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#Blaugust Day 20: Record Keeping

August 20, 2015 by Thalen

It seems like at any given point I have sufficient brain space for at most two mobile games. I think the energy mechanic most of them use is a lot of the reason; I feel like I'm wasting resources if I let my energy fill completely and sit there for a while. Currently one the two games I'm playing is Fallout Shelter. The other, which I've been playing for a couple of months now, is Final Fantasy: Record Keeper.

From what others have told me, previous mobile Final Fantasy games have not had a good track record. Final Fantasy: All The Bravest appears to be particularly reviled as a mindless cash grab. Happily Record Keeper is a lot more engaging and requires actual strategy to play. The real-money aspect is a bit pricey, but the special currency (mythril) comes at a decent pace in game and you can absolutely play without ever spending cash.

The basic premise of Record Keeper is that there's a world that maintains records of important battles throught the multiverse in the form of magical paintings. Some evil force causes these to be damaged and so you must travel into the paintings and experience the battles they record to restore them. The battles reward equipment and orbs which are used to create all the classic FF abilites that you can then equip. Completing paintings gets you special rewards including rarer equipment and orbs, and most importantly new characters.

This, to me, is the main draw of Record Keeper; the ability to build a stable of your favorite characters from across the Final Fantasy milieu and relive fights from the various games with teams built out of that stable. Boss fights typically have the same tricks and special features they had in the original games, and Dr. Mog, your mentor, can provide tips for each boss fight before you go in if you don't already know how it works.

Quistis, Arc, Gordon, Lightning, and the Warrior of Light
face Medusa in the Tower of Owen

The monetization, like a lot of Japanese based games, is a gacha system. In this case what you're randomly getting is equipment from the various games, ranked from 1 to 5 stars. 5 star is the best, but also the rarest. You get one free draw a day, which could be anything (usually 1 or 2 stars, but I've gotten a couple of 4 star items that way) or you can buy draws that are guaranteed to be at least 3 star. If you pay cash for this, it works out to $3 for a single item or 11 items for $30. A bit pricey for my liking but you can get plenty of draws using in game currency.

Along with the regular paintings, there are also events running on a regular basis. These are usually themed on a particular character or characters and let you unlock new characters who aren't available through the normal paintings. Right now the Lightning event is just about to end, and an Aerith event started a couple days ago and runs for the next week or so. If you miss a character, it'll eventually come back around again, but the character unlock is usually fairly early in the set of event fights with rare equipment and orbs as rewards for the really difficult ones.

You can finally get her back

All in all, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper is a really fun game that will hit anyone with a love of Final Fantasy right in the nostalgia. If you decided to give it a try, using this link to get the game will get both you and me a little added mythril so you can start drawing new equipment that much sooner. Check it out!

#Blaugust Day 19: Scattered

August 19, 2015 by Thalen

We've reached that point in Blaugust where it starts to get difficult. The stored up ideas have been used and we're dependent on new ones for our posts. Tamrielo may be able to come up with a couple hundred ideas in an hour, but my mind is not so fecund. Or maybe I just self-censor too much, I know that's a problem. As much as I say that this blog is for me, I'm always aware that I have an audience and that anything I post could theoretically be viewed by anyone and everyone in the world.

Damn you brain!

Last night was a pretty light one gaming-wise. I played a little Magic Duels, long enough to knock out the daily quests I had active. One was to win 2 duels with either a blue/green or a blue/red deck, so I tried out an artifact deck based on Kodra's recently talking about how awesome they were. I won both duels, but the deck never seemed to really click. The idea is supposed to be lots of cards that spawn artifacts (mostly 1/1 flying thopters) and benefit from artifacts being in play along with cards that buff artifact creatures. Despite something like a dozen or more cards in the deck that create the thopter tokens, I never put out a single token in either game. Just bad luck of the draw, I guess.

Three in the deck and I never drew one

Apart from that, I logged into Marvel Heroes for a bit and finished up getting Thing to level 60. With that done, I looked through my stable of characters to pick the next to run up. One problem I've found with the story rebalance is that any character that completed the story on normal prior to the rebalance still has all the story quests completed post rebalance. That means I've got a few characters such as Squirrel Girl and Storm who are between level 20 and 40 that I can't use the story to level. I'll just have to go with the old legendary quest / Midtown leveling method for them I guess. It works, but it gets tiresome fast.

I ended up pulling out Deadpool, who I got as my free hero for the anniversary celebration. He's supposed to be a lot of fun to play, and his synergy bonuses are +10% each to rare item find and special item find which are useful for pretty much any character, particularly the level 60s that I'm hunting end-game gear with. I ran him through the first chapter and liked him reasonably well. I'm playing him mostly shooty so far, with AoE bombs to deal with packs of minions. They did a good job with the humor and fourth-wall breaking of his voiced lines; hopefully they won't wear thin as the game goes on.

Seriously considering picking up this costume

Finally I went offline and read for a while. I'm about a third of the way through Choke and it's as disturbing and hilarious as I expected from Palahniuk. I imagine most of my readers have seen the movie version of Fight Club (if you haven't, you really should), but a lot of you probably haven't read the book. It's well worth your time even if you've seen the movie. In fact I'd say it's even more worth it if you've seen the movie, as the differences between the two make a fascinating study in how you go about adapting a story to a new medium in a way that takes advantage of that medium.

#Blaugust Day 18: Butterfly Knives

August 18, 2015 by Thalen

Last night was my regular raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We started out by steamrolling through Alexander to get armor token drops for those of us who hadn't gotten ours this week. I ended up grabbing a bolt from each of the first two sections, and a lens and spring from the last two. Hopefully I'll be able to grab another lens next week and get a hat made, leaving me with just chest, pants and a bracelet to go for the bard job. I guess I need to hurry up and get the paladin job leveled up to 60 so I can gear it next. Tanks seem to be what we're shortest on in our free company, so I've been wanting to help fill that gap a bit.

After Alexander we moved on to make some attempts at Thok Ast Thok Extreme where the Primal Ravana dwells. Ravana is the first Primal we've faced in Final Fantasy XIV that's new for this game and he's pretty cool. He's a giant multilimbed insectoid with four glowing sword blades and is the patron of the Gnath beastmen, an insect hivemind.

He won't know what hit him

I don't think any of us were really expecting to defeat Ravana in a single night of attempts; he's widely considered the hardest Primal fight yet, and is fairly complicated with multiple stages and a pretty decent dps requirement to make it through a few of them. The hardest is the butterfly stage, where a number of butterflies start to fly into the arena and begin channeling a spell. Any butterfly that completes the channel dies and causes a sword to drop into the arena. The more swords that drop, the more stacks of a nasty defense debuff everyone in the party gets. This is immediately followed by a massive unavoidable attack; too many stacks of the debuff and you just won't survive. On our first try four swords dropped; way too many. The second time around we managed to only let one through.

Ultimately we managed to at least make it far enough in to experience all the fight mechanics, though not much further. He was at about half health on our best attempt, but then we botched handling his 'charge repeatedly across the arena' attack and all fell down.

All but our White Mage, Paragon, who attempted valiantly to avenge us

When we go back in next week, I think we have a decent shot at actually defeating him. He's tough, but his mechanics are managable and all the one-shot kills are sufficiently telegraphed to deal with if you're on your toes. If we can successfully down him we'll have finished the content that went in when Heavensward first went live. Of course, the madness that is Alexander Savage is out there now. That may be a ways in the future yet.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015 by Thalen

Many years ago, when I was but a lad, my best friend came into possession of the newly published Second Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. We were fascinated by the system and the concept, and I wanted my own copies. At Waldenbooks an employee suggested I might want to start with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which would be an easier introduction to the game. I bought it, and the rest was history. It's because of that choice that instead of Faerun, Oerth or Krynn my favored game world, the one that I return to time and again, is Mystara.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

Mystara in its earliest form, from the D&D Expert Set

Over the years, I played and ran a lot of games of Dungeons & Dragons set in Mystara (originally just called The Known World) and I built up a large collection of adventure modules and supplements. I had come in at the perfect time, as TSR had recently begun to actively detail the setting through a series of Gazetteers that detailed each of the major nations of Mystara in turn. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor setting was incorporated as the distant past of Mystara, prior to a great nuclear apocalypse. The world was revealed as hollow, with ancient extinct civilization preserved within. The great airship Princess Ark crossed the world and even reached the moon (which is populated by samurai cat people). A worldwide calamity stripped Mystara of magic for a full week.

Eventually TSR decided to retire the Dungeons & Dragons rule set and only support Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. For a short period, Mystara continued to be supported and new AD&D supplements were released for it. After only a few however, Mystara was retired as well. It's mentioned every so often in newer editions, most recently in the 5th edition books as one of many campaign worlds that exist, but there hasn't been an official Mystara supplement published since 1995.

Every Monday I plan to bring out an item from my collection and show it off a bit. I'll talk about what it is, where it fits into the setting as a whole, and maybe tell a few stories about games past. Next week I'll be starting with the very first Dungeons & Dragons books I ever owned, the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules.