Skyward Fire

Developed & published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 2 in the last quarter of 2006, FFXII is the last game in the Final Fantasy franchise before Final Fantasy XIII, the title on which the series will go multi-platform. In Microsoft’s E3 2008 Conference, it was announced along with the screening of a very promising teaser trailer, which said that FFXIII would come to the X360, at the same exact time as its release on the PS3. The announcement drew flak from Sony fans all across the world since this deal was going to delay the street break of FFXIII for the PS3. The development of the X360 version is supposed to start once the PS3 version is finished, and even when it’s done, it won’t be out till the X360 version is done. So consequently, there’s a long way to go until that happens.

Final Fantasy XII is the immediate successor to Final Fantasy IX, the last Final Fantasy title for the PlayStation, Final Fantasy X, the first Final Fantasy game for the PlayStation 2 and Final Fantasy XI, the premier Square Enix game that’s played online over at PlayOnline. At around the time of the development of FFXII, Final Fantasy X-2 was released as a sequel to Final Fantasy X. What gave the team a push-up motivation was the success that Final Fantasy XI obtained. The group of developers that was working over Final Fantasy Tactics got together to pitch in into FFXII, because FFX and XI were being sharpened, thus introducing a third FF console and Games for Windows team.

The FFXII development team comprises of Hiroaki Kato, the project manager, Taka Murata, the project supervisor, Takashi Katano, main system programmer, Akihiko Yoshida, main character design, Jun Akiyama, event director, Kazuhiro Kataoka, lead map system designer, Yoshinori Tsuchida, real-time rendering programmer, Hiroyuki Itoh, director of game design, and Hiroshi Minagawa, visual design director. These developers have developed action/real-time-based battle systems, which certainly bridges the gap between fields and battles. The previous games in the franchise used a random encounter-based battle system.

In my opinion, FFXII had great potential of being a better title than Final Fantasy X, but then again, there’s just something big that’s missing in XII that Final Fantasy X had. The integration of the action/real-time-based battling system seems to have magnified the difficulty in developing the game. It seems like every individual working over this integration had a distinct speculation of the franchise, which resulted in something very unpredictable, when they should have created prototype for testing to determine what could have faltered in the new system. Now, everyone knows that the FF franchise is a big one, and if they’re going to have a new project enlisted, fans and contemporary developers will obviously have expectations, which indirectly put a lot of pressure on the core development team, be it the field of audio, or system graphics. Square Enix has got some of the most advanced minds in the industry, but then again, chaos and confusion had to pop up since too many cooks always spoil the broth. The slightest error while distributing such a massive project to generic teams would have certainly added to the dilemma. In spite of the fact that the team working on FFXII was absolutely fresh and capable of producing something very new, the perspective of using too many contributive ideas ruined things.

The very basic tools that have been used while synthesizing the game include top notch industry brand names like Autodesk, OPTPiX and Softimage, with products including but not limited to Maya & MotionBuilder, iMageStudio and XSI. SE also used a lot of tools they had built themselves, which helped the team when it came to the hit-and-trial method for pre-visualizing the graphics for real-time previews using the rendering engine, but that wasn’t enough. The whole build deal took longer than expected, and the hit-and-trial error assessment program had to be side-stalled within a timeframe. A time restriction always limits the ability to try something new, and it also imposed a no-option situation for the creation of another error. There was a time when Hiroyuki Itoh had to ditch parts of the game which felt like they would stress out the team if they were to be worked upon any more.

Another crisis that was faced happened when the game went in for quality assurance. The game is mammoth & complex and the debugging process for a game from such an important franchise within time restrictions could have been another limiting factor. The game was bound to attract many gamers, out of which a major number plays just for fun. The difficulty level was supposed to be set in an orderly way, and here’s where the time factor comes in. By the release date deadline, there was just way too much debugging to go through, and all of it couldn’t be attended to, and the game seems to have missed out there too.

In spite of all odds, the game eventually succeeded. The development team tried there best to overcome all the hurdles they had in their way and shipped out a title that was welcomed. In spite of the various drawbacks within the game that didn’t please everyone, many aspects of the game-play mechanics became a pioneer in game development and set a benchmark for future titles in the genre. You have to give it up to the team developing Final Fantasy XIII for taking their time. This assures we won’t come across the kind of situation we faced while playing FFXII. This goes out to everyone who has been cussing at Square Enix for extending FFXIII to late 2009 or early 2010. The time that would be taken to develop the title for the X360 gives time to the PS3 QA Testers to give out their best. This will help the core development team to debug and minimize every last possibly visible glitch within the game, giving the PS3 version an upper hand.

With all the downloadable content planned for Xbox Live including mini arcade games as spin-offs to FFXIII and everything, plus everything exclusive that PSN and PlayStation Home is going to get, this doesn’t get any better than this. Patience pays, so sit tight until Final Fantasy XIII hits the shelves; it would be totally worth the wait and bigger than what any one can imagine.

This has to be one of Hideo Kojima’s ideas to take on the X360 fanboys. Obviously, just for the sake of humour, this does indeed tell us Konami still favors the Sony PS3. Here’s an in-game video that cracked me up, don’t worry, it’s spoiler proof.

I can hardly wait for my copy to arrive.

Edit: Embedded video link fixed. YouTube removed the old video for some reason.

Edit 2: Okay so the video is off YouTube again. I’ll put up a consistent link very soon. Promise!

Edit 3: Embedded video link fixed, again.

Just in case the link goes down again, you can download the FLV version of the video here.

As the date for the release of the last Hideo Kojima directed MGS game nears, the anticipation is just reaching new heights. The customers who had pre-ordered the game were given a chance of play the much awaited Metal Gear Online title. Apparently, the response to the online beta version was a lot more enthusiastic than what Konami had earlier expected. People actually had to wait ages (make that two days on an average) to just register for a Konami ID and a MGS Game ID. The download of some of the upgrade required for the console took a lot more time expected. Even machines with the most speedy connections were made to wait for 2-3 hours. And there’s just no telling how ugly it must have been for those owning connections with lower bandwidths.

The fourth and final Kojima game is apparently the most highly anticipated game for any Sony console ever, well, at least after the ranks of the games from the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the Final Fantasy franchise. GTA 4 was very recently released, and it was welcomed in the gamer community with open arms. And the street break date for FFXIII isn’t decided as yet. So one game that will keep you busy for quite some time now, is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

In the last 10 podcasts or so, made officially by Kojima Productions Podcasts, Ryan Payton, Kristine and Mark, MGS has been the discussion rage, especially MG Online,and the most basic features of the multi player. This version of the game has taken multi-player tactical gaming to new distances. The gameplay is highly addictive, and has been adored my MGS fans across the world. The only backdrop with the entire deal is the fact that the games are region locked, that is, if you’re from the US, and are willing to play on Asian servers on a US based console, you simply cannot. Well, actually, you can, but then again you’ll have to use proxies and complex third party hacks, which are certainly not recommended if you love your brand new, bitching expensive PS3. Plus, MGO is currently in Beta (the Greek letter for the alphabet B is used in the welcome screen and various windows, which is actually very cool. There are various game modes, where you can either play as Solid Snake (not recommended if you’re a novice), and also as the various teams in the game. But then again, there comes the urgency where you need to be familiar with the plots of the previous MGS games. You know, how deep you get in every time you play an MGS game. In MGS4, you must follow the subtitles and the cut-scenes well enough, or you’ll loose track of everything. No wonder there are gamers who brag about finishing the game, but if you ask them a question from here or there in the game, they start drawing blanks. It’s no fun playing MGS4 without knowing what happened in the prequels. You’ll be shooting arrows in the dark if you try anything close to that.

The Sony PlayStation 3 is a machine powerful enough to render the graphics and sound to the top notch levels. Although Hideo Kojima had said in an interview that he couldn’t exploit the game enough to force it up to show it’s best, the eye candy and pleasure for your ears would still reach new heights. He was actually planning the game on multiple DVDs, but then again, Sony refused to have a PS3 game with multiple DVDs, and that plan went into the pooper. Then a deal was reached where it was decided that MGS4 would be the first ever game to come out on a Blue Ray disc. For Hideo Kojima, that was still not enough. They decided they would have two blue ray discs, which was, obviously, very shocking for Sony. They never expected  the game so big that it would actually be as big as two blue ray discs. They never agreed, and Kojima had to cut down the game to just one disc. Kojima wasn’t satisfied, and neither did he bow down. The storm troopers at Konami decided they’ll have a lot of downloadable content available for the gamers once the game came out. And MGO Beta was supposed to be a subject of test.

The response was over-whelming. The servers went down in no time. As mentioned earlier, the initial registering process was long, and harassing. They never expected this to be so, so huge. A lot of people went for the Beta, and they hogged the servers for some really long sessions, which caused total chaos and ultimate downfall of the servers. This just lets how big this is. This just tells that since the last few years, the craze for the MGS franchise has shot up hard. I myself hadn’t played any MGS game until the last six months. It was all the crazy buzz about Guns of the Patriots amongst a few of my friends that brought me into this. And I am absolutely loving this. The good thing about this is once you get hooked up, there is no going back. The day isn’t far when Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots would finally go live, and gamers across the world would have some sleepless nights to come.

PS: This just in. A score of days to go, and the MGS4 team has just decided they’ll be releasing a limited edition version of the game, that’ll have some voice-overs by Hideo Kojima himself over an MGS documentary, and a full color 64 page art book. Pre-Orders have currently been taken off, but watch out http://twitter.com/KonamiEN for updates.