U-Play, Origin, and Lord Gaben er Steam

Capitalism is about money and choice, the freedom to buy the things from people for stuff or services you like. But...computers are weird...and they change people's perceptions of things for reasons I cannot understand. Unlike in the real world where I can go buy, say Super Mario from Gamestop or Best Buy and the game remains indistinguishable from either place, people who buy something on a PC have a very different understanding of the same item they bought between services like Origin, U-Play or Steam. Somehow, Mass Effect is a magically different game if you buy it on Steam. People of the internet will claim how profoundly better Mass Effect is on Steam versus Origin. Or how much worse Far Cry 3 is on PC because of U-Play.

I personally fail to understand any of these claims myself, nor does anyone ever present me with a decent argument as to why the services of U-Play and Origin inherently make a game worse.

You don't hear this same spat from people reading Game of Thrones on an iPad versus someone reading it on a Surface Pro or Kindle do you? Never once have I heard someone tell me "Man that new Stephen King book was great, too bad I bought it on my Kindle." But you'll hear this all the time from gamers wishing they could play Titanfall on Steam instead of Origin.

I ask, what's the difference? I personally see none. All three services are pretty darn good, they take up few if any system resources, and they are all very well made. Furthermore, the actual game you are playing doesn't change in the slightest just because you booted up one platform that has more orange than one that is mostly black in color. Sure your friend lists are different, the game library is different, and oh dear your achievements are given by someone other than our Lord Gaben...errrr Steam. Big whoop, I still fail to see how any of that decreases the quality of the game.

Was Super Mario a worse game because you had to blow in your Nintendo to make it work? Sure it was irritating, but the games were still great, we put up with it. The games EA and Ubisoft put out are also fantastic, and as long as your PC isn't a buggy mess you won't be doing any blowing to get them to work. So what is really getting everyone's goat on these different platforms that the PC has? I have some theories:

U-Play:  When U-Play came out it also came with a caveat that you must always be online to play the game, it would even boot you out if your connection was interrupted. As DRM restrictions go, this is by far the worst one. Ubisoft quickly removed this restriction after all the flack. They went so far as to add things in their service that no one else has. Achievements actually earn you DLC for the games you play. No one seems to care though, they just still hate U-Play presumably for this reason.

Origin: I feel like Origin only gets a bad rap for a few reasons. One is people love to hate EA, they just do. I'm not sure why exactly. Sure they make some lame choices like the Sim City debacle (another always online idea...see the trend?), the botched Battlefield 4 fiasco (something that should be online that failed to stay online harharhar), and of course people hating EA for making a Madden game every year (yet it still sells like hot cakes). The other reason Origin gets so much hate is that EA refuses to sell their games on Steam now and people like having all their games in one happy little place in their computer. News flash, your games on Steam aren't all in one happy place either on your computer technically. Some games root your saves into My Documents, some in My Games folders, others will actually use the Steam folder by default. Want to mod them? Again, more searching for the right files, more poking around. It isn't the same thing as having a PS4 and shoving all your games in it people, PC gaming requires some work and that will never change.

I think the main complaint with both is people don't like "more DRM." DRM gets an understandably bad rap because it restricts gamers on using the thing they bought. PC gaming in general is restrictive in that you can't lend or borrow games you have like console gamers can. We used to be able to buy one game and install it on all of our friends PC then use the disc as a frisbee and still play the game. Then DRM stepped in to make sure everyone was buying the game. It mainly came about as an answer to Torrents and people outright stealing the games. DRM became so restrictive and so terrible though, that it soon became less intrusive and less of a hassle for gamers to just steal the game. More DRM inevitably led to more people stealing games. People buying games legitimately suffered from DRM whereas gamers who stole the game didn't. It was awful. There was a time where Gears of War was programmed literally to stop working on PC on the new year of 2011 (I think that's the right year) but people who stole the game didn't notice at all. This was fixed, but just one of many, many examples of where DRM was a hindrance.

Cut to today where most every company has gotten the hint that people don't like intrusive DRM schemes anymore. No longer are there games that require you to be online for the sole purpose of DRM despite all the rumor flinging about Sim City 5 their goal was more of an interactive city game, not imposed DRM. And yeah, it was a bad idea lol. Never the less, Origin, U-Play and Steam all have the exact same amount of DRM which requires you to...load their program *gasp*

Such a hurdle has never been faced by PC gamers. Loading a program? What blasphemy is this, what heresy, what...what....wtf? Really is that all it is? Why are people complaining about this?

I think the worst amount of complaining comes in the form of Amazon reviews of games. Any time you see a PC version of a game on Amazon it's likely to have 3 or less stars regardless of game quality. What are people complaining about you ask? God you're dumb...it's the DRM of course! What reasoning do they give for not liking it? Because...it's...because DRM that's why! And that's it...These people are somehow trapped in 7 years ago back when DRM was bad. I swear it's like these guys don't even play the game and just review all of them to knock DRM.

Let's go back to my book example one more time. A better comparison would be if someone bitched online because they bought The Stand on Amazon Kindle and could only read it with the Kindle app on their iPad, but instead wanted to read it on the iBook app or whatever it's called. It's the same device, the same book, just a different animation of page turning...RIOT!

Here's what I grew up with and had to deal with...remember when you had to RENT games from a store? That's a building for those of you who just turned 15 years old. Back then you had to hope they had a copy in stock. You didn't worry about WHAT you played it on, you worried about WHEN you got to play it at all. If it was out of stock all you could do was peer over the counter and see who had it so you could hunt them down and steal the game...ok I never did that...I was never tall enough to peer over the counter.

The point of this rant of course, is quit your damn bitching!

*Apparently loading up Origin, U-Play and Steam all at the same time is akin to spinning around 3 times in a mirror at midnight chanting to summon Bloody Mary*

Final Fantasy 13-3: Lightning Returns

It's taken me a while, but I'm finally closing this Final Fantasy 13 saga of mine. I've previously written two other articles about FF 13 and 13-2, neither of which were really reviews but critiques on one or more things that baffled me about the direction Square had been taking the Final Fantasy series. This one will be no different, and more of a combination of the previous two.

Final Fantasy 13 I outlined just how horrifically bad the battle system was and that became the most popular post on this blog. 13-2 I went into great detail the many glaring plot holes I saw as I went. I picked apart what each game did the worst essentially and what stood out to me as really questionable. With 13-3 though...I honestly can't point to one thing, and that's not a good thing. Literally everything about this game leaves me scratching my head asking, why? Why did they choose to do this? Ultimately, I ask myself, why does this game even exist?

I think I will focus this blog on the main character Lightning. I've discussed in the past how terribly vexed I am about this character. How she can have 3 entire games about her and yet I know next to nothing about her at the same time. How is it that Cait Sith from FF7 has a deeper and more meaningful character arc than someone who's had 3 games devoted to her? She has no arc what-so-ever. Hilariously, the opening cinema of FF13-3 explains how God has taken her emotions away for her to complete her current quest. To which...if I had been drinking water, immediately spewed it at my TV in shock and dismay. Lightning, for the uninitiated has NEVER had any emotions to speak of to begin with. God took nothing away at all. Her entire character amounts to protect her sister....the end. She has no personal goals or needs. She has no sense of humor, no personality, she is completely a blank slate.

What vexes me so about her though isn't so much that she has literally no character to speak of, or that they had 3 games to develop her and didn't, no what vexes me is the creators of the games have all spoken out about how much they are going to miss working on games with Lightning. Interviews with them they go into great detail how attached they became to her, developing her, and going into her life and struggles etc, etc. Here I sit with my mouth agape reading this and wondering...what am I missing here? What is there about this character that has them nearly in tears having to part with her after this game? I am at a complete loss for words on this. Here are some quotes:

"We would never feel sick of these characters or these worlds," Kitase-san says. "Don't worry, we love them and we have an attachment to this whole story and characters. But in terms of this story, the whole Lightning saga story, this is going to be the end, and we're going to be moving on and not continuing in any sort of way. But the characters, since we do love them and do have an attachment to them, we're hoping there might be ways where they can make like a cameo, or something like that. For example, in Final Fantasy XIV, we're going to be doing like a collaboration with that game, and Lightning will make an appearance within the game. So we're hoping that there will be an opportunity to showcase them in some other form."

And this little ditty:


"What sets Lightning apart from the other [Final Fantasy hero] characters is that you don't see very many female heroines being the main character," says Kitase-san, "of course apart from maybe Terra from Final Fantasy VI. So that's definitely something that sets Lightning apart. She's not only a woman, but she's also very strong and also very cool, and she can put up a good fight. That's definitely one of her positive features. Even outside of the series, I got to go see the show floor at E3 and at Gamescom, and looking at other publishers I noticed that Lightning is probably one of the only female characters that pushed out in the forefront for their game titles. Of course, we had Lara Croft when Tomb Raider was about to be released, but now that that has launched, Lightning is one of the only female characters that is out there being the face of a title."

This one is my favorite:

“When I was making the game, I wasn’t really thinking about it, that I was going to have to say goodbye to her at the end of the process,” Abe told IGN through a translator. “But when I was playing the game during testing, when I reached the very end of the story, for the first time I felt a kind of weight. All the time that we’ve spent to create her from scratch and develop and progress her, it dawned on me there that this was the end, and that was an emotional moment.”

See what I mean? This is all from the creators of the game. Is anyone who played the games THIS emotionally attached to Lightning? I can't imagine how. I couldn't find the interview I wanted, one that I read around the time this game came out, but I recall reading how much time they said they spent developing her character, her background, her likes and dislikes, how she ticks, etc. Of which, NONE of that actually made it into any of the games and it floors me how that can happen. It's almost like how people describe their favorite color and why. No one ever really gives a great reason for it, you can't express it all that well, you just say that you like it, the look of it pleases you in some way. I swear that is the extent to which we have Lightning. They made something pretty to look at, and that was it. Then they try to go into how much depth she has, and that she's the female "Cloud" and us gamers scratch our heads and try to figure out what the hell they are talking about.

Let me please destroy the comparison to Cloud if I may as well. Now to be perfectly fair the creators made the comparison in terms of "popularity" not to literally put boobs on Cloud and call it a day. The internet however has maintained that she's just like Cloud! Yet, offer zero reasons as to how this comparison makes sense. Cloud begins his journey as a mercenary who is only out for money. He makes jokes, snide comments, dresses in drag, he's full of personality. Then he grows attached to the quest of his comrades and eventually befriends them. So much so, that he'll risk his life for them. But then tragedy strikes one of his closest friends and he couldn't save her. This causes him to go into severe depression and he doesn't want to take on the responsibilities of leading his group anymore as he feels he is unfit to save anyone. His friends convince him otherwise as the quest progresses and Cloud gains a renewed sense of hope in himself. THIS is a clear character arc. This is also a very cursory glance at the depth to which Cloud was written and presented. There is so much more nuance into how he developed, how he thinks of himself, and how he views others thinking of him and I could go on all day about it. We were told all of this about him though in the game, he was very well developed. We know his mom, we know his friends as a kid, we know his hopes and dreams, we know how he reacts to tragic events and how he deals with stress. He is very well fleshed out.

Lightning though? Uh...we know she wants to protect her sister and she doesn't really give a damn about the other people in her group either. She's very cold, she's all about the mission, whatever that may be and that's really it, that's all we can say about her. She's also exceptionally gullible as we see in the first game the villain outright tells her what he needs her and her group to do, and she DOES it essentially helping him succeed at destroying Cocoon. Only slightly after that does she attempt to save it, but she was helpless to do so and her friends had to be sacrificed to stop it from being destroyed. GREAT job Lightning...In this third game she's also unquestionably following the orders of God to round up souls for a new world. Now I haven't beaten the game yet...but I did discover that God is the final boss...so clearly it was being evil in some way or another and once again our gullible heroine was helping evil apparently.

I'm not sure I've ever played a game where they wrote so much and said so very little about the main character except for those games where you create a character and it has literally no character at all. It's dumbfounding that a company like Square can make characters as profoundly deep as those seen in earlier FF games or Xenogears and then have an entire trilogy devoted to what amounts to nothing more than eye candy. That's Lightning's character, eye candy, and this game pushes that notion to the forefront. The battle system is designed around changing her outfits for fucks sake.

Even characters that didn't have any depth to them in previous efforts like Squall in FF8 still had some notion of character in how they reacted to problems. Squall's character arc went from not caring what happened to Rinoa to risking his life for her. The game doesn't do a great job expressing WHY they become close as Squall's dialogue amounts to "...." and Rinoa incoherently goes from wanting to jump Seifer's bones to immediately wanting Squall's wang after they presume Seifer to be dead...but the point is Squall does go through a character change in that he is no longer self centered. What change can we say about Lightning? That she went from emotionless to God stole my emotions so now I'm even MORE emotionless? That about sums it up right there honestly and really this is not only the most glaring flaw about this third entry, but definitely the overriding flaw of the entire 13 series of games.

*If it looks like plastic, smells like plastic, and tastes like plastic, then you just ate plastic...wtf is wrong with you?*