New FFXI Expansions?! O rly?

 

And you thought FFXI was dead!

Aparently FFXI is going to expand itself three times in 2010! Wow, this was supposedly the year that the devs were going to pull the plug on the game. These are mini expansions like those last three that came out. Don't expect to drop anything more than 10 bucks on 'em. There is a website up, but it is just a tease, oh ffxi!

FFXI expansion teaser site  

Luna Online Full Review

Well, here it is, MMO-rphines first review! If you've been following all of the follow ups I've written, then you probably know the direction in which this review is going.

 

This is what your characters look like. You should see the NPCs though

Luna Online starts off innocent enough. The music is nothing to write home about. The graphics are bright and cutesy, not bad at all to look at. The character customization is really crappy and you have a hard time telling if you are a boy or girl. Of course, if you wanna look uber kewl you'll have to buy cash shop credits. So they throw you off in the starter area where every girl has huge, heaving breasts and armor that barely covers anything. Yet, for some reason the characters are little, underdeveloped children. The quests are very stream lined and you'll be able to knock them down quickly and level up fast. Combat is quick and it's really nice you don't have to loot anything, lets you focus more on the killing.

 

Hey look this hamster is playing Luna Online!

Eventually, you'll graduate from there and just go to the next generic town, and then the next, and the next, then that's when it happens. Your quest log starts getting a little thin. You either have to do really unrewarding quests that make you walk like 3-4 zones away THEN back! It's just a scam to get you to buy their teleporting map item so you don't have to walk. Your next choice is to just run repeatable quests over, and over, and over, and over again. I mean literally for hours, same quest, same monsters, no fun. Did I mention there is no end game content? So your grinding only leads you to dun-da-dun-da MORE GRINDING! Oh. and don't die unless you want to lose about an hours worth of work in a few seconds. Yes, the game is a grind and it's not bad at first with it's quick combat but, like anything done over and over with no end in sight, it's going to drive you crazy. Unless you are one of the blind fans who must have never played a good RPG and continue to play this crap trap. Some of them report that levels past the 90's may take a weeks worth of playing to achieve for us normal folk! A FUCKING WEEK TO LEVEL WITH NO END GAME? WHAT IS THE POINT!

Wut noob? You said you were level 9000!

So, now we know the game is a grind, but what else is there to do? Well, the game boasts an “innovative date system”, and by innovation I mean total fucking garbage. Also, this innovation dictates the instances in the game. The instances are highly generic and there is no real reward to them except being able to grind monsters in them. So, you wanna run one of these instances? First, you have to find someone of the opposite sex. They must be a certain match level since, you know, if you guys aren't compatible it's hard to kill mobs together. You must be in a party, which requires you to be right next to the person, so lets hope they aren't like 5 zones away. FINALLY! We can do a dungeon! Yay! But only three a day. They really need to color code the names so you know if its a boy or girl. All of the characters look like wimpy metro sexual faggots. So, if you play a male, expect to get people sending you tells saying “Girl?” Seriously, get rid of your flawed innovation system, it's garbage, along with this whole game.
The whole UI is nothing special just a hum drum copy of the WoW one, except not as fluid. The quest tracker blows, the quest log is in broken engrish, so sometimes figuring shit out is like piecing together hieroglyphics to find the lost arc. Some of the quests just keep repeating for some reason even though it doesn't tag them as repeatable. There are quests called (linkage) which, I have no clue what the fuck it means. I googled it to find no answer, don't expect a whole lot of info on this game. In fact, stay away from it. It was a long, long, long month, and I groaned anytime I had to play this game. There is no satisfaction from it at all and you'll probably grow bored before level 30. Do yourself a favor and just step away, far away.

Final Score: 4/10

Happy Ten Years Online Gaming Addiction, I mean PSO! Part II

 

"Hi, I'm PSO's unplanned child! Therefore I am hated bawwww."

In October of 2006, PSO decided to have a child. Many people, including your blog author, waited patiently for this title. We ate up any news of this game that we could find. Then, finally, the time came. Let me explain how important this game was to me. I freaking canceled my FFXII limited edition reserve to be able to afford PSU. In case you didn't know, Final Fantasy is one of my most beloved RPG series. This is the series I started playing at six years old. Basically, I grew up a FF nerd. So, yeah, this game had a lot of fucking expectations to live up to.

Some people got upset that PSU wasn't a PSO clone...a little too upset.
 

Well, sadly, PSU wasn't the game we all thought it was going to be. Everyone was kind of expecting a PSOII with updated graphics and new drops. But, I'm getting too far ahead of myself. I haven't even installed the game, yet! Now, of course, on day one there were mad problems. Server wouldn't even work (ironically enough the pay to play servers were working just fine.) So, I was forced to play the story mode. Yuck, I couldn't get into this garbage, it was horrible. The game itself felt entirely clunky and slow. Later I found out that there was some kind of fucked up setting you had to change for your game to run smooth. I was really getting turned off from the game at this point, but was hoping online play would make up for it.

 

LOL SEGAC! If you don't get it then you don't know.

 

Finally! Online, the game is bustling and everyone is spamming and doing the dance emotes, just having a good time. There was one little problem. A huge chunk of the game was locked out for online play. If you ask me, this move might have been what really pissed off a lot of people, initially. So, all of the data was on the disc, but SEGA locked it and would then unlock it, calling it an “update.” Way to be a bunch of lazy assholes, SEGA. You just love dicking your fans, don't you? No wonder you're a slave to the other consoles. No wonder you aren't even good enough to make Sonic games, anymore. Bluntly, FUCK YOU SEGA. Seriously, you know what made this even more shitty? They made sure to release the “new patches” ONE DAY after the new billing cycle, but more on this later.

 

Every girl on PSU was big breasted loli.

So, in the beginning there was hardly anything to do. Only a handful of missions and the max level was 50, which some people capped off in less than a week. The beloved rare hunting was replaced with a clunky, unforgiving crafting system. Meseta, which was once a joke in older games, was scarce. Sometimes I found it tough to keep my character stocked up on heals, so it was nice having a force. There were some good things. The character generator was very nice for an online game, the clothing you could buy gave you a sense of identity, the graphics were very bright and pretty (I loved the photon glow on weapons), combat was really fun and the photon arts made it more action-y.

 

Even Derek Zoolander is smart enough to be a SEGA developer.

Still, this wasn't enough in the beginning and I still tried giving it a chance. After the first “update” a lot of people got pissed and quit. It was hardly an update, it was more of the famous SEGA re-skins of older monsters in a generic environment. Also, the risk vs reward on these new missions weren't worth the time. Everyone still flocked to the easier, more reward filled missions. This really left a bad taste in my mouth and I sadly ended up leaving PSU.

 

Everyone was excited when I returned to PSU.

I'm not sure if it was even a year later, but I came back. At this point the level cap was around 110-120 and there were a ton more missions. Money and items dropped more and it started to seem like classic PSO. The game that I thought was doomed actually ended up consuming my life like the old PSO did. Still, it had its flaws. People still flocked to certain missions that gave them the best rewards instead of, you know, TRYING SOMETHING FUCKING NEW FOR A CHANGE! All in all, I made some good friends on there and the game was a blast. I eventually reached max level on the game and called it quits. I wasn't too fond of the way they handled updates and even to this day our beloved PS2 players will never know the full extent of the game because of SEGA closing the servers, already.

But, wait! There's more! There were a couple of PSO games released for your handheld pleasures. But that's another story, for a later time.