Infinity

Let's discuss for a moment how I've been spending my time over the past month or so. I discussed briefly in a previous entry that I'd been playing the enhanced edition of Icewind Dale (released by Beamdog last year) with a co-op partner. We played through the game in its entirety, including the Heart of Winter expansion and I have to say I enjoyed it a lot. Unlike the Baldur's Gate series which is very plot and character-driven, Icewind Dale is much more about gameplay and atmosphere. There is much in the way of lore that serves as a backdrop for the game but it is not its driving force. For me, it is a game primarily about slaying zombies, trolls, and frost giants while acquiring levels--and it does that quite well. The strategic gameplay and large variety of spells inherent to the series are in full display in Icewind Dale, but I definitely noticed a lot of abilities unique to the game. Bards and druids are less interesting in the Baldur's Gate series by comparison, for instance.

Still, I have to say I was drawn in by the game's wintry setting, its ancient castles and caves, its snowy mountains and mysterious caverns. Castle Maldurek from the expansion was particularly impressive in scope with its many puzzles and tough enemies. I'm immensely grateful for Beamdog for having created an enhanced edition of the game because I doubt I would have powered through the game's original version with its set of decidedly vanilla classes. The sequel, on the other hand--that I may well play, enhanced edition or no. I'm intrigued by the changes it introduced by adopting 3rd edition D&D rules. I'd definitely like to play it before attempting Neverwinter Nights, which of course was the first of the Forgotten Realms RPGs since the original Baldur's Gate to not be built in the classic Infinity Engine.

Speaking of Baldur's Gate, I've also completed Beamdog's enhanced edition of it with a different co-op partner (the one with whom I play games on a regular basis, in fact) and was as usual very pleased with it. Sadly, I didn't get the opportunity to experience a lot of the game's added content save for a sidequest involving Neera the wild mage. I may well go back to it and play through content I missed at a later time. Of course, playing through the original saga in my mind served only to prepare us for playing the Baldur's Gate II Enhanced Edition which for some reason I had not yet played.

As I have discussed previously on this blog (admittedly, probably close to two years ago now), Baldur's Gate II is possibly my favorite game of all time. This most recent playthrough is only reinforcing that opinion. Particularly pleasing is the fact that I no longer have to deal with the inconvenience of attempting to get the original version of the game to run on modern hardware. Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition works right out of the box and seems optimized well for modern PCs, although it is of course not without its fair share of bugs.

Although I really enjoyed playing Icewind Dale, replaying Baldur's Gate II really drives home what it is about the game that keeps me coming back over and over. I've always been intensely engaged by games driven by an ensemble cast of characters. Baldur's Gate II's myriad character sidequests keep me endlessly entertained--and these characters are mostly pretty interesting and occasionally hilarious. The game's emphasis on creating a likable cast of characters combined with an excellent combat system and a healthy amount of exploration and quests really melds together to create an engaging, memorable, and endlessly replayable experience. For this particular playthrough, I'm playing a half-elf skald. I've never done that before and it's working out great.

I could easily become burned out on the Infinity Engine if I keep this up, but for now I feel pretty ready to finally play through Throne of Bhaal.

The After

After I finished Final Fantasy IV for Android, I decided it was high time I finally played through Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. I think it was a game worth playing as a longtime fan of FFIV and its characters, but it's definitely an immensely flawed experience that smacks of some combination of laziness and/or a low budget. I hesitate to call The After Years a cash-in but I may grudgingly have to admit its true, especially as it pertains to the game's original episodic release. It is a game in which the player is tasked with taking control of many of Final Fantasy IV's various heroes, as well as a number of new characters. In these characters' individual chapters, they traverse two or three repetitive dungeons, backtrack, and get perspective on an unfolding threat.

In some cases, this sort of gameplay is not too bad. Palom's chapter, in which he takes on an apprentice from Troia named Leonora, is sweet and interesting. The prologue chapter featuring Cecil's son Ceodore is cool because it introduces the concept of Bands (the game's combination attacks system) and a mysterious hooded man who is clearly Kain. Edward's chapter is unforgivably bad as it tasks the player with traveling through the waterway north of Kaipo probably three times with a party consisting of Edward only. If that wasn't frustrating enough, the chapter introduces only one other character (by the name of Harley) who is quite possibly even more useless than Edward himself.

An uncomfortably high percentage of these early chapters are an absolute slog to play through, but I felt the game redeemed itself somewhat by the time you reach the game's final chapter--The Crystals. It is at this point that all of the game's characters come together to combat the ultimate threat. After an introductory period in which the party is static, the player is finally given free reign over which characters can be placed into the active party. With a roster of characters pushing 30, this really opens up the player's options for party compositions. There are fewer things I enjoy more than composing parties of characters, be they predefined or not. Bands add a huge amount of variety to these team compositions, as all of the game's characters can perform unique combination attacks with 2-4 of the game's other characters.

The final dungeon consists of parts of the original game's Lunar Subterrane spliced with sections of other FFIV dungeons. Bosses like Baigan, Lugae, and the Magus Sisters return once more and must be fought to advance further into the dungeon. I would say the dungeon took me anywhere from ten to fifteen hours to get through, but I really enjoyed doing so. There weren't puzzles or much in the way of interesting design, admittedly, but fighting my way through all those classic bosses was a real treat in a way I will freely identify as fanservice. I've heard that 2D versions of the game also include bosses from other games in the Final Fantasy series--but the 3D version instead includes the horrifyingly difficult Lunar Dragon, Leviathan, and Bahamut.

I think The After Years had a lot of potential as a game. I love almost any game that features characters that adventure separately until reuniting much later in the game. I like many of the updated character designs, particularly Yang and Golbez. New characters like Leonora and Ursula are really interesting, whereas others (Calca and Brina) are pretty terrible. The gameplay is virtually identical to FFIV, apart from the excellent Band system--which may have been the primary thing keeping me playing. I'm glad that I played (and finished!) the game, but it has a lot of problems and I doubt I'd recommend it to most.