I've only really read from fans of the series on another board but they all say it's really good gameplay-wise.  Storyline and characters they don't seem to thrilled about.  And even they admit the facial animations are horrid.  Video game sites like IGN and Gamespot seem a little more critical.  I'll be playing it no matter what reviews I may read may say.  I'll be seeing SignoftheHammer from the old site tonight too and I think he bought it last week, so I'll ask him what he thinks.

I bought Final Fantasy XV this week so I'll be starting that next.  By the time I'm done ME:A will probably have one or two DLCs.

I finished the storyline of Final Fantasy XV tonight. What drizzling shit. From Chapter 8 onwards it was just a long tube (much like the first three quarters of Final Fantasy XIII) until the final boss. Due to my doing a lot of sidequests before going to Chapter 8 I was way over levelled too and breezed through everything. But is that final boss battle even a challenge at lower levels? It felt like one of those un-loseable battles.

The storyline is so fucking weak though, man. Granted I haven't watched the movie or read the manga...BUT I SHOULDN'T FUCKING HAVE TO!!!! I bought the game I should at least get a story that I can somewhat follow and piece together. XIII had a story that was confusing as fuck but at least it was in there, you just had to look for it in all those data files, which was really lazy.

So as I played the last few chapters of this one I see Luna die and I laughed. Because I don't know who the fuck she is other than the fiancee of Noctis who he hasn't seen in years. The characters turn into complete dicks to one another and I had no idea why. I don't even know why that guy with the brown hair is the bad guy. He seemed like a good guy before Chapter 8. I think that guy with the white hair who was dead was Lunas brother? Why did the brown haired guy kill him? What the fuck is going on? Who were all those bodies hanging by the brown haired guy in the throne room? Where the hell did this ring come from? What's this time travelling shit? GHAAAAAAA!

Square fucked up large with the story on this one. I'm going to do the sidequests that unlock post story now and since the only decent fun I got out of this game was sidequests I'm considering beating Adamantoise my "end-game" or maybe whatever the strongest hunt is.

It wasn't nearly as bad a game as I dreaded it would be. Or maybe it was? The story was so bad. But since it's such a small part of the experience I had I can't let it drag the game down too much.

6/10

I beat Final Fantasy 4 today. It was a great game. Played the PS1 port of it. Once I got my guys leveled up to the lower 60's the final boss was super easy. I tried when my guys were just mid-upper 50's and I got destroyed in seconds.

Not sure what to do next. Probably going to take a break from getting invested in anything too big since I have been putting off my web development courses badly since started FF4 a couple weeks back lol. I downloaded Lego Star Wars (fo free) on Xbox Live so I may play that. I love the Lego games so much. I also want to try my hand at Final Fantasy 8 again. It got a lot of hate, but I really enjoyed that game... I also need to finish FF7 once and for all....

MAH GURL!



MAH GIRL!!!!

After about six hours Mass Effect: Andromeda reminds me of the first Mass Effect but with better graphics. Except the facial renders look terrible...on everyone. It's a very empty and lonely feeling game. But it's familiar enough. The Remnant are already reminding me of the Protheans/Reapers so I really hope they don't go that way. It's been done in the first three games. Maybe it would be cool if the Reapers show up there too though. I don't know. We'll see how things go.

I never played Super Metroid when I was younger. Watched my best friend play it a bunch, but it always looked too confusing to me... SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..

I redownloaded the SNES emulator I had a few years back and decided to give Metroid a spin... HOLY SHIT I GOT SO HOOKED TO IT! Ended up beating it today after starting it last week. Definitely one of the best games I have ever played. The wall jump is a bit wonky, but the game overall is just so damn good.

I miss old games. Finish them within 8 hours, don't have to sit through tons of cut scenes, just plain fun. Unless a game is SUPER AWESOME (Mass Effect) I find it very hard keeping my attention in a game that takes 20+ hours to beat.

Did you save the little animals at the end?

So I finished Mass Effect Andromeda tonight. A game that was met with (somewhat justified) backlash upon launch and in the six months since its release has faded into obscurity usually relegated for indie games no one sees and sequels no one asked for to series no one cared about. Not the fate for a game in what a lot consider to be one of the greatest video game series of all-time (myself included).

The game was plagued with problems right from the start. Some have been fixed via patches in the ensuing months but some are forever to be unfixed. The first problem and maybe the most glaring problem for the game is the facial renders. To put it lightly…they’re terrible. I played as FemRyder and she always has this look of…well…a look of bad CGI on her face. There are strange facial expressions all over the place, be it the eyes or the mouth. I was able to look past it myself but in 2017 it’s pretty unacceptable. But it’s not just her. Every human face is lifeless and sterile to a point where it’s almost creepy. But, at least there are more than one human facial renders. There are two Asari models, and one is exclusive to a squadmate. Every other Asari has the same face. And it’s not a good face. The most captivating race in the original trilogy has been reduced to clowns. Turian, Salarian, Krogan and (the new races) Angara and Kett all look exactly the same, but that’s forgivable as it was that way in the original trilogy. But even the color variations of character-to-character are almost non-existent.

Then there’s the second big flaw in this game: the bugs. There weren’t too many “game breaking” bugs that I occurred but there were enough little ones. Ranging from characters warping across screens to the music and sound just randomly cutting out to the game freezing at points (…that one was pretty game breaking but thank the Goddess for auto-save and my own patience). I could live with one but I encountered all those and more at various points. Again, unforgivable in 2017.

Those are the two big gripes I had with the game but there is good in there. Aside from the facial graphics the environments look really good, even if there isn’t too much variety in them. It’s basically…snow wasteland, dessert wasteland, another dessert wasteland…a wasteland with mountains…and a dark jungle that I hated going to. Exploring space is way more beautiful than it was in the trilogy. No more floating around on a mini-map. In this game you really get the feel that you are on a scout ship exploring a galaxy. Hey, no fucking Fuel Cells this time around. That’s a plus!

Let’s move on to the story. After Mass Effect 3 it was really impossible to carry on unless Bioware was prepared to release three separate games (one each for the Red, Green and Blue endings). So they went with a very logical option of moving away from the Milky Way entirely. The story follows a group settling an entirely new galaxy thousands of light years away from our galaxy and six hundred years in the future (as was the time it took for them to travel there), entirely untouched by the Reapers and the war against them. So whatever happened in the original trilogy is ancient history that the people in this game were entirely unaware of (as they embarked before Mass Effect 3). We follow “the Pathfinder” and the trials she meets in exploring a galaxy no one thought would be as it was once they arrived there. I’ll leave it at that. There are, however, some allusions to the original trilogy that present moments of great interest to me. Nothing too revealing if you’ve played those games. But just enough. When the game ends there are lots of opportunities for a sequel left open, but sadly with the poor response the game got I’m not sure if any of its questions will ever been answered. That makes me really sad. Because not just the questions need answering. I think the squadmates and people you met need more story given. I fear that they will all get a worse fate than the characters in the Dragon Age games (which was at best sometimes a cameo appearance from game to game). I hope Andromeda gets a sequel but I fear the worst.

Where the game really shone was the combat and gameplay. The original games were (at best) a poor-mans first-person-shooter once you got down to the action. There was the strong story to overshadow everything but without it that would have been more apparent. But this game has the combat from those games amped up to “eleven” with more action elements included, such as jumping. Combat in this game is downright fun and exhilarating. If there’s any problem with it it’s that it’s actually very easy. But I was playing on “NORMAL” difficulty. Perhaps I should have turned it up a few notches. I was always having fun partaking in combat in this game so why bother?

What more can I say? This game really harkens back to the first Mass Effect in many ways. Much like that game planet exploration is…a thing. There aren’t as many planets to explore but they’re much vaster than those in the first game so it all evens out. And the micromanagement of characters and equipment is on-par or possibly even moreso than the first game. So fans that were turned off by how that was dumbed down in the second and third games of the original trilogy have that to look forward to. And driving a vehicle on planets surfaces returns and is even more a part of the game than it was in the first game. However, despite lacking weapons the Nomad handles like a dream compared to the Mako. The only real problem with the gameplay is the abundance of “fetch quests”. I spent eighty-six hours playing this game and at least fifty of those hours were spent doing fetch quests. And those fetch quests usually involved: go to Kadara…go to Elaaden…go to Eos…go back to Kadara… go to the Nexus…go to Kadara…again. Now, that’s only because I decided to be a completionist in this game and get as much as I could out of it (and as much moneys worth out of it that I could). Some players might be content to plow through the story quests as fast as they can, which takes about twenty hours. But, you’re missing out on a lot. And you’d be missing out on all the squadmate banter, which is something that was lacking in the other games and was quite entertaining. NPCs (especially the Angara) all have the same few voice actors recycled throughout the game but your squadmates are all exclusive voices and all of them have unique characters that are very nice to be around, except Liam. I wouldn’t put any of them on par with Garrus or Tali just yet but after the first Mass Effect game I probably wouldn’t have cared about them either. But the banter makes he believe these are all characters I could grow to love. Except Liam.

Back to the planets you explore. As I said: they look beautiful. But the problem is…that’s it. There’s almost nothing on them. The planets are all so lonely and barren. There might be an Outcast outpost here and there but for the most part they’re empty canvases. That leads to a problem with possible sequels: unless the next game is set literally THOUSANDS of years in the future there’s no opportunities for a vast metropolis like Illium in those games. And doing so would leave all the characters I spoke of earlier out of future games out of the story (even the Asari and Krogan). And when exploring planets there aren’t many ancient relics alluding to ancient civilizations in the Helus cluster, other than the Remnant/Jardaan. And by games end you’ll be left wondering how long the Jardaan were even present in the cluster. And you’ll be left just calling them another “Protheans”. But I find them more technically advanced. I would’ve liked more allusions to long-forgotten races and long-fought wars.

In the end I was very glad to have played this game. I don’t think it NEEDED to happen but I’m not upset that it happened. It was great to go back into the Mass Effect universe once again, even if I think this game is destined to be an astrix in its history. When I finished it I was sad. Because I did find myself enjoying the people in the story. But I wasn’t sad like I was at the end of Mass Effect 3, when I knew that it was the end of their stories and I’d never see them again. I’m sad because with the poor reception the game got that they’ll be lost in the vortex of digital obscurity. Never to be seen again. Never to have their stories fleshed out more. The same goes for the Kett and the Jardaan. I don’t want to know everything about them but I think there’s still more that should be told. Above all I feel sad for Ryder. I think she was a good lead character who I really enjoyed playing as that’s gotten a bad wrap by no fault of her own.

I hope to go back to Andromeda, some day.

7/10