Tyler if you come to Mikes today bring my coat it’s fucking cold outside goddamn, should be in the backseat of your car.
Here’s my take on FF (as a guy that’s played the series from 1’s release - 12).
1-Shit game but introduced job mechanics and team compapability, the grinding necessary in it kind of ruins the fun unless you know a few tricks. Introduction of superbosses (like Ruby weapon, etc) in Tiamat’s stage on the walkway.
2-Shit, focuses on narrative, the first bad step.
3-Surprisingly decent game, job system refined, storyline thrown out the window, a little grinding is necessary but manageable.
4-Overrated, good game but focuses on story instead of gameplay, excellent compositions by Uematsu.
5-Likely the best in the series. Job system moved as far forward to date (barring FFXII international/FFT), storyline thrown out the window again, superbosses brought back. Introduction of AP makes customization more fluid.
6-Overrated, but a solid game. More excellent compositions by Uematsu (probably his best work), focuses on storyline almost completely and dumbs down the job system to Esper system. Reworks the two worlds gimmick and enhances it from FF5. Extremely easy to break.
FF7-Overrated (generally), extremely narrative-based, dumbing down the esper system further to the materia system, there becomes no such thing as team cohesion, since everyone’s the same. Overall a very mediocre FF (although the Meteor plot twist was good).
8-Shit, for a million reasons, even the music is bad outside of a couple tracks. Easiest to break of all the FFs. Focuses on storyline almost entirely, and it’s a fucking bad one that the fanbase looks too deep into (like MGS2).
9-Typically underrated. Lots of sidequests for multiple playthroughs, harkens back to team cohesion, excellent soundtrack, ample mix of storyline and gameplay, few minor bugs ruin the experience though (slowwwww ps1 load times).
I can’t play RPG’s at all. I played through FFVII and FFX, and that’s it. I was fairly obsessed with FFVII when I was younger so I did everything possible in that game, but as I go older, and got introduced to multiplayer games, I couldn’t play them anymore. I did the bare minimum to beat FFX, but I remember enjoying most of it aside from Yuna and Tidus drama. I thought about getting XIII but chose not to, and I’m glad I did, I cannot play single player games for the life of me. I can probably count the number of single player games I’ve completed on my hands alone. Even when I know they’re really sweet I just can’t invest in them. I got ME1 for my birthday and almost fell asleep after the first mission, same with the first Assassin’s Creed, even a game like Dead Rising I couldn’t force myself to enjoy. I think I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like God of War, that game is so damn boring I can’t stand it. I think a lot of this actually might have something to do with the fact that I’ve only ever played console games on a CRT. I’ve never owned a nice television myself, and I think that in those boring first few hours of gameplay it’s easy for people to get through it on cool visuals alone. Dead Rising is a whole other story, I couldn’t read a damn thing on my screen to try to get through even a piece of that game.
So I went to play AE in Hong Kong yesterday, and I had a 6 win streak b4 ppl stopped playing me. The game feels really different! I couldn’t play Yun at all, i hate dive kicks!! And the game seems much slower!! Blanka’s links seem easier but his HP roll sucks, i find it ok when I use it in a combo but not for chip damage.
Balrog still seems good tho! I was able to get a few perfects and fought gouken in arcade, the game is quite boring when you don’t have a worthy opponent to play, so I ended playing guitar freaks instead.
Thanks for hosting tonight Mike. Board games were fun, and I’ll bring Dominion/Bananagrams next time.
Greg, here’s a brief Yomi primer from what I remember (so you don’t have to read 8 pages of rules):
Choose a character, shuffle your 52-card deck, then draw 7 cards. Each deck has different distributions of cards appropriate to his strengths/weaknesses, and each card has a top and bottom that do two different things.
Each player plays a card face down (with the side he wants to play facing the opponent). Once both are down, reveal them
Attacks beat throws, throws beat blocking/dodging, blocking/dodging beats attacks (if both players play an attack, the one with the highest speed rating wins, if both players throw or block, nothing happens)
If an attack successfully lands, the offensive character can choose to combo after it by playing cards that “link” after the attack (almost always “straight” cards) until you play a card marked “Ender” (usually a strong attack) or until you play the maximum number of combo cards your character is allowed. Example: you play a very fast card, like a 2, and win. You can play a 3, 4, and 5 after it, if you hold them in your hand and your character is allowed a 4-hit combo.
If you decide to combo, the player on defense can lay face down in front of him a “bluff” card. After the combo is over, he turns it up: if the bluff card was a joker (2 in the deck), he takes no damage from the combo and gains a few other special benefits, such as drawing more cards. Otherwise, he just gets hit like normal. I think this is kind of like bursting in GG or alpha counters, which can be baited by stopping combos early.
Blocking is good because you avoid taking damage and you get to return the block card to your hand, instead of discarding it, and draw an extra card for free. Dodging is good because you get to counterattack with 1 card of your choice (no combo after) and your opponent can’t avoid it.
After the turn is up, each player draws 1 card and plays again.
There are other quirks… players can sacrifice damage and end combos early with a “knockdown” move, and on the subsequent turn, half of the knocked down characters’ block/dodge cards don’t work. Aces are powerful cards, so there are ways you can search your deck to retrieve them by discarding pairs or three of a kind from your hand.
I guess the coolest part of the game is the character abilities. Each characters’ J, Q, K, and A cards (and sometimes random numbered cards as well) are all special moves that have unique properties. Each character also has one universal ability they can activate at any time (noted on their character card). So for example, one character can transform into “dragon form” to do more damage/improve properties of certain cards. One character gets free throws if you block any of his J, Q, K, or A cards. One character can combo any numbered card after any other (not just straight cards). If the strong grapple character plays a slow attack card but it loses to a faster attack, he can still combo after it. Stuff like that.
If you like looking through cards just to see what they do, all the cards are conveniently displayed on this site: Sirlin Games - Yomi Card Images I like scanning through and seeing what the different Aces do and stuff.
It does look like a pretty fun game, but it’s too expensive to get unless a bunch of us pool our money I think, especially if it turns out that none of us like it.
18:25 is really dirty… if i’m to understand correctly, there is no way that by standing up there he hit the c. mp on the 2 frames he normally has. with ch, he has 5. so daigo reacted to counter hit! on the side and finished the combo with beefy stuff. i think he would have done walk up stuff but he stopped and capitalized on counter hit. that’s really dirty.
Yomi is a pretty fun card game but I really like how despite having the same types of normals between characters they managed to diversify their play styles based on their own special abilities. You will end up maining a character or alting a few because each character has different play styles. From what I’ve played of the online version I quite like the combo based characters.
The Momochi vs Daigo match was another perfect example of SF101. The fireball wars, zoning, and footsie game was on another level. Daigo did some incredibly nasty stuff like using Forward Fierce to get underneath an air fireball and then trip Momochi on his landing. I think my favorite moment was at 17:00 when Daigo was fighting in the corner and Momochi was spacing himself for the sweep and just when he went for it Daigo does s.short to change his hitbox and cause Momochi to whiff his c.RH and then he immediately punishes the whiff with c.RH. So fucking good.
I actually thought that TKD was playing a very Vanilla style Fuerte. I’m pretty sure if he had more experience playing Super-Fuerte he would have done better.
somehow every single fucking tournament announced for 2011 so far is in the middle of a shift. I want to go to Van but that isn’t going to work for me.