Skip to main content

Back to Square IV (Cont.): Platypus Nostalgia

A sudden bout of illness has made normal activity difficult again, so I've had more time than usual to mash buttons.  My play-through of the port of the DS reboot of Final Fantasy IV has taken me right up to the foot of the tower of Babil (gotta love the dwarfs!).  Earlier meditations in this series can be found here and here.

I have to say that I like the way that characters pop into and out of the story.  I always felt weird leaving characters behind in FFVII.  In FFIV, there's a plot excuse for why a character suddenly joins or leaves the party.  I've already mentioned in a prior post that this forces a player to keep adjusting their tactics as the composition of the party (and their respective skills) changes.  It also means that when characters rejoin the party, they may do so at higher or lower levels than the other characters and thus make game play more challenging and unpredictable than it would be otherwise.  Finally, not all characters increase their stats as they go up a level.  Tellah, the sage, loses speed and other stats the more levels he goes up as a nod to the fact that he's an elderly man.  What this means on a practical level is that I have to consider my tactics more carefully than in FFVI, FFVI, or Chrono Trigger.  It also means that my party dies much more frequently.

On the level of story, I'm continuing to enjoy things.  The variety of locations and characters is much more complex and feels more organically united than in FFVII though it's not quite as much so as FFVI.  I particularly like the Dark Elf in his Lodestone Cavern and the Dwarf Kingdom in the underworld.  Everything feels distinct as if it had an existence of its own.  None of the towns or castles scream "we needed something to go here" (see Kalm in FFVII).  Nor are there any locations so far that are coherent and interesting, but feel like they belong in a different game (see Cosmo Canyon in FFVII).  All the character plot-lines continue to interweave as we see Cecil taken back to Mysidia to receive mercy and help and to liberate Baron.  Edward's story continues even though he's not allowed to rejoin the company and Kain also continues to develop as a a character while he's away.  Even though Rosa's tied to a post (geesh), her pity for Kain helps keep him sympathetic even as he turns traitor.  One story complaint I had is that Golbez's seeming immortality isn't sufficiently explained.  How badly did Tellah's "Meteo" hurt him?  Why didn't he die when the party overcame him in the Dwarf Crystal Room?  Oh, and why is he twice as tall as everyone else?  It seems like they could at least have him fall over when Tellah blasts him and maybe explain what spell he's using to stay alive after Cecil, Rydia, and Co. paste him.  Oh well.  That's nit-picking.

So there you go.  I have some more thought jumbling round inside my head, but they'll have to wait for another post, maybe of the "final thoughts" variety.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....