Well, let's clarify that a bit. There is still definitely a Point B to get to, but if you are foolhardy enough to jump right in, you will most certainly get your ass kicked. This means that you need to grind a bit. Fortunately, Chapter 11 comes with a number of Missions which you can do - these are really just regular battles, against specific enemies. I've done the first 15 so far, but even that number is somewhat misleading, because I've spent 15 hours building my way up towards being powerful enough to handle some of those missions. Which is to say, I've killed a LOT of monsters. Basically, I've been grinding endlessly so that I can grind more effectively, if that makes sense.
It's a little ridiculous that the game is asking me to do this. Actually, let me rephrase that - it's downright jaw-dropping to realize that this is the game's intention, and that there is an audience out there that wants this.
And yet, here I am, 15 hours in and still invested. At the conclusion of Mission 14, I got myself a chocobo; that was my primary motivation for all this grinding, even if the end result is extremely underwhelming. (Hooray, I can go from one end of this endless prairie to the other a little bit faster.) And now that I'm here, I've started to figure out the evil genius at work.
See, one of the first things you'll see when you start Chapter 11 are these absolutely gigantic creatures - similar to those titanic elephant monsters in the LOTR movies. Like so:
You can't see how big that monster is - it's bigger than THIS BLOG. If you were to go after that fucker right off the bat, you'd get stomped before the battle even began. Hell, if I were to go after it right now - and remember, I'm 15 hours in on this chapter alone - I'd be lucky to get one hit in before my whole party got wiped. But I know that if I were to keep grinding and finish all of these "purely optional" Missions, I'd eventually get powerful enough to take one down. And I kinda want to be able to do that, at least once.
This is why I'm glad that the release calendar is still a bit dry; this is going to take quite a bit more time.
2 comments:
I am so torn. I played the first few hours of this game, enough to get the sense that it probably could totally pull me in if I let it, but not so sure that I wanted to go down that road, given the frustrating structure, the near-endless grinding and so on. I feel like my final reaction to the game would be similar to Brad Shoemaker's: a bit glad in the end, perhaps, to have had the experience, but simultaneously exasperated by its problems. Do I give in and press on, or do I trade it in?
I just. Don't. Know.
Caro - it's a serious dilemma. I got totally exasperated with it about 10 hours into it, and for some reason (well, because there was nothing else to play), I kept at it. Now I'm in it because I feel like I've sunk too much time into it NOT to see the ending.
Frankly, it makes me more curious to try FF7 again, or maybe FF8. I'm a little bummed that my PS3 isn't backwards-compatible, or otherwise I'd definitely try FF10 or 12.
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