Final Fantasy Retrospective: Mobius Final Fantasy, June 10-June 16

 

There is an impression that Final Fantasy has given to me lately. I have been playing Final Fantasy XIV for almost an entire decade and I began to really notice an emptiness to the world of Eorzea when Stormblood was released. I hadn’t really thought about it in Heavensward, but I did notice how awful it was trying to farm skins from Archaeornis and Amphiptere in order to level up my Leatherworker crafting class.

I also noticed that, in the Dravanian Hinterlands, although it felt like home (and by that, I mean it looked sort of like British Columbia), there also weren’t a lot of trees. It was basically a wide open space with trees at its edges, with what looked like an abandoned city littered throughout the space. The music was gorgeous, and after having played A Realm Reborn and seeing how absolutely full the maps seemed, with low power enemies everywhere, I was willing to cut Heavensward some slack. The story was well written and that was enough to have me give the game the benefit of the doubt.

That said, at the same time that I was playing through Heavensward, I was getting back into Guild Wars 2. Look at any map of any region in the game, it’s absolutely full of things to do, and wooded areas actually feel like full wooded areas. There are actually plenty of trees to run around in, and as soon as I help one person, there’s another person to help a few feet away. I’m never at a loss for something to do.

When Stormblood hit, the very first zone I explored began with large trees and was looking promising, but soon turned into a scorched and arid land with very little vegetation to speak of. There’s not much to see in this barren land, not even any sand. Enemies, especially the ones required to farm materials from, are once again spaced pretty far apart. With the ending of PlayStation 3 support that occurred during this expansion, leaving the PlayStation 4 and various personal computers as the sole platforms to experience the game on, the meme of “PlayStation 3 limitations” stopped being a thing, so any theories I had about systems being unable to render all the enemies properly got thrown out the window. Unless the game’s graphics are just too intense to render enemies closer together in Heavensward, Stormblood and now Shadowbringers like they were in A Realm Reborn, there’s only one other explanation I can think of.

I think that Square-Enix might have a problem where they can design landscape but not figure out what to put in that landscape. They’ll render very pretty-looking graphics and be at a loss for what players can do in them. Final Fantasy XV is a really good example of this. One of the things I thought when playing the game is that I can get the same experience from just heading out on the highway and watching the scenery for a bit. I won’t hear people calling for help, and I won’t get attacked by Iron Giants at night, but that’s the basic gist of the game. Go out on the highway, or if you want to, you can run around across barren landscapes looking for the occasional random encounter. It’s actually possible to fight less enemies in Final Fantasy XV than it is in Final Fantasy XIV, despite that the technology behind the more recent game should be more advanced and allow for more enemy encounters.

I also have a theory that Final Fantasy XIV‘s zones feel emptier because you can fly everywhere and avoid everything.

This is the sort of thing I thought about when playing Mobius last week. I couldn’t help but notice when the Warrior of Light moves between nodes, the world looks like it’s been ruined. Certain chapters consist solely of rocks, rocks and more rocks.

I began to wonder if empty and ruined worlds are the only kinds of worlds that the teams working on Final Fantasy can come up with any more. Where last the Retrospective series left off, both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest took place in worlds that consisted of bright greens and clear blues. As time goes on, Dragon Quest will continue to use the happy, colourful palette of fantasy to create its world, but Final Fantasy is going to begin to lean more towards the real world to gain inspiration. Final Fantasy VII is going to basically wallow in the slums for the first several hours before opening the world up to Cloud and the rest of the gang, and Final Fantasy VIII takes place in a world with trains and schools and modern arms such as guns (Final Fantasy VII also had guns). Even Final Fantasy IX is starting to industrialize by the time we meet Zidane. Final Fantasy XII begins in a desert country and the first several hours are basically spent either in Rabanastre or out in a barren land of sand, sand and more sand.

It’s almost like the series followed a path from medieval fantasy and gradually took place closer and closer to our present day until Final Fantasy XV gave us a “fantasy based on reality”. It actually also reminded me of the progression in the Breath of Fire series, with the world of each game gradually becoming more desertified until the fourth game was basically one brown and barren continent and one very Asian-inspired continent, right down to the Asian-sounding battle theme. I guess the opposite of desert is Japan?

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter took place underground, post-apocalypse, so presumably this is where we’re going to be by Final Fantasy XX.

Mobius takes place in a world called Palamecia where the kingdom of Cornelia resides. It’s like a combination of the first two games in the series, both of which contained a lot of green fields and forests and only the occasional non-green area of land. Somewhere in the intervening years, both worlds seem to have been used up somehow, scorched and broken, adopting the kind of landscapes that I’ve seen in Final Fantasy XIV, a world which has been ruined over and over by several calamities. These calamities likely did not happen in Mobius, but it still feels like the world is basically used up by this point.

Something that I’ve been assuming about Mobius is that the game awarded a bunch of power and currencies to me within the first couple days of playing in order to allow me to motor my way through the Warrior of Light storyline and catch up to where all the other players are, but as I finished chapter five and made my way to chapter seven, I began to realize that the game really wasn’t set up this way and the reason I was able to get as far as I did was due to both luck and a little bit of skill on my part.

The biggest reason I was able to get as far as I did was due to a card called I vs. I. It brought with it an Earth-elemental attack called Thanks, which hits multiple times, adds Earth element to your weapon and also changes all elements at the top of the screen to Earth (except Heart elements, which turn to Prismatic, or the game’s “wild” element, usable as any element). It also has a very powerful attack, and as far as I can tell, it’s my most powerful card, In situations where I didn’t want to use it throughout chapter five, I conveniently was able to make temporary use of a Dark elemental card that basically did the same thing, through use of the game’s Rent system.

Every single time you move to a different node, you can rent use of a card from another player at no cost to you. The game will select up to three players relatively close to you in level and randomly find others to fill the list and give you five cards total to choose one from. I am presuming (although I don’t know for sure) that most, if not all five of these players are working their way through the same chapter as I am at the time. Many times during my first two weeks, I was able to make use of cards that were very useful to what I needed at the time, to the point where the cards I was using in the deck, plus the rental card, essentially nerfed most of my battles.

Unfortunately, in chapter seven, I’ve hit a wall. My battle nerfer card is Earth elemental, my back-up battle nerfer card hasn’t been offered to me as a rental for a while now and I’m supposed to face a bunch of powerful Earth elemental enemies that can down me from full health in one turn. It’s here that I began to realize that I’ve been trying to play, in the span of one month, a game that’s been active for five years. Chapter seven came out almost two years after the game’s first chapter. I’ve been trying to do in three weeks what players would’ve had two years to accumulate power to do. The game’s been balanced with those two years in mind.

One of the systems that I can’t possibly try to outpace is the weapon upgrade system. Selecting Boost Weapon in the Shop tab brings up a menu where you can augment up to four weapons at once. Adding a bonus of 20 HP to a weapon will at first take a very short period of time: the first 20 HP requires one hour, the next one requires two, and so on. Adding a bonus of two points of Attack or Break Power or an extra two percent of Magic can take over a day. This also requires a quantity of skillseeds. After six such upgrades, you can finish modifying your weapon and this requires Crystals, which are incredibly rare as a reward.

You could spend Magicite to speed up the process but now that Magicite can no longer be purchased and while it isn’t quite a finite resource, you can grind it if you know how, the time left playing Mobius is a finite resource and players might not be able to justify grinding for a while just to earn a bunch of weapon upgrades in order to try to get past a brick wall in their path. By the time they do, there might not be enough time to get past the next brick wall.

The process also seems to be sped up whenever I battle enemies, so in this manner, the game encourages players to keep playing even as it pays lip service to the idea of taking a break every so often.

I finally got a Defense star when I finally completed six upgrades to my weapon and was able to click the Modify Weapon button. I got a second one from the Sphere Grid. If you’re surprised you haven’t heard there’s a Sphere Grid in this game, don’t worry. It’s not a part of the main game, and the stat bonuses the Sphere Grid awards don’t carry over to the main game, just the Final Fantasy X crossover event.

Rather than trying to hit my head against the Chapter 7 brick wall, I opted instead to try to complete some side content this week, and that took me right back to the Final Fantasy X crossover event. Perhaps because of the power I’d gained following the main story quest, the only thing keeping me from blasting my way through this side story was time.

Tidus’s story is full of the kind of fan service that makes a game like Mobius possible in the first place. Literally all of the music used is taken from Final Fantasy X, and the further the Warrior of Light follows Tidus, the more things from Spira show up to greet him. Valefor shows up to be a boss fight at the end of the second chapter, and the final shot of the chapter is of Tidus seemingly returning to Spira and being reunited with Yuna, but the Sphere Grid itself states that additional power is going to be granted to the player in a third chapter, so this is probably only a tease, especially for players who have seen the best ending of Final Fantasy X-2.

I can’t help but wonder whether Tidus’s adventures in Palamecia are meant to be canon to Final Fantasy X or not, and if they are, then the shutdown of Mobius is going to render part of the continuity of the characters from Spira permanently lost. It’s likely that nothing in Mobius is actually canon to their respective games, so they’ll never add a scene to Lightning Returns where Lightning recounts her travels through the realms and mentions meeting the Warrior of Light in Palamecia or Sara Tyger in Eorzea (I guess she’s another Warrior of Light), or even offer an account of her battles against Chaos in the Dissidia games.

I didn’t get back to chapter seven of the main story this week, nor did I do much with chapter six. It turns out that, since chapter six follows a different protagonist, both it and chapter seven unlock at the same time, rendering six completely optional. That said, six introduces this different protagonist who has not shown up in the story before, then presumably has her meet the Warrior of Light, in which case the two are together and talking like old friends at the start of chapter seven. Some very important context is missing and it’s like we went from Simba running away from the Pride Lands, utterly convinced he’s killed his father, all the way to him returning and having a warthog and meerkat as allies to help him overthrow Scar. Where did he find such a motley crew and why aren’t the prey animals afraid of him? Better yet, why isn’t he eating them and why are they instead talking like old friends? Maybe they have some dirt on Simba that keeps them safe from his teeth. Yeah, that’s it. It couldn’t possibly be because they spontaneously chose to raise him up to be the kind of lion that doesn’t eat prey animals, right?

So yeah, the Warrior of Light shows up with a new ally at the start of chapter seven, and it’s like the game is daring me to go back and play chapter six. I tried my hardest to stick with chapter seven, though, and hopefully make it through this week so I could also attack chapter eight. The game even goads you forward, for Vox is as emotionally manipulative as ever and shows the Warrior of Light the people are cheering for him and not only is the music of the chapter triumphant, the Warrior hears cheering as he travels between nodes on the map. I still don’t know what Vox benefits from any of this, and considering how difficult the fights are now, I will likely run out of time before I can find out.

Thing is, I tried. I really did. But when one battle ate up several of my Phoenix Down, and my supply was already low to begin with, I knew that I was not going to make it through the chapter.

At this point, it feels a little discouraging to get so far, only to hit the wall. Hopefully I’ll have a little bit better luck next week…

 

Next week: No defense against the tough breaks…