fairly fresh – a lot of folks were still making their way through the main scenario, and the more hardcore were working on the harder raid content. I found myself in the latter camp, working with a group of folks out on the east coast a couple nights a week. We had made our way through the first raid after about a month of trying, but a confluence of people getting busy with school or running for their lives ahead of Tropical Storm Imelda along with my workload spiking caused both the raid group to have to go on hold and for me to have to quit altogether.

The raids themselves are quite fun, and even in the normal difficulty mode tuned for the player base at large, they can be quite challenging. I saved a video replay of the first time I cleared the fourth encounter –

I’d saved the video partly because it was my first clear of the raid content that released with Shadowbringers, but also partly because I’d figured out the dance routine just well enough to be able to save the raid from a wipe at about the mid-point. Common wisdom about the use of limit breaks in the game seems to be – usually you want the DPS to have it, and there may be specific events which require the tank to use the limit break instead, but if a healer has to use it, that usually means the attempt was destined to fail and the healer just prolonged the inevitable. So this was a fairly unique set of circumstances to have happen all at once.

Over the last 8-or-so years that I’ve played this game, I’ve gone into raids as a DPS, as a tank, and as a healer. Healing seems to be uniquely challenging in that not only do you have to dodge all the same stuff that everyone else has to dodge, but you also have eight health bars to watch, you have to be aware of when the heavy damage is incoming (both the things that are raid-wide and the things that are focused on one or both tanks), and you still have to pitch in on damage dealing when there’s nothing else going on.

Then once you have all of those things figured out, you start optimizing. Do you need to drop a huge raid-wide heal just because everybody’s at 85% health, or ignore it and let them recover on their own? Do you have to stop and heal the tank through a tankbuster, or can you throw an instant-cast shield and trust that they’ll mitigate the rest of the damage themselves while you continue throwing out damage?

In the harder difficulty content (which the above is not), you go so far as assigning healers to tanks, giving people specific spots to stand, and building up internal rhythms that you follow rather than playing a more read-and-react style. You know when the encounter starts you can cast four damage spells before the first big tankbuster comes in, then the team has to fan out and you have to stand on this particular square, and so on. The penalty for not doing the right thing or not healing the right person at the right time is stiffened too; a boss that doesn’t get downed in 10-12 minutes tends to start throwing out massive raid-wide damage as punishment for taking too much time, so if too many people have too much downtime on the DPS charts, the chances for failure skyrockets.

Anyway, it’s a lot to think about, and the worst part is there are 7 other actual people involved. So you can imagine that having this many buttons to press, and needing such detailed knowledge of encounters, and knowing that the penalty for not doing your particular job is that other players’ characters take a dirt nap, there’s a lot of stress and anxiety around getting back into shape and being able to play again if you’ve taken any measurable amount of time off. Maybe the worst part is that the game doesn’t store your hotbar assignments on the server, so you come back to the game with an empty hotbar and need to rely on muscle memory kicking in before you can get your act completely together again.

Thankfully, one of the new features in the Shadowbringers expansion was the ability to run dungeons with AI counterparts. Seems to defeat the purpose of an MMO to offer single-player modes, and the playing the game this way is definitely a lot slower than playing with other humans who have optimized their play styles, but it does give a low-stakes way to figure things out again. After about a day of playing with the bots, I had my hotbar sorted back out, and in comparing my new hotbar to what I had in the video above, the results were nearly the same. Leading up to Shadowbringers, the recovery time was closer to three or four days.

Square-Enix is on about a two-year cadence with Final Fantasy 14 expansions; that is to say, they’ll release an expansion, then spend the next two years releasing periodic content updates/additions before releasing the next expansion. We’re at the tail end of the Shadowbringers expansion now, with Endwalker (the next expansion’s title) slated for release in just a few months. So since I stopped playing shortly after Shadowbringers came out, that means I have roughly two years’ worth of content to get caught up on in the next four or five months. Should be doable, but this is going to wreak havoc on my backlog. I was a portion of the way through Yakuza 5 (itself part of an endeavor to play through the entire Yakuza series), and I had a handful of titles that were on the radar for immediate playthroughs after that, and now everything’s on hold. Oops.

Ars ran an interesting article earlier this week about ticking time-bombs in PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 hardware. The simplest explanation for this issue is that these consoles have internal batteries meant to help keep system time. If the battery is pulled and replaced, the system is programmed to phone home to the PlayStation Network to reset the clock. This process depends on Sony retaining support for the ability of these consoles to phone home – Sony could, at their discretion, ‘upgrade’ the service such that discontinued consoles can no longer sign in, which would leave a PS3 or a PS4 with a new clock battery in a state where it needs to find out what time it is but can’t.

(Side note – seems that the lifespan of these batteries is measured in tens of years. That’s quite an improvement over the Sega Saturn battery, which sometimes only lasted a few months!)

It hard sometimes with articles like these to tell where the reality ends and FUD begins because it’s a discussion of potential events that have yet to occur. Yes, the outcomes are tested, so we know how these systems respond when their clock battery is pulled and replaced, but at the same time, we don’t know if/when Sony plans to free these consoles from the requirement to phone home to validate content, or if/when Sony plans to lock them out of PSN forever.

It does raise some interesting questions about what would potentially change in some kind of firmware update. Would the system just get its time from pool.ntp.org? Or would time not matter at all anymore? When the time comes to end PSN access for PS4 hardware, do you force-feed the firmware update so users aren’t locked out, or do you just post the .PUP file to your website and tell people to sneakernet it onto their hardware when they’re good and ready? That would certainly solve the case where a PS4 gets retired from service after someone gets a PS5, then it sits in a closet for 7-8 years until somebody decides to pull it back down and give it to a relative or something, and Sony has long since retired any PlayStation Network endpoints that know how to talk to a console from the 2010s.

(Point of emphasis on that last sentence… the argument will invariably be “well leaving the server there shouldn’t cost you anything, so there’s no reason not to do it”. That’s a fair point, but I can also say from personal experience that it doesn’t take long for the knowledge of how to operate/maintain that server to evaporate as employees move on, company R&D and support dollars get prioritized elsewhere, and document libraries get upended by corporate-issued edicts for IT to lower costs and migrate everything to a cheaper solution. That’s to say nothing of the ongoing expenses that will need to be incurred in keeping security issues patched, and occasionally upgrading the entire operating system. Eventually, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth.)

Or – in the worst case scenario, which Ars was getting to – does Sony do nothing, and essentially leave 200 million consoles out in the cold when the decision is made to lock them out of the online service? It was just a few years ago that Sony got ahead of Microsoft in the eighth generation of consoles simply by staying quiet while Microsoft got hit over the head for their inability to explain whether the Xbox One would be required to be online or not.

For PS3, the damage seems limited to just downloaded content. If the system doesn’t know what time it is, it doesn’t know whether the content is valid to be played or not. This is one of the reasons why I tend to stay away from digital content in the first place. You never know when you’re going to want to play something like I am Setsuna on the Switch, for example. But, if you wanted to do that in 2031 and Nintendo’s long since binned their online storefront for the Switch (as they have for the Wii and Wii U), how/where do you get a copy? From Japan, where physical copies of the game with the English localization built in were published.

For the PS4, the consequences seem most dire – apparently this online check happens when you load any game at all, physical or digital. So if you replace the clock battery, and the PS4 can’t call home to find out what time it is, it’ll never be able to play any games again. That’s quite the end state for a game console.

As alarmist as that sounds, papering over the issue with a simple “well, the PS5 is backwards compatible” ignores the possibility that one day it might not be. Folks should remember that PS3 once had hardware-based backwards compatibility with PS2 which was then replaced with software in a cost-cutting measure, but then Sony decided later on to patch that functionality out of the platform. (Along with OtherOS functionality, which earned them a class action lawsuit, but that’s a different topic for another day…) So, even though Sony’s design decisions for the hardware of the PS5 lend themselves well to easy support for last-gen games, it’s easy to see a future where that functionality has been rolled back.

On that note, the jailbreak community for Sony’s older consoles seems pretty well-established at this point. I actually got a 60GB fat PS3 (the one with the hardware-level compatibility with PS2 games) a few years ago and jailbroke it. So now it never needs to go online, and if I want to play games on it, rather than introduce additional wear and tear on the Blu-Ray drive, I can just point the system at an .iso file on disk. It’s actually rare that I do this these days – the last game I played was Digital Devil Saga, which was about a year ago. Between wanting to focus on newer games and being busy with work, the PSX/PS2/PS3 backlog has intentionally been kept small. But as I said above, sometimes you want to go back and play these games.

Same goes for the PSP and PS Vita, which have similarly lost support from Sony. In fact, a jailbroken PS Vita is probably the best way to play PSP games on native or native-like hardware now, due to the dwindling supply of reliable PSP batteries. A few years back I had a workflow involving both jailbroken handhelds where I could rip an .iso file off of a UMD and then sneakernet it over to the PS Vita to run inside the PSP emulator. Works great, and provides easier access to games that are on dead consoles and dead media formats. While the UMD has thankfully run its course already, some games, like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, have never been rereleased on any other format.

(Speaking of pointing systems at .iso files, I do plan to eventually build out some kind of a file server and rip as many of the disk-based games as I can, probably as part of a larger project to build out a Plex server. Got a lot to get done before I get there, though.)

When I have both good and bad things to say about something, I’m never sure which I should lead off with. If I start with the good stuff first, then that all gets forgotten by the time I’m through criticizing things. On the other hand, if I lead off with the bad, to me it seems like I went with the bad stuff first because it’s the main dish, and the good stuff afterwards is lip service to keep the intended audience from thinking I just wanted to bitch about things.

But speaking of intended audiences, there’s a 0.0000001% chance this ever gets read by anyone important, and I’m probably not saying anything anybody hasn’t already said since Xenogears came out twenty (!) years ago, so I guess it really doesn’t matter.

I unintentionally held off on playing Xenogears for years. Not because I thought it was bad or anything, but because it simply never entered into orbit. The only new Squaresoft release I played in fall of 1998 was Parasite Eve; the rest of the time I was busy playing Final Fantasy Tactics or WCW/nWo Revenge or F-Zero X or pretending to be a college student. I had an “oh yeah, I should play that” moment in 2011 or 2012 and got the PSN version of Xenogears for my PSP, but then promptly shelved it for one game or another. And then early in 2018, with a mission to knock things off of my backlog once and for all, I finally got around to it.

So there you go – decades of not playing what people call the greatest JRPG ever, and it was only because I was doing the video game equivalent of forcing myself to eat my vegetables.

I won’t rehash story elements here because it’s already been four months and I’ve already forgotten some of the finer details of the plot. The overall impression I had was that it was probably a lot edgier in 1998 than it is today. A gang of people fighting against an organized religion? If the concept of a Moral Majority had any sway left by the time 1998 rolled around, that has certainly waned even more since then. Without the urgency of modern thought to bolster the narrative, Xenogears’ story falls back to being simply another “rebels vs. empire” story; one in which two of the main characters cross the lines of battle in the name of love, one in which the younger main protagonist has a mentor named Doc, one in which your ship turns into a giant mech called the “Super Dimensional Gear Yggdrasil IV”. That is to say – not terribly original, with a side helping of rampant intellectual property theft.

The real crime in this game is what happens in the second disc. I’m no stranger to visual novels, so the idea of pressing X to read a book masquerading as a video game is nothing new. But when the entire first disc of your game is a forty or fifty hour JRPG experience, and then the second disc is another twenty hours of mashing X and doing half a dungeon here or a boss fight there, something’s seriously wrong. What was wrong in this case was laid out by the director in a Kotaku interview – a story in which a video game being developed by a staff of inexperienced game developers was cut off at the knees by the reality of software development and Squaresoft’s release schedule. The second disc had an entire game’s worth of material crammed into highlight reels and occasional bouts of actual gameplay. That’s a shame.

So what about the gameplay? This in itself is a mixed bag, but it’s mostly good. Xenogears attempts some light platforming in spots, which can get frustrating. There are only so many camera angles to work with, so jumping from one ledge to another sometimes becomes a bigger chore than it needs to be. The battle system is a nice change of pace from the normal menu-driven stuff Squaresoft was mostly known for in the 1990s. Characters start their turns with a bucket of action points for the player to spend however they want – press triangle to spend one point on a light attack that’s all but guaranteed to hit the target, press square to spend two points on a medium attack, or press X to gamble three points on a heavy attack with a greater chance of whiffing. Chaining these moves together in certain combinations unleashes more powerful attacks called Deathblows. You don’t get these for free – Deathblows must be learned over time by taking certain actions a certain number of times. This feature isn’t very well documented in the game; aside from some cryptic progress bars buried in the menu and a vague directive to go out and experiment, I had no clue what I was doing and had to consult the internet for help.

The one aspect of the game I can’t find anything to complain about is the music. The soundtrack is equal parts grandiose, mysterious, and commanding of your attention. Songs like The Wind is Calling, Shevat of the Azure Sky demand replays just so you can more fully digest everything that’s going on, and The One Who Bares Fangs at God (again, I’m sure this would have been more impactful of a song title twenty years ago) calls out as a really unique spin on a final boss theme. Composer Yasunori Mitsuda really had a run going in the 1990s. Between Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross – if your favorite band put out three albums in five years that were that well received, or your favorite sports team won the championship three times in five years, you’d call it their golden age.

Overall, in the face of astronomical expectations based on decades of hype, I found myself leaving the Xenogears experience not overwhelmed, but also not underwhelmed. I think I was just whelmed. The story was only okay, the gameplay was mostly okay but occasionally annoying, the overall delivery of the game as a complete package was a 50/50 situation. At least the soundtrack gets played regularly when I need music to listen to. I think I expected to be blown away by this game the same way I was blown away by contemporary Final Fantasy games. Not only was I not blown away, the hype caused the flaws to stand out even more than they probably would have otherwise.

Sometimes creative works of art are worthy of the “flawed masterpiece” moniker. Final Fantasy VII might be one – great game, sloppy translation. Or how about Persona 3 – the storytelling and pacing of the game were fantastic, but wow, your computer-controlled allies were stupid. Xenogears doesn’t really fit the mold. It does one thing well, and the rest only kind of okay or worse than okay. 3/5.