I don’t know if anyone’s seen this lately, but this article really hits a few sore spots. For example:

12. Don’t bulls&^% us on the difficulty

Gradually tougher enemies, more enemies, mind-bending puzzles, it’s all good. It’s all fair. But DO NOT try to artificially make your game harder with:

Arbitrary triggers in RPG’s. Why isn’t the Dark Elf waiting at the Black Temple like he said? Because I haven’t talked to every f’ing person in town yet. Can we at least write in some kind of actual cause and effect here that might make some kind of actual sense to me? Because I don’t get any sense of reward or accomplishment by randomly activating subroutines via mind-numbing repetition.

Ammo starvation. I’m looking at you, Resident Evil for the Gamecube. I have a gun. LET ME USE IT. Don’t pretend your game is “challenging” because you only give me four bullets to kill eight zombie dogs with.

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Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot them for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness.

Unnecessarily difficult end levels. I’ve worked for 50 hours to get to this point in the game. Don’t make me watch the “Loading…” screen and then the f’ing climactic cutscene 75 times, once for each attempt to beat the last boss. And don’t make the method of attack so f’ing obscure and specific that nothing short of a trip to GameFaqs will get me through it. Talk about killing immersion…

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Hard games are fine. We like a challenge. But be fair about it.

There’s nineteen other points in the manifesto - just in time for Summer Games 2005.

Have you ever wanted to take a loved pet you’ve raised, feed it a cherry bomb, and admire the results? If so, you’ll probably sympathize with Square Enix’s approach to the Final Fantasy franchise with “Final Fantasy X-2“.

“Final Fantasy X-2″ (FFX2) is the first true sequel to a Final Fantasy game. Since the days of the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, Square produced regular installments in the series. (We will ignore the irony of a game containing the modifier “Final” spawning fifteen-plus games on over seven different platforms during more than a decade.)

FFX2 continues the story in “Final Fantasy X” (FFX), the first of the franchise on the PlayStation 2 platform. FFX was a wonderful game with a great storyline about generations of summoners selflessly sacrificing their lives so that their families will live in peace, safe from the ravages of a force called Sin. FFX featured some great characters, including the protagonist – a young man who awakes after an attack on his city to find himself a thousand years in the future. FFX did away with the overworld map found in previous games, and leveraged the PS2’s power to create visually stunning settings and characters. Finally, the score to FFX was one of the best in recent years. The “Zanarkand” theme is one of the best pieces of original music to come from video games in some time.

“Kimahri no have musical talent, thus cannot help you save the world.”

So, now imagine that you’re a Square executive, with this popular game on your hands. The fans are happy, the game is selling well, and you see the opportunity to make a quick buck from the game’s popularity. What do you do?

Any self-respecting Final Fantasy fan would have probably made a game about the events prior to FFX. (Prequels are hot at the moment.) But, Square did the opposite and created a sequel. In order to cut down on expenses, there are very few new settings and places in the game. If you’ve played through FFX, everything looks exactly the same as when you left it. The character models are recycled and the proud warriors you met on your previous quest are now hawking souvenirs and guiding tourists at the key places in the previous game. Rather than invest in a good new score, Square replaced their successful composer and his music with J-Pop. (We’ll get to this in a minute.) Finally, Square cut the traditional amount of storytelling in half and replaced the missing hours with annoying mini-games and sidequests. In order to force the diehard fans to play through tedious tasks of finding cacti and digging for crap, Square tied the ending of the game to percentage of tasks the player completed. If you just want a good story and don’t feel like spending weeks finding and raising chocobos, you’ll be rewarded with one of several crappy endings. I understand the appeal of finding every last energy tank and missile in games like Metroid, but such things really piss me off when I’ve spent twenty hours on a game only to find out that I won’t find out what really happened, because I skipped an inane mini-game five hours into the game.

“If I cannot join your band, my flunkies will battle you. Repeatedly.”

However, with those warts, FFX2 might be forgivable, save for one last thing. In FFX2, you play the same three characters through the entire game, and your three characters are the fantasy equivalent of the Spice Girls. That’s right – you travel around the world, fighting monsters and solving mysteries as a girl band. When the population is about to start a civil war and things are getting ugly, you don’t bash some heads, instead you throw a goodwill concert. Not only do you play a girl band in the game, your characters’ powers and abilities are a function of the outfit they’re wearing. If they’re set up as a kick-ass physical warrior and find themselves against a magical foe, a quick trip to the wardrobe to don the “oh so cute” wizard outfit will set them up to cast Firaga, Ultima, and the rest of the traditional Final Fantasy spells.

“Introducing the ‘Saving Spira Through Bad Music’ Tour!”

Now, before a female reader accuses me of being a misogynist, let me be the first to say that I enjoy games with strong female characters. I’m a big fan of Namco’s Xenosaga series (featuring many female leads) and I enjoyed Square’s “Parasite Eve” (featuring a young female NYPD cop). However, I do not want to be playing a game where I’m sending the fantasy equivalents of Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera to fight evil and save the world. There’s a time and place for that kind of nonsense and it’s not inside my PlayStation.

Now, as I write this review, I must confess that I’ve not fed this game the bomb. I have been about two hours away from completing the game for the last two months, and despite my hopes to the contrary, I am dreading finishing this game. I’ve already sunk twenty-five hours into the game so two more hours shouldn’t be an issue. However, I don’t relish completing a Final Fantasy game knowing that I’m getting the ghetto ending. I keep telling myself that I’ll finish the game “this week”, but the will to do so never materializes. I keep telling myself that I need to reach closure and beat the final stage so I can find out what happens, but I’d rather pretend that some cynical bastard executive at Square Enix didn’t just take a dump on one of my favorite series in order to make a quick buck.

Update: The bomb has been served. I had to sit through long unskippable cutscenes (didn’t make it on the first try), dialog and writing that would make George Lucas blush, and the standard Final Fantasy “fight the boss five times before going home” battle. But the bomb has been served.

It took me over thirty hours and a few weeks, but I’ve finally fed the bomb to the second episode in the Xenosaga series.

For those new to the Xenosaga franchise, a quick history: In 1998 Square released Xenogears for the original PlayStation. Xenogears featured an adult storyline that revolved around controversial religious elements (that almost nixed its American release). After a dispute, the Xenogears creator left Square and took a few developers with him to Namco. Because of copyright and trademark issues, the franchise was renamed “Xenosaga”. The first Xenosaga episode premiered on the PlayStation 2 in 2001. The game was marketed as the first of six episodes and it is renowned for its long cut-scenes and strong storytelling. The second game is pretty similar to the first, using the same graphics engines, storytelling structure, and so on.

Depending how you involved and detailed you like your gaming universe, you’re either going to love or hate this game. The latest episode’s title is “Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse”, continuing in the tradition of using Nietzsche-inspired titles to reflect the game’s themes. In addition to Nietzsche, the game throws all sorts of background material at players: Jungian psychology, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Catholicism, existentialism, and a touch of Freud. Xenosaga has been the first game that I’ve felt compelled to play with a laptop at my side opened up to Wikipedia so that I could look up all the new unfamiliar references.

In addition to the torrent of ideas and themes, Xenosaga features the most expansive cast of characters that I’ve seen attempted in a video game. Throughout the game, you work with a core group of eight, each with their own backstory and motivations. Throughout the game, you encounter many other key characters that push the story along. There is a ton of backstory told, and the second episode focuses heavily on the last twenty years leading to current events in the game. Each of these characters has an individual arc and it’s clear that their present roles in the game are not at the end of the arcs, but somewhere in the middle.

So far, each game has taken roughly thirty hours to complete. Take that thirty hours and multiply it by six, and there’ll probably be anywhere from 180 to 200 hours worth of gaming and storytelling before it’s all over. With such a large canvas, the plot is as ambitious as the characterization. The Xenosaga universe is set over four thousand years in the future, where humanity has colonized space. After a mysterious catastrophe, alien beings called the Gnosis appear in regular space and start annihilating humans. The Gnosis are attracted to powerful religious artifacts called the Zohar, which humanity is trying to exploit. The main character in the series is a female engineer working for a large corporation building an anti-Gnosis warrior android called KOS-MOS. After the initial skirmishes, the conflict crystallizes as being a struggle between the Federation government, a breakaway U-TIC organization, the Ormus religion, the Vector corporation, and the government of a planet called Second Miltia. On a micro level, the characters interact as expected, and on the macro level, these giant organizations likewise collaborate, fight, and attempt to outmaneuver each other to win the endgame.

As I’ve said before, if you get into this stuff, Xenosaga is great. If you’re a gamer that likes to get down to the actual gameplay, the storytelling probably overwhelms the gameplay experience. It’s not uncommon to experience fifteen-minute cut scenes, interspersed with five or ten minutes of interactive player time.

The actual gameplay mechanics doesn’t stray far from traditional turn-based RPG combat. You can fight as your main characters and in some areas, your characters pilot giant mecha to fight against other giant robots. There is a traditional set of magic spells (called “ether”) that characters learn while advancing levels. Characters earn general experience points that raise strength and hit points, and they also earn skill points that can be selectively used to gain special abilities such as increased strength, spells, and status immunities.

The combat system breaks from traditional systems by using something called the “boost system”. When characters fight, they build up boost points. Players (and enemies) can use their boost points to circumvent the turn system and move to the front of the line. Furthermore, players can inflict greater damage on enemies by discovering “break points”. Break points are combinations of attacks that stun the enemies and leave them vulnerable. For example, if you attack the enemy’s head then their torso, you may stun them and allow your party members to hammer them while stunned. A large part of winning the game is learning this system and breaking enemies, then boosting to chain together attacks to achieve maximum damage. This injects a bit of real-time thinking into turn-based combat that doesn’t become a twitch contest.

Episode two spans two disks, but it’s relatively short for an RPG. Players can spend twenty to thirty hours from the start to the final boss battle and the game provides players with an optional side quest after the completion of the main game. It’s useful to think of this individual game as disks two and three of a larger set since players will be lost if they haven’t gone through the first episode. If you don’t feel like keeping track of a ton of characters and plot points, you will want to pass on this game. Personally, I really enjoy intricate drawn-out epic stories, so Xenosaga has hit a sweet spot for me.