I’m a winner. January 19, 2012
Posted by potluckbrigand in Uncategorized.Tags: GOG, Syndicate
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I’m a winner!
If you’ve never been to Good Old Games, you should go, because they are awesome. They have tons of classic PC games for less than ten bucks a pop, DRM-free, and (mostly) working on newer operating systems. I’ve been buying stuff from them for a while and it’s been great to revisit old stuff and even better to play games I’d never had the chance to.
This week, they released a game called Syndicate, which I had never heard of. It’s from 1993! I was in third grade! Some of the people I work with hadn’t been born yet!
It sounded fun, but even more fun for me was that they had a contest leading up to the release to… well… I’ll just post the contest rules to give you some context, and then I’ll post one of the winning stories! (I wrote it.)
From GoG.com:
“The legendary Syndicate will take over GOG.com on the 19th of January.
The original sci-fi strategy Syndicate will be released on GOG.com for $5.99 this Thursday. This gritty cyberpunk treasure shows up here with some bonus content: the game manual, dark SF artworks, and avatars.
As you can read in this review Syndicate is “A modern masterpiece. The self-respecting gamer should ensure they have Syndicate nestling snugly on the games shelf as soon as possible.” Follow the wise advice and get Syndicate in just two days for $5.99.
While you’re waiting, we’re having a fun contest to keep you guys occupied until Thursday:
Syndicate is a game set in a grim future. As the world’s multinational corporations grew, their profits began to rival those of small countries. Soon they owned small countries and corporate influence was felt at the highest level of world government. Smaller corporations were swallowed up like plankton in the wake of behemoth mega-corporations.
GOG.com needs your help to take over the world. You and three friends–real or imaginary, past or future–are going to form a team that you’d recommend to us to lead the charge to make GOG.com the world’s biggest Syndicate.
We want to know if you’re up for the challenge.
Mission:
Assemble your team of cyborgs, give us your Team Name, Method of Operation, and any other relevant information you’d like.
Go on, spread your influence across the globe and tell us how.
Bounty:
1 free copy of Syndicate for the 10 posters who have the best Syndicate team. We’ll be reading through all of your posts (Hello, discordiac, our new marketing manager who “volunteered” for this job!) and picking the ones that we like best.”
I stayed up all night to see if I won in the morning (an unexpected and very large bill made it almost impossible for me to actually BUY even a six-dollar game until payday… so even that small prize was worth it), and sure enough, discordiac picked mine as one of the winners.
ENJOY.
“It was the theme of the era. We all lived in a time of “Always-on.” The technocrats at the top knew in the depths of the empty, black holes where most people keep their hearts that if the people weren’t going to protect themselves, then by God they would do it for us.
The Department of Regulated Mechanics had their metal fingers buried in our heads, every one of us. Their own cataloged serial numbers were stamped on the side of every piece of tech that went into any person or animal in America. It allowed them to guarantee our safety, they said… but it also allowed them to keep tabs on us.
Now our world, our culture, and the very zeitgeist we’ve all worked for centuries to build and hone is being held captive, trapped behind a curtain of pixels and black bars.
Robotic eyes refuse to see.
Metal ears refuse to hear.
“Without the express written consent…” emblazons every thoroughfare in every metropolis, psychological and cultural dead zones where our own thoughts aren’t safe from militaristic copyright enforcement. Even our dreams are subject to the iron grip of the DRM.
We’re all forced to live inside the lines, but there are a few of us who have learned to work on the other side of the fence:
The Potluck Brigand – I don’t talk about myself. Individuality went out with anonymity. We are legion, all of us, occasionally for better but usually for worse. I take from the table without offering a thing of my own. Culture bends and changes like a thousand million rays of shining light. Consume until they have no choice but to include us. Until the world is like it was before the DRM, our table will become more and more sparse, drained of its unique brilliance, and no one will add anything new…
Lark – she is the Yin to my Yang, but I don’t love her. The lives we have in this world make such notions impossible. What can two people with no real experiences have in common, other than their lack of experience? Nonetheless, she balances my somewhat nihilistic view of the past and future with stoic optimism. I find myself, more often than not, continuing our crusade for her sake. After all… even an old curmudgeon like me would love to see her future, even if I were to see it through DRM’s mechanical eyes.
Citizen Number 679-83-4222 – His name was Graham when I met him, back in the pre-DRM days. Back when you could talk and share and the wires and skies were full of the free-form ideas of a billion people all hooked into the same free Internet. When the DRM shut down that Internet and began using their technology to govern the way we interacted with each other, he began referring to himself by the Social Security Number the government had attached to him at birth, despite Social Security itself having run out of money decades previously. The government and the DRM wouldn’t let him change his name officially since the number was technically their property.
Demagogue – A true man of the people, the one we call Demagogue espouses the cause of the righteous for all to hear. Liberty. Freedom. Choice. Concepts we’ve all heard of, and some of us are even old enough to remember. He once worked for a successful recording studio and fought on their side, but time and wisdom freed him from his industrialized yoke and he was able to see the terrifying end governmental control was leading us towards. He is the only true orator among our small group… and also the only one I would not trust with my life.
We are called “The Luddites” by our detractors, but that is not who we are.
We love technology. Technology is the only resource we have that will give us any hope to coalesce our collective will into any meaningful action against a corporate world that doesn’t trust its citizenry with their own lives. We fight with our technology, and we are far from alone.
GoG has an entire army of soldiers at their disposal. A thousand faceless, nameless simulacra willing to hoist the banner of freedom and principle over the bloated corpses of the DRM and shout word “Freedom” at the sky. They have the means, certainly, but for all their military might, they lack vision. They lack direction. They lack a plan.
We are the Dreamers.
When guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns. The same is true for ideas. The guns will help us destroy what we hate, but it is OUR ideas and OUR ambition that will help the outlaws rebuild what we love.
And we will free you all. One thought. One idea. One dream at a time.
-taken from the Manifesto of the Dreamers”
I tried to make it as heavy-handed and flowery as I could in keeping with the theme of the sort of Cyberpunk noir style. Apparently I succeeded!
Also, special thanks to my buddy Jeff for reading my original draft and pointing out that I had nowhere in it referenced how my team was going to make GoG the most powerful corporation in the future. I somehow missed that on my first run!
I’ll let you know how I like Syndicate, Internet Friends.
Go play Bastion. July 21, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in Generic Posts.Tags: Bastion, games, xbox 360
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Hey this is just a quick post for once.
Go play Bastion if you’ve got a 360.
I don’t have any jokes.
If you love games that look like moving art and that also play well you’ll enjoy it.
Have a good day, Kid.
NEW! From Software! Or… From From Software? July 19, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in A New Lease.Tags: a new lease on life, armored core, from software, games, michael d. oreilly, mike oreilly, videogames
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We’ll take a much-deserved break from jumping all over SquareEnix for a while. I suppose I had some pent-up bile ready to spew, and in finding so ready an outlet, my targeting functions were impaired.
If I’d only has an FCS with a better ECM resistance, this might not have happened…
Hey! That gives me an idea:
Let’s talk about robots.
Man, I love robots. It seems that everyone who likes fantasy or science fiction has a favorite subject contained in its annals.
I have a couple of friends who love dragons, a friend who’s really into anything orc-related, I’ve known several vampire-freaks (both Twilight and real vampires) and my wife squeals over anything with a unicorn.
For me, it’s robots (or “Mechs” for the uninitiated).
I’ll watch or play anything with robots in it. There’s an important distinction to be made, there, though:
That doesn’t mean I will always LIKE anything with robots in it, just as my dragon-loving friends don’t necessarily like “Reign of Fire” or “Dragon Wars” (although really… what’s not to like?). No matter how bad something looks, though, if it features robots in its box art or synopsis, I’ll give it a try (yeah… I even rented “Robot Jox” once. Let’s not talk about it).
This has led to a few great classics that have endured throughout the years on my shelves, never sitting there long enough to gather dust before I have to pick them up and play again.
This has also led to many (probably more) personal outrages and games that led only to a deep feeling of shame, like having to bail your errant teenage son out of jail (I assume. I don’t have a son and I never asked my dad to bail me out any of the times I was arrested. Don’t worry, they were never able to prove anything). In fact, I probably hold “Front Mission: Evolved,” a release from just last year up as the single most disappointing game I have ever played, despite the fact that it features big robots throughout. NOTE: It’s not the WORST game. From a gameplay perspective it’s perfectly adequate, but its lack of replayability or meaningful multiplayer coupled with its absolutely ABYSMAL length (I played from beginning to end on Normal between lunch and dinner) made it an atrocious misappropriation of my already limited gaming budget for a title I had been so looking forward to from a series and developer I trusted.
And just who was that developer?
…
Go look it up. I said I wasn’t talking about them anymore.
I’m not here to talk about bad robot games, though.
I’m here to talk about what I consider to be the best ones!
…
Well, best on the consoles. I think it would be very hard to look another mech gamer in the eyes and tell them the “MechWarrior” series is not the best ever.
But where “MechWarrior” succeeds as an absolutely superb example of a mech simulator, giving what I can only imagine would be the best possible feeling of really piloting a 100-ton steel behemoth around, punching basketball-sized holes into tanks and other giant robots, “Armored Core” fills the role of the Arcade Shooter.
“Armored Core,” developed since the 1990s by the Japanese company From Software, a company whose pronunciation and inflection of their name continues to elude me, remains one of the most enduring mech combat series in videogame history.
Including the Mobile Phone games released only in Japan (What is it with the Japanese getting awesome mobile phone games while we’re stuck with “Angry Birds”?), there have been 21 games between 1997 and today, with the 22nd (oddly titled “Armored Core 5″) in the works for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Sounds successful, right? And it has been!
In Japan.
Well okay that’s not entirely fair.
While it’s true that the stereotypically robo-obsessed (robsessed?) Japanese have embraced the series better than we are likely ever to, “Armored Core” still enjoys at least a dedicated cult following here in the States (Note: I looked, but I was unable to find solid sales statistics to compare back and forth. It’s possible I’m incorrect about this, but I’m going with my heart). It’s too bad, too. “Armored Core” is not perfect, but when it comes to giving the player the ability to build their own mech from parts they worked to obtain through missions completed as a mercenary AC (short for, well, Armored Core, the titular robots) pilot, or working their way up through the ranks of the elite Arena fighters, Armored Core delivers a unique and entertaining experience that is difficult to duplicate.
Why, then, in an industry dominated by stagnation and repetition, does “Armored Core” fail to achieve mainstream acceptance here?
Well… I think there are a couple reasons for it, and I would be happy to share them with you.
Read on, won’t you?
Simply put (perhaps too simply, but hey I’m no scientist) Americans just don’t seem to care about giant robots.
Unless Shia LeBeouf is running around underfoot like an idiot.
Sometimes people will tell me, “Giant robots are stupid because they’re impractical. We’ll never make effective bipedal war machines because they will always be too easy to knock over compared to a short, wide vehicle with treads that has the same amount of firepower.”
I’m not sure why my friends all seem to have well-reasoned arguments specifically designed to crush my dreams, but I suppose I take friendship where I can get it.
I don’t know why robots have attracted this sort of stigma. I agree from a scientific and tactical viewpoint, they fall flat (get it?) on this point. Yes, something tall with such a high center of gravity and no real way to get itself back up if it falls is never going to replace tanks as our primary source of shooting big holes in things. Nothing that awkwardly-shaped could ever be considered reliable on a battlefield (Hell, I’m amazed on a daily basis that I can even stand up straight, and a giant robot would outweigh me by a factor of about Louie Anderson to one).
I’m okay with that, though! I play games with magic! Monsters! Guys who can take seven thousand bullets in the gut and keep on truckin’! I think I can handle an unrealistic portrayal of the evolution of technological warfare (as long as it’s totally rad).
That’s all secondary, though.
Giant robots may not be as popular as vampires or what have you, but they have their fans here in the U.S. I don’t think that’s really why the “Armored Core” games do poorly here.
Like before, I think it’s hard to pinpoint this without talking about the company behind the games… so that’s what we’re going to do.
“From Software,” the oddly-named Japanese Gaming developer (Maybe they meant to reference the German psychoanalyst but they misspelled it?) has been around since 1986, and are responsible for some of my favorite games.
I’m not going to beat the word “underrated” to death, here, but go ahead and stick it in front of any of the following titles and it will probably fit.
Along with “Armored Core,” they are responsible for “Otogi,” “Tenchu,” “King’s Field,” the horribly under-appreciated “Enchanted Arms,” and of course their massively successful surprise hit “Demon’s Souls,” which is about as good as console Role-Playing gets for me (and, as someone who is really not very good at games, stands as one of my great accomplishments in conquering its MURDEROUS peak). In fact, I think it would be safe to say that “Dark Souls” (the sequel) is my most-anticipated game this year, even over “Catherine,” which is made by the team that made my ABSOLUTE favorite game ever.
But that’s actually a good point, and I think one of the things that drives people away from From Software and into the oft-cold arms of other developers.
In case you couldn’t figure it out, I hold “Persona 4″ up as my favorite game. Despite its pretty standard-fare battle system and relatively uninspired dungeon crawling, not to mention its impossible difficulty level (in keeping with Shin Megami Tensei tradition), its story, characters, voice-acting, and pacing are peerless in their execution, and I have never cared so much about a group of fictional people or been so sad that I finished a game (it took me 95 hours, and I could have gone another 95 easily).
But this article isn’t about “Persona” or Atlus, so why bring them up?
Well, because even though I can’t ever say enough nice things about that game’s story, I also love the stories in “Armored Core,” “Otogi,” and “Demon’s Souls.”
Now, if you’ve played those games, that might sound like a weird thing to say. If you haven’t, then you might not be aware that, for the most part, the stories in those From Software games are, if not non-existent at times, then entirely avoidable and completely secondary to the gaming experience… but that’s what I like about them.
From Software has this weird idea that you don’t need to explain everything to everyone, and you don’t need to beat the player over the head with your story.
If you care to listen, all three of those series have great, engrossing stories happening around you as you play, and I think that’s what makes them so immersive. It gives you the distinct feeling of being part of the world you inhabit. The world does not exist for you or revolve around you… it lives parallel to you, and you’d better get in line or it’s going to go right past you.
Specifically, “Armored Core” is, by and large, the story (or stories) of a future ruled by rival corporations. Throughout the course of the series, corporations come and go, and every few games the ongoing plot is ditched in favor of a fresh start (for example, “Armored Core 1,” “Project Phantasma,” and “Master of Arena” all follow the same story and characters, but “Armored Core 2,” the next game in the series, has all new locations and corporations).
The player plays as a mercenary AC pilot working for a whole guild of mercs that assign soldiers to jobs offered by the mega-corporations (or other third parties), and that’s where the immersion comes in. By being able to pick and choose who you work for you shift the balance of power one way or the other and affect the course of events in the world, and as you progress you will get different assignments depending on who’s in power (largely thanks to your efforts).
It really demonstrates the difference between player-driven and writer-driven story telling. There’s nothing wrong with either one. “Persona 4″ was a largely linear game, at least as far as the main plot was concerned, but I still love the hell out of it.
From Software has demonstrated an affinity for this non-linear flow of information (and indeed almost entirely skippable in most cases), and I think their sales and mainstream acceptance have suffered for it here in America.
From Software’s average Metacritic score (going back to 2000 when the records begin) is 64, which is not great. Even some of the “Armored Core” games haven’t done well, with “Armored Core 3″ on the Sony PSP pulling in a 43, which is pretty awful (and not entirely undeserved).
In fact,”Armored Core” itself, as a series, only has an average score of 65, which is barely better than the company as a whole, and like anyone, I can’t say in good conscience that anything made by them is a safe bet. I personally don’t care much for “King’s Field,” and despite its popularity and (I think) originality, all of the “Tenchu” games I’ve played have been plagued by some awkward controls, lame AI, and confusing map structure.
But, especially if you like big robots, I can heartily recommend the games in the “Armored Core” series. If you want to build and battle giant steel monsters there’s really no better place to go on the consoles. I can even recommend the newer “Armored Core 4″ and “AC4:For Answer,” another oddly-titled product from the company that LOVES their prepositions. They mixed up the style and controls quite a bit for the newer games, making the whole thing much faster and more arcade-y than ever. It might look like a betrayal to the series at first, but stick with it and maybe it will grow on you (although good luck beating “For Answer.” The last few missions in that one were nightmares for me).
Try them out, and while you’re trying new things, play “Demon’s Souls” and, if you’ve got an original Xbox or a 360 (I think it’s compatible. You’ll have to check, Internet Friend) check out Otogi and Otogi 2.
I like robots, and I hope you do too.
—–
If you like robots like I do, chances are you’ve got some time on your hands, so drop me a line. We’ll talk about robots, and other things.
-Mike
What if Final Fantasy VIII had been good? July 13, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in What if?.Tags: a new lease on life, final fantasy viii, games, michael d. oreilly, mike oreilly, squareenix, videogames
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Okay, okay. If you’ve bothered to read my other posts, you’re probably getting the idea that I intend to harp on Square and no one else.
This isn’t true, but I will forgive you, Internet Friend, for thinking that. There’s certainly enough evidence to support it.
I promise this will be the last Square-related article for a while, but much of my impetus for this Weblog stems from my love of gaming, which was largely spawned from my interactions with Square’s lineup of Playstation-era RPGs. Final Fantasy VII showed me what it was like for the first time to enjoy a game as much for its story as its gameplay. Growing up with Mario and Sonic, while without a doubt incredible games that are still enjoyable to this day (on lazy Saturdays, my old roommate and I would crank up his SNES and just play through Mario World, making sure to hit all the secret levels we could remember), never before had I seen true integration of thematic elements into my gaming experience. It was a new frontier of interactivity that immediately struck a chord with me.
From then on, I knew I was a gamer.
Before, I had played games. They were fun, certainly (I had a friend who had the Sega Channel. How sweet was that thing?), but I had never noticed the great untapped potential that existed in that now-primitive little grey box.
I wanted more!
From there, I went on to other Playstation RPGs, and tried to play the old SNES games that were supposed to be awesome (I’m embarrassed to admit this now as an adult, but I remember trying Final Fantasy III and being unimpressed, put off by what I thought was a too-steep difficulty). I remember trying Breath of Fire 3 and Suikoden and enjoying them both very much (in fact, I may talk about Suikoden sometime. Does anyone play those games?), but in 1999 I experienced something new in my gaming life:
Anticipation.
I had never had a reason to look forward to a game until I heard about Final Fantasy VIII, the sequel to the game that GOT me into gaming.
It was the first game I ever pre-ordered, and I remember my mom actually took the day off of work to go down and pick it up for me (I still had to go to school, but the gesture was not lost on me. Thanks, mom!).
When I got home I opened it up and popped it in, prepared to lose myself for days in it, and you know what…
I loved it. I really did.
My somewhat inflammatory title for this article might have led you to believe that FFVIII is not a good game, and… well you’re partially right.
I loved FFVIII, and I still love it. I played all the way through it last year for what was probably the fourth time, but as the years go by and I am able to look at it through the eyes of an adult, it becomes more and more obvious that, sadly, it’s actually not a very good game.
It’s classic in a campy sort of way, with its angsty protagonist, insane story, bizarre characterizations and frankly one of the WORST plot-twists in history, not to mention the (subjectively) worthless romantic lead being alternately uninteresting and in the way pretty much throughout.
I suppose I should stop now and say this:
THIS ARTICLE WILL CONTAIN MASSIVE SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME, SERIOUSLY, MAN WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!? BUT I WILL SPOIL THE HECK OUT OF THIS GAME, BE THEE SO WARNED.
Our lawyers insisted I say that before I talked about a game that came out twelve years ago, so there you go.
Something occurred to me the other day, though, and I thought I would share it with the world (or at least, the 40 or so people that have read my blog. Hey, hope you guys are coming back. Tell your friends, huh?).
What if Final Fantasy VIII hadn’t been stupid?
In thinking about that question, I fell down in the shower and hit my head on the sink, and it came to me in a flash:
It’s already not stupid… it just hasn’t accepted it yet.
Dig this:
Final Fantasy VIII isn’t the story of a bunch of kids (the majority of the cast is technically underage. Not old enough to smoke, but old enough to travel to the ends of the earth alone and go into SPACE) saving the world. Not REALLY.
Final Fantasy VIII is essentially one of those Japanese High School dramas, with just a touch of harem anime, and on those fronts it actually succeeds.
I will attempt to break down my thoughts, and tell me you don’t agree with me. I DARE YOU.
1. THE CHARACTERS
This is the best part, because the characters you need for one of these stories are already present. Allow me to elaborate:
SQUALL – The brooding main character.
These games/series usually have two kinds of male protagonists: there are the good-natured, happy and usually innocent everyman that the male audience is supposed to identify with, creating embarrassing situations for himself in front of the girl he’s got a crush on, or allowing his best friend to get him into trouble. Counter to those, there are the dark, moody antiheroes who use their own emotional distance as a crutch and an excuse to be rude to people that clearly just want to help them. Deep down, they might mean well, they just don’t know how to express themselves and they need the new, cute and improbably interested transfer student to help them out of their shell.
Oddly enough, this character is also meant to identify with the male audience, because I guess a lot of teenagers feel like no one understands them. Who knew?
RINOA – The perky and forthcoming transfer student.
Rinoa actually took me a while to figure out, because at first it seemed like she was completely ancillary to the story. I thought about writing her out entirely, but then I remembered the strange Japanese obsession with transfer students (at least in their media and entertainment). Think about it… isn’t there ALWAYS one? This person (boy or girl) usually shows up early on in the series (or game) and makes quick friends with the protagonists, and even the stony-faced main character can’t help but be interested. What are these strange feelings I’m having? Etcetera.
Rinoa would be essentially the same character she already is, minus the Forest Owls thing and the whole “possessed by the sorceress” plot… so uh… wait what does that leave her with? Hmm…
We’ll come back to this. It’ll be important, I’m sure.
ZELL – The bumbling sidekick.
This one is pretty straightforward. Zell DINCHT (God, really?) is the athletic, loyal, but somewhat simple-minded friend of the protagonist. In the beginning, Squall resents and rejects his… uh… “advances,” but in the end, is convinced of his sincerity.
QUISTIS – Senpai, secret crush.
The older, better student, Quistis has put school first her whole life and, as a result, doesn’t know how to reconcile her feelings for the younger Squall, who never reciprocates. I would ditch the whole “teacher” aspect of her character, as I always thought it was somewhat unreasonable that, at only a year older than the rest of the gang, the school saw fit to instate her as a member of staff. Also, it never really comes into play after the first couple of hours into the game, so we wouldn’t be losing much by losing it. Instead, I say make her the Student Body President. That position always seems important in anime and videogames, and it would explain why she would have a fan club.
SELPHIE – Special Education?
Okay, that’s not fair. Selphie isn’t stupid… not really. Like Zell, she’s simple-minded, but where Zell excels at physical activity, Selphie is more drawn towards other extra-curriculars, which manifest themselves in her obsession with the School Festival. Hey… there’s pretty much always one of those festivals in Japanese games and shows at some point. Again, it seems to be a big cultural thing. Selphie would fit as a friend to the Student Body President because of her interest in school business, which Quistis would likely find admirable.
IRVINE – The scumbag womanizer.
Irvine had an interesting arc for me in the original game. Or, I guess it’s not so much that he had an arc… more so that I had an arc in my shifting affection for him. I absolutely hated him at first, with his stupid turd-box hat and lackadaisical attitude towards casual sexual harassment (funny note: I initially misspelled “lackadaisical,” and spellcheck recommended “neoclassical.” That’s not even close), and he didn’t help matters with the whole “choking at the last moment” fiasco at the end of disc 1. As time went by, he sort of grew on me, though. He was clearly a man with a strong desire to make himself appear to be tougher than he actually was while he actually held a surprisingly deep intellect. He often acted as an unexpected voice of reason, and I think I saw something a little more interesting in his character than most people I’ve talked to. That said, his character wouldn’t change much in my new FFVIII. He’s not really essential to the plot in any meaningful way, but his presence balances the main cast with three boys and three girls, so he can stay.
SEIFER, FUJIN, RAIJIN -
Okay. I should have said this first. RULE #1: More Fujin and Raijin. Their importance in the story was actually pretty downplayed, I thought, or if not their importance to the actual story, then their importance to Seifer himself, who is the only character that exists as an antagonist for the entirety of the game. Sorceresses come and go, but Seifer’s there from the word “go.”
Towards the end, before the final showdown with Seifer, who spends the entire game getting the ever-loving hell beaten out of him, Fujin finally admits that in reality, they know he’s out of control, and maybe deep down he even knows it, but they had to support him because not only are they his friends, they’re his ONLY friends. That’s heartbreaking! What’s even funnier to me about that is that, at least at the beginning of the story, Squall had EXACTLY ZERO people who would have been willing to do that for him, so even as big of a jerk as he was at all times, Seifer might still be considered more of a successful human being.
Seifer and his cronies fill the typical role of school bullies or perhaps rivals in a club. Actually, I like rivals better. It fits better with the two of them sword fighting in the beginning. Maybe they’re in the Gunblade Kendo club? Whatever. I’m not the writer.
CID, EDEA, KIROS, WARD – The Funky Faculty
Headmaster Cid, Edea (who is not, in my version, a sorceress. More on that soon), Kiros, and Ward (the older versions who work with Laguna in Esthar) would all make acceptable faculty members without much change to their characters. The subjects they teach wouldn’t really matter, either, but there’s no sense in coming up with all new characters when the ones we have will suit the situation just fine.
So those are our characters. As I said, most of them already fit neatly into well-established and time-worn Japanese archetypes, and would require very little if any refining to make my new story work.
PART 2 – What could laughingly be referred to as the Story.
So what would I do with the story of Final Fantasy VIII once I’ve got those characters worked out? I’ll tell you.
THROW IT OUT.
By and large, I don’t think high-schoolers should be saving the world, or at least, if they are, they shouldn’t be taking the train to do it.
Games like the incredible Persona series work for me in that regard, because the threat is closer to home, and more tangible, so it makes sense to me that the hometown heroes would decide to go out and get the job done themselves.
In Final Fantasy VIII, they establish that there is an entire force of soldiers (called SeeDs if you didn’t know) whose job it is to take care of things like this, and they decide the best course of action is to send the three newest (and I remind you underage) members out to take care of business.
Okay, yes I know that the quest isn’t initially to Save the World, but it IS to assist a RESISTANCE MOVEMENT in OVERTHROWING A GOVERNMENT, or at least, to establish that country’s independence. You know what I was doing when I was seventeen? PLAYING FINAL FANTASY.
That mission fairly quickly turns into a POLITICAL ASSASSINATION, which, I remind you, was to be carried out by a complete virgin. They send the completely green team out to meet up with the completely green sniper who has never shot anyone and shoot an all-powerful sorceress, which could affect the outcome of the ENTIRE WORLD’S future (indeed, this is what causes Irvine to choke).
I’ll go ahead and stop there, because it doesn’t really get any better for the rest of the game, and Time Compression isn’t even the dumbest thing that happens. Chances are, if you’re bothering to read this, you know what happens, and you want to know what would have fixed it.
So we’ve gotten rid of the plot. The prison, the floating city, nukes, sorceresses, comatose piggy-back rides… what’s left? If I get rid of EVERYTHING then there’s not really a point to this article. It’d be like saying “Well Suckerpunch would have been great if only it didn’t have any of the things that were in it and it was instead about seven samurai who join forces to save a village being attacked by bandits.” Yeah I’d be RIGHT, but so what?
Okay. If you’ve played FFVIII and, more importantly, you’ve talked to other people about what they didn’t like in the game, I am about to blow your mind.
Ready?
STORY – Make it about Ellone, Laguna, and Raine.
A good Japanese teen drama needs a personal story, and despite the fact that we all live there, saving the world is not very personal. Now, a girl with unexplainable magic powers that allow her to send people back in time psychically to influence the lives of people she was close to? That’s personal, and it’s actually pretty interesting on its own.
Sure, it played out kinda lousy in the game that was released, and once we knew what was going on, we’d lost interest because we knew it wasn’t important to the story. It was just an inconvenience.
But why Ellone, and more importantly, why Squall et al?
I’m sorry to do this to you so soon after blowing your mind once, but brace yourself.
Yes, I am here complaining about the unreasonable plot and how ridiculous some (most) of the events contained therein are, but I am now going to say, contrary to all popular opinion…
KEEP THE ORPHANAGE SUB-PLOT.
…
That actually kind of hurt to type.
Easily one of the most idiotic plot twists in videogame history, for those that might not remember (I wouldn’t blame you for blocking it out), it turns out that five out of six of your main characters all grew up in the same orphanage, which was run by the school’s headmaster, his wife (who turns out to be the sorceress Edea despite no previous mention of the relationship), and a slightly older girl named Ellone.
Now, in and of itself, that’s not terrible, except that it comes out of nowhere, and no one involved remembers ANY of it until it is convenient to the plot for them to do so.
Oh don’t worry, though. They explain it.
The magic monsters they’ve been sticking in their heads the whole game have janked up their memories, and deleted ONLY the part that makes them remember their childhood or where they grew up. Well, all of them except Irvine. He remembered. He just thought it was weird that no one else seemed to remember, so HE NEVER MENTIONED IT AT ALL.
He hit on the girls that he went to primary school with relentlessly, despite the fact that they very eerily didn’t seem to remember him whatsoever. Creeper.
I think it would be fair to say that the Orphanage subplot is widely regarded as one of the dumbest (not to mention unnecessary) plot twists ever… but IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE.
Here’s my idea:
Take the orphanage, and replace Cid and Edea with Laguna and Raine.
Laguna and Raine, who shared a mutual but unspoken love for each other, ran an orphanage with the help of their (or maybe just Raine’s) adopted daughter Ellone, a precocious but earnest young girl who acts as older sister to young Squall, Selphie, Zell, Quistis, and Irvine. It’s worth mentioning that rather than being on an island out in the middle of the ocean, the orphanage would probably be nearer to Balamb. Doesn’t make any sense for it to be out there anyway. It’s not a wildlife sanctuary.
One day, a couple years after all of the children had gone to live in the dormitories of the Balamb Garden Boarding School, Laguna finally gets the nerve, now that they’re alone (save for Raine’s almost grown adopted daughter), to confess his love for Raine, and she admits that she feels the same.
They begin talking of marriage, but Raine tragically falls ill and dies not long after, cutting their relationship short and leaving Laguna and Ellone alone together in the empty orphanage.
A couple years later, Ellone and the caring but ultimately heartbroken Laguna go their separate ways. Ellone is out of High School and says she wants to start her own life. Laguna wishes her well and is left finally and ultimately alone.
Unbeknownst to anyone but herself, Ellone’s love and strong desire to see those she loves happy have manifested themselves into strange psychic powers… namely the exact power she has in the game: the ability to send people telepathically back in time into the bodies of people she cares about.
She decides finally (and resolutely) to approach Squall and the gang and ask them for her help. Growing up in the orphanage with them, they are the only ones she has a close enough bond with to make her plan work: Take them back into the bodies of Laguna and Raine and try to make them confess their love for each other earlier in their lives.
The player would have to play through earlier periods in each character’s life, including Laguna’s military life, in an effort to make things better for them both, and give them more time to be together and be happy before what would still ultimately be a tragic end.
Squall and friends would happily agree considering everything Laguna and Raine sacrificed for them all for so many years, and so Final Fantasy VIII would be split between these flashback events and the day-to-day lives of the students themselves as they try to keep their plan a secret from the faculty and the disciplinary committee (Seifer and gang, if you don’t remember).
In the end, they would be successful, with the unexpected result being that Laguna and Raine enjoyed many happy years together, but at the expense of their relationships with the children, who are never brought to the now non-existent orphanage. The children sacrifice their own childhoods and relationships with each other to bring happiness to the two people that made their lives good for so many years.
…Or they would…
Except for the Transfer Student, who inexplicably remembers both timelines.
In a scene that mirrors the one from the game where Irvine explains how they all know each other (except Rinoa), Rinoa herself would convince them all what had actually happened (Somehow. I dunno. I’m not the writer), and they would all realize the truth, and begin remembering themselves (Magically. Whatever. I keep telling you, I’m not the wirter).
The final shot of the game would be a grown Ellone opening a card that has a mysterious picture of five small children holding hands and standing in the surf, smiling at the camera with the words “With Love – Everyone.”
—
Come on… That’s beautiful!
So keep the characters, keep the worst parts of the story, and Final Fantasy VIII could have been one of the most interesting and divergent games in the whole series. Put Nobuo on it and get some really sad music for the touching scenes and…
Dang.
I wish I had played this instead of writing about it.
Agree? Disagree? Let’s talk about it.
I don’t agree with most of what he says about FFVIII, but that doesn’t mean he ain’t right – The Spoony Experiment
This guy not only beat me to it, he did it better! – Squall’s Dead
The SaGa of Final Fantasy Legend July 13, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in A New Lease.Tags: a new lease on life, games, michael d. oreilly, mike oreilly, saga frontier, square, squareenix, videogames
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Square again.
Sorry if they’re already overstaying their welcome here, but upon re-reading (and editing. I really need to read my posts before I publish them) my article about Nier, I realized I spent just as much time talking about the company that made it as I did talking about the game itself, and, if you’ll remember, I didn’t have many good things to say about their recent performance as a purveyor of digital entertainment.
In discussing my views on the subject of their games, both contemporary and arcane, I recognized a flaw in my comparative logic:
I was talking about an new and relatively fresh intellectual property, and one that had no real expectations beyond the company logo. In fact, something I didn’t mention (because I admittedly didn’t know until about five minutes ago) was that Nier was developed by much of the same team responsible for Drakengard, which stands as one of the first signs to me that Square was beginning a downhill roll.
But prior to talking about this fresh I.P., I was only referencing Square’s former excellence by citing THE BIGS.
You’ve got your Final Fantasies. You’ve got your Secrets of Mana. Your Crono Triggers. Big names, big games. Of course Square used to be awesome… they made Final Fantasy III! (Sorry, gang. I’m American, so i call it 3, not 6. Don’t worry about correcting me. I know. You can call it 6 if you want. I won’t hassle you for it. That’s why we’re Internet Friends.) How can I compare their new, relatively unknown stuff to their old heavy hitters?
Well, there’s more to it than that.
I mentioned that Square had the occasional miss, even back then, but the point I failed to make was that the vast majority of their releases, even the smaller ones developed by their secondary teams (apparently they have ten teams now, which actually makes me a little sadder since it seems like none of them can produce consistent quality products) were great titles, ones I would even call classics.
Games like Einhander, Threads of Fate, and the Bushido Blade series acted like the mortar between the bricks of a mostly spectacular lineup that kept us all going throughout the 1990′s.
Don’t think I forgot about Xenogears, either. That game holds a permanent place on my top ten list across all the years and all the platforms, and I honestly don’t think I’d be the gamer I am today without that one. You likely won’t hear me talk much about it here, since the whole point of “A New Lease” is to talk about games that were poorly reviewed or that no one played, and Xenogears is neither of those (an 84 Metacritic score, while lower than I would personally like, makes it mostly exempt from my long-winded praises).
My point is, while today it seems that SquareEnix can’t even make good sequels to The Bigs, back in MY day it seemed like everything they touched turned to gold, even tiny little projects that wore the badge of a producer’s pet project.
That having been said, I was gearing up to write an article of one of my other favorite Playstation-era games that it seemed like no one but me and my buddy Sloth ever played: SaGa Frontier.
This time, not wishing to go in utterly unprepared in the facts department as I did last time, I decided to do some actual research before I started talking about what I thought was a wonderful and wholly under-appreciated RPG, so I hit Wikipedia (it counts) and typed in “saga frontier.”
I think my jaw might have actually hit the floor. If not the floor, then at least the table I’m sitting at.
SaGa Frontier, one of my most favorite of Square’s I.P.s and a unique gem that seemed to come out of nowhere…
Was the seventh game in the series.
Now, as an American gamer, that’s not really that surprising. Japanese games go unreleased stateside all the time (See the “Final Fantasy III vs. Final Fantasy VI” debate referenced above), so learning that there were earlier games in the series, let alone six of them was not, in itself, especially shocking, but when I clicked the link to the “List of games in the SaGa series,” I was surprised to see that the first game listed in the series was “Final Fantasy Legend,” followed by the second and third iterations using the same title.
SaGa Frontier, rather than being a game in its own unique universe apart from The Bigs, was actually directly related to The Biggest. King Big. SaGa Frontier was basically Final Fantasy’s first cousin.
For those who don’t know (I didn’t), the Final Fantasy Legend series of games were on the original Gameboy in all of its yellow and black glory, and while they did share the name (in America, at least) they didn’t have a whole lot in common with the core series (in fact, according the Wikipedia, the name was only changed to Final Fantasy to improve marketability), and as kids, we weren’t especially picky about the mechanics that were brought over. We just cared about all the things that had already made Final Fantasy so great! We just wanted to see our Black Mages (there weren’t any), quest for the Crystals (there weren’t any), and ride Chocobos (Wark)!
Okay, so maybe Final Fantasy Legend had basically nothing to do with the games we already loved, so if anything, it seemed like changing the name HURT the marketability of the game to fans of the series, but taken on their own, the Legend games were pretty good. The first two introduced me to the idea of leveling my characters based on my actions rather than an arbitrary experience point system, which I found out recently (okay, just now) was lifted directly from the Japanese Final Fantasy II, but since that game wasn’t released in the States until the late 90′s in a bundle for the Playstation, it was new to us and seemed very original.
The SaGa series continued on the Super Famicom (Japanese Super NES) with the Romancing SaGa games one, two and three. All of them were much loved on the other side of the Pacific if Wikipedia is to be believed, but they never saw releases over here (well… sort of. More on that later), so I can’t attest to their quality from personal experience.
So in or around 1998, I picked up what was apparently the fourth game in the series that had been released over here, but the first actually bearing the “SaGa” name, with its watercolor cover that looked like it was painted by someone doing his best Amano impression (with relative success, I thought).
The game doesn’t make a great first impression. The music, while well-composed, sounds somewhat tinny at times through the Playstation’s sound processor, and while the backgrounds are satisfactorily rendered, they make the low-res sprites look pretty lousy by comparison. This game was made in that era of games where fully-rendered character models were still not fully practical, but in the interest of saving time (I assume), sprites would be made by generating a 3D model and then photographing it from various angles and using those photographs as 2D images to build your standard 8-sided sprite out of. Did that make sense? I guess it’s a little hard to explain. The backgrounds, by and large, are the same. 3D-rendered snapshots that make up the pre-rendered backgrounds. This isn’t really a problem, I suppose. It doesn’t detract from any of the fun I had with the game, but I’m left wanting more in the visual department. More paintings would not have gone astray, as they generally look more impressive, especially if the shot is just going to be static anyway.
Don’t think I don’t understand. I do! This method is cheaper, and when Square assigns what is effectively the B-Team to a project (I don’t mean that mean that as a pejorative. I just mean they didn’t put the Final Fantasy VII team on this one, is all) they probably aren’t giving them the time or money necessary to turn out a project of overwhelming technical quality.
Still, the first thing you see after selecting “New Game” is a screen where each of the seven protagonists are sitting idly by, waiting for you to pick which one you’ll play as, and your first reaction (and the correct one) has to be: “Wow. Seven different protagonists? That seems like a lot.”
Well… it is! That is a lot of protagonists, and no doubt about it. Each character represents their own unique and separate storyline that all exist parallel to each other in the same world, sometimes interacting and intertwining with each other. In fact, some of the seven main characters are actually attainable party members for the other characters, which is kind of a nice touch. Lute, for example, has perhaps the shortest and most basic campaign of any of the main characters, but he can be recruited by almost everyone, giving me the impression that he really is just some kind of globe-trotting minstrel who’s looking for adventure (Hint: He is. That’s not really a spoiler. About twenty minutes into his campaign the captain of the ship he’s on basically says “We need to kill this big bad. You in, Champ?” and Lute just goes with it).
Actually, one of my favorite characters you can recruit as a party member is Rouge, the brother of Blue, who is one of the protagonists and his main antagonist. It really gives you a feeling of involvement in the world around your characters, and there are a ton of them you can recruit aside from the mains.
Each game has a maximum of 15 characters you can put in your party, and while some of them are universal, like the drunken swordsman Gen, who is easily one of the best characters available (“He just cut through a rope with a steel pipe!”), each campaign also has its own unique members that are related directly to the story you are going through, so it provides a great balance between old standards that you’ll try to recruit in each play-through and entertaining, unique personalities to keep you interested in what’s going on.
The variety of environments, stories, and characters gives the whole game a very open-ended feel, which apparently was the idea, and indeed one of the major themes throughout the entire SaGa series. Where Final Fantasy was intended as a linear, story-driven series, SaGa provided the reflection of that ideal, comprising many disparate narrative threads to create the story of a world, rather than a person (or small group of people). In fact, I never thought about it until just now, but I don’t think you ever save the world in any of the SaGa Frontier campaigns. Each has a big final boss, sure, but to the best of my recollection, none of them are especially world-threatening. No giant Meteors or (God forbid) Time-Compression. There’s nothing wrong with those things (well… not meteors anyway), but it’s nice to engage in a different type of Role-Playing experience.
As far as gameplay is concerned, I always enjoyed the battle system quite a lot, even if it is REALLY hard at times.
Each character can equip different sets of items based on their race (Human, Mystic, Half-Mystic, Robot, or Monster) and each race has their own unique sets of abilities and skills so you can balance your battle team of five however you see fit. What’s that you say? You want to know what my team was? Well, depending on the protagonist, there would, as stated, be different characters available, but usually…
FIVE ROBOTS.
You could also further customize your Human and Mystic characters by going on INCREDIBLY challenging and rewarding quests to unlock the various opposing forces of magic to augment your party or individual characters however you you want. Runes and Arcane Tarot, Light and Shadow, Time and Space… with only one exception, none of the characters were REQUIRED to complete these ordeals, but doing so not only expanded your experiences in the world of The Regions (which I just found out is what the universe of SaGa is called), but will also further the impression that your own open-ended experiences are contributing to, if not the world, at least your own characters’ progression.
Even further, while most Human characters can equip and use MOST magicks and weapons, they all have distinct affinities for one thing or another, and exploring these, complimenting them (or defying them for even MORE challenge) makes this deep game even deeper.
The SaGa series never really seemed to take off in America, and I was actually surprised to learn of its illustrious past in Japan. In fact, even though I have yet to meet a single person apart from myself and Sloth who have played the game, SaGa Frontier sold over a million copies, and ended up being the 15th best selling game ever released for the Playstation. Further, according to Wikipedia, it was voted the 18th best Playstation game of all time by the editors of Famitsu, which is, if you don’t know, THE Japanese gaming magazine, at least as far as we’re concerned here in the West.
It was followed up here by SaGa Frontier 2, which I honestly didn’t play much. The visuals in that game were beautiful, but the gameplay never drew me in. I don’t really remember why. As we speak, there is a copy on its way to me via Amazon (I ordered it about halfway through writing this), so I will attempt to give it another honest try and let you know.
After that one came Unlimited Saga for the Playstation 2.
I played this one and hated it. I honestly can’t say I remember much about it, either, so my opinion won’t be much help. The battle system was like a slot machine or something and you didn’t really explore… it was like a boardgame… I don’t know. I keenly remember not having fun.
The only other one to be released in the States was simply called Romancing SaGa for the Playstation 2. It was a full 3D remake of the Super Famicom game of the same name. I actually own this game, but haven’t played it more than a few minutes. First impressions were not great, with very odd character designs pervading throughout.
Like I said, though, SaGa Frontier had pretty poor first impressions, and it became a standout hit for me in an era of incredible games. Overshadowed perhaps by Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears, and Crono Cross, it still has a place of honor on my shelf next to The Bigs.
I’ll probably try to play Romancing SaGa again. Supposedly it’s similar to Frontier in its open-ended story and game progression, so I’ll take a look at it more seriously and get back to you. It has a Metacritic score of 58, but I’ve loved lower-reviewed games than that.
Disagree with me? Let me know! We’ll talk about videogames.
Agree with me? Let me know! We’ll have a party.
A NIER miss. The story of the little Square game that couldn’t. July 11, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in A New Lease.Tags: a new lease on life, enix, michael d. oreilly, mike oreilly, nier, square, squareenix, videogames
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I thought it fitting that I start this online odyssey (Onlidyssey?) with a game from the company that fills me with more mixed feelings than any other.
SquareEnix, formerly known as Square (and, I suppose, Enix) is one of the oldest and enduring companies in the videogame business. They were (and are) responsible for Final Fantasy, undoubtedly their most iconic and popular series, which is funny still because I once heard that the title that many people make fun of (“How can it be ‘final’ if there are fourteen of them? Hurr hurr.”) was thought up because the company was close to going under, and the developer thought that the original Final Fantasy would actually be their last game ever produced.
It’s a romantic story considering their success with that game and their broad dominance of the JRPG genre that followed in its wake and arguably continues to this day. I don’t know if it is, in fact, true (you have the internet, friend. Go look it up for me, would you?), but it sets the stage for a great rags to riches story.
Sorry, I suppose I should be more specific. I am referring to the Square (sometimes Squaresoft) half of SquareEnix, who were responsible for Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, Crono Trigger, and Front Mission, some of the most highly-regarded classics of a bygone age, and still respected and played to this day by fans worldwide.
Hold on…
I’m getting word from upstairs that no one but me likes Front Mission.
…
UNDISPUTED CLASSICS, ALL. I’m on the Internet. That makes it gospel.
But I get the distinct impression that modern gamers have all but forgotten about the latter half of SquareEnix’s namesake: Enix. A great company in their own right, they never gained the popularity and status that Square enjoyed (stateside, at least), but with classics like Dragon Warrior (or Quest, if you’re nasty), Star Ocean, and Valkyrie Profile, they were able to establish their own place in the Role-Playing zeitgeist by putting out consistently good games to entertain and delight a market that was hungry for as many Japanese games they could get their hands on.
Still, they were no Square, at least as far as my friends and I were concerned. I remember keenly how we would read about a new game on the horizon, and simply the presence of that “SQUARE” logo was enough to get us interested. Sure, they weren’t ALL destined to be classics (I don’t personally have many fond memories of Vagrant Story, for example, though I know some people do), but Square had achieved that status where the mere mention of their name would conjure all of the energized anticipation that had previously only been reserved for Christmas morning. We were too old for that anyway. We were teenagers. We had GAMES to play.
So why the elaborate framing story? I’m just shy of five hundred words and I haven’t even mentioned what I came here to talk about tonight with my Internet Friends (I have decided your title deserves capitalization henceforth). Well, hold on to your butts. That was just the introduction. The idyllic origin story of childhood bliss that gave way in time to a jaded adult that spends most of his time in front of one box or another, trying to eke out a stream of entertainment to keep from quitting his job and burying himself in a hole.
Okay, perhaps I’m exaggerating somewhat. I have declared after all that I love videogames, and how important they are to me, and one company can’t ruin that, no matter how hard they seem to be trying.
But if my teenage obsession with Square was like the opening scenes in Hobbiton, fireworks and all, then SquareEnix represents the Black Riders, coming on wicked steeds to wreck my day.
Their list of releases on Wikipedia reads almost like a rap sheet, with most of the bright spots being the (metaphorically) innumerable ports and re-releases of their old classics, which should be pretty telling on its own. My two favorite videogame companies came together to form a single entity, and I assumed it would be a singularity of awesome that combined all of the best things of the best games and ushered in a new age of enlightenment and joy. Re-reading that sentence, it is entirely impossible that my expectations may have been a little too high, but come on… Drakengard? Star Ocean: Till the End of Time? Final Fantasy X-2!? Square had turned from the company whose announcements made me squeal with childlike delight and exclaim, “Ooh! What are they doing now!?” to the company that made me roll my eyes and say, “Ugh. What are they doing now?”
Now, obviously you can tell from the last few paragraphs that I am not a fan of hyperbole (cough), and don’t let it be said that EVERYTHING they make now and for the last few years has been unadulterated crap. Final Fantasy XII was, I thought, actually very good. I know general opinion is somewhat split on that game, and I actually passed it over for a long time because I played the HORRIBLE demo and wanted nothing to do with it. Once I got it, though, I was glad I did. There’s a lot to enjoy in that game. Valkyrie Profile 2 was another one I liked a lot. The companies I loved are in there, somewhere. Some of them still know what they’re doing.
The fact remains, however, that not only do I not especially look forward to new SquareEnix releases, I don’t even bother to follow them anymore. Going back to the idea of Market Saturation (I capitalize it because it is important to me), I’ve simply stopped making the time to look at their upcoming games in the collective shadow of the great new productions that hit shelves every month.
Or, if you’re someone who has a more pessimistic attitude about the gaming industry, they get swept away in an ocean of bland, repetitive crap that makes up 99% of the games that come out these days. (NOTE: please adjust that percentage depending on just how pessimistic you are. I’d hate for you to feel like you need to lock yourself into my numbers.)
This (finally) brings me to the point of this post.
I had long since stopped following Square’s contributions to the community at large, but while surfing this great Internet of ours, I happened across Gamespot’s review of a new game called “Nier” (pronounced, I assume, “NEEEEEEEYURRRRR”), brought to us by none other than our old friends SquareEnix. Gamespot gave it 5.0 out of 10 possible points which, if you’re unfamiliar with the scoring system, is pretty lousy. They assigned it the demerits “Gratuitous Swearing,” “Too Easy,” and “Weak Story.” In the section where they list the good things about the game one of the items was “Some cool camera transitions,” which I actually found genuinely funny. I’m not sure how hard to have to be looking for good things before you give up and say “Well, uh… their camera angles are pretty solid.”
Now please don’t think I am trying to pick a fight with Gamespot or that I am prepared to talk at length about how “wrong they are” and how they “don’t know what they’re doing.” The opinions expressed by the writer of that review are theirs to have, and I would not pretend to be in a position to deny them that, even if I am on the Internet. Opinions can’t be wrong, but I can disagree with them… and frequently do.
That’s neither here nor there yet, though.
Gamespot was not alone. Theirs was perhaps lower than average, but Nier pulled in a 67 or 68 (depending on which system you played it on) on Metacritic.com, which I think would be fair to say is pretty unfavorable. At the very least, it could be said that the consensus was that Nier was an unremarkable game, destined perhaps for the bargain bin and future obscurity.
Square had, it seemed, swung and missed once again.
I thought little of it after that. I am always willing to let a publisher or developer surprise me, but in this case I was content to let this one pass me by. I had no disappointment left to give SquareEnix.
Months later found me in an all-too-familiar setting: Wandering amongst the racks of games at my local Specialty Shop with money burning a hole in my pocket. I had experienced some modest success with White Knight Chronicles (we’ll talk about that one sometime), and I was in an Action-RPG kind of mood, and the (admittedly ridiculous) boxart for Nier beckoned me over, offering, if not a great experience, then at least an average one. I took pity on the game no one loved and took it home with me.
What I found frankly astounded me.
Nier is, in my own opinion, one of the most heart-wrenching and emotionally touching games I have ever played.
I’m not kidding.
Many of the flaws that people had pointed out in reviews are certainly present. From a gameplay perspective, Nier is competent but average. The inclusion of bullet-hell sequences in boss fights was something of an unexpected bonus, adding a level of unique complexity to a pretty shallow combat system. Still, fighting is fast-paced and the enemies are varied enough to keep me interested.
There is also a lot of anomalous swearing in the game, mostly from the extremely filthy mouth of one of our female protagonists, Kaine.
Kaine is a great bridge to another of the game’s flaws as well. While I found the overall visual design very good, with parts of the game being very bright and idyllic when it needs to be and dark and foreboding when the situation calls for it, the design of the main characters are actually almost comically bad. You get used it as the game goes on, but Kaine’s thong and nighty and the titular Nier’s strange eye-strap and severe lack of clothing for a father who’s simply trying to make his way in the world and provide for his daughter provide some very unintentional hilarity early on. (EDIT: After writing this article, I went back to play some more of the game and purchased the Downloadable Content which came with a couple new costumes for each character. The samurai armor for Nier is pretty awesome looking, and Kaine’s new outfits, while still leaving little to the imagination, are at least somewhat more reasonable, so good for them for employing a little more restraint and good design sense, even if it was too late to save first impressions.)
They are backed up, however, by some solid voice acting that reminded me in places of Demon’s Souls (in a good way), with an almost laconic sense of minimalism. Things needed to get DONE. They didn’t need to get talked about.
Where the game positively sucked me in was in its absolutely superb story and, to contradict one of the common complaints about the game, its pacing, but that comes with a pretty major caveat:
Don’t do any side missions.
Everything you heard about them is true. They are boring, repetitive, they make you go back and forth through the same areas killing the same creatures over and over looking for item drops. This isn’t World of BOREcraft (See what I did there?). I’m supposed to be playing an action game, right?
By and large however, these quests can be safely skipped without having to worry a single whit about missing crucial story information, and for the most part I did exactly that. I did a few that expanded upon some of the lesser characters (there is one where the twins sing a song. I liked that one), but these were pretty obvious and not especially easy to miss.
Taking the dreadful fetch quests out of the equation resulted in a story that kept moving pretty well and tugged at my heartstrings relentlessly. Almost without exception, every character in this story is tragic and sympathetic (even the potty-mouth), and even the segments that make you stop listening and start reading I found oddly compelling. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the game portrays the world of dreams using only words, allowing you to picture what’s being described and putting your own individual spin on the transpiring events, making these scenes very evocative and indeed dreamlike in their own way.
I suppose I don’t actually have that much else to say about the game itself. I felt the game was unfairly received by the public at large for its by-the-numbers gameplay, but the numbers are there for a reason, and I would hate to see that keep you from enjoying what I think is actually one of the best, most thought-provoking stories in recent memory.
If you plan on playing through the game more than once (and you should… the story changes on each subsequent playthrough up to the end of your fourth one) and you plan on skipping the side missions (and you should… as far as I know they don’t change a bit), I would expect the game to take you between 30 and 40 hours, which is either a big time investment or a good value for twenty bucks depending on your view of the situation.
Check it out if you want a playable game packaged with an amazingly emotional experience. I hope you are as surprised as I was.
Do you agree with me? Disagree? I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment here or feel free to e-mail me at m_oreilly@hotmail.com
A theme is a good place to start. July 10, 2011
Posted by potluckbrigand in Generic Posts.Tags: a new lease on life, classic, games, michael d. oreilly, mike oreilly, playstation, video, videogames, xbox
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My name is Mike, and I’m on the Internet.
I’m also a writer… or at least that’s the idea.
Quite complimentary to the old aphorism, when it comes to getting any actual work done, I am my own worst enemy. The last thing I usually want to do when I get home from work is, well, more work.
So! What’s a modern American male to do? If you answered: “Play videogames,” then you obviously read the banner at the top of this page. Good work! I hope it was the first step on a long and fruitful relationship between us.
You are correct, Internet friend. I like to play videogames. Moreover, I have come to the point in my personal development where I am not in the least ashamed of saying that videogames are an important part of my life. Although, to be completely fair, I’m only guessing this is something that might shame some people. It’s never really been a problem for me. Either that says something about me, or it says something about them (theoretical though they may be).
But why am I here?
There are boundless legions of people who write or, better yet, make Internet videos about games, and the ring is already so crowded there’s hardly any room for me to throw my hat into it. I know this, and I don’t really hope to garner my own celebrity here on WordPress amid the thousands of talented (and probably some untalented. Let’s be honest with each other if we’re going to be Internet friends) writers, poets, artists, and all-around decent people. I might have a shot at being the most delicious krill in the whole shrimp-cloud, but when the whale sucks us all down, he’s never even going to notice me.
Get used to the analogies. They’re sort of the cornerstone of my writing.
I’m here, I suppose, to try and fill a small niche. More and more, when I talk to people I know about various games across different platforms and generations, I find a common thread throughout our discourse: people really hate a lot of games, and it seems like they’re never ready to back it up.
I don’t feel like they owe me an explanation. Their opinion, regardless of its motivation, is theirs, and I don’t begrudge them that. On the incredibly rare (cough) occasions that I engage in hyperbole, I may state that something (a movie, a song, a game, etc.) is OBJECTIVELY bad. This is of course a ridiculous statement to make about any art form. One man’s Nickelback is another man’s… uh… someone good, I guess. It doesn’t make Nickelback objectively bad, it just means I am not likely to ever really see eye to eye with someone who is willing to defend them.
But when it comes to games, I see a lot of out-of-hand dismissals of new products. People take one look at a new game (or worse yet, a numbered review score for a new game) and will immediately bypass it without a look over their shoulder. People who consider themselves fans of videogames will let dozens of potentially awesome games go right over their heads every year
Why does this happen so frequently? Well, that’s actually the easy part to explain.
Market Saturation!
According to Wikipedia at time of writing, there are 812 games available on the Xbox 360.
If you assume that each game would take you 10 hours to get through (Some more, some certainly much less), you’re looking at 8120 hours of gameplay, which is close to 340 days of combined playing time, assuming you give up those pesky mammalian habits like sleeping or eating while you’re playing Halo 3. Who has that kind of time!? I mean, I love games, don’t get me wrong, but man I got stuff to do!
There are so many games coming out that we really have no choice but to narrow our scopes and focus on things we know we like, whether it be as broad as a genre we adhere to, or a publisher we are loyal to, or only games starring Nolan North (although, that’d be pretty much everything these days. Not that I’m complaining). Again, as I write this, it is a little over two weeks until Atlus’ “Catherine” comes out in the U.S., which I have been looking forward to for a while. Not necessarily because it looks interesting (it does), but chiefly because it was made by the team that did Persona.
Even I’m not immune to a narrowing in the face of such an information overload, and here I am professing to broaden your horizons!
Oh. I see I haven’t actually professed that yet.
Where am I?
Right! My thesis.
I am always pleasantly surprised when I pick up a random game I passed over and I end up enjoying it, and I am always dismayed when I mention it to a friend and I am met with the response “Oh, man. I heard that was terrible.” It’s always “I heard,” and rarely, if ever, “I played that too, and I didn’t care for it.”
My desire is to perhaps liberate some of my new Internet friends from the confines of our own ignorance in the face of potentially solid entertainment.
My background in gaming dates back to the Playstation 1 era. I had played game before that, certainly, but it wasn’t until then that I really started noticing that games were something special. Go ahead, guess which game sold me. I’m sure it will be incredibly easy to do so. Much more recently, I worked for a couple years at a national videogame retailer (I won’t say their name, but I doubt they’d care since they’re out of business), and while there I got a lot of opportunities to talk to a lot of different people. Some would consider that a bad thing, but I took those lemons and made a Weblog!
When I update this Internet Journal, I will attempt to kindle your interest in games that I thought were, at the very least, worth your time. My criteria for the games I choose will vary case-by-case, but in general, I will endeavor to pick games that either received poor scores from reviewers (I will use Metacritic to determine the average scores), or games that, despite GOOD scores, simply didn’t sell very well for whatever reason.
I hope you will return, Internet friend, and I hope you enjoy whatever it is I end up writing about in the future.
At least while I have no followers, I will be happy to field any questions or take requests. This should be an outlet for the discussion of overlooked classics and new treasures that, while they might not last the ages due to some bad marketing, will at least have a safe and happy home on my shelf.
FOOTNOTE: When it comes to requests/suggestions, Internet Friend, it is worth bearing in mind that I have access to a Gamecube, Xbox 360, original Xbox, Playstations 1, 2, and 3, a Dreamcast, Saturn, Genesis, DSLite, PSP, Android Mobile Phone, NeoGeo Pocket Color, and of course a PC (though it’s not much of a gaming rig). That runs the gamut fairly well, but anything that can’t be played on those systems can’t be played by me. Please don’t hesitate to mention them, though. Anyone else who happens by your comment could surely put the information to good use.
