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).
Continue readingAerith Keeps Taking The Thoughts Right Out Of My Head In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.
Continue readingBringing Majora’s Mask Into My Dungeons & Dragons Campaign
This time, it was only three weeks between sessions for my recently resurrected Dungeons and Dragons campaign (the one I call The Leeching Wastes) and it was only three instead of the originally planned two because two of the players got sick. Which means this is the first time this group has had two consecutive sessions in way more than a year. In this session, after a quick review of what happened during the last session and a much longer process of updating player tokens on Roll20 and figuring out stuff for NPC tokens, we got right into it. We rolled initiative for a fight, the players realized that the enemies were super focused on the one NPC the party needed to keep alive, we started a skill challenge to cross from the edge of the territory to the party’s target location, one character flubbed a skill challenge super badly, the entire party fought against nature, and then they all discovered the world outside The Grove (where the player characters live) in was stuck in a time loop. I finally got to reveal that I had Majora’s Masked my campaign by giving them a haunted moon, a messed up time loop, and a (relatively) young being with godlike powers that listened to all the wrong prayers for all the right reasons, all as a result of stuff that had come up in our game of The Ground Itself that wrapped up in December of 2022. Sure, I had some of god stuff in mind prior to that, but I’d planned to keep it on the down low until a bit more time had passed so I wasn’t burning through every idea I’d had at the outset of the campaign before the party hit level five. But, when the narrative builds itself in that direction, who am I to deny it?
Continue readingSpoiler-Filled Musings On The Locked Tomb Series By Tamsyn Muir
This post is going to be full of spoilers about the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, so you should probably avoid it if you plan to read those books or have been convinced to read them by any of my past reviews. I’m not going to be actively discussing spoilers or the plot specifically, just my overall thoughts on the series so far, but I realized while writing my review of Nona The Ninth that I couldn’t really talk about what happened in it, much less my thoughts about how it related to the previous books, without basically spoiling everything. So, now that you’ve been warned, I’m going to get to the good stuff.
Continue readingLooking Back At The Distant Peaks Of 2023
A year ago today, as I’m writing this, I was frantically double-checking my packing lists, my driving plans, and my flight details. I’d just had one of the most stressful months of my life, as I realized my original flight plans had been messed up, had to scramble to cancel my flights and book a new one in its place, and had to figure out how to change my plans to incorporate a thousand-mile drive into both ends of my first trip overseas. After all, I couldn’t afford to to get a convenient flight from anywhere to where I was going. I could, though, afford to take an extra few days off, drive across the country (there and back again), and sleep in my car (at rest stops, of course) during the long overnight drive. I had already budgeted for work on my car’s breaks, after all, so it was clear that the more affordable option was to spend time rather than money. I have more time than money, most days, so it was a pretty easy calculation to make. I also had to spend hundreds of dollars on new clothes since nothing even remotely nice looking fit me anymore, which made March of 2023 the most expensive month of my life. Even with some hefty student loan payments (ramped up as part of accelerating my repayment plans) and my much increased rent hitting my bank account every month this year, I don’t think I’ve topped out that monumental month of costs. I was stressed, barely getting enough sleep, and had lost some pretty significant chunks of my support network the month before, so I was barely scraping by. Still, I got everything done, didn’t have to spend money I didn’t have, and made it safely to the east coast even on the tiny amount of sleep I’d gotten the week prior. I made it, despite everything.
Continue readingWhat Comes After Heart: The City Beneath
Well, we finally did it. My players in Heart: The City Beneath hit their first Zenith beat (the one I’ve been working toward with the player who wanted to withdraw) and another got assigned the group’s first Critical Fallout, which we’ve altered just a tiny bit from its as-written description because the player and I agreed it would be more interesting to give him and his character something to work on as a potential end/major alteration to his character that he won’t be able to remove. It felt more fun than just killing his character off, anyway, though I suppose we’ll see how that goes when we next meet in the middle of April. Our next session was due to happen on Easter Sunday and while none of use are impacted by the holiday, two of the players will be traveling that day and largely unavailable, so we’re skipping that session and picking up in three more weeks from the “brushing off the dust” moment we left the game at during our last session. It was fun to bring an end to the Corporate Invasion moment, given how it all played out, but I’m glad we were in the middle of that arc/delve since it allowed me to provide my players with all of the information and impetus the players would need to move their characters towards the final stage of their arc. So now we’re gearing up for this final push, to see where everything comes to a close.
Continue readingPatterns In The Clouds: Comparing Final Fantasy 7 Original and Remake Protagonists
Somewhere, between all the articles I’ve read about Final Fantasy 7 (the original game, Remake, and a few non-spoilery ones about Rebirth), I read a bit of commentary from one of the developers of Remake talking about Cloud’s romance/personal connection scene from Remake. He described Cloud as being five years younger than he appeared, and five years younger than every other protagonist in the game on account of his lost memories, which meant that his interactions with the other adults around him often came off as weirdly stifled or uncertain in a way that mapped better to a 16-year-old teen than a fully grown (if still somewhat young) adult. As I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy VII: Remake, I’ve been thinking about that interview and how it changes the way I read Cloud’s dialogue and body language. At the very base of all this is the image Cloud is trying to project to other people, of being a tough but cool SOLDIER (“ex-SOLDIER”) guy who is untouched by what is going on around him. On top of that, you have this imposed emotional distance that, in the original game at least, was part of maintaining that image of himself. That so far seems to be the case here, though I’ll admit I’m curious to see how that might be changed by the events of Rebirth and whatever the third installment in this series is called. Still, I can’t help but feel that the two Clouds, from the original game and from the Remake/Rebirth/Re-something (my money is on “Renewal,” currently) series, are very different characters.
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