class Book(models.Model):
    contributing_authors = models.ManyToManyField(User)

book = Book.objects.get(id=4)
book.contributing_authors.all()

book.contributing_authors.all().using('default')

user = User.objects.get(username='bobdole')
user.book_set.all().using('default')

class Book(models.Model):
    users = models.ManyToManyField(User)
    users.value_from_object = lambda obj: obj.contributing_authors

    @property
    def contributing_authors(self):
        users = User.objects.all()
        user_id_set = set()
        for user in users:
            if user.book_set.filter(id=self.id).using('default').exists():
                user_id_set.add(user.id)
        return User.objects.filter(id__in=user_id_set)

Final Fantasy XIII: Disc 2

(Other parts: Disc 1)

I’ll start things off by saying up front that Disc 2 has made an immense difference to my opinion of the game.  Despite my pretty rough criticisms of Disc 1, the last half of Disc 2 really tipped the scales.

The beginning of this disc was pretty true and faithful to the game style that disc 1 had built up.  In fact, there wasn’t much fanfare as the game winds down and tells you to put in the next disc.  I had written my review of disc 1 after having played a couple of hours of disc 2, and my sentiments hadn’t changed at all.  Everything began to swivel once Lightning and Hope end up in a situation that reunites them with Snow, who is joined by Fang, a character only glimpsed during the first disc when Snow starts throwing a tough-guy tantrum with damp eyes.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Disc 2: Limit Break

Major good:

• Characters finally merit some emotional attachment by the end of Disc 2.
• Vanille is less stupid, Hope is less angsty
• Game has a purpose, understood by the characters
• Great character voice overs. I couldn’t appreciate this during the first disc’s distractingly poor story progression.  I thought XII was good, but XIII is better.

Major meh:

• Too much use of background music which has vocals.  This comprises only a couple of songs, but their repetitive use is pretty… meh.  I enjoy those songs, but it feels like they’re being wasted on grinding areas.
• They *almost* make a character kill himself.  Now that would have been a great twist to normal FF titles.  Unfortunately they only use theatrics to make you believe for a brief time that said character is a goner.
• Shops are compressed into a meaningless magic save point service, removing entirely the discovery of rare items from remote and distant lands.  Again, rather meh.

Major bad:

• Terrible interaction with the world around you.  The world is a maze, and you’re the hamster.  Everything else is colored tubes for you to run through.
• Characters still don’t quite understand what it is they’re after.  Nor does the player.  At least there are lots of story components that mean something after 20 hours of game play.  The story itself is interesting, but they’re stretching the amount of story in FFVII disc 1 into all of FFXIII.  Naturally things are moving more slowly.

Major “huh?”:

• The chocobo theme now has lyrics?

I had reached my limit of the bad.  I was surprised by Disc 2 and felt energized by its story, finally giving the adrenaline to the story which it much needed.  My limit had been surpassed, but good things came from it after all.

In-depth

Beginning at about 8 game hours, I was left the with the distinct impression that a 24-hour game length was going to be pitiful, assuming the next two discs were about the same length.  Unlike several other Final Fantasy titles, XIII is ruthlessly linear, and so one cannot too quickly chalk game length up to the inter-disc common content they’ve got to store to play the game.  Each disc’s areas are unique to that disc.  I would venture a guess that disc 2 had more CG than the first.

I was happy however to discover that by the time it asked me to put in Disc 3 (which I was heavily anticipating, giving the game events), I had put in a total of 24 hours game time (inclusive of the first disc).  This second disc had far fewer flashback moments to explain the pre-game 13 days, instead containing far more battle time.

An enormous amount of tension and frustration builds in the gamer as you experience the first disc and the beginnings of the second.  This can be seen clearly in my shared thoughts about the former.  The primary cause is lack of actual story events.  The game wants to start off fast-paced, but it sets an ill precedent for the pace thereafter.  Somehow VII pulled off a similarly paced intro with fewer problems in the immediate game hours afterward.  The biggest issue as I played seemed to be that no two map areas seemed connected, because each time a splintered party duo would reach some area event, story focus would switch to another party who was now miraculously in another game area without really allowing you to see how they got there.  This built a mounting annoying sense of the game taking control away from you.  A companion plague was that none of the characters had any concrete reason for heading in their chosen directions.  Each miniature group was either mindlessly running away or mindlessly meandering into the heart of Eden, Cocoon’s capital city, for no extremely good reason other than blind “rage” (for that’s that the Datalog entries keep referring to, although the character emotions didn’t perfectly match the description).

Snow’s predicament of being captured by the group Fang fronts turns out to be uneventful enough that the game only tosses you two brief scenes of Snow on board an aircraft as a prisoner, doing us the quick courtesy of introducing the ever-present Cid character.  (The Cid role seems to be getting more diminished as Square goes forward.)

The primary story told at the start of Disc 2 is that of Lightning and Hope, who are reinforcing each others’ desires to be stupidly mad at relatively simple problems, yet refuse to actually face those problems.  Hope is the primary troublemaker, as he becomes more and more determined to hurt Snow.  Lightning begins to cool off as she realizes that she’s indoctrinating him with a desire to fight, fight, fight.

After a time, the story starts to (finally) accelerate as the depressed duo make it into the city in which Hope lives, a checkpoint area in their quest to kill stuff.  Snow and Fang join up and the game immediately shakes up your party configurations (thank the heavens!).

At that point, despite some drawn out streets saturated with enemies, the game truly hits its intended speed, proving to be both emotionally charged and inspirationally difficult.  There’s nothing like stepping out of a bombed house only to literally be fighting a massive strikecraft which you are meant to actually defeat.  If you ask me, it’s always a good sign of a game’s game-face when they make you wonder if you’re actually supposed to lose or not.

One of the (few) problems with Disc 2 is that you are taunted with the fact that this game does not actually allow you to interact with the world.  At all.  Vanille and Sazh are in the middle of a Golden Saucer of sorts and you cannot interact with anything.  To liven things up, it gives you a minigame of chasing Sazh’s Chocobo chick around, as it excitedly flies around the fully grown Chocobos in the small grassy areas of the city.  A nice effort by the programmers, but it is a little weak in comparison to what one might have expected from the City of Dreams.  God knows I want to chase Chocobo chicks around in grassy areas.  Luckily they use Vanille’s internal conflicts to reveal new information here and there.

In order to get Sazh and Vanille reunited with the Lightning’s powwow, the games puts some pressure on the duo to drive some intriguing events that finally made me overcome my annoyance with their slow-moving story arch.

Balance in the Force

It was not until 22 hours into the game did it finally allow me to pick my own party leader and arrange my characters according to my heart’s desire.  No sooner than I did so was I absolutely mauled by the battles that awaited.  This surprised me, as I had carefully equipped my party with the items I desired them to have.  There’s no such thing as an under-leveled character in XIII, so there was no excuse for failure.  Just the same, I died twice within 10 minutes of game play.  I decided to put my party back the way it was before the game let me change it, and I begin (slowly) conquering again.  Stopping to think, I had to give a moment of silence for the SquareEnix guys who arranged the skills of the characters and balanced the parties in the story so delicately.  Never in the game had I been hopelessly overwhelmed until the moment it trusted me to make my own party.  As I made this realization, I became confident in my situation as the player.  The game had thrown me a curve ball and I adapted to it.

Money is Everything

XIII leaves you with a hopeless amount of Gil for most of the game.  Never does an enemy drop money like candy.  This leaves the player in an awkward state of mind that they aren’t supposed to be buying anything, especially when Phoenix Downs are on the market for 1000 Gil, and your total stash is only barely double that.  You spend a few game hours aboard an enemy airship on Disc 2, and a peek at your inventory by the end of it reveals the master plan for money in XIII: Credits.  Credits are simple items dropped by military enemies in the game.  They come in at least two flavors, one selling on the market for 2500, the other selling for 5000.  Selling your entire stash of credits near the end of this airship area yields about 60,000 Gil, assuming you’ve been fighting most of the enemies you encounter (which are oddly simple to penetrate by running straight through the middle of them).

What else does a l’Cie do with 75,000 Gil but immediately go buying nuts and bolts for weaponry upgrades?

I had only dabbled in weapon and accessory upgrades until I realized how much money I had.  The trouble with weapon upgrades previous to holding nearly 100k of Gil is that you can’t actually make any useful progress on accessories, let alone weapons.  You hold lots of components for such upgrades, but most of them aren’t worth much, and they certainly don’t make a massive difference in the majority of cases.  But once I had almost a dozen Perfect Conductors (better than other such conductors, such as the “super” variety) and 75,000 Gil, the waiting game was over.  Within moments, I had Lightning and Fang’s weapons upgraded to give about +100 strength each.  Considering those weapons start as +30 strength weapons, the difference is obvious once you’ve staggered an enemy.  The entire purpose of the currency in this game is to upgrade your weapons, not buy new ones.  The money converts directly to expensive upgrading components.

Final Fantasy XII started down this track of making enemies give you useless items which you could sell at shops for petty amounts of Gil.  Eventually, you’d build up enough random items to actually mean something monetarily, but until then, your inventory was just plastered with items that may as well have remained nameless, for nobody could care less about the specific item.  It was only about how much it sold for.  XIII finally breathes some live into this issue by making components upgrade weapons, and forcing your R&D funds to come from your sold Credit Chips.  This makes items useful, money meaningful, and your Inventory menu very tidy.  All components are kept separate from your consumables.  The latter is the list that appears in battle when you want to use an item.  Rather than stupidly showing you skins and furs that you might want to throw at an enemy, XIII is conservative enough about items that your battle list is only 3-4 items long most of the game thus far.  I bumped the count up to 5 when I bought some status-removing items (bad, baaaaad Fog status).

No MP == Dependence on Magic

I had seen accessories that I picked up refer to a “Pain” and “Fog” status, but what you don’t understand can’t hurt you.  Until it creams you in battle.  Fog is basically the “Silence” spell from traditional FF titles.  The trouble in XIII is that since no MP costs encumber your battle plans, you’ve trained yourself to expect those Ravagers to support your physical attacks and boost that Chain bonus.  When you realize that the Medic is being gravely silent back there, you suddenly notice the icon for this new Fog status, which quite literally cripples the entire character.  Changing Paradigms does nothing, since both Hope and Vanille (the two primary Medics) are all-magic Saboteur/Synergist and Ravagers.  Not a single useful action can come from the characters to remedy the situation, unless you’ve happened to have unlocked the Esuna spell on one of your other party members.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

The most bizarre discovery of higher-level magic is that it typically doesn’t increase the amount of damage the spell does.  Aero, for instance, does X damage, and Aeroga does about the same.  The critical difference is that 2nd and 3rd level spells are area-of-effect.  More important is that the 3rd level spells (or -ga spells in general) tend to throw enemies into the air, giving your party a critical time advantage against your opponents.  You realize the implications of this tossed-into-the-air effect once your party spends a good fraction of its time in battle rising into the air and then face-planting, instead of firing spells as intended.  XIII invents some new status effects (positive and negative) to help and prevent this interruption, and it can frequently make an incredible difference in a boss fight.

Try, Try Again

Early in the game, boss battles meant that you had to try and fail several times before coming out victorious.  By the end of this second disc, I had the hang of boss fights, although they still take quite a while.  In fact, the Eidolons are typically a bigger challenge than the boss fights, although they end much more quickly, for better or for worse.  Each character must conquer his or her Eidolon, their emotional state frequently triggering the fight to claim the power of the Eidolon.  This battles usually prove more difficult because one does not actually kill the summon– instead you must perform some type of feat, such as high chain bonuses or defendability.  Only after an indicative meter fills as a result of your actions can you end the battle.

The good news is that despite a fairly hard boss fight system, finally having three party members (instead of just two) really does wonders for your ability to multi-task healing and fighting when required.

And now on to Disc 3.  Abrupt ending…. not quite sure what on earth happened, but the ship just disappeared into the wall of a busy sky scraper.  But I can tell it’ll be good.