In which my displeasure with Square Enix grows to the point that Final Fantasy XIII-2 plays second fiddle to a platformer from 1993: New releases for the week of 1-29-12

NeverDead

(PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) Action game about an ancient demon-hunter cursed with immortality. His immortality is an important gameplay mechanic: you can be damaged, dismembered, or even decapitated but can never actually die.(Though you can still lose if your non-immortal partner is killed.) Luckily, you can pick up and reattach lost limbs as needed, and even roll back to your torso if your head gets cut off, so that the action can continue and the game doesn't turn into an undead version of Johnny Got His Gun.

(Speaking of still-living severed heads, why has there never been a game based on Re-Animator? What kind of universe are we living in when Hudson Hawk, Krull, The Lawnmower Man, Congo, the Noid, Chester Cheetah, and the red circle on bottles of 7-Up have all had games made about them and Re-Animator never has?)

It sounds like an interesting concept, I suppose, but there's only room for one video game hero with re-attachable limbs in my heart, and that's the one and only Plok: adventurer, warrior, flag connoisseur, harmonica virtuoso, Renaissance man, and guy so badass that no enemy can knock one of his arms or legs off because he removes his own limbs so that he can hurl them at his foes. Accept no substitutes.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

(Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) I've detailed my waning love for Final Fantasy and Square in general before and won't repeat it in detail here, except to say how odd it feels to be so indifferent to the release of a new Final Fantasy game when there was a time when such an event would have me ablaze with anticipation. It's like going through puberty in reverse.

Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear

(Xbox Live Arcade) Expansion for the tower defense game Iron Brigade, aka Trenched, from Double FineProductions. I like tower defense and have heard good things about this game, so it's a shame it's an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Speaking of things that seem to have been shoddily jury-rigged together,* do you ever get the feeling that some games are named by coming up with a bunch of titles and subtitles independently, and then just picking one of each at random? Presumably the name Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear makes some sort of sense within the context of the game's story, but outside that context it looks like the guys at Double Fine were playing MadLibs around the office when they remembered that they were supposed to have come up with a list of proposed titles for the new expansion by the end of the day and decided to just go with whatever was already written down.

*(I kid, I kid. A good friend of mine has an Xbox 360, and it was a technological marvel until its most recent red ring of death occurred after the warranty ran out and he decided he just didn't give a damn any more and went back to PC games.)

Gorilla Gondola

(iPhone) I have no idea what this is about and have nothing to say about it, but I include it here because I have no idea when or if the opportunity to have the phrase “Gorilla Gondola” appear on this blog will come again.

Nothing ends, Cid. Nothing ever ends.

Leigh Alexander has an interesting post at Kotaku about her problems with finishing games that she likes: the more she enjoys a game gets attached to its world and characters, the more she'll try to extend the experience as long as possible and the less likely she is to actually finish it.

I can relate to this. Unlike Alexander, I do always finish a game if I like it, but I've definitely had the experience of trying to put that off as long as possible. The most memorable time this has happened in the past few years has been with Persona 3 and Persona  4. I loved both of those games, both for their gameplay and for their characters and story, and I didn't want to leave either behind. I've also put a ridiculous amount of time into Just Cause 2 and have yet to complete the final mission, though my hand will probably be forced in the near future by sheer lack of anything left to destroy.

My earliest recollection of doing something like this, however, is my fanatical Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction-esque attachment to Final Fantasy III /VI on the Super NES. It wasn't the game that introduced me to RPGs and made me a fan of them- that was Dragon Warrior- or the game that made them my favorite genre- Final Fantasy II/IV-  but that game enthralled me like nothing had before. I loved everything-  the gameplay, the story, the characters, the absolutely incredible music- and just didn't want it to end. It helped that my excitement for the game had been raised to a fever pitch by the fact that I wasn't able to play it for several months after it first came out. I didn't have the money to buy it, and the sole rental copy at my local video store (kids, ask your parents) was always checked out. And I mean always; I know because I walked or rode my bike up there every day for months to see if it was in. I was eagerly looking forward to it after being amazed by its predecessor and tantalized by playing a few precious minutes of it at the local FuncoLand (kids, ask your grandparents),  so once I actually got hold of the game I held on to it like grim death.

November, 1994: A young John Markley traverses the Chicago metropolitan area in search of Final Fantasy III. While Markley would ultimately find an available rental copy in a now-defunct independent video store, many were not so lucky; between October of 1994 and the release of Chrono Trigger in August of 1995, thousands of gamers who left home in the '94 Chicagoland JRPG Rush would lose their lives to frostbite, starvation, avalanches, and the dearth of console RPGs on the American market during the 16-bit era. 

Still, I couldn't leave it unfinished- I had to see what would happen. More importantly, not killing  my archnemesis Kefka would've set a dangerous precedent. You let one insane, magically augmented jester get away with becoming a god by tapping into the power of three ancient imprisoned goddesses, unleash a storm of cataclysmic destruction that scours the planet with fire and rearranges the very continents, slaughter uncounted millions of innocent people, leave human civilization in ruins, and turn the entire world into a bleak, desolate, post-apocalyptic hellscape with the most depressing overworld music in the history of RPGs, and the next thing you know they're all going to be doing it. You've got to nip this sort of thing in the bud.

The result of my dallying was that when I finally, reluctantly, decided to finish things, my character's levels were so absurdly high that my final encounter with Kefka lasted all of about half a turn. Attacks in Final Fantasy games back then had an absolute, unbreakable limit of 9999 damage per hit, but when the toughest character in your ludicrously over-leveled party is equipped with both the item that lets them hold a sword in each hand and hit twice with each attack and the item that lets them do a quadruple attack every turn, it doesn't really matter that much.

Ten years of PlayStation 2

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love came out for the Playstation 2 on the US on March 30th.That's not a big deal in itself (unless you're a die-hard fan of the strategy/RPG/dating sim/mecha genre), but last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the Japanese release of the PlayStation 2. The American anniversary will be this fall. A decade after its birth and three years after the release of PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 just keeps lumbering along.

It's been quite a 10 years, too. So many memories: The first PS2 game I ever played, Summoner. Still an underrated game, in my opinion.

The time a friend and I played through Metal Gear Solid 2 in a single marathon session, lasting late into the night. If you're familiar with both the late-game events of MGS2 and the psychological effects of sleep deprivation, you know that's not a good idea. Never before or since has a game caused me to repeatedly ask my friend “OK, have I fallen asleep in my chair and started dreaming, or did he actually just say that?”

Spending more time on the Disgaea games than I have ever spent on any other life activity, including (but not limited to) family gatherings, personal hygiene, schoolwork, and social engagements, EVER.

Becoming violently ill when I failed to anticipate the results of combining a rental copy of the PS2 port of Half-Life, my life-long vulnerability to motion sickness, the lingering effects of an indeterminate quantity of Guinness consumed earlier in the evening, and what later turned out to be the early symptoms of a strain of flu that was going around.

Loving Xenosaga. Then grudgingly tolerating Xenosaga II. Then loving Xenosaga III which, aside from its inexcusable failure to bring back Shion's glasses, was a fantastic comeback for the series.

Seizing control of the train in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and accelerating to such high speeds that it derailed as I approached a bridge, went flying over the side of the chasm the bridge spanned... and just started floating in mid-air, presumably because the programmers at Rockstar didn't anticipate my train fetish.

Being the only adult male in the Western hemisphere who actually liked Tidus in Final Fantasy X.

Joining every other adult male in the Western hemisphere in wondering why the hell Vaan was even in Final Fantasy XII.

Ace Combat 4, Ace Combat 5, and Ace Combat Zero. I let out an anguished Revenge of the Sith-style “NNNNOOOOO” when I found out that Ace Combat 6 was an Xbox 360 exclusive.

The RPG/horror series Shadow Hearts, or at any rate the first two. (The third one was just sort of meh.) Aside from the great gameplay, it broke the usual JRPG mold in all sorts of ways: Instead of the usual fantasy settings, it was set in the early 20th century in our own world. (Aside from some minor liberties taken with history. For instance, the real Grigori Rasputin died after being beaten, shot, and thrown into a river by a cabal of noblemen and reactionary politicians, rather then when his aerial fortress was destroyed by a Russo-Japanese shapeshifter in the sky over Petrograd.) The battles were turn-based but relied heavily on reflexes as well as strategy. Protagonist Yuri Hyuga was actually old enough to buy tickets to an R-rated movie without being accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Plus, it had what is probably the filthiest joke ever to appear in an American localization of a Japanese RPG. (Early on, the heroine is being held prisoner in a village where the people have turned to cannibalism. Yuri is having none of that, so he breaks in to demand her release and... well, from there it practically writes itself.)

Persona 3 unexpectedly becoming one of my favorite games of all time. Which I then sold online in mint condition for over $100 when its unexpected success caused a crippling shortage. Then finding a complete used copy in very good condition at my local Game Crazy for $40, buying it, and then selling that for over $100 as well. (Hey, arbitrage is an essential part of any market economy.) Then, shortly afterwords, cackling like some evil top-hatted Gilded Age plutocrat when Atlus announced that they were localizing Persona 3: FES and the once-lucrative Persona 3 used copy market collapsed. Then getting Persona 4, which managed to be even better.

Yes, it's been ten truly magical years of action, adventure, drama, obsessive behavior, profitable speculative bubbles, drunken first-person shooter-induced projectile vomiting, assorted angst-ridden bishonen both likable and unlikable, and Russo-Japanese shapeshifters making appalling puns about cunnilingus. A true golden age.

Final Fantasy creator announces new part-performing amusement for the Wii

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and his company Mistwalker will be making a new RPG for the Nintendo Wii called Last Story. It's nice to see the Wii getting more RPGs, given how sparse the system's RPG selection has been so far. (Though the same could be said of every console so far this generation, sadly.)

I know I'm taking the low road and going for the obvious joke, but... With all due respect to a talented man responsible for some of my all-time favorite games, it's a shame his otherwise boundless creativity apparently doesn't extend to names. We've gone from “Final Fantasy” to “The Last Story?” It's as if a group of former Epic Games employees made a game called Clockwork of Strife or Fraudulent Playoffs. I hope the game does well enough to result in more Mistwalker games for the Wii, so that players can enjoy the epic adventure to be had in The Concluding Tale and The Ultimate Confabulation and The Last Weepy, Drunken, Rambling Anecdote Before Falling Off the Bar Stool and Sliding Into an Alcoholic Coma.

The Golden Age

Kotaku has an interesting post about when the original Final Fantasy came to the United States. The roleplaying genre in the United States had been largely confined to computers when Final Fantasy came out. A newspaper article from 1990 featuring Nintendo Spokesman Tom Sarris said the following:

Basically, you can expect something for everybody,'' he said. "One of the most eagerly anticipated titles here is 'Final Fantasy,' which is very, very big in Japan, and that is very much geared to the adult market.''

Final Fantasy is a role playing-adventure fantasy game that will come with two maps and, Sarris said, the biggest instruction manual ever to accompany a Nintendo game — 84 pages long.

I still remember that manual, too. I loved game manuals growing up; at least, I loved the ones that had lots of detail and didn't read like they had been translated by Babelfish from Japanese to Chinese to German back to Japanese to Quenya to ecclesiastical Latin back to Chinese and then to English. If there was a map, or some big chart like the one that came with Dragon Warrior III, I could entertain myself almost indefinitely without bothering to turn the game on.

Now you're lucky if a manual bothers to tell you anything beyond the controls and how the different multiplayer modes work, the answer to both generally being roughly "the same way they work in every other game to come out in the last half-decade." Video game documentation has gained sentences that consistently look like they were written by someone who actually speaks English, but lost its soul.

Final Fantasy being intended for the adult market fits with my experience in elementary school. (As well as explaining anomalies like the repeated occurrence of the word "motherfuckers" in the dialogue of several characters and the game's otherwise inexplicable abundance of references to events from the Eisenhower administration.) I have friends who like RPGs now, but were utterly baffled by my interest in something so "boring" back when we were growing up: turn-based combat, reams of numbers to keep track of, talking to other characters. These were foreign and repugnant concepts to them, like Frenchmen eating snails or the pagan blood rites of some tribe of Stone Age headhunters or the music of Ace of Base.

Final Fantasy spinoff hits Japan in October

Square Enix will be releasing a game called The Four Warriors of Light: A Final Fantasy Anecdote in Japan on October 29 for the Nintendo DS.



I don’t know Japanese, so the game’s official site is impenetrable to me. However, inside sources report that The Four Warriors of Light: A Final Fantasy Anecdote explores a heretofore neglected aspect of Final Fantasy, telling the epic saga of how the heroes of Final Fantasy VII became increasingly desperate for ways to kill time on their many long, tedious airship journeys across the world as they fought to save the planet from Sephiroth. As our heroes struggle to come up with some topic of discussion that hasn’t already been beaten to death in order to ward off boredom during yet another interminable 13-hour flight from the Chocobo Farm to the Gold Saucer, each of them tells the tale of some minor and usually pointless incident from their past.

Players will thrill to Cid Highwind’s seemingly endless stories of times he was an asshole for no reason, hear Tifa’s tragic tale of being bullied in 2nd grade because of her overbite-correcting orthodontic headgear, and get another chilling look into Cloud Strife’s troubled past as he reveals the time the ball return machine got jammed during league play while he was working at his part-time summer job at Nibelheim Lanes Bowling Alley and Children’s Fun Zone. In the stunning climax, Barrett shows everyone his old vacation slides of his trip to Costa del Sol and spends the entire length of an epic 20-minute cut scene ranting about his hotel’s shoddy room service and unreasonably expensive mini-bar.

Admittedly, it’s also possible that “anecdote” is just an awkward translation of “gaiden.” I still think this idea is better.