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 readingVideo Gaming
Aerith 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 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.
Continue readingI Played Original Final Fantasy 7 So I Can Critically Engage With Remake & Rebirth
Just a quick head’s up: this post contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7: Remake. Feels a little weird to put a spoiler tag on a game as old as FF7 (it is only six years younger than I am, after all!), but it’s pretty relevant given Remake and, more recently, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
For the fourth time, I started playing Final Fantasy 7. The original, I mean. I’ve only started playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake three times so far. I actually played Remake before I’d played the original. I grew up in a limited console household and none of my friends had a PlayStation around the time that FF7 came out, so I missed my opportunity to enjoy it in my youth. When I had subsequent opportunities, mostly in college and afterwards, I just never felt inclined to spend the time. After all, so much about Sephiroth and the major plot twists of FF7 have seemed into general knowledge of the world. I mean, I knew Sephiroth was a ghost, that Cloud wasn’t really in SOLDIER, and that Aerith dies no matter what you do. Hell, a great example of that is that I’ve never once had to add the word “Sephiroth” to a personal dictionary on any web browser or cell phone I’ve ever owned and that’s not even true for “Aerith” or her incorrectly spelled variant name, “Aeris.” I was under the impression that there wasn’t really much left in the game for me to experience, especially after I watched Final Fantasy 7: Machinabridged and got a lot more of the details. Still, as I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and realized that my save data for Final Fantasy 7: Remake hadn’t transferred from my PS4 to my PS5, I figured I might as well give the original game another try.
Continue readingGetting Lost In Warframe With My Friends
I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
Continue readingModern Game Opinions Poisoned By Rampant Nostalgia
Today, as I took a break from the frenetic pace of my work day and turned my mind toward what I should write for today’s blog post–I landed on writing about my time listening to A More Civilized Age and watching The Clone Wars as a part of my foray into media review and discussion podcasts, a topic I will now be addressing another day–I remembered my first foray into media discussion podcasts and why I not only fell off the train but stayed away from all of them for multiple years. In fact, the only reason I’ve gone back is because the idea behind the current run of Media Club Plus (which I recommend more strongly than I’ve ever recommended anything), of watching Hunter x Hunter with someone who hasn’t watched much anime at all, was so charming that I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to follow some of my favorite podcasters on this particular journey. It took a lot to overcome the reason I stopped listening, a reason that seems pretty trivial and small when you consider it on its own, but this reason was the final straw of a growing resentment that had been building for a while. You see, the podcast I listened to back then (merely because it cross-polinated with other stuff I listened to) was the video game review podcast “The Besties.”
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 23
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.
Continue readingCome To Palia For The Chill Farming MMO And Stay For The Intricate NPCs
Last September, I wrote about the end of a tabletop gaming group and, in the last paragraph, mentioned that I regretfully couldn’t get into a game, Palia, as much as my two friends were. Oh, how the times have changed. Mostly for me, since my two friends are just as into Palia as ever, but I’ve been getting into it more and more over the past month and finally hit the point where I was playing it by myself, even when they weren’t online, which is the sign that I’ve stopped playing a game because my friends are playing (which is a perfectly fine reason to play any number of games and the main reason I’ve played pretty much every single massive multiplayer online game I’ve ever played) and started playing it because I enjoy it. Not much of the game itself has changed, aside from various quality-of-life improvements, additional story elements, and some expansions to the core aspects of the game (it is still in pre-release development), but I’m currently enjoying it more than I have before. It took me a couple weeks to figure out why, but as I finally locked into the gameplay loop over the past few days, I was able to figure out what about this game has caught me this time around.
Continue readingPicking Through Hyrule In Tears Of The Kingdom
While watching Dimension20, I’ve been playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again. I’ve given up on any hope I had for a Master Mode and done my best to accept the game that was sold to us. It feels unfair to say this, but it feels so much less than I hoped it would be. I understand that my expectations were set sky-high by Breath of the Wild, but I feel like so much went into turning that game into An Experience that just wasn’t kept around for the sequel. The sense of wonder and grandeur that Breath of the Wild builds is spent trying to create a sense of horror around The Gloom and Ganondorf’s return instead. All of the early building in the introductory sequence falls flat because all that accomplishes is setting us at what is the common starting-point for almost all Legend of Zelda games and then none of the freaky gloom, horrific music, or creepy visuals come up again as something to be dealt with or feared for multiple hours. Then, when it finally comes up again, it is a minor environmental hazard tied to The Depths, which is unfortunately the section of the game with the greatest squandered potential of all, or a strange and potentially terrifying encounter that is incredibly easy to flee from. It becomes a minor concern only during the final boss fight and, even then, if you’re set up with halfway decent armor, good food buffs, and tons of hearts, it’s trivial. With none of that to rely on to create a coherent throughline for the game (like the mixed wonder of exploration, grief at finding a decayed world you can’t remember but know you failed to protect, and hope for the future that thread their way through all of Breath of the Wild), all you’ve got is an admittedly fun game to play with an interesting world to explore while building all kinds of weird machines.
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