Linkstew

This IGN Cube article hypothesizes that games based on the Final Fantasy Unlimited anime series (only in japan (at this point)) might be (among) the first Square games coming out to take advantage of the Gamecube/Game Boy Advance link. The plot synopsis of the series (see the article) really got my mind in gear, coming up with some ideas on how a GBA game and a GCN game could interact.

With the Final Fantasy Unlimited background story, imagine that the Game Boy Advance game puts you in control of the parents, stuck in the monster world and attempting to get home (and probably save the earth from certain destruction, if past Final Fantasy stories are any indication), while the Gamecube game puts you in control of the children, attempting to rescure their parents from the monster world. Imagine that the parents could send messages to the children, affecting the unfolding of the story. Imagine that the children could send items and supplies to their parents in the monster world.

Sure, these are all hypothetical ideas, and aren't based in any sort of reality (Heck, I know nothing about Final Fantasy Unlimited. For all I know, the parents are dead, so my ideas wouldn't even make sense.). My point is, just with the premise of a party divided into two worlds, with one world being played out on the Game Boy and the other on the Gamecube, there are a lot of neat possibilities. I'm looking forward to seeing what they actually come up with.

Holy crap: The sky is falling, hell has frozen over, the earth is standing still, and pigs are flying over the moon!

Square will be developing Game Boy Advance and GameCube games!

Also, here is an editorial on the news.

So I played about an hour of FFX last night before collapsing from exhaustion...

And honestly, so far, I'm a little underwhelmed.

Word of advice number 1: When you fire up the game, do not watch the credits/intro that start playing, not because they spoil anything, but because they're long and they're repeated when you select "New Game." And the second time, you don't have any way to skip them.

The graphics aren't nearly as fantastic as I was expecting. The environments are great, but the character movements are sometimes jerky, and very unrealistic. And some models are still very blocky in places that I wasn't expecting.

The main character (Tidus) has a chubby face! Every time I really watched him I noticed it. I'm not going to be able to get over this. Chubby Cheeks!

The voices are acceptable, but some of them are definitely much lower quality than others. Pity there's no option to turn them off should I decide to give up on them halfway through.

The control and dynamic camera is going to take me a little while to get used to. It's very strange to be holding left, then have the camera switch such that I'm still holding left but the character is moving up on the screen... But then if I let go, and press left again, the character goes left, in a different direction than he was before despite pressing the same direction. It's meant to make sure you keep going in the same direction when the camera goes nuts, which will probably work out okay once I get used to it... But so far, my first instinct upon seeing the camera change is to let go, and then when I press the same direction as I was going before I go off in some other direction, and I have to struggle to reorient myself.

The camera feels a lot like Devil May Cry, for those who have played it and are wondering. (Or vice versa)

And finally, despite having played an hour into the game, I have no fucking clue what's going on. I mean, I understand that it's meant to put you in the same state of mind as Tidus, who, certainly has no clue what's going on either, but it had the wrong effect and kind of put me off... Instead of making me fight my exhaustion to stay up and play the game and find out what was going on, I just found myself saying "Fuck it, I don't know what the hell is going on, I'm going to bed, I'll find out later."

And I think that's a bad sign. It doesn't draw you right in in quite the way that the first hour of FFIX did, with its festival and dual and kidnapping and airship escape and subsequent crash.

It's not enough to stop me from enjoying the game, and now that I'm awake again I want to go shake some answers out of it... But I fear that the casual gamer is going to be put off by this, and that's not so good.

It just occurred to me that when I say out FFX as "Eff Eff Ecks," it sounds like I'm saying SSX with a lisp. I guess I'm going to have to find some other way to refer to the game.

I called FFVIII "fate," and FFIX "fix," so... Fecks? Feck?

Eh. Anyway, the game is in my hand, and it actually was a nice surprise when I got back to the office and found it waiting for me, because that final put me absolutely out of my mind, and I'd completely forgetten it was coming.

Yaroze, my copy of Final Fantasy X is in FedEx's sometimes capable hands! I'll be getting it tomorrow, with superb timing, after my final final, and with only a few other commitments, I'll be able to go home and immerse myself.

To Zanarkand!

(On a related note, here is IGN PS2's review of the game. It's long and kind of poorly edited (in my opinion), but it's very informative without spoiling anything important.)

(This post brought to you by the letters, F, X, and the number 10.)

Schweet! Final Fantasy X went from being about a month off to being less than two weeks away! Of course, this just means that I'll play it over winter break instead of the other games I'd been planning on playing. So many games, so little time. =\

After I got the Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy X soundtracks today, my initial impression was that the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack was leaps and bounds better than the Final Fantasy X soundtrack. But then it occurred to me that perhaps I like the IX soundtrack more because I've played IX and all the songs mean something to me. But then I remembered that I was able to fall in love with the Chrono Cross soundtrack long before I'd played the game, and that led me back to believing that the Final Fantasy X soundtrack isn't all that.

But before I really pass that judgement on the FFX soundtrack, I need to listen to it a few more times. But at 4.5 hours long, that's a non-trivial task.

Any which way, if you liked Final Fantasy IX, you'll like the soundtrack for sure. I already like it better than either VII or VIII's, though the jury is still out on VI vs. IX (VI being my favorite Final Fantasy soundtrack before now).

My doubly former roommate Keith, and self proclaimed encyclopedia of Final Fantasy, took it upon himself to prove that everyone who claimed that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had nothing to do with the Final Fantasy games are wrong. Here is his spoiler filled, point by point document showing the similarities between Final Fantasy: TSW and the games. Admittedly, these similarities don't at all warrant the name Final Fantasy, but they're there. If for no other reason, TSW shouldn't have been called Final Fantasy because there was no magic in it.

That I was going to see this movie was a given. The thought of not seeing this movie never crossed my mind. My agenda for the week looked roughly like this: 1. See Final Fantasy. 2. Do some other stuff.

I've been mulling over my opinion of the movie for several hours now, and I've only come to one real conclusion: I do not want to go see it again any time soon, which means that my roommate's on his own, since I ditched him to see it with some co-workers tonight.

But that I don't want to see it again any time soon is not the damning statement that it might sound like. I just don't want to see it again because the story is pretty generic, and the pacing drags like crazy. Many many scenes seemed to be shouting to me. They were shouting "Hey! Look at these pretty pictures! Here, I'll give you a good long time to really appreciate them. Go on, don't be shy. You can stare."

"Get on with it!" I found myself frequently wanting to shout. "Yes, I can see that you make pretty pictures. Can you make a pretty story?"

Crafting this story must have been a nightmare for the filmmakers -- they were simultaneously trying to create a movie that could be marketed and received equally well in both the US and Japan. I'm not Japanese, so I can't comment on their success over there... But in the US, I think that audiences will be able to put two and 2 together and find parallels to all that "environmentalist stuff." And considering the narrow line the movie makers were walking, I think the story was "good enough," though I recommend in the future they choose one side of the pacific or the other and run with it.

While the story itself was good enough, the telling of that story was, much like A.I., poorly paced. And the editing was just choppy, especially near the end of the movie. And choppy editing, combined with a predictable (if disappointing) ending and the feeling that time was slowing to a crawl just tends to make me cranky. A good enough story, but not-so good telling of the story. Okay, fair enough.

But who cares about that? It's all about the graphics. Trust me. If the story starts to make your left eye twitch (a sure sign of a bad story if there ever was one), you can just shut off your thinking part and drool at what Square dared to do. You know the characters aren't real, and they never pretend to be real, but as long as you don't let that get in the way, they're more than good enough; If you just check your disbelief at the door you'll do fine. I did find it amusing that the best looking characters were the more minor characters. The two main characters just felt far less real than some of those more minor characters did, and the face of the villain was a ridiculous caricature of pure sinisterness. There were a few other animations that felt out of place, like the random steam dials near the end of the movie, but I tried not to let things like that distract me. The visuals were great, and worth the price of admission alone, in my opinion.

Two other quick points: The story sure reminded me an awful lot of Final Fantasy IX at the broadest level, and it was completely ridiculous how the villain died. Now that I think about it, the villain was completely ridiculous in general, and probably the most stupid and inept villain I've ever seen. In fact I think I'd claim: Worst villain, ever. Wow, what a moron. At least Kuja (in FFIX) had some depth.

Wait, I'm not making myself clear. The more I think about the villain, the more angry I get at how ridiculous he was. But I can't actually explain why publically without giving away the end of the movie. Seriously, the movie would have been written without that character, and it would have been better for it. He was just there because movies need bad guys, and so here's the guy you should hate. He's the one with the sinister face and the black leather coat wanting to shoot a giant laser at the earth, so it's easy to tell which one he is. Only I'm hating him for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, see it, stare wide at pretty pictures. I give it a 3.5/5, and if I were forced to use whole numbers I'd round up to a 4.

It was about a year ago now that Vagrant Story was released to an unsuspecting and an unprepared world, and in that time, it's been highly praised as one of the best PlayStation games ever, right up there with Metal Gear Solid. In fact, along with Soul Calibur and Zelda 64, Vagrant Story holds the honor of being one of the only three games to ever get a perfect score from the terminally picky Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu. And yet, despite critical praise, few seem outside of the hard core Square fans seem to have heard of this game. Sure, it had a commercial, but it wasn't sold to the average gamer. It was assumed that the average gamer would never play a game like Vagrant Story (and perhaps they were right), and they didn't even try to share it's excellence with the world.

I actually beat this game back in March or April, but I've been dragging my feet on writing this review. Of course, there's the question of why it took me that long to beat such a great game, and I have a number of excuses. Notably, I started Zelda 64 before Vagrant Story was even released, and I'm still working on that one. But more relevant to this review is the fact that when Vagrant Story came to the US, a lot of "game play" was added. What this means is the bosses were made harder, and the city of Lea Monde was populated with a lot more enemies. This, combined with the complete medieval city (complete with catacombs!) the game created for you to explore, made for some... problems... when I got lost. So, since I didn't have a rigid path laid out for me to explore, and I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be, I didn't have any plot driving me along, and I got bored and stopped playing in favor of other games. Finally, I finished it when I got motivated to figure out where I went wrong. It took me a couple of days to do that.

The player controls Ashley Riot, a special agent of sorts, on his mission to uncover the circumstances surrounding an attack on a baron's manner. And of course, Ashley has an obligatory mysterious past, but for once, we're spared a video game romance, and instead get religious philosophy which, in my book, is a good thing. Unfortunately, there isn't enough story to go around. In Japan, the game supposedly took about six hours to beat. When it came to the US, it jumped from a six hour game to a twenty hour game, which spreads the story more than a little thin, requiring a very patient gamer to get through the quest.

This game is not an RPG. It's an adventure. You control a single character, and the battles happen in real time, though you select your attacks and targets via menus. As Ashley takes his journey, he gains special attacks, new weapons, innumerable items, and magical powers. And all of Ashley's abilities are accounted for by the plot. In addition, every weapon and every piece of armor Ashley acquires can be taken apart and reassembled in various ways at workshops scattered throughout the city in (frequently unsuccessful) attempts to create better equipment. The entire system is incredibly complicated, but it allows near limitless flexibility as a reward for the patient players willing to experiment. For the impatient and unwilling to learn the system, this trait of the game is probably undesirable.

The graphics are very impressive, but they stretched the poor little PlayStation to it's limits. The models move with grace, and the attention to detail in the rooms of the city is incredible, but the frame rate is less than stellar, the textures very blurry, and the palette limited. When you play Vagrant Story on the PS2 with psx texture smoothing enabled, however, the quality of the textures increased dramatically, making it practically look like a whole new game. The palette unfortunately remains limited on the PS2, but that was arguably intentional, because of the intended realism of the city Lea Monde.

With a freely movable camera and a highly controllable Ashley, all the buttons on the PlayStation Dual Shock controller are used to their fullest. My only real complaint about the control scheme is that unlike every other Square PlayStation game, they chose to make the O button confirm instead of the X button, which is arguably more clear to the user, but there's something to be said for being consistant over being clear. I found myself frequently tapping X when I meant to tap O, and found myself in all kinds of menus I didn't want to be in because of it.

Vagrant Story is a 5/5, platinum star game, but it's not for everyone. Unlike the mass-marketed Final Fantasy, it takes patience, experimentation, and perseverance to complete. And while the ending set up hooks for a great universe of adventure, it'll never happen because Square failed to sell it's product, and faced with a "failed game", redistributed the development team. Well, I guess it might happen, what with Namco developing Xenosaga, a new installment in Square's Xenogears universe. And I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

First, I've got a few of those dangling questions that I want answered. How was it determined that a clock stopped a week before the game time started? Why did all of those enemies keep zombifying my party when I started using auto-regen? And most importantly, why did the final sequence of the game have to steal from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Star Wars Episode I and The Matrix?

But those small questions aside, I really liked Final Fantasy IX. I'm still undecided on where it falls compared to the other Final Fantasy games, but it was a very good game that was a cut above the rest. I don't think it will unseat Final Fantasy VI (III in the US) from number one in my heart, but I'd wager IX has a good run for number 2. I'd probably have to play them all again to really rank them, because it's been so long since I've played some of them.

One of the first things I desire in a Role Playing Game is good characters. This is really reason number one that I like Final Fantasy VI so much. With fourteen characters, each of whom have their moments in the sun, there was excessive character to go around. In Final Fantasy IX, the characters interacted well, and while there were a couple I was less than thrilled with, I could live with it. I felt the same about Final Fantasy VI. And for that matter, I liked everyone in Final Fantasy IX better than I liked my least favorite characters from VI. What did irritate me about the characters in IX was that there were so many scenes of character development that were hidden from the player unless you happened to have a certain character in your party at just the right moment. Now that I've read a couple of walkthroughs, I see I missed a fair amount of development for the couple of characters I wasn't too happy with. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Next, the pacing of the game was great, right up until I stopped to do a "little sidequest" at the start of disc 4 that took me 15 hours. The chocobo quest would have been much more fun if the chocographs had been about twice as common initially instead of the quest getting exponentially easier as your chocobo evolved. The only reason I kept playing it was because I knew what the prizes were, not because I wanted to. Compare this to the card game in FFVIII, which I played for about fifteen hours because I wanted to, and I didn't know about it's rewards until Pi told me after I'd beaten the game.

The game was way too easy, and the final dungeon doubly so. In FFVIII, that last dungeon really sucked... But in IX, it was just a walk down a straight park. Feh. Yawn. The rest of the game was pretty easy, too. The only times I really got killed were when I did things that were optional. I don't mind the ease too much, though, because that really keeps the story moving as long as I want to go forward.

The other thing that kept my motivated was my desire to strangle the villain. Kuja, much like Kefka, annoyed me, and hence, I wanted to finish him off. Even if he looked suspiciously like a she at certain times. Looking at a couple of columns, I see Kuja didn't seem very popular amongst long time Final Fantasy fans. I'd just like to remind them that, whether he was smart or evil or anything isn't important, as long as you want to see him dead before the game is over. The purpose of the villain is to be beaten, and if the player likes the villain, then why would the player want to smash the villain and laugh at his crumpled corpse?

The graphics and sound were both great, as far as I'm concerned. The graphics maintained an acceptable framerate, unlike Chrono Cross. The full motion videos were great fun, and the music was all tasteful and well done.

Finally, my only real complaint about Final Fantasy IX. The various interfaces in the game were less than stellar. Why didn't the synth shops tell me how many of the items to be synthed I had remaining? How come there were about three different targeting methods during battle, depending on if you were using magic, attacking, or using an item? Why did the damage inflicted upon my party always get covered up by my menus? How come no one ever told me that pressing select showed me so much useful help? Why wasn't there a way to quickly see who had learned what abilities from each item so I knew if I could ditch it or not? And the list goes on. I liked the battle system itself, I liked the story, I liked the characters, I liked the ending, I liked the graphics, and I liked the music. The interface just lacked a lot polish. Most screens didn't present enough information where it would have been easy to toss in more useful stuff, and while it was possible to do everything I needed to do, a lot of it could have been done more efficiently. But much like windows, that wasn't enough to stop me from getting the job done.

I just finished disc 2 of FFIX last night, and I'm still enjoying it a lot. I just thought I'd share a couple of tips with you that'd make your life easier, though. First, as soon as VIVI learns the ability "Loudmouth", equip it on him and keep it there.

Second, and more importantly, if you don't know what on earth all of those strange abilities you keep learning do, hit "select" while on the ability screen, and balloon help will pop up with a description that says, for example, "Loudmouth prevents silence." Sheesh, I wish I'd known "Ability Up" lets me earn abilities faster sometime sooner than a couple of scenes before the end of disc 2. So remember, if you're confused about anything at all in the game, everything has contextual help when you hit select.

Good Interface: Providing a lot of context sensitive help.

Bad Interface: Not telling your user there is help available.