Scraping It All and Starting Over

There comes a time in many RPG's where you hit a wall. There's that one boss you can't beat. Epic 30 minute battles are fought with the boss, only to have your entire party destroyed in one powerful AOE attack.

You have to take stock of where you are in the game and figure out if you need to grind it out further or just scrap what you've done, start over, and follow a guide.

I'm at that point in two games.

I've discussed how Final Fantasy VII is a huge black mark on my gaming history. I'm currently on disk 3, right at the point of no return.

Before I ventured on, I decided to make sure I was properly equipped to handle the final fight.

I've read that Knights of the Round is almost necessary to defeat the final boss. But the requirements for Knights of the Round are pretty steep.

Even if you don't have Knights of the Round, Yuffie and Vincent are almost necessary, both of which I missed.

Since I hate wrangling Chocobo in the game, let alone some rare one, I'm considering starting over and specking my characters different ways and get the two characters I did not.

I could potentially spend another 10 hours grinding and leveling up to where it doesn't matter as much. I've had friends tell me they've beat the game around level 75-80. I'm currently sitting in the mid-50's.

Starting over means losing about 50 hours of game play. I fear if I start over, I'll never finish the game. I'll hit the wall I hit back in the late 90's and never progress.

The other game I'm currently stuck on is Vagrant Story. It's my all time favorite RPG. I've beaten it before, so I'm not agonizing over this decision as much. (Plus the game is only about 10-20 hours long) I'm stuck on a dragon and don't have any of the gear to make this a fair fight. He's killing me in two hits.

I know if I started Vagrant Story over, I would finish it. It's just a matter of how long will it take me. I'm about 3/4 of the way through the game and was really looking forward to finally taking on some of the New Game + dungeons.

I think I need to step away for a week or two, reassess, philosophize over our role in the universe, maybe get a life coach. Only then do I feel I can make this decision.

Editorial: Inverted Axis and Inverted Choices

My wife humors me and plays video games with me sometimes. She's pretty good at them. But there's one setting she always needs to change immediately, and that's to turn on the inverted Y axis.

It's not often you meet someone that prefers the inverted axis. I know only three people that prefer the inverted axis, and two of them are in my wife's family. It seems to be a relic of the Flight Simulator days, or at least that's where my wife traces it back to.

There are times where she plays as the first player, saves the inverted setting, and the next time I pick up the controller I find I can't hit the side of a barn. And sometimes its not immediately apparent what is wrong. I'll play ten minutes just thinking I'm having a really off day before I remember that my wife had the controller last.

It's just strange how some settings are just assumed now and when a developer does them differently, it can really mess up your life.

Remember during the Playstation 1 era where many Japanese developed games had "O" as the select option in menus and "X" as the cancel option. (I'm looking at you Konami and Square)

I can't tell you how many times I spent five minutes stuck on the title screen of Metal Gear Solid because I would press "X" to load the game.

Or when you try to play Halo and end up throwing grenade when you really just want to aim down the sites.

Things that seem to have been ingrained into our gaming DNA by large adoption of standard settings. Call of Duty and Battlefield have taught us that the left trigger should aim down the site and the joystick-less games of the present just about shun the inverted axis.

I wonder if research and development studied the best way to handle these settings or if a few guys on the development team picked up a controller and found their preference, forcing it on the masses.