The Last of Us

I've been meaning to play this for a while, and finally got some time to get to it. It was recommended by some friends at work, if I wanted to avoid too much grind. I played it on PS3.

I always figured this was a post-apocalyptic game, with emphasis on survival/scavenging. There are also some zombie-type aspects to it.

First off, the game looks amazing. Like really amazing. The models, faces, mannerisms, and animations are all fantastic. Then add solid VO, and the cutscenes are just stunning.

The story is amazing, and the characters are believable, with their own motivations guiding their actions.

The game's gives you an objective that you're going for even though it's always going to be a difficult path to get to that single objective. It does keep things focus though which is really nice. It also gives you a hint if you stick around in a place for too long, because you don't know where to go or forgot.

The gameplay was clear and clean. It's a stealth game until you're spotted, then it's a cover based shooter, or you could just book it and run for the next objective. I had to book it a few times, and it's nice it's an option. It also was nice to see that quite a few cutscenes were done with in-game graphics, versus watching a movie. And with that, you usually at some if not full control over your character. I like that only take control away when they have to.

The controls can take a bit of time to get back into, if you step away for a week (or two), but they make sense.

Throughout the game you can upgrade weapons at workbenches. You get parts for upgrading throughout the game, and you get an upgrade tool at specific spots, to allow unlocking various levels of upgrades. You can also see from this that there are 5 levels of upgrades, so you know you have a good chunk of the game left when you only have 1-2 upgrade tools. At first I found the bow to be very weak, but once you upgrade it, it's amazing. It's a ranged silent take down weapon. Also, the target size for a head shot is forgiving. Also, always carry a full health shiv for unlocking rooms, their contents is worth the minor spend.

I also enjoyed the game much more when I found the lock on option, because I am terrible at aiming a reticle on any console. In this game, you really can't afford to just waste bullets with misses.

A few things I would change:

* Add a continue button screen to the end of loading a game. It takes long enough, and not all loaded games will take you to a safe place

* Make enemies consistently drop ammo. Possibly just on easy difficulty? They drop ammo consistently near the end, but not throughout. Arrows can sometimes be retrieved from a corpse, but not always. Missing and hitting a wall will break the arrow.

* Possibly have an option for how long to wait before giving the hint? There were a few places I was clueless and needed the hint sooner, or missed the dialog hint.

Final Fantasy X-2 HD

I probably started playing originally on PS2 about 5 years ago, which was quite a few years after I purchased it. I just never had the time.
I purchased the HD remake on PS Vita, and I can now play it in bed, during lunch breaks, etc.

The usually turn based combat got a bit more active in this one. Attacks can push back an enemies attack (like a stagger) and you can combo your attacks for more damage if you can time them to hit close to one another.

I also love bringing classes back, this time in the form of dress sphere changes. You can swap mid-combat as long as they're in the grid you're equipped with.

The class levelling system is pretty good, with some holes in a few places. Levelling a warrior is painfully slow, levelling a thief is tedious, levelling a black mage takes a lot of mana, and levelling a white mage is astonishingly easy (just auto-heal every turn). You get a class skill point every time you use an ability basically. You also get a point or two on kills.

The graphics were really good for the Vita, and the voice acting was a bit better than FFX.

I'd say the story was overall weaker than FFX, but I did like Paine.

As per the usual, you can grind to your hearts content, and then the rest of the game will be much easier. The addition of the fiend arena makes this much faster and easier. It's also a great way to get items, gil and level your classes.

Here are a few notes I had while playing the game:

As soon as I found out there was a Charm Bangle. I bee-lined for it. I'm shocked at how close it was to the beginning of the game. Shocked. This helped drastically reduce the tediousness associated with exploring areas for chests and alternate paths.

One of the best classes is Lady Luck. It has the awesome abilities of auto-critical hits, doubling experience, doubling gil, and doubling items. This also stacks if you have more than one in a group. Broken. You have to beat Shinra for this in the sphere break tournament. If you don't, he just runs off with it and says something about being "just a kid." What a D-bag.

Holy crap. Chapter 4 is almost nothing but watching these darn cameras and painstakingly waiting for someone to talk to them for some period of time, which is hard to tell when it's over for most of them. I think I need this for the mascot sphere or I would have skipped this. Also, I had a few hours to burn on a plane, so this was slightly less terrible to do.

Chapter 5 is starting better. There are some length puzzles to be done. Gathering Cactuar's is going to be quite tedious. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get close to 100% story completion, but seriously lost my steam halfway through Chapter 5. I finally got the Catnip accessory and Mascot dress sphere. After that, I was ready to just mark this as done.

This game is extremely crashy. I crashed quite often, and also ran into an issue where combat was stuck in wait mode, with no one acting. So I had to force close it. I sent every crash report I could.

The team

One of the harder bosses in the game. I still had a hard time beating it. Lots of phoenix downs were used.

My son once posed like this. It was just as awkward...

Nostalgia... so smelly...

Hells to the yes.