Skip to main content

Back to Square IV: Platypus Nostalgia

The First Final Fantasy title was a major event in the formation of my creative imagination.  I was fresh from my first reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and primed for the idea of exploring a fantastic world peopled with strange heroes and even stranger monsters.  A friend and I teamed up and spent months carefully working our way through the world of the four crystals armed with a whole host of maps, charts, and strategy guides.  We never quite beat the game.  I believe baseball got in the way.  In my mind, only a short time passed before another Final Fantasy title hit the shelves -this time with a much expanded world and more intricate plot- and we were off again into a world of adventure.  This time, we did beat the game and hang up our controllers with honor.  More Square Soft titles came and went, and I have to confess to never having gone back to either of the first two games in all the years that followed.

It was with a sense of delight, then, that I noticed yesterday Final Fantasy IV (released as Final Fantasy II in America) popping up on Steam for 50% off.  I scooped it up this re-launch (originally created several years ago for the Nintendo DS) and have played a little less than the first two hours.  The updated graphics, sound, and (I think) translation, are a welcome change, but all of the old fun is there as well.  We'll see how my trek progresses over the months to come as I look at this child-hood favorite through adult eyes.  Whatever I discover, you can be sure that I'll share it here at Platypus of Truth.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane: The Platypus Reads Part CCLII

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (Cont.): The Platypus Reads Part CCLI

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
15 comments
Read more