Platypus of Truth

 

All set for some Grand Alliance Death in Warhammer's Age of Sigmar.

I really did beat it, you know; The Legend of Zelda . -not in 1987, but in 2018. I might blame those old lithium batteries that deleted your game at the worst possible moment. That happened to me in grad school. I guess I've been waiting more than 30 years to see the end of the darn thing. Simple as it was, I liked it. The Legend of Zelda , the original NES version, will always be the ur-video game for me. If A Link to the Past  is Aeschylus, Sophocles is Ocarina of Time , and Twilight Princess is Euripides, then this is the Homer from which they all sprung. There's a magic and a wonder in the raw simplicity of its design, in the inevitability of its limited digital vocabulary, the steady drone of its music, that has as much power to enchant today as it did 30 years ago. Zelda is now its own Neo-Platonic mythology with endless branches and variations still leading young souls up the ladder of wonder to the primal unity of Virtue. Still, the highest does not stand without ...

I finished the Steam port of SquareEnix's Final Fantasy III . It took me a year, and having to go all the way back to the start to relearn the job system, but I did it. Final Fantasy III  is a role player's RPG. The job system makes the characters much more customize-able than other early titles in the series and the lack of save points in dungeons make proper supply and strategy non-negotiable. All-in-all, it's the most difficult classic role playing game that I've encountered -no wonder it took so long to hit the U.S. market. That said, however, what would have been a disadvantage when I was a kid is now a major selling point of the game. Final Fantasy III  requires and rewards thought and care as players delve into its lushly imagined world -and a delightful world it is! The tone is light and upbeat with its Funkopop-like animation and sense of high adventure, but without the kiddieness of a Secret of Mana (though it also should be noted that there are no moments...

This year marks the completion of Houston Grand Opera's staging of the complete Ring Cycle  by Richard Wagner. My wife and I have been able to attend all four operas and have witnessed Wagner's retelling of the creation and destruction of the Nordic World. I haven't seen anything like it. The La Fura Dels Baus  staging HGO used seemed to swirl the Volsungsaga  with The Orestiea , Final Fantasy , Mad Max: Fury Road ,  The Wasteland , The Dry Salvages and The Abolition of Man . It was a heady cocktail that appeared to leave those over forty cold while it made the twenty-somethings I know weep with rapture. So you know where I fit in, I bought the boxed set on DVD. Wagner's work is a paean to the power of Nature and a warning to those who would use power over Nature to gain power over others. It's a timely message for the city of Houston, a place that worships unbridled wealth, revels in the wholesale destruction of the natural world, builds its low-cost of living...

Exploring a new medium today: Prismacolor art markers. Today's image is Castle Sasune from Final Fantasy III (of the many jobs). The game's enjoyable, so I thought I'd take a stab at the art -though that doesn't come as naturally to me. Mostly, it seems as though it will take me a while to get a handle on this new medium.

Something I forgot to mention in my prior post : Final Fantasy II is an open world. Once the party gains Minwu's canoe, it can reach just about any area on the map with enough effort. Paid travel via Cid's airship or Leila's pirate vessel make travel even easier as the game moves on. The only restriction on the character's travels is their ability to survive the increasingly difficult monsters that wait only a little ways off the beaten path. As the heroes begin as a trio of nobodies, this creates another in-world reason for the characters to restrict their actions to certain areas of the map. The bottom line of this is that it gives the game the feel of a real world in which you are free to travel from A to B but must suffer the consequences if you try. While this hides a good deal of rail-roading, it does so in a way that makes it easier to suspend disbelief and by in to the story the game is telling. That suspension of disbelief is key to creating the sense of wond...

I remember when SquareSoft's (now SquareEnix) original Final Fantasy came out. It was a turning point in the evolution of the game industry and it took my young imagination by storm. What I didn't know at the time was that there were a host of other titles in the series already in the works. What we Americans would know as Final Fantasy II would actually be the fourth title in the franchise. After Square made the switch from Nintendo to Playstation, they began releasing these other titles for the American market. I had other things to do while that was happening, so it's only just now that I've gotten around to playing Final Fantasy II and experiencing the adventures of Firion and his friends. Final Fantasy II makes a number of ground-breaking improvements over the original title. There are defined player characters with their own rudimentary stories and personalities. Some of these characters come and go, as in Final Fantasy IV, but the number of them that meet a gri...

A second take on Final Fantasy VI's Terra Branford, this time with Prismacolor brush-tip markers. -still needs work, but I think I'm getting the hang of the thing.

For my first attempt at using watercolor pencils, I decided to draw Terra Branford from Square Enix's Final Fantasy VI. I've always appreciated the concept art of the series, and the work done for VI stands out as some of the best. I'm still plugging away at my free copy of II and will post first thoughts here soon.

This post has been a long time in coming, interrupted as it has been by moves and surgeries. By now, I have completed two trips through the Steam port of the DS reboot of Final Fantasy IV (America FFII). This was a touchstone game for me, though perhaps not so much as Final Fantasy I and VI (America FFIII). It certainly cemented my love of RPGs and particularly anything put out by Square in the old days. On the level of nostalgia, then, Final Fantasy IV was a hit. There were so many things that I had forgotten that the game was full of the pleasure of rediscovery both times through. My play style has certainly evolved over the years and I enjoyed being able to make better use of the spells and items available to move my characters through the game without all the endless level grinding that marked my younger days. In particular, I took a page out of Sun Tzu and decided to feed off the enemy by having Rydia repeatedly cast Stop and then getting my MP back through Osmose while the boys f...

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 i...

I've played my way through the DS version of Final Fantasy IV up to Cecil's transformation on Mount Ordeal. Thus far, I've been impressed by the amount of plot material and the careful attention paid to each member of the cast.  The later is something that I felt Final Fantasy VII occasionally fell flat on.  I also enjoy most of the heroic fantasy melodrama and find that it's worn well over the years (perhaps an updated translation of the dialogue helps with that?).  Rosa needs a serious feminist intervention, but her kindness toward Edward and Rydia give her a little counter-balancing depth to all that save-me-save-me-Barbie-princess non-sense.  That aside, every character has a well-established motivation and background that fits in well with those of the other characters and the overall plot. Another difference from Final Fantasy VII (the game in the series that I've played through most recently) is that each member of the ensemble has very distinct skills th...

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 wi...

A further thought occurred to me over the past week and I thought I'd add it as an addendum to my previous post .  I noticed that the plot felt "tighter" in the more constrained first third of the game.  The slums under Midgar are constrained in space, atmosphere, tone, action, and cast.  It is a wonderful feeling when you finally get out of Midgar and find a whole world to explore.   That said, after a half-hour or so of play it becomes clear that this new world is far more diffuse.  The cast begins to widen out beyond what the story is able to fully develop.  The action for many hours consists of chasing Sephiroth to a series of new locations that are only visited once or twice and these new locations lack the deep and consistent atmosphere of Midgar.  All these changes alter the tone of the story in ways that can be jarring.  The "tightness" wasn't there any more. Thinking about this reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's aphorism: "art is limitatio...

So here's to the one I never got to play.  Some of us missed the bus when SquareSoft made the jump to Play Station.  The most I saw of Final Fantasy VII when I was growing up was thirty or so minutes of the opening.  Since then, I've heard nothing but rave reviews, but with no Play Station, no game.  The fact that a PC version was released at the same time seems to have escaped me.  Anyhow...  Steam was running a sale on the PC version this past Christmas and I decided it was time to finally sit down and find out what all the flap was about.  So here are my thoughts; a decade late and more than a dollar saved. The first thing I noticed (especially after having just replayed Final Fantasy VI) was the huge leap forward in graphics from previous titles.  We not only get a more visually dynamic battle arena, we also get a more subtle medium for story-telling culminating in several extended and well-done cinematics.  The polygons are clumsy by ...

April is the cruelest month around here -but May brings graduation.  In the meantime, we've had school plays and parent education nights.  Banquets, theses, and recitals are all on their way. In the midst of this hustle and bustle, we did find time last weekend to see Houston Grand Opera's production of Wagner's Das Rheingold.  It was the first Wagner piece I've seen and I have never experienced anything like it.  The Spanish company that put together the production pulled out all the stops and made a show that ran two-and-a-half-hours without intermission seem short.  The avant-guard staging with strong elements of cyber-punk left me with the feel that all the best parts of Final Fantasy VI and VII had suddenly been apotheosed.  And while we're on the topic of pop-entertainment, I'll add that like Jackson's ring cycle, I have to wait a whole year for the next installment.  Pop-culture aside, I was particularly impressed how the costumes, staging, an...

Squaresoft stopped working with Nintendo right about the time I was finishing high school.  I and Nintendo went one way, Square went the other.  In retrospect, it seems like Squaresoft made the right decision.  Nintendo's killer apps remain wonderful, but they've been lagging ever since.  Now what all this means is that I only played through an hour or two of Final Fantasy VII when I was a teenager.  I remember sitting in a friends attic one summer and getting a look at it.  Then other friends came over and we moved on to Resident Evil...  Anyhow, time marched on and I never did manage to pick up a Playstation.  Then, just this past Christmas, some of my students tipped me off to the fact that Steam was selling Final Fantasy VII at an absurdly low price.  I jumped on it and have logged about fifteen hours on the game. I have to admit, it took me a little time to get used to post-apocalyptic, heavy-industrial feel of the game.  Once I g...

Reading The Talismans of Shannara , encountering its particular tone again after so many years, brings with it a constant succession of images.  For some reason, Tyrsis and Varfleet are linked in my mind with the wintry world of Narshe in Final Fantasy III/VI (the book predates the game by two years).  I suppose there's also a Resistance in the game and several attempts to enter and escape an occupied city.  Still, I'm not quite sure how these things became connected in my mind.  Other disjointed memories come floating in: eating bread and cheese in the basement before going out to shoot with the bow and practice knife throwing, listening to the BBC's production of The Hobbit , playing a Tolkien ccg in the vaulted family room during a thunder storm.  Was I reading the book when these things happened?  Why these images and not others?  I don't know. One thing I do know: we did because we read.  Our world was interesting because it was wrapped in ...

My friend, the Game Guru , spent the past weekend with us.  As usual, this meant a chance for me to catch up on the state of the field.  Being the slow-coach that I am, I had to admit that I wasn't bothering with Elder Scrolls VII so much as puttering around with Final Fantasy III/VI .  This didn't bother the Game Guru at all so we popped the old cartridge in and did a little dungeon crawl.  While trying to drill the SrBehemoth, I pointed out that the game was a lot easier than when I was fifteen.  Indeed, all of Square's games have gotten much easier since I've aged a bit.  My friend replied that the versions that were put out in the U.S. were often "dumbed-down" on the theory that U.S. players were young children.  This led to a consideration of what makes a game "adult."  We came down on complexity of story and theme and difficulty of play. Now, when we talk about media being "adult," those aren't the two things that typically come...