After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly limited potential since there doesn’t seem to be much in it other than crafting resources. What if I missed something actually interesting [turns out that following the plot unlocks exploration activities so the interesting stuff isn’t even there or available to you until you’ve gone through the requisite steps]? What if there was a quest that I missed because I didn’t run along the top AND the bottom of each cliff? And, like, after spending some sixty or so hours (probably more, to be honest) playing two Final Fantasy 7 games–Remake and Intermission–that didn’t let me move freely around the world, I might have gone a little bit overboard. Also, you can jump now. Sort of. You have to be next to a cliff that the game judges is short enough for you to jump up, jump down, or somehow clamber over, but you can do it. Only vertical jumps, though, which lends some credence to one of my idle theories from a post that went up just over a week ago. If you want to hop across a small gap, you better hope you can jump down and then back up the other side. After all, you’re not jumping. You’re executing environment maneuvers. Heaven forbid you actually jump. Still, all that aside, it’s been an interesting look at what I might be able to expect from this game as I continue playing.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Closing The Loop In My Dungeons And Dragons Campaign
Bumping our record to three out of three scheduled Dungeons & Dragons sessions for the first time in years, my group playing The Leeching Wastes met for our third session following the revival of the campaign. Last time, I revealed that their characters were caught in a time loop situation and that there was something going on with the moon thanks to a (relatively) young god performing her first miracle, finally living out my dream of bringing Majora’s Mask to my D&D table. This time, the party reviewed their plans, ran through a short scene that turned into a long scene (which is my favorite way that a short scene can go) between two characters, decided to wait until they could start fresh with a new loop, and one of them even turned into a weretiger. We also talked through the mechanics of the time loop and how they weren’t designed to be punishing since they’re only third level character, talked about how the checkpoints worked in case they needed to try again, and then they absolutely aced it on their first full attempt to get through, all without using the skills of the NPC I’d created to fill in some of the somewhat alarming gaps in the party’s abilities (suffice it to say that there are no terribly cerebral characters in the group). They just strolled right through it, arrived at the boss fight, and even learned a little bit about everyone’s favorite cute, little NPC that they were guiding to a central point in The Grove so she could perform a druidic ritual to help The Grove’s balance be restored. A good, fulfilling session where everyone got to have a good character moment or two, where everyone got to show off their stuff in combat, and where the paladin obliterated half of the two-monster boss fight in a single critical hit thanks to some hefty damage rolls and a damage type vulnerability. Good times, all around.
Continue readingSpring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring
I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.
Continue readingTaking A Break Between Final Fantasy 7s Remake And Rebirth with Intermission
Over the weekend, taking much longer than I expected, I played through both chapters of the Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intermission. I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of the name, but even after looking it up, it seems confusingly similar to what they’re calling the remake of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, so I’m just gonna call it “FF7: Remake Intermission” or just “Intermission” for short. Despite my confusion and unwillingness to engage with it deeply enough to deal with the overly complex naming scheme used for parts the remake of Final Fantasy 7 that aren’t a part of the “core” game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Fort Condor minigame was a lot of fun, if a bit frustrating at times (I beat the grandmaster, but only be restart spamming so I could get an advantageous start and then getting a bit lucky as the match continued), and seeing the other side of Avalanche was an interesting addition to the world. I got a bit tired of how many references were crammed into the game, partly because it made it very clear that Rebirth was going to have less going on in the periphery than the original game did. Which, you know, makes sense given how much they’ve expanded the part of the original game that they turned into Remake. Games aren’t infinite, even if this one comes on two discs unlike literally any other massive PS5 game I’ve played (though not needing the internet to play this game is a pretty big plus that none of those other games can claim), so it makes sense to trim down some parts of the old game to make room for additions like riding Segways.
Continue readingPlaying A Shipshape Support Character In A Birthday One-Shot
Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to our trip to Spain in 2023 and our desire to run a D&D game in a castle while we were there, but this was my first time playing along side one of the players and my first time to play under this GM since early 2023. It was nice to be back at his table, to be able to play a silly, goofy character, and to enjoy some light-hearted fun. And then talk with one of the other players for an hour and a half after that, which included discussions of creating a book club for the two of us to use as motivation for getting through interesting-to-talk-about-but-difficult-to-read books like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which we’ve both bounced off before). But I digress. This post is about the one-shot, my fun little character, and how I incorporated both my desire to create an interesting thematic character while still making one that will be an effective part of the mechanical side of the game. They were built as a nod to the limitations of a one-shot and as a means of maintaining a high degree of effectiveness that would, if used well, make my allies look good instead of me.
Continue readingChanging The Past By Destroying The Future In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
I finished Final Fantasy 7: Remake. I’ve still got to do the Intermission thing with Yuffie and I’ll probably go back at some point to finish collecting the achievements by playing through the game on Hard Mode (I’ve been enjoying the extra challenge of a more difficult game mode lately and I enjoy the combat in FF7: Remake enough to figure overcoming the challenge could be a fun way to spend my time), but I think I should finally be getting to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth sometime this weekend [this turned out to barely be true, as I only had about an hour to play it before I went to bed Sunday night]. In the meantime, though, I’m surprised by my lack of ideas to write about. Sure, I’ve got plenty to say now that I’ve fully played through both Remake and the original Final Fantasy 7, but most of that is kind of boring since it amounts to “oh, I know who that character is, now” instead of “who the hell is this Sonic The Hedgehog-looking bipedal Cat?”. Which, honestly, is still my main impression of Cait Sith since I played FF7: Remake the first time not long after I watched the Sonic The Hedgehog movie in theaters (and all that separated the two experiences was the everlasting month of March, 2020). He sure looked like a character right out of that movie. Other than that, most of my impressions of Remake have nothing to do with the original. After all, the whole point of the end of Remake is that you’re ultimately rejecting the pre-ordained future of the original game. Quite literally, given that you fight three strange figures in the lead-up to the Sephiroth fight that are, according to the Assess skill (which shows you a bit of background information about the enemies you’ve targeted, some battle strategy information in yellow text, and then a bunch of game statistics such as weaknesses, resistances, and immunities), the embodiments of people who fought for the future you’re rejecting.
Continue readingFinding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.
Continue readingSongs To Correct The Course Of My Mental Health To
Content Warnings for general discussions of mental health with a focus on mental breakdowns, trauma, depression and surviving abuse.
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium Finished Their First Day of School
We did it! My Dungeons and Dragons group playing a Modern Fantasy “school-aged teen slice of life but with fantasy tensions” game I’m calling The Magical Millennium finally finished our first day of school! We got through a second period of lunch and specialty training, everyone had fun coming up with a bunch of electives, we talked through what everyone did immediately after school, and then I outlined how we’re going to handled the rest of their first week of class. We didn’t have any new social encounters (though I did have updated rules on hand just in case) since the one that seemed likely to happen during the second lunch period was avoided entirely. Neither the Non-Player Character nor the Player Character who might have fought each other did, instead choosing to abruptly look away after their eyes accidentally met across the cafeteria. It was a tense moment that passed quickly, thanks to their complete and total mutual rejection of any social contact. Other than that, we had fun making a Group Chat text channel in our Discord server (which was rapidly used by several players to simulate their chatting throughout the day) and started getting our first look into the world at large. Which, thanks to our decision to place this game in the real world and then tweak it from there, is super fun to place around the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All I have to do is open Google Maps and there is all the information I need to describe the world around them. This is honestly an incredibly fun game to play and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun running a tabletop game of any kind.
Continue readingDon’t Be A Jerk On April Fools’ Day
April Fools’ Day, the day belong to the multiple fools of April, has always been a strange creature in my life. In my youth, it was a day of complex emotions for me. On one hand, my maternal grandfather–the one I was close to and cared about who passed five years ago–was a great lover of practical jokes and provided me with no small amount of delight by introducing all the little practical joke toys one could buy from a magic trick shop (that my grandfather frequented for much his adult life since his love of practical jokes and magic tricks was lifelong and much to the chagrin of my grandmother and their children) to my family. Whoopee cushions, little hand buzzers, flowers that squirt water, pop rocks, and so on. It was always a lot of fun when we’ve visit him around the end of March, usual for some Easter celebration, and he’d pull all these little pranks on his grandkids, none of which ever hurt and were always a delight because we got to keep water tools he used (which always came with instructions on how we could prank our parents at home).
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