Platypus of Truth

It's not the emperor's fault, sure he was on the wrong track with this whole "blood and iron" thing, but he's not really evil.  It's those advisers that are the problem.  If one could only speak to the emperor, make him see reason, all would be well. Heard that one before? It's interesting to me that in both Final Fantasy III and Secret of Mana, that the emperor is almost a non-Character.  We hear about him, but the real villain with a fully fleshed-out personality is one of his aids (Kefka or Thanatos).  These aids treacherously overthrow their master and then get down to the business of doing some real damage. Why is this? One could see this as a reflection of Japan's World War II experience where Emperor Hirohito got a pass while Tojo took the blame.  It could also be that an Emperor is essentially a glorified bureaucrat and that makes him relatively uninteresting as a video game villain.  An aid, or a right-hand man can mix it up with the...

Characters.  An important part of any story is its Characters.  Great plot plus uncompelling Characters equals fail. In the 1990s, new technology was allowing video game designers to actually tell stories with their games.  Pong and Asteroids were left in the dust and new market for story-driven games opened up.  At the forefront of this movement was the company Squaresoft with its innovative Final Fantasy series.  As Squaresoft pushed the envelope in video game story-telling, a new problem arose; for the first time video game designers had to create believable characters.  The stories had just gotten that big. Building off the success of Final Fantasy II (Japan IV), Final Fantasy III (Japan VI) and Chrono Trigger featured large casts with sweeping plots, richly orchestrated music, and a myriad of varried locations.  To hold player's attentions, each character of the cast had to be unique with his/her own story arch and defining characteristics....

No, I haven't built a world-destroying mech powered by a mysterious orb.  Alas...  However, imagining a society in the throws of the Industrial Revolution that has also discovered magic is what Final Fantasy III (Japan VI) is all about. Final Fantasy III was developed by Squaresoft (now SquareEnix) as part of their hugely successful Final Fantasy Series.  In fact, I believe Final Fantasy XIII is just now coming out.  At the same time Final Fantasy III was in development, Squaresoft was also working on its hugely popular Chrono Trigger.  While the Final Fantasty series continued from one epic success to another, however, the Chrono Trigger series spluttered and died.  In fact, the re-release of the original game for the DS has largely been responsible largely for driving up the price of used copies of the orginal SNES release, rather than urging SquareEnix to create a sequel (which is what fans had hoped).  Why the two series took the paths they did...

I'm well into the second draft of my Charles Williams meets John Knowles writing project.  Helping me along the way has been Maas' "Writing the Breakout Novel."  It's a fun read, and I've enjoyed the chance to think systematically about literary production.  We'll see how far this latest venture goes. In the meantime, I'm trying to find a new working title for the project.  So far, it's just been labeled "House Book."  I've been kicking around ideas that are a little more inspiring, such as "The Corpse House."  That sounds like it would sell. On the back-burner are a series of plays including: a supernatural thriller set in late 19th century Connecticut called "The Conqueror Worm," a murder mystery set in Weimar Germany called "Mack the Knife," and a satire on life as an over-educated 20-something called "Who's Afraid of Walter Whitman."  Did I mention some of this is REALLY back-burner?...

Happy May 1st, everyone.  May is the last full month of school, and it's always the period when student revolutionary fervor roils just beneath the surface of the classroom.  Every little huddle of students looks like a Committee of Public Safety, and you start to worry that they might all show up to school one day wearing brown.  Was that the Internationale I heard coming from the boys' locker room? In all seriousness, my students have performed well this year.  They have survived quite the literary blitz.  This year's reading list included: The Aeneid Beowulf The Prince Hamlet Julius Caesar Sense and Sensibility Wuthering Heights Jane Eyre Great Expectations Idylls of the King Pygmalion Orthodoxy Peralandra Mere Christianity The Screwtape Letters The Chronicles of Narnia A Separate Peace All in all, I think we laid a good ground work for future studies.  My Tenth graders, for instance, can now claim to have read most of the Old and N...