Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994)

Clare:  So, Final Fantasy VI. This is the first (and only) Final Fantasy for me where this was a replay instead of the first time through. I guess I'll start off by pointing out what struck me as somewhat different this time compared to the first time I played it. For one, it seemed considerably shorter and somewhat easier than I remembered it. I first played it...four years ago? Can that be right? Almost five? Anyway, it was the first JRPG I played all by my lonesome instead of with you, and it took a looooooong time for me to finish. Partly it was because I didn't play it as regularly as I could or maybe should have, but I also didn't have a great strategy for leveling up, so some of my characters were often underpowered and it turns out that you do need more than four characters at various points (maybe we can touch on that again later).

Anyway, this time the experience seemed much quicker and also much easier. The first time through, I couldn't beat the final boss and had to leave the final dungeon, do some optional side quests, and come back. This time, it only took us one try and it wasn't even that big of a deal. I'm not sure how much of that was familiarity with the game, and how much of that was just being better at JRPGs (and partnered with an even more experienced person). I also remember the magician's tower as being harder and also more rewarding to beat. This time it was a bit of a grind, and I wasn't as thrilled with the reward.

Length and difficulty aside, the game is as or more charming than I remembered it. I love the story, and I love most of the characters. There are a lot of sweet little touches, some that I remembered, some that I didn't, that make this a really pleasurable game to play. (I really love the way Mog freaks out every time you get in a battle, and the way Umaro gets all confused when you're back attacked. It's like a 2 second animation, but it just tickles me.) So what about you? You've played FFVI before, so how did it feel compared to your first time through?

Ben:  This is also my second time through the game.  In fact, I think this is the first time I've EVER replayed a JRPG - at least one that I'd already finished.  For that reason, I can't say I was looking forward to it.  But I was surprised how much we enjoyed ourselves with this one.  Am I alone in thinking that it seemed to go by really fast, for a 35-hour game?  The game is just that good.

FFVI is often considered to be one of the easiest games in its genre, so I definitely want to come back to your comment about the difficulty.  I think people have an impression that classic JRPGs mostly play themselves, and that outside of minor decisions like whether to use magic or attack, there isn't much skill to apply to a game like this.  But your comment makes me realize that, even in a game like this, basic "gaming skills" that some of us take for granted - familiarity with a controller, solid hand-eye coordination, is important.  I know this is something we've talked about before, but I'm wondering if that has something to do with your earlier experience.

Anyways, we certainly want to get back to these characters.  Although earlier Final Fantasy games had more than four playable characters, this is the first one that let you actively choose the members of your party.  There are obvious reasons why you can tell a better story this way - just remember how absurdly often characters would sacrifice themselves in FFIV, only to re-appear later on.  But the developers of FFVI really ran with this concept, to the point where bringing certain characters along unlocked hidden cutscenes and lots of extra dialogue.  What I especially love about FFVI is how important every moment of it feels - there are no truly superfluous towns, and there are many seemingly-unimportant NPCs (like Duane and Katherine, the wounded soldier and Lola) that play an important role during later in the story.  That's partly why it went by so quickly.  Although the ending drags a tiny bit - most of the sidequests are squeezed in at the end - there are very few parts of the game that feel boring.

Clare:  I think the way the party works is one of the best parts of this game, especially compared to the way previous Final Fantasies dealt with it. The characters are all very well defined, with complex backstories. You accumulate party members through the first 5 or 10 hours of the game. Each one has his or her own particular talent in battle and can equip different types of weapons and armor. Eventually, they can all learn magic as well. You get comfortable with certain party members, use the same ones all the time, level them up, and then all of a sudden, you need to create TWO parties instead of one, and you have to split up the dream team and bring in the B list and it makes it a bit more dynamic.

But the best part of the party dynamic comes halfway through the game. The basic plot of the first half (evil emperor tries to take over everything and also exploit magical beings to gain powers) reaches a climax, the real big bad is revealed (the goofy general Kefka betrays and overthrows the emperor), and the whole world is actually destroyed. That made a huge impression on me the first time through -- your party fails, pretty badly, to prevent a massive tragedy. And then your big party gets broken up, and only one of them wakes up a year later on a crappy island of death and pain, all alone except for one dying old man. You go from having all this power and all these friends to having nothing at all, and everything being bleak and awful. Even the enemies are these extremely pathetic suicidal squirrels who seem to be dying of radiation poisoning. 

And then you have to build up the party, one member at time. Some of them have lost hope and don't want to join you, some of them have to face their pasts. It's really exciting, and even if you don't really want to use some of these people in combat because they have an awkward mechanic, you still want to get them all back because they're your friends! I guess the biggest bummer this time around is that we still weren't able to get one of them, and that was really depressing, because I figured that was going to be my big change from last time. Maybe we should allow FAQs for replays?

Ben:  I missed Shadow too.  It's a bit heartbreaking - if only we knew to wait for him before we jumped to the airship.  After some thought, I've made peace with this - I know he was prepared to sacrifice himself, and in some ways I feel like his death makes his story arc a little more satisfying.  Especially considering what a selfish jerk he was when we first met him.  This confirms what I said a long time ago about replayability - although the idea of doing things differently can appeal to me, often I end up making decisions and doing things in the same way.  So it is with the black ninja.  As for FAQs, I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with using this - every time I do, I feel like the game has failed me in some way.  (We did end up using it to find one of the dragons in the Ancient Castle, and I still regret it.)

I also feel like the world-change halfway through is what really defines FFVI.  Most Final Fantasies have multiple world maps - VI puts a cruel twist on this idea, since the second is a hellish version of the first.  Every character has to come to terms with this change - some very nearly don't.  JRPGs are known for having silly, overwrought stories, but there's something about FFVI that makes it feel...honest.  (Perhaps it's the clear parallels with the atomic bomb, but that is an argument I'll leave to cultural historians.)  When Terra rebutted Kefka's cynicism with the trite claim that life is worth living for the day-to-day interactions, she's not just mouthing the usual goofy JRPG nonsense.  The entire philosophy of the game's design backs up that statement.  This is a world that feels lived in, where all of its characters really seem to care about each other.  There's plenty of silliness - Locke's preserved dead girlfriend takes the cake - but there's a real heart there.  And it doesn't hurt that it's backed by some of the greatest music that Nobuo Uematsu ever composed.

Clare:  Ha ha ha!! The dead girlfriend! While the music is absolutely wonderful, I do wonder at the choice of using the goofiest theme whenever you visit her. Speaking of doing things the same way, are Terra, Celes and Sabin just better than all the other characters, or are they just more fun? Because they were my three badasses last time, and again this time. I mean, I do really love Celes, but it doesn't seem like there should be anything special about her mechanistically. Her special move (absorbing the enemy's next magic attack) isn't that useful. And other then that, she's just a regular warrior with the same magical abilities as anyone else. But she just seems so awesome! I guess all of the awesomeness I see in her comes from her cutscenes and/or character design.

Anyway, since I can't seem to talk about games without mentioning gender, I do think Celes and Terra have a kind of neat little relationship going on. Terra doesn't have any romantic connections in the game. Instead, the role of person who cares about her and talks to her and stuff goes to her girl buddy Celes. I think that's kinda neat that they have this friendship. It's not that developed, but it's kinda nice. Celes' "romance" with Locke is kinda lame, though. Especially the way he saves her in the ending cutscene, despite the fact that she's clearly better at everything than him.

Ben:  Gameplay-wise, the characters in this game are seriously unbalanced.  Perhaps we would like Cyan a lot more as a character if he wasn't so difficult to use.  You're right that Celes' ability is not that useful, but she can wield swords like Ragnarok and Atma Weapon, which end up being the best weapon in the game.  So there are naturally characters that you lean towards, which in the end starts to affect your opinion of them.  There's nothing in the dialogue that says 'Celes is very strong-willed, and makes for an interesting comparison with Terra' (in fact, besides her Magitek background, she's pretty demure in conversation), but that's the impression both of us got.

But naturally, the game counters our inclination to make a super-party by forcing us to use nearly everyone in the final dungeon.  We made pretty awful choices - putting two uncontrollable characters in the same party is never a good idea, by the way - but somehow managed to pull through.  And in the end, the fact that we surreptitiously beat Kefka with a tiny white moogle continually Jumping with a spear (the effectiveness of which we discovered not five minutes beforehand) is so much more satisfying than if we'd planned it out perfectly.

I want to end by saying that FFVI is, if not my favorite RPG, then certainly my favorite 16-bit game.  As much as I loved Chrono Trigger, that game lacks the maturity of this one, in my humble opinion.  Any final thoughts?

Clare:  FFVI certainly has a special place in my heart. Most people seem to think either this one or the next is the "best" of the Final Fantasies. I'm definitely excited to give that one a go, after an appropriate break to give the JRPG urge some time to recharge.

Zelda Runthrough: Four Swords Adventures (Gamecube + GBA, 2004)

The Wii U is not the first time that Nintendo would combine a television screen with a handheld.  They had that idea a decade earlier, in the GameCube era.  Using a special cable, one could connect a Game Boy Advance to a GameCube controller socket for certain games.  Although only a few games would use this for anything other than unlocking special content, those that did, like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Pac-Man Vs, made for memorable multiplayer experiences.  The best of these, by far, is Four Swords Adventures.

Although the original Four Swords game was developed by Capcom, Nintendo took the idea and really ran with it.  They kept the basic framework, such as a level-based design, with up to four players, that allows you to carry only one item at a time to make menus unnecessary.  But instead of randomly-generated levels, the sequel had predesigned ones, because it's much, much longer than the original.  Whereas Four Swords was an interesting proof of concept to add a bit of meat to a LtoP remake, Adventures is a full-length game.

FSA still doesn't have much of a story, although for a multiplayer game, I suppose it's better than most.  The black blob Vaati is back, although this time there might be a certain pig-guy behind the scenes.  This game has entire towns to explore, with plenty of characters to chat to.  Amusingly, interacting with an NPC brings up dialogue only on that player's GBA screen, which means you might want to read it out to the other players (preferably in a funny voice).  One of the levels is almost a mini-adventure game, with lots of puzzles to solve.  Speaking of puzzles, there are plenty of great dungeons in this one, with some real head-scratchers.  If you're playing with less than four people, than the extra Links will tag along behind, requiring you to master the use of formations to solve lots of puzzles.  In fact, the game is probably a bit too complex (and long) for four players.  Two seems about right.  You can play the game single player, with a GameCube controller, but I wouldn't say FSA is on the level of the best Zelda games.  It's the multiplayer, and the multiple screens, that makes it fun.

Speaking of other Zelda games, FSA is a huge love letter to Link to the Past - the world map itself is copied wholesale from that game, although each section is broken up into three or four stages.  The graphics - which are roughly the same on the TV and GBA - also appear to be 16-bit, although there are some great visual touches that the better hardware allows.  For example, bomb explosions will ripple out, causing the pixels themselves to shimmer.  It's a nice-looking throwback, and also the last 2D Zelda to appear on consoles.  Gameplay-wise, it owes a lot to LtoP as well as Link's Awakening, with lots of horizontal platforming sections, like in the later game.

So, all in all, I was surprised by how much I liked this game - Clare also enjoyed it.  My main quibble is that while the game has players working together to solve puzzles and defeat enemies, there's a rather unnecessary competitive element thrown in that tends to counter these.  You see, the game has you collecting Force Gems, which are essentially rupees.  You do this mainly to unlock your swords' extra power in each level, but also the player who collects the most gets recognized at the end (without receiving anything).  This encourages players to be dicks, hitting each other to knock out gems, and acting as vultures whenever a player dies.  (You can't hurt each other directly, but there are plenty of indirect ways.)  Worst of all, just as you're congratulating each other for beating a tough dungeon, the game informs you that, rather pointlessly, there has to be a winner.

When one of those players has beaten every previous Zelda game, it's not really a fair contest.  Kudos to Clare for winning a couple times.

Overall, though, definitely worth tracking down - if you have a couple spare GBAs handy, that is.  Yes, the hardware costs are prohibitive, but the greatness of this game makes me really wonder why Nintendo did not work any 3DS connectivity into the Wii U.  At this point, with the 3DS so popular, I'm sure they're kicking themselves for not doing so.

Lame Meal

Another Math Genius = He Ain't Smart Enough

Final Fantasy V (1992, Playstation)

For my latest Final Fantasy post, I decided to do something different.  As you may have gathered, I've been playing through the series with my wife, Clare.  In honor of the first FF to allow for 2 players, we've decided to do a "2-player blog post".  Hope you enjoy!  (We may decide to make this a tradition here at TPINS.)

Ben:  So...Final Fantasy V.  Sandwiched between the much more famous IV and VI, FFV is perhaps the most controversial game in the series.  Some people think it's a blemish on the series, and some think it's a hidden classic.  But whatever people think about the game and its strange job system, everyone seems to agree that its plot is not much to speak of, so how about we start there?

FFIV's big innovation was the large cast of characters, each with well-defined personalities that played off their fixed class in some way.  FFV, like earlier entries, has just four(-ish) characters that can be anything from healers to bad-ass ninjas to...flamenco dancers.  Unlike those previous games, however, these characters actually have somewhat fleshed-out backstories.  I actually found the occasional flashbacks to be surprisingly touching.  For instance, when Bartz, pretending to be asleep, overhears his parents arguing about his father leaving home to go on another dangerous adventure.  How do you think these characters compare with those from FFIV?

Clare:  I found myself much more invested in FFV's characters than FFIV's, because they stuck around for so much longer. After it became apparent that some of FFIV's characters were going to drop out more or less permanently, it became much more frustrating to deal with the remaining team members...were they going to disappear into some sickroom somewhere too? I also think FFV allowed for a nice mix of scripted character arcs and player input in the form of which job(s) each character was going to level up. For example, Faris is a pirate captain. Having her level up as a fighter makes a lot of sense with her scripted plot. On the other hand, the plot seemed to want Reina to be the healer -- she is the "kind" one, the princess, but there was nothing stopping us from subverting this trope and making Bartz our healer instead. Somehow, this lends more richness to the plot than there otherwise would be. Reina isn't just the kind, sweet princess out healing the team. Instead, she has a meta-narrative of trying to figure out which of the many jobs are going to work for her...for us, it turned out that alchemy and archery were really her thing. Furthermore, Bartz is sort of scripted as our lead guy. He is the first character we control, and seems to fit the wandering hero trope. But instead, he winds up being the support character to the much more physically powerful female warriors. Speaking of which, even if Bartz is one of the fighters, the game has as many female characters as male ones. It's not possible to have the girls be the token female healer -- there are just too many of them.. So what did you think of the largely female cast? Do you think it represents a real shift in gender dynamics in the Final Fantasy series?

Ben:  I was hoping you'd bring that up!  The Final Fantasy series, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the stereotypes that pervade depictions of females in JRPGs.  FFV, despite being dominated by women at the end, is no exception.  Reina is the "kind healer", Faris is the "unrepentant tomboy", and Krile is...well, I suppose she's more of a cipher, although some have suggested that she's supposed to be the "lolita".  But one of the great things about the job system is that you're free to subvert those expectations.  And except for a couple cutscenes where Bartz shows off his ninja prowess, the story lets you have it your way.

But while we enjoyed having fun with these characters, their story was hard to take seriously.  This is a game, after all, where the greatest threat to all existence comes from an ex-tree named X-Death.  If I may go on a tangent, though, there is some sense to be made of this.  The informative Final Fantasy Wikia tells us that this is actually a portmanteau of Exodus and Death.  This brings to mind the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, responsible for the exodus of Adam and Eve.  Really, recasting the villain from that story as the tree as opposed to the serpent is an interesting interpretation - I wonder if the Gnostics had something similar in mind.  Probably not something Sakaguchi was thinking about, I guess.

...Anyways, another thing about this game that nobody seems to talk about is how great the monster designs are.  Seriously, this game goes off the deep end, giving us cats wearing wings...


 ...ballerina goblins doing handstands...


 and...again, X-Death is an evil tree.

 I would argue that with RPGs pre-FFVI, the monster designs, and not the story, are the real "content" of the game.  Would you agree?

Clare:  I think one of the surprising things about pre-FFVI Final Fantasies is that they seem to have complicated and weird stories that aren't really all that different from later RPGs, but they are delivered in a much clumsier and less coherent fashion. In FFV, we have an evil tree trying to destroy the universe, yes. But there is also the fact that the world was split in two (I don't remember if it is clear why that happened), and you can travel between these worlds via meteor. There is also a strong theme of fathers passing on the torch to a younger generation, who has to step up and take their place as heroes. There's sort of a lot in there. Not as much as FFVI or ChronoTrigger, but it's still a fairly complex set of elements. On the other hand, the storytelling aspect of the games is still a little clumsy, and the individual elements don't really gel perfectly into a whole. It's much better than FFI, where everything was delivered in one near-incomprehensible infodump at the end, but they still haven't quite figured it out all the way by FFV. FFVI seems like such a huge leap forward because it knows how to tell a complicated and strange story. It has a better set up, a better reveal of the true enemy, a more solid story arc over all, and the stakes just feel much higher. So, to take a long time to answer the question, I think the story "content" of FFV is not really that different from later games, but the delivery is still clutzy enough that the really enjoyment of the game comes from things like the monster designs. And those designs are great! I loved the handstand demons. Also, this guy:

looks a lot like one of the monsters from Mother 3:

So, there's that.

There's also the fact that, unlike in previous Final Fantasies, I really felt like we hadn't fully completed this game. There were a lot of optional bosses that we didn't beat, a lot of summons we didn't acquire. We didn't level up all the jobs, or try all the alchemy combinations, or learn all the songs. It seems like there is just much more to do than ever before, and unless you are really devoted, and probably have a manual at hand, you won't really get to do or see everything. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see this as being a good direction for the series? I'm a little torn. On the one hand, it lets you decide more what you want to do (and potentially adds replay value), but on the other hand, it puts a kind of pressure to put more time into the game than you might really want to. When we encountered a lot of the optional bosses, it was pretty obvious that we were nowhere near being able to beat them, but if you let the story move on, then the opportunity to do so disappears. Is it reasonable to expect players to spend another several hours leveling up just to get a new summon?

Ben:  If Final Fantasy V gets talked about today, it's usually because it's great for "Let's Play's" - the replayability of the game, with its myriad job combinations and various collectathons (summons, blue magic, songs, etc), surpasses anything that came before it.  As a rule, the only games that I enjoy replaying are the ones, like adventure games, that play exactly the same way a second time.  And yet I enjoyed Final Fantasy V despite this, because there's so much fun experimentation that you can do in a single playthrough.  And moreover, this experimentation feels necessary.  The boring fighters that you can get away with in earlier games just don't cut it in FFV - you need to add a ninja skill like 2-swords (which allows dual wielding) or forgo a shield and use 2-handed to double the attack power, or else you're not going to be useful.  Also, the traditional elemental black magic is relatively useless against later bosses - much more useful is time magic, like Haste2.  The magic spell that allows you to restart the battle should be in every JRPG ever.

There is plenty in the game that we missed, but we did most of the optional sidequests - at least all of the obvious ones - and randomly discovered an extremely cool hidden town.  I think there's a healthy attitude to take, somewhere between speeding from cutscene to cutscene and being an absolute completionist.  I too wish that we could have beaten Omega or Shinyuu, but I think the game tried to make it clear that those battles were for masochists.  Certainly, it was annoying to stumble into them after hours without a savepoint, but I do like the idea that there are beings out there that can crush the greatest of heroes.  If Shinyuu wanted to take over the universe, we'd all be doomed.  It is true that Final Fantasies would soon pander more and more to perfectionists.  I remember the Playstation-era games containing many sidequests that seemed impossible to 13-year-old Ben without a walkthrough.  I'm very curious to see if that will still be the case.

Overall, I would agree with placing FFV in the "under-rated classic" department.  Certainly, Square's decision not to release it in America for several years seems increasingly baffling.  One final question:  what do you think modern JRPGs could learn from FFV?

Clare:  I guess all games have to walk the line between showing you too much and not showing you enough. If you want players to have a feeling of discovery -- that "Oh my god, there's a hidden town here!" feeling -- then you have to also risk that some things are going to remain hidden. And overall, I think that's a good thing. And if there is going to be some challenge to a game, then you have to risk having some bosses who are too hard to beat. I guess "hard" isn't really quite the right word. I don't think anyone is really "bad" or "good" at this style of turn-based RPG. It's more a matter of being persistent or not. In fact, I think that's where a lot of the fun comes in. The most fun thing in this game is seeing Faris deliver 9999 HP of damage with a sorcery attack, but that's only fun because before that were hours and hours and hours where a really good attack was probably only worth 200, or 500, or 2000 HP. The thrill of beating Shinyuu is probably similar. It's fun mostly because you were totally unable to do it before, and it took hours and hours of grinding to get up to a level where you could even have some kind of strategy.

So what can modern RPGs learn from FFV? I guess the biggest lesson is that there is a balance between having characters who can do everything and having characters who are too limited by their class. If all your characters are good at everything, there isn't much strategy, everyone is just an equal badass. But I hate being punished for making bad decisions in choosing classes early on, or for experimenting with different strategies later. In FFV, you can only be good at 2 things at a time, but you can learn new things and change your mind up until the end of the game. We didn't make Reina an archer until the near the end, but it was easy to switch her, and she wound up really powerful. Each character has his/her own role, but those roles can be switched up easily to allow for more, well, more play with the mechanics. The other lesson that sadly hasn't been implemented much, is that RPGs are super fun with a partner. FFV allows a second player to control half the characters in battle, and that makes it so much more fun. It is an easy thing to implement in a turn based game, and it sort of makes me sad that we can't do that in all upcoming games. But not too sad, because FFVI has the same mechanic. I call Celes!

All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

This is a movie whose Wikipedia summary is less a summary than an accurate description of everything that occurs during the film.  So let me just say that this is a movie where Robert Redford endures a harrowing ordeal at sea.  I suppose the film to compare this to Cast Away, which has slowly become the gold standard by which these sorts of survival movies are compared.  I didn't think much of Cast Away when it came out.  It seems overly fascinated with all of the different ways that a man might survive, and even stay sane on an island for years.  There's no room for fate in Cast Away - in the end Hanks' character saves himself when no one else is going to.  Yes, he gets a bit lucky with that ship at the end, but the way it's presented, it's like he earns that ship.

Redford's character in All is Lost is certainly more resourceful than most people.  Certainly not everyone could make it through what he does in this film.  But what makes All is Lost the better movie is that, ultimately, it's not up to him.  If God deals you a bad hand, then all the resourcefulness in the world isn't going to save you.  How does a man face that knowledge?  Well, the genius of the film is that Redford conveys those emotions with panache.  There's some genius touches in this movie, such as when Redford shaves while a big storm is coming in.  I certainly felt like I learned more about Redford's character than Hanks' in Cast Away, and Redford didn't need to talk to a volleyball to accomplish that.

xx (The xx, 2009)

Shortly after this album was released, The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a review, in which he discussed an early xx concert he attended on a lark.  The music, performed at a near-whisper, sounded aggravatingly sterile, and Frere-Jones left feeling confused and unusually irritated.  Then he heard the album itself, which is wonderfully intimate and emotionally resonant, and concluded that the band had constructed the record first without a thought to how it would sound live.  This is a reasonable conclusion.  It is also completely false.  The xx were playing shows for years before their debut, and developed the arrangement of each piece through a great deal of experimentation.

This basic misconception explains a lot about the xx.  Regardless of Frere-Jones' first impression, the xx is a band that fills football stadiums when they perform.  Yet there's no doubt that they do so on the strength of a single album, whose success they've had a great deal of trouble replicating.  Their second album was critically panned, and the songs on their third, forthcoming album have so far fallen a little flat in performance.  Perhaps the reason is that the band doesn't really understand why their music resonates with so many people.

The tags that we attach to this music - "minimalist" being the most important - were not intentional.  It's hard not to listen to the lead singers, male and female, and think that their music is not about a relationship, even though both are gay.  Clearly, the band deserves their success, but it's hard not to feel that there's a fundamental disconnect between them and the audience, and the group is going to have to reconcile this before they can move on.

In any case, the album is so good that they should have lots of time to do so.

Something I learned This Week

A slimline Playstation 2 can be left on for 24 hours covered in a thick gray sweater in 90 degree weather and still work fine.