I remember when I first beat Super Mario 3. It was one of those elementary school summer days complete with heat index, Southern Indiana style oppressive humidity and a tornado watch later in the evening. I could barely hear the final boss music over the air conditioner mounted in the window just behind the family TV.
When Bowser dropped through the floor, I felt a real sense of accomplishment, in spite of having used the Nintendo Power walkthrough magazine, complete with maps and detailed strategies. It didn’t matter to me that I had used warp whistles to skip at least a third of the game.
I never even stopped to wonder if I had “really” beaten the game or not. I’m pretty sure those ideas only became relevant once the internet came along, and that was all years in my future. On that day, all that mattered was that Bowser had been vanquished by my hand after many months of work and practice.
Fast forward thirty-odd years. Now I have a Pile of Shame: a mountain of video games I have never beaten. It taunts me and looks at me smugly whenever I come into the living room. I’m pretty sure it talks about me behind my back.
About two years ago, I started making a real effort to try to manage the pile. The pandemic was supposed to make this easier, but then Animal Crossing came along and slowed me down.
Marina's feelings reflect my own.
Even so, I have made progress, even to the extent of doing something ten-year-old me never could have imagined: completing two games in a single weekend.
One of the main reasons I have a Pile of Shame are the games I most often choose to play. Enormous, epic RPGs rife with sidequests are the bedrock of any backlog. Most of my backlog is solid bedrock. It’s always nice to see one of those games drop off the list, and having Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Final Fantasy X drop off at the same time was a kind of treat I don’t expect to ever see again.
I have liked the Assassin’s Creed games for years. Even though I don’t play them as they come out, and sometimes I’ll skip a game just because I’m not interested in the historical setting, but by and large I keep track of the series and try to get the games when I can, although I never pay full price for Assassin’s Creed. There are just too many of them, and the price drops fairly quickly. Plus, lately some of their best content comes as post-launch DLC. Knowing I’m going to shell out for a season pass compels me to at least try to get the base game on the cheap.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey had a lot going for it in my book. I liked what I had seen of Kassandra, and the ancient Greek setting seemed like fun. I also liked that the series was leaning hard into its RPG elements. Also, at the time (March 2020), It was pretty obvious lockdown was approaching, so it seemed like an opportune moment to get an enormous game.
Final Fantasy X might actually be the game that has been in the pile of shame the longest. In undergrad there were a lot of foreign students on campus, and I knew this guy from Hong Kong who really, really loved RPGs. I never had much interest in them myself until one evening I dropped by his place to borrow a book and interrupted him playing video games. The PS2 was just getting to be a big thing (yes, yes, I am old and decrepit. fine.) and there on my friend’s seven hundred pound cathode ray cube was Final Fantasy X.
I was completely blown away. The memory is so clear I can even tell you what was going on. I walked in during Kimarhi’s cinematic where he leaps out of the bushes and a tutorial battle starts. It was such a quantum leap past my Nintendo 64 that I almost couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even have a Playstation yet, but right then FFX went into my backlog. I bought the game on PS2, but it wasn’t until I got the remastered version for Switch that I finally decided to push through and finish the story.
<final fantasy x sweeping vista>
The Death March
It took me more than a year to get through Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. My game clock was near 250 hours by the time it was over. Every time I thought I was near the end, I found out the goal post was further away than I thought. Around Christmas, my partner took to calling it a “death march.” On the weekends she would see me playing the game as she came through the living room, shaking her head and muttering darkly.
Being a gamer herself, she understood my desire to play the game, but couldn’t help but wonder if the designers were in their right minds. (Spoiler: it seems doubtful they were) Weirdly enough, in spite of there being too much game to play, I never got bored with it, and I never even felt frustrated or exasperated at all with it until the very last hours (more on that later). The writing and acting were both extremely good, and the characters kept me wanting to play, which really took the edge off the repetitive mission structure.
This has been said many times since AC Odyssey was released, but it bears saying again here: this game is too big. It is absurd how much there is to do in the game, and the worst moments of this are exacerbated by the game’s pace combined with some technical aspects that are maybe not things that can be fixed, but are annoying nonetheless.
There are times when everything about Odyssey tells you that you are on the brink of something epic, only to send you on a mystery tour of ancient Greece before you reach your destination.
Get used to seeing this. Possibly for dozens of hours.
As an example, let’s take the first part of the Daughters of Artemis questline. Early in the game, my compulsion to try to over level brought me into contact with a series of quests where you track down elite animal enemies and return their pelts or antlers or whatever to the quest giver for (I believe) parts of an armor set.
As is typical with these games, the quest makes you do one loop so you get a feeling of how the quest will work, in this case I had to hunt a giant boar. Then everything opens up. My quest log had a list of creatures I could choose to hunt. The lowest level creature was the Hind of Keryneia .
To actually get to the thing required about an hour and a half of travel to get there. First I had to go over a mountain range and through several forested areas, around and / or through various enemy campsites, forts or cave hideouts, all while avoiding roaming packs of wolves and lions and whatnot. That got me to the shoreline. Then I had to find a dock, call my boat and then sail to the island where I could find the beast, where I could then start another overland trek just like the last.
And get used to looking at this for hundreds of hours. No, really.
This was typical of many questlines in the game. The whole thing isn’t just enormous and jam-packed with things to do, everything is also arranged to put more digits on the game clock.
All that said, I never got bored. I always wanted to know what was going to happen next, and the characters (especially Kassandra) remained well-written, consistent and able to surprise me for the entire duration of the game (except for one part, more on that later).
The game really wants you to think it works like this.
Final Fantasy X shares one main feature with Final Fantasy XIII. The game is just so incredibly linear that it feels confining. It gives the feeling of a ride at a theme park. Wonderful, but completely on rails. The enormous world you see is obviously an illusion.
The game actually works like this. Just one long, narrow tunnel.
I spent about fifty or so hours with Final Fantasy X, and it felt like the polar opposite of Odyssey. For one thing, where Odyssey is so much of an open world it is sometimes difficult to find your way around, FFX is so constricted it’s almost claustrophobic.
For most of the game, the only quest is the main quest. There is almost nothing to do but move forward. For most of the length of the story the characters remain engaging and interesting, somewhat in spite of the script and voice acting. This is the first game Square-Enix had ever fully voiced, and it shows. It’s not that the actors are bad, necessarily, but their performances are almost always cringingly stilted. It seems like they were all still getting to grips with how this should be done.
This laugh sounds as fake as it looks.
Also, the central plot point is a little bit weak. I’m not sure it actually makes sense, and also it makes about as much sense at halfway through the game as it does at the end. There are lots of moments of revelation that seem like they were intended to read as major twists that just don’t seem to matter after a while. There just isn’t much suspense because it’s so easy to see things coming.
After about forty hours, it became hard to keep caring about characters who so steadfastly refused to change. They have decided who they are and what they are about and no amount of overwhelming evidence or personal experience seems to shake them…until roughly 45 hours in, by which point it’s too late for the audience.
This summon was the reward for the one side quest I did. Not sure it was worth the time.
At roughly the same time, the meagre handful of side quests become available. I skipped most of them, because by that point I just wanted to be done.
Endless Goons
Enter, pursing bear.
Combat in Odyssey is definitely a high point of the game. There are multiple options in a hostile situation, which is always appreciated, and the designers seem to have fixed a problem that I have always had with AC games: the hard line between hand to hand fighting and stealth.
In most AC games, you can tell if a particular enemy encounter is supposed to be approached as a straight-up brawl or as a stealth mission. Of course, if you get caught by an enemy during a stealth encounter, it can become a brawl very quickly. Here’s where I usually have a problem, because it doesn’t really quite work that way.
The problem is that if you get detected and engaged when the game wants you to sneak, you are basically going to need to reload a checkpoint and start over. If you try to fight, you will be overwhelmed and looking at a “Game Over” before you know what’s going on. Most importantly, once a stealth encounter becomes a combat encounter, it is usually either impractical or impossible to make it a stealth encounter again. Once you cross that line, you cannot cross back.
My preferred method of conflict resolution. Hide in a shrub and hope nobody notices me.
Odyssey solves this problem to a large extent. I’m a very stealth-oriented player, so if I had to clear out a fort or a cave, I always at least started with stealth. Pobody’s nerfect, however, and I did get caught occasionally.
There were several possibilities at this point. Sometimes it was both feasible and practical to just fight my way through the remaining foes. Sometimes I ran away and waited for everything to calm down, then resumed my stealth strategy once things had cooled off. The third possibility was getting detected, fighting the one or two hostiles who detected me…and then just getting on with the stealth right then because nobody else had reacted to the noise. This, while tremendously unrealistic, was an amazing improvement over prior games.
It was such a relief to not have to reload my game every time I made a slight mistake in my approach. The greatest obstacle to completing a game that is 200+ hours long is frustration, and Odyssey avoided frustrating me at all the most critical times.
Melee combat has also been improved. In most AC games I avoid open combat as much as possible, both for the above reasons and because melee combat can be very clunky and unreliable. This is not so in Odyssey. To just walk in and start swinging is not only a viable strategy most of the time, it’s also preferable in many cases. I always felt like I had a chance to win, even when I was getting sliced to ribbons, and the game always seemed to play fair. I never felt like the deck was stacked against me or that my timing was fine, the game just did not respond fast enough. The combat in Odyssey is better than in any other AC game I’ve played, and it really felt like I had a whole other set of strategies available.
Speaking of which, I particularly enjoyed the embracing of AC’s RPG elements. This game, more than any other AC I’ve played (and I have not yet played Origins) is a full-fat RPG experience. The skill trees give you a way to plan your build as you go, and EXP is never so easy to come by that you don’t have to think before buying the next ability.
Along with that comes my least favorite thing about Odyssey’s design. I don’t like enemy scaling in RPGs. I like it even less than horse riding, which I cannot stand. To be fair, Odyssey does both scaling and horse riding better than any other game I’ve seen, but I still don’t find them fun.
Scaling, for those who might not know, works like this. As you play through the game, you defeat enemies who give you points. Enough points and you level up, which gives you more health, strength, etc. The point of this is that as your character gets stronger and more capable, more powerful enemies can then be defeated, which give you more points, which cause you to level up and so on and so on.
Scaling is when the game levels up the enemies as you level up your character. In other words, let’s say you find a campsite full of Level 10 enemies. That’s a little much for you right now, especially considering you’re only Level 7 and there are a double handful of bandits in the campsite. So you go away, and do other things to earn EXP and eventually, at Level 12 or so you return to the campsite, only to find those enemies are now Level 15. You became stronger, which means they became stronger.
This might sound relatively fair to you. But before you etch your opinion in stone, answer me one question. In that situation, what, then, is the point of leveling up? Why bother with character growth at all?
In my opinion, RPGs make an unspoken, yet sacred pact with the player. If you have the patience to stick with it, you will eventually be able to beat any enemy because ultimately, character growth will sustain you.
AC Odyssey breaks that pact. There are ways to slow down the scaling, but it never stops. The best you can do is keep the enemies at most five levels below the player character. I think that’s borderline cheap behavior, and I do not approve of it.
FFX is surprisingly traditional in its approach to battle. Encounters are random, with the obligatory “breaking glass” sound effect followed by a battle screen with everyone standing in lines and waiting their turn. I wonder what the reaction to a completely turn-based FF was back in the day.
Back in my day, no RPG would dare to break the sacred covenant.
Looking back on it now, it must have seemed odd. Since FF moved over to the Super Famicom in the early 90’s, the Active Time Battle system had been standard issue for FF games. Sure, each game tweaked it here or there (most effectively in FF IX, the best game in the series for my money), but overall the battle system had worked more or less the same for almost a decade, and to go back to the old-style turn based system must have felt like a step backward for some people.
I’m a fan of turn-based RPGs, so I found it to be accessible and efficient. The tweaks FFX makes to the system largely come in the form of a column on one side of the screen that tells you explicitly where everyone’s turn is going to be for the next ten or so turns. Delaying the enemy’s attack becomes a much more attractive option when you need to heal up one of your party and can see that the enemy’s turn comes before your healer’s turn.
FFX also keeps the faith with the player, though it pretends not to.
Also, you can swap characters in and out with no penalty at any time. This can save the party in many different ways, and is definitely appreciated. The battles feel well-paced, and you can always just sit and consider your options, all of which feels both completely fresh and also “like Final Fantasy.”
FFX at least tries to appear less traditional in its character growth system. FFX uses a chart called a Sphere Grid. When you level up, instead of getting some stat boosts and another numerical level, you get a “Sphere Level”, which means you can place a token on the next available spot on the chart. This may give you more hit points, magic points, or a new spell or ability. The tokens are dropped by enemies as loot along with money and EXP (which is called AP in a further attempt to make you believe this is all new and innovative). The remastered version makes these token drops much more plentiful, so you never feel stuck or like you have to leave something behind.
Oh, no, no levelling up or EXP here. Nope. No, sir.
There are branching paths, but they are locked, and often lead only to small extensions of the single path you’re already on. The only time I bothered to unlock sections of the chart was on those occasions where the character had reached the end of “their” section of the chart and I could then unlock the path onto a different character’s section of the chart to pick up their skills.
It’s all perfectly fine, but again, it’s a situation where you really only have one path to take, but the designers have done everything they can to give you the illusion of agency. It would have been much simpler and more honest to just level up the characters like Dragon Quest does and have done with it.
Technical Fouls (and other sporting nonsense)
Odyssey’s presentation is impressive. The graphics are beautiful, with a surprisingly large color palette for a game that all takes place in a fairly small geographical region. The sound design is also excellent. The music, when present, is fantastic, but there are also moments where the only sound is the ambient noise of the location, and that too is brilliant in its subtlety.
I didn’t experience many crashes, freezes, or any of the other things I’ve come to expect from large open world games, but what I did experience was a tremendous amount of load time.
Seriously, the loading times for this game on PS4 are ridiculous. From the time I clicked on the icon for AC Odyssey to the time I could actually move Kassandra across the Grecian countryside was close to twelve minutes on average.
Ah, yes, you'll also need to get used to looking at this. Best of you start getting used to this one first, actually.
I got to the point where I would only play the game on Saturday and Sunday because any other time of the week I had neither the time nor the patience to sit through the load screens. I would often respond to emails and texts during load times for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Final Fantasy X for the Switch looks and sounds as good as the game ever will without a complete re-make. It is a twenty-year-old game and it shows, but it is still gorgeous, and the soundtrack’s pathos and melancholy is still as effective as ever.
This game came bundled with its sequel, Final Fantasy X-2, and my one gripe about this is that the sequel is not on the game card. I doubt there is any technical reason for this besides manufacturing costs, but still, it’s annoying.
The End Of The End
Completing games is a completely different thing for me in 2021 than it was in 1991. One thing has remained: I still use walkthroughs and guides when I get stuck and I have no shame about it. These games are expensive and time consuming, and I play them to have fun. Losing is not fun. So there.
My memories of beating Mario 3 make it feel like I spent as long getting to that final battle as I did getting to the hour-long parade of cinematics that closed out AC Odyssey. It’s not true, of course. Odyessey took way longer, but strangely felt a little less epic. Partially, that’s because of the nature of the final encounters of a game as long and narrative-driven as Odyssey. At some point around 2000, there was a movement to make these final battles less about the battle itself and more about the story, which made those final battles easier, or in the case of Odyssey, practically unable to be lost. I faced the toughest enemy in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey probably forty or more hours before I beat the game. In a way, it makes sense, but it still makes things feel a little more hollow.
Final Fantasy X was made at a time when the process of changing to this newer style of final boss was still taking place, and playing it now shines a light on this. FF X essentially has two final bosses. The first is a more traditional “enormous beast” that is built to be a challenge of your battle skills and preparation. The second is the simple, low-stakes narrative closer. It is not really impossible to lose, because there is a bit of puzzle-solving to figure out how the battle is supposed to go, but once that particular code is cracked, it’s a simple matter to waltz to the final cinematics. Again, while not exactly unsatisfying, it was still a bit hollow. Possibly, it was even more frustrating than the final boss of Odyssey because the enormous beast that preceded it gave me the impression that I could relax and feel a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps take a moment to ponder what the hell the composer was thinking inserting that bizarre out of place hair metal music behind that last battle. Instead another battle starts. It frustrated me, and that point in the game is not one where I like to be frustrated.
Was It Worth it?
Surprisingly, yes. In spite of all my criticisms, both games were worth the time I spent with them. I fully intend to replay Odyssey someday. It has probably the best protagonist in the series (I played Kassandra and you should too), and the combat is so good, it made for hundreds of hours of engaging gameplay.
I will definitely move on to Final Fantasy X-2 at some point. I’m told it’s a hidden gem, and redeems some of the more unclear plot points of X. I am certainly looking forward to that.
Sure. Why not.
The pandemic is (probably) almost over. I doubt I will ever complete two games on the same day ever again. There just won’t be time or mental space for it. If you ever get the chance, though, you should have the experience for yourself. The juxtaposition of the games throws some of the details into sharp focus in some unique ways. I don’t consider the time wasted, but the value I place on my time has definitely changed. I’m looking forward to being busy again, so I can’t imagine everything aligning so well again. And that’s a good thing.
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