After gaming for over forty hours, I have finally completed Final Fantasy XII. Now I can finally report back to my regular duties (like Eclipse, schoolwork, and watching anime).

I’m planning to go home on Friday morning which effectively leaves me with two more days left to beat Final Fantasy XII. Can I do it? This game is taking forever, seriously.

At least, that’s what the installer said to me anyway.

I guess I have to install Xfire now.

This next term might prove to be a difficult one.

I’m not going to be taking Final Fantasy XII with me back to Waterloo since my brother just bought some new games for the PS2. I’ll probably pick up the console when I return home for Reading Week though. It’s not really a big deal, IV and Ring of Fates will probably keep me busy for a while. I don’t plan on playing Revenant Wings until after I’ve beaten XII.

So, I noted yesterday that Final Fantasy XII’s battle system was different than the ones we’ve had in the past (excluding Final Fantasy XI, of course), and today I shall note that this battle system is surprisingly fun. It wasn’t really all that exciting to me when I was just fighting miscellaneous enemies but my opinion quickly changed during my second boss battle with the flaming horse in the sewers when I realized how engaging this system was. I was moving different characters here and there around the screen and issuing commands to them in real-time, it was simply a joy to both play and watch.

I haven’t really done much with regards to the customization of my characters’ gambits but I’ll be sure to blog again once I get a handle on it. I’m pretty comfortable with controlling my characters manually right now but I presume that that will quickly change once I start fighting more difficult enemies and bosses. Hell, every character that’s joined my party thus far, guest or otherwise, has always been higher level than my main party…which probably means I should spend some time leveling up. Alas, but I’d really rather get on with the game than to spend my time leveling up. ;)

Well, I received my copy of Final Fantasy XII and Luminous Arc from Play-Asia this morning courtesy of FedEx. Unlike my purchases with Amazon.co.jp, I did not have to pay customs anything for some reasons.

I’ve invested about an hour into FFXII thus far and I will say that it’s pretty fun. I’m not sure if I totally follow the battle system at the moment since it’s rather unconventional when compared with other traditional Japanese RPGs but I presume I’ll get acquainted with it in due time. I had actually thought that I would have more control over my party’s actions in battle but I was quickly proven wrong as I saw the characters swing their weapons at will. More to come later.

Anyone played Luminous Arc for the Nintendo DS before? How is it? I’m currently thinking about picking it or Heroes of Mana up in the near future. Now I was going to suck it up and go for the North American version (which I usually don’t unless I “have” to), but after seeing the cast list with names like Sayaka Ohara (Layla Hamilton), Aya Hirano (Suzumiya Haruhi), Chiwa Saito (Subaru Nakajima), Shizuka Itou (Hinagiku Katsura), and Akira Ishida (Athrun Zala), I am having second thoughts (as if it wasn’t obvious enough).

Oh, and Yasunori Mitsuda collaborated on the music composition, this game can’t possibly be bad, can it?

I was hacking away on my statistics assignment when I decided to take a little break and surf a little. I came upon the image above and I practically had to bend down to pick up my jaw! It seems that this fellow purchased Mountain of Faith from Palet Mail Service and got this print for kicks! Must resist…impulse purchase…argh!

According to the Touhou Wiki, Touhou games are supposed to pretty much work straight out of the box on Wine 0.9.45. At the moment, only version 0.9.39 is marked stable on Gentoo so I decided to give that a try but things didn’t quite work out. There was no sound and the sprites weren’t being rendered properly.

Thus, I decided to go with the unstable ~x86 ebuilds and emerged 0.9.45 instead. The game ran just fine without any graphical glitches but I still had no audio. Following the instructions presented at the end of the emerge, I decided to use winecfg to configure my Wine environment. I was told that I didn’t have anything configured when I clicked on the ‘Audio’ tab but it would go ahead and configure a recommended driver for me. I let it do its thing and the tab went about and populated itself.

And now I could hear the awesome music of Imperishable Night! Thanks, Wine!

The Japanese characters isn’t being rendered properly but I guess that’s not really a big deal. I’m not even sure if it’s a system thing and/or a Wine thing anyway because I’ve had rendering issues on quite a few Japanese sites on Linux. :(

I just got wind of this piece of news from my brother a few minutes ago. I am saddened by this although at the same time, as they are no longer making any games based on the Dungeons & Dragons universe, I suppose it doesn’t really affect me all that much.