In my life I have seen many things. I have never yet seen a game that so blatantly tries to force people to buy peripherals as Final fantasy Crystal Chronicles. The big “new cool thing” in the game is that its a 3d action-rpg with full multiplayer. Now, having played it, I can honestly attest that the only way to play multiplayer is if every player has a gameboy advance. That’s right - you cannot use your own controllers.
Note that they dance around actually saying this outright except i the manual… which you don’t get to read unless you own the game. The only other clue is a graphic on the FFCC site, which doesn’t actually say you can’t use your own controllers. Even if you already own a gameboy advance, you’d need a new gamecube link cable - more $$ for Nintendo.
I swear I will never buy a Nintendo console again.
Now, Nintendo has sucked majorly in recent years. What possesses them to drive away their clientele by forcing Square Enix (and don’t try to tell me it was all Square’s idea) by doing this crap?
The worst part is that FFCC isn’t even a particularly good game. Its pretty and reasonably fun, but not really worth 50$.
I was so disappointed by FF9 and 10 that I didn’t even buy the next two games to come out. I’m hearing decent stuff about 10-2, but not enough to persuade me to buy it. I might get it if the price drops low enough, but I was burned by paying the full price for the earlier ones, and then seeing a “classic release” come out priced at about $20. I don’t NEED to buy games right as they come out, I can wait for a while, especially if the classic release will cost less than half of the original full retail price.
I’m certainly not going to buy a PS2 modem and a subscription to another online service that can only be used for one game, so I’m not going to buy XI.
Tell me about it! In Coneria City, it costs 30 Gold to heal at an inn, yet just across the ocean in Elfland it’s 100G! Goddamn elf innkeepers, jackin’ up the prices. Don’t they know they’re hurting the light warriors who are trying to SAVE the FRIGGIN WORLD?
Did you know that you have to have broadband to play on Xbox Live? I mean, that’s like $50 a month, and that’s not even including the subscription to Live itself! It’s like Microsoft is in cahoots with the DSL conglomerates who are in cahoots with money fairies that conspire to steal your hard-earned pennies and force you to play Crimson Skies every night.
So I’m going to take a guess and say that, since FFCC is not actually released here yet, you either imported it or got a pre-release review copy. Assuming you’re in either of those positions, I find it pretty hard to believe that you never heard a single word about how multiplayer requires GBAs. This is not news. People have been whining about this for months and months now. In addition, link cables cost something like $10 first-party or $6 third-party, and if you’re that hard up for cash you can get a free one by pre-ordering. In addition to my addition, I sincerely doubt that Nintendo forced Square at gunpoint to use GBAs, since Square could have very easily said, “Screw you, we’re moving back to the PS2.” Finally, just about everyone who has played the game has called it an absolute fucking blast, so you’re in a very small minority there.
I’ll leave the rest of your Nintendo-sucks ramblings alone, since they’re your opinions, aswrongastheymightbe.
I’m sure that, seeing as you’ve played the game and all, you would have realised that the only conceivable way it could work (something pennyarcade attest to) is by using GBAs as controllers. With four players, having the game stop the moment somebody checks their inventory or selects a spell would ruin the experience for all involved. When you can use your GBA screen for this, the problem disappears.
I think it was better for Nintendo, Square-Enix, God, or whoever else you want to blame, to have flat-out disallowed controller usage, since it would have meant people ended up playing a dud version of what is (apparently) quite a nice game.
That’s a matter of personal choice, but given the sentiment expressed in the OP, I think it was a good idea to have gone with the dichotomy of ‘as it’s meant to be played’ versus ‘not played at all’. I think that had Nintendo allowed you to play the game with regular controllers, we would have suffered the bitching of people who ‘hated how the thing has to pause all the time’.
I mean, it’s not as if they’re desperate to shift more GBAs, they’ve got like a 95% share of the handheld market anyway, right? Furthermore, since the market is (as you have shown) obviously so intelligent as to not be duped into buying extra GBAs to play FFCC, Nintendo have really gained nothing.
It’s a matter of choice - you decide whether or not the game is of sufficient quality to warrant the purchase of a GBA or two and some link cables. If it’s not good enough, don’t buy it. Seriously, if you didn’t know you needed GBAs to play this thing, you probably don’ t have the fine motor skills to hold, much less operate a one, so you would have been doomed from day one. Don’t sweat it, there are plenty of people in the same boat.
I didn’t like FF9 near as much as the others, but LOVED FFX. I love FFX-2 even more, despite FFX being better made(course the existance of Baralai helped with FFX-2 ehheh). I have NO intention of going near FF11(dislike online games).
I don’t need to have games right away either, but sometimes that could be risky. Suikoden 2 is a good example of this. It was once $49 dollars and now it’s hard to find and extremely expensive.
As for FFCC, I personally didn’t know that you needed all those extras to play the game. But, then again, I don’t have a GameCube. I’ve seen commercials of this game and it DID mention the GBA, but I didn’t pay much attention beyond that.
Isn’t it interesting how the farthest you get from the starting city, the higher the prices get(and the better the weapons get)?
So Coneria, you can buy a stick and a piece of wood to protect yourself.
In little tiny village in a little cove that is extremely hard to get to, you can buy mega armor and kill-o-matic BFG, for the low price of 2 billion dollars a piece.
So why does the biggest city on the planet have the crappiest stuff?
And doesn’t it completely screw the economy of the little hamlet to be paying injecting all that new money into the economy all of sudden, because suddenly the shopkeeper is Bill gates? Or is inflantion just incredibly common in that town, so that’s why everything costs so damn much(or maybe everyone is extremely rich)?
If you’ll visit the FFCC website (requires Flash), you can view a demo of how the multiplayer works. There’s no way you could get that kind of information without the individual GBAs. Also, the Game Boys allow a player to manage his inventory, select spells, etc. on the fly without having to pause the rest of the players. If you didn’t use them, the game would either have to pause every time one of the four players wanted to change something or clutter the screen with menus during the action. See Secret of Mana on the SNES as an example of how annoying the former is. It seems that the GBA is not necessary for the single-player mode, though it is optional (and I note that the guy in the single-player video is geting his ass handed to him by a monster).
That said, I think Nintendo is counting on the fact that it currently holds the majority on the handheld market. How many people own Game Boys? How many people own Gamecubes? How many own both? I’m betting that a substantial amout of GC owners already own GBAs, so playing the game is only a connector away. This time the focus isn’t on a game with “extra” stuff for GBA connection; it’s a full-on requirement and the extra utility of another four screens is supposed to be an (if not the) integral part of the multiplayer game. It’s a gutsy move, but I hope it inspires more material for connectivity in the future.
I’ve got a GBA but not a GC (yet, though I probably will someday). I’m not much of one for multiplayer RPGs and definitely not MMORPGs, so I’m going to stay away from FFXI and maybe FFCC as well, unless either one comes with a good single-player game (like PSO did). However, I can see what Nintendo and Square are doing here. It’s been known since the GC launched that with an adapter it was possible to use the GBA as a controller, but this is the first time I’ve heard of it used. The idea–and I think it’s a good idea, if somewhat poorly executed–reminds me of the Dreamcast’s VMU, which had the possibility of allowing you to pick football plays, for example, displayed on the VMU, so your opponent would have a harder time figuring out what was coming. My problem would be with the GBA as a controller. After all, you’ve only got the D-Pad, the A and B buttons, and the two shoulder buttons, plus select and start. While you don’t need a lot of buttons for an RPG–heck, they did it with two on the NES–it still seems like figuring out the mapping could be tough. Plus, if you’re like me and have a launch GBA and not a SP, then you’ve got the problem of no backlight, so I’d have to use the third-party light. Also, can the GBA be powered through the connection to the GC, or are you going to sit there and eat through a 20 pack of AAs per person?
It’s at times like this that I realise how much I love Penny-Arcade. Every time there’s a pit thread on gaming, I’m presented with a choice. I can either construct an elaborate parody post - filled with metaphors, similes, and dramatic irony - that’s sure to make your thread backfire.
No, what pisses me off is that people have no choice. I don’t ind using mine. Hell, I own one. But I think its really pissant of them to not allow people to use their own hardware.
And you just fucking KNOW they’ll be trading on your rep. “Stay in the hotel the Light Warriors stayed in! See the beds they slept in! See this lock of hair they left behind!”
I know how you feel. I was really pissed when I bought the new Zelda, and it wouldn’t work in my PlayStation. Dammit, they should allow people to use their own hardware! Fucking Nintendo!
Incidentally, how do you reconcile this rant with what you told me in this thread during our little chat about the merits of Baldur’s Gate? Some highlights:
And the piece de resistance:
So, what’s it like being a gigantic hypocrite, anyway? Is the pay any good? Do you get dental?