The Remake Problem

What follows will occasionally ride off the rails. It’s why I’ve started writing it about eight times over the last three years, and why I’ve not written it before now.

Anyone who has ready my blog or social media feeds knows that I speak out against remakes of video games. Movies too, but we’re going to stick to games here, because the problems I’m going to be talking about are unique to video games. This seems like the right time to tackle this subject, with the follow up to That Game I Didn’t Like coming out this month, and renewed begging from a certain corner of the Final Fantasy fandom asking for a remake of Final Fantasy VIII. Rather than blocking another dozen Twitter users for their opinions, it’s time to just…put it all on the page so I can point to this wall of text in the future so people can continue to ignore me.

But the fact remains that this is a sensitive topic to me for a number of reasons. I do see video games as an art form. I think that it’s an interesting medium for narrative, both in terms of literal storytelling and ludonarrative alike. This means that original texts are going to be far more compelling to me than a revised text. The meaning can get lost in constant translation – something that anyone who has played Working Designs release can attest to.

This isn’t to suggest that remakes are universally bad. Some remakes are genuinely inspired works, such as Resident Evil. The Gamecube reimagining of the original 1996 game has been ported to modern consoles continuously for a reason.

But what about the original?

Replacement and Erasure

Resident Evil released in the US in March of 1996 on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The original long box release is a gem amongst collectors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the ridiculous art work on the tall CD box. But as I learned from a fantastic video by Stop Skeletons From Fighting, there’s more to the original version of the game than the box, or even the original soundtrack.

In the process of localization, Capcom introduced numerous changes to the original release of Resident Evil, all of which made the game harder. This measure was taken to pull players away from renting the game and finishing it in a weekend, a fact that’s hilarious given the sheer volume of people who have finished the game only using the knife. Ink ribbons came in smaller allotments. Auto aim was removed. Following the jewel case printings of the original game, the game would go through its first modification in the form of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. Most of the changes would be considered to be for the better, since the game now had multiple difficulty levels and aim assist. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that the game would get modified. The Greatest Hits release of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut would see the original score abandoned and replaced with one that is…let’s be charitable and call it experimental.

By 1998, there were three versions of Resident Evil. Sure, this is somewhat typical of Capcom given how their fighting games get numerous revisions. I would argue that this is different though. For one, I can play pretty much any version of Street Fighter II on my Switch right now using one of two different cartridges. I can not do the same with Resident Evil.

The 2002 remake only compounds this problem. A further revision on the Nintendo DS is yet another wrench in the works.

If you can hear terrible MIDI trumpets right now, I am sorry.

In 2024, you have two legal options to play Resident Evil on modern hardware. You can play a remastered version of the 2002 remake, or you can play Resident Evil: Director’s Cut Dual Shock Version through a PlayStation Plus subscription. There is no legal avenue to play with the original soundtrack, or to tackle the unique difficulty of the original release. Admittedly, this isn’t a worst case situation. But it does reflect how a remake or revision can push an original version out of the view of players.

Far worse is Silent Hill 2.

The original Silent Hill 2 was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, less than a year after the console launched. As recently discussed on this blog, it remains a revered classic. Months later, an expanded version would release on the original Xbox, akin to the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. These versions eventually made their way back to the PlayStation 2. A poorly developed remaster of Silent Hill 2 released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. There are also PC ports of the original, but…

There are no legal avenues to place the original version of Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. Instead a remake is in the works from Bloober Team. If you’ll allow me to editorialize a bit: it looks completely terrible.

With the release of the remake, newcomers to the series will only have the newest version of the game to take into account. This is the case for games like Resident Evil 2, any number of classic Final Fantasy games, and dozens upon dozens of others. The only avenue to play original texts is often emulation or the purchase of expensive original pressings.

Preservation in a Time of Erasure

According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of video games are no longer available. I’d have to do a bit more digging to find out, but I do wonder if examples such as the ones I’ve listed above are included in this.

As more and more games are delisted from digital platforms, and the concept of ownership is further and further pushed into the trash, access to legacy titles is slipping through our fingers. Certainly, if you have the money, you could indulge in the hobby of retro game collecting, but that bubble never seems to burst. This leaves piracy, but not everyone is comfortable with the concept, or wants to learn the ropes associated with emulators and such. But this isn’t a problem for a number of younger players, who were raised on live service attractions first and foremost. That’s the market of the future, and the one that major publishers want to attract.

I’ve acquired so many sets like this on Switch for a reason…

The death of preservation, the erasure of classic games, is nothing but good for those who hold the money at the top of the industry. An industry that generated 347 billion dollars in 2023 has little interest in the past – it isn’t worth as much money as a digital t-shirt in Fortnite. It is a net negative for the potential of video games as an artform, however, to attribute success of the medium to the amount of money it has generated in revenue when most of that money comes from predatory microtransactions, not to mention the quality of life for the people who created everything that generated that money.

The art isn’t making the money.

Art, however, is a continuum, ever moving, ever evolving. Access to the history of the medium can drive and influence new works. Knowing what worked and what didn’t can teach a lot more than a class on how to generate the most income with an indie game.

The ongoing push for remakes from an incredibly vocal public suggests that while the interest in classic games is there, there isn’t enough interest in playing the original texts. Certainly, you could go play Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on any modern platform, but this hasn’t stopped a number of people from taking to social media to demand a remake in the vein of Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Remakes Are Ultimately Uninteresting

For the sake of consistency, I will reuse one of my previous examples.

I know what Silent Hill 2 was about. I know what happened, I know how it played, I know what I saw and experienced. I know what the Red Pyramid Thing is and what it represents. Silent Hill 2, as a text, is a brilliant work of art that utilizes the medium beautifully.

This game is going to be bad!

The remake can not repeat the successes of the original text by the simple merit of the original text already existing. I have played the original, and there are no surprises to be had from playing a remake. The changes depicted in the existing trailers point to a game that seems to be alien to the experience I had while having no ideas of its own. The promise of a Red Pyramid Thing origin story isn’t appealing. As Patton Oswalt so perfectly put it, I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from.

I’ve been following video games for 24 years at this point, and have played hundreds of titles. This includes a number of remakes, revisions, etc. It’s almost impossible to avoid, largely due to the way that video games were developed and ported and released over the first twenty years after the NES revived the industry. Good remakes, such as Ys Memories of Celceta, only cause me to have interest in the original texts. This entry in the Ys series is not a remake, but the canonical telling of Ys IV, as the original games Dawn of Ys and Mask of the Sun were outsourced to HudsonSoft and Tonkin House respectively rather than developed in house by Falcom. Celceta references both of these games. And, given that I quite liked Memories of Celta, I want to know more. I want to play these games.

Also, that 90’s anime box art. Yes.

Which means that I have to play original versions, emulated, patched for translation. And…I will. I have a Polymega now. I will be buying these games off of eBay and playing them using fan translations to experience the original texts.

But that’s not ideal at all. It’s not something that everyone will do, not something that many will be willing to do. It’s the kind of thing that obsessive enthusiasts and historians do, and I’m definitely of the former category. While I’m okay that Falcom has created their canonized Ys IV, I lament the fact that the originals are doomed to obscurity, much like the okay-at-best Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.

To press it further, I feel like there isn’t enough consideration for the practical costs of a full remake of an a idea. The cost of video game development is extraordinary at this point, and games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth aren’t cheap to produce or promote. Asking for more of those means that the money goes to remakes, not new ideas. I may have thought that Final Fantasy XVI was mediocre, but I’ll gladly accept that over the ongoing rehash of VII. The original text should be maintained and rereleased on modern platforms, but I don’t expect a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into “updating” a game when that original game is perfectly fine as it is. Even bad games deserve to be maintained in such a way. We have plenty that we can learn from bad games.

Revisionist History

Before I wrap this up, I want to address one of the common talking points I see in online discourse regarding remakes. This is the idea that a remake allows a game to “live up to the original vision” or something along those lines.

It’s still an incredibly captivating experience because the writing is superb.

I could spin an entire thread about how this ultimately gets us things like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy, but I’ll keep this simple: A finished text needs to stand up to scrutiny. I’ll gladly point players to Xenogears as an example of one of the most fascinating JRPGs, an ambitious and incredible game that still isn’t celebrated as much as it should be because of a flawed second half. And as much as I’d like to step into the parallel universe where Xenogears was finished to its original spec, I can’t. I have to play the version we have. Thankfully, it’s very good, and worthy of study and dissection. See the incredible video from KBash that released in 2023 for one such discussion.

It may be true that Kazushige Nojima wanted Final Fantasy VII to be an endless battle between Sephiroth and Cloud in the original game, but that isn’t what the original text boils down to. The original text is about spirituality, grief, environmentalism. It isn’t about Sephiroth. If it was, in fact, about the spiky haired amnesiac fighting the silver haired guy with the long sword, there would have been more of that in the game. Instead, Sephiroth is just a villain to frame the adventure around, a means to bring the player to each beat in the story. He doesn’t do much of anything in the original game because it would interfere with the themes being explored through each character’s story. This idea that the original text would have been better with 80% more Sephiroth is grotesque to me.

I can’t imagine that Stephen King imagined the final chapters of The Dark Tower unfolding as they did before his traumatic accident in 1999. The accident informs the work, changed the way he envisioned it. Whether or not you think the final books in King’s epic are good are beside the point because they are what the author wrote, and it is there for us to experience as it is.

Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler ahead.

This is a bit unfair. I really just think Zack is an awful, boring character.

Zack Fair walking through a portal at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake was a Greedo Shot First moment for me. It completely undermines the meaning of the original text and reveals the remake to be exactly what it is: fan service, or even more accurately, fan fiction. You might like fan fiction, may enjoy writing it, but you have to admit that, on some level, you don’t get fan fiction without the original text existing.

That anyone thinks that Nojima meant for Zack Fair to be alive in the original game is appalling to me. It’s revisionist history. It’s deeply boring and cynical. It’s exploitative. It appeals to fans and no one else.

The Golden Age of Remasters

As I write this, Limited Run Games has collected remasters of Rocket Knight Adventures and Felix the Cat on sale, marking the first time these games have been legally available since their original releases. Similarly, the boutique publisher and developer has sold a remastered rerelease of the obscene and awful Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which launches digitally in March 2024. Konami has released numerous collections of classic games, Atari and Digital Eclipse released a monstrous documentary-esque collection with Atari 50. For all of the doom and gloom about the 87% of lost games, there is an effort being made in some corners of the industry to preserve and revive games that were left in the past. It isn’t difficult to play a game as bland and lifeless as Cybermorph or as challenging as Gimmick in 2024. The work is being done to keep these games alive.

Don’t skip this game! It’s great!

When the topic of games being remade comes up online, I immediately say “remaster or port only” I do not want a reimagining. I do not want remakes. I do not need games to have up to date graphics and retooled gameplay. Turn based games do not need to be made into action games. Action games, likewise, don’t need to be turn based. The original games were the way they were for a reason, top to bottom, and should retain those decisions as they are rereleased for modern players. I will give a pass to things like save states and rewind features. They are staples of emulation platforms, and can ultimately be ignored.

If you’ve reached the end of this piece, thank you for reading. Please understand that I’m not out to take the fun away from you, nor am I suggesting that the old video games are somehow better than new ones. They are different. The past isn’t wholly good or bad for any medium. But video games, like any art form, have a rich enough history that there will always be lessons waiting for the next generation to tap into. When we demand a remake, we are, in some form, asking to erase the original texts. To make them hard to access. The remake will be on new code, more likely to be retained and reused to sell the game again in the future. A remaster, port, or emulated rerelease may have problems, but they will give a player a far more interesting look into a work than a remake ever can. Because the art is in the original text. The remake is just tracing the outlines.

A Short Message About Silent Hill

Konami has revived the venerated Silent Hill franchise. What remains of the beloved series resembles a reanimated corpse. 

Following the launch of the bizarre Silent Hill: Ascension, I’d wondered if some of the other projects that Konami announced as part of the series revival would go through retooling or even be outright cancelled as a result of the backlash. Based on the recent free release The Short Message, I do not think this is the case. Perhaps its because of the cost of producing a web series, a free release short video game, upcoming additional games from various studios that the train can’t slow down. One product will promote the next and so on simply by keeping the name in the public conscious. A decisively bad choose-your-own-adventure web series can be replaced by a free game that has all of the tact of a sack of hammers. That will ultimately be replaced by the anticipated remake of Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team. Given the history of the series, one wonders if they will surface.

Putting aside my ongoing apathy for remakes – not to mention my complete lack of confidence in the Silent Hill 2 remake based on the trailers and reputation of the studio producing it – I find myself wondering if Silent Hill, as a series, should have just stayed dormant.

Part of what follows is a review of the free title, Silent Hill: The Short Message. Part of it is an assessment of what seems to be haunting Silent Hill as a concept. No, this will not be about the nebulous existence of Team Silent. Yes, the games I would claim as the “good” Silent Hill games comprise the first four titles, attributed to Team Silent in myth. However, PT is also a great Silent Hill. Yes, we will be talking about PT.

The Short Message

Silent Hill is a series known for many things. What comes to my mind, first and foremost, is surrealism. There’s something off about the world that the player explores. It bears the resemblance of an average small city, resembling any middle American vacation spot. It could even be the city where I live, whose downtown sits on the waterfront, and spells out a history of bloodshed and horror. This, of course, isn’t a rule. Silent Hill 4: The Room is tangentially connected to the city of it’s namesake. It is no less a Silent Hill experience.

Second, of course, is subtlety. The characters in Silent Hill games aren’t pouring out a novel’s worth of text. There are beautifully directed cutscenes, of course, but the dialogue isn’t natural. It’s the dialogue of a David Lynch character. It’s easy to trace a line from these games to a number of films – Jacob’s Ladder would be the one I always point to. The distorted Americana is all Twin Peaks, a series that inspired a lot of famous video games.

However, I’m sure that anyone reading this is aware of the lineage and aesthetic components of a Silent Hill. There’s something of a shorthand in place with the series at this point, one where it can be pointed to when any new horror game aims to copy it’s specific blend of uncanny storytelling and hellish environs. It is the thing that the weaker entries in the series can most easily copy, leaving us with games like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Origins, or the painfully awful Book of Memories.

Silent Hill: The Short Message starts here, with the aesthetics of a distorted reality. The protagonist, Anita, is dumped into the ruin of an apartment building, striking the bells of cliche by suddenly waking up and having to go and find a missing friend. The corridors of the old building are full of doors that do not open, trash, graffiti, and touches that foreshadow what will come in the last twenty minutes or so of the game. So far, so Silent Hill 2.

The problem is that Anita never stops talking.

Her constant speech breaks any connection that I, as the player, have with the narrative and experience. There is never a moment where I can put myself into what is happening in this dilapidated apartment complex because there isn’t enough space for me in this. It’s entirely Anita’s experience, through and through, and I am just there to watch it unfold. All subtlety is lost because there is no need to look into the visual storytelling – Anita will explain everything for you.

There is a certain amount of conversation that could be had about the script that I’m not entirely comfortable discussing. For one, I’ve seen the depictions of teenagers cited as realistic, accurate. I’ve seen defenses for the message of the game in regards to online bullying and abuse. I have also seen that this called trauma tourism, a comment that is itself damming (I could not find an original tweet referencing this, so I am linking to the recent Jimquisition on the subject.) I am going to limit my commentary to the issues I’ve had with the game.

The splicing of live action scenes into the story to break up gameplay was an okay touch. Honestly, the writing for Maya is far more interesting than Anita because she bears all of odd touches that make for a Silent Hill character. She’s a bit pretentious, which means I liked her more than anyone in the entire series, and there is a degree of unease that surrounds what she says despite how lively her paintings are.

See, I can say nice things too…but they aren’t about the gameplay. And the gameplay is really what kills this for me.

The Short Message seems to want to fill the space left by PT, itself a free game made in the leadup to a larger project. The player explores linear corridors and does a few light puzzles to proceed to the next story beat, and there is a loop to the experience where the story splits into three chapters. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a tedious romp. The building doesn’t change from loop to loop, just the access to a couple of new places, including a vibrantly lit high school hall. This is the place where the first of two puzzles is introduced, a tedious number search that feels completely out of place.

Between the slow crawls through repetitive corridors are sequences where Anita is chased down by a monster. Passing through a door marks a delineation between the exploration portion of the game and the Scary Monster Time portion. These parts are, mostly, incredibly easy. I didn’t see the monster at all until the second to last chase, and even then, it’s easy to avoid it.

This also describes any number of indie horror games that spawned out of the success of PT and ultimate cancellation of Silent Hills. The chase sequences also remind me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

Except this isn’t scary.

Part of this is on me, of course. I saw the cherry blossom monster the first time and thought it looked like the cornflake homunculus from the Jimquisition, and that immediately killed any terror it might have inflicted.

But more than that, separating the monster chase hallways from the rest of the setting means that there is no reason to feel tense at any other stage of the game. It’s just a place where cutscenes happen and a character constantly talks and texts people. There is no isolation, there are no threats. The game does not engage with the player beyond sticking the movie in their face.

So, it’s not a good game. That’s okay. We haven’t had a good Silent Hill game in a long time, and this didn’t change that. Why would this keep the series on my mind for days after?

The Looming Spectre of P.T.

PS4 consoles containing PT still sell for hundreds of dollars. Efforts remain ongoing to keep the promise of a brilliant Silent Hill in the form of this experimental demo alive years after it was taken off of the PS4 online store. There’s a reason for this – it’s genuinely an incredible little game, and thanks to a single publisher’s poor thinking, one that will be impossible to play someday. Hardware fails us all, eventually.

Lamentations continue for the death of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills, a game that promised to bring back the unease and terror of the legendary series, snuffed out in the night by Konami much like their relationship with the esteemed creator at the helm of the experience. PT remains a point of discussion when talking about video game preservation, and there have been numerous efforts by fans to recreate the game for PC. The shadow of this little game loom large over the series, as it truly was a promising glimpse of what Kojima Productions could have done with Silent Hill.

Comparisons of The Short Message to PT are not an accident. It is no doubt an effort to fill some of the space where the conversation of PT took place. But it lacks everything that made PT worth discussing. It’s far to easy and straightforward. There wasn’t a concerted effort by players to figure out how to finish this game because it folded over within 90-120 minutes of effort. What’s more, The Short Message lacks any meaningful interactivity as the player proceeds through its environment. The only inputs required by the player are for movement and opening doors. PT didn’t ask much of the player beyond a few light puzzles, but even some moments required the use of a the zoom button, which pushed the tension up for some quick jump scares.

Cheap? Sure. But usually effective because of how it uses interactivity to drive the experience.

Part of what makes PT special is that it exists as an allusion to Silent Hill while bearing few of its hallmarks. There is no thick cloud of fog on a lakeside town. There are no unusual side characters. There is only one monster, and doesn’t have a simple symbolism attached to it akin to any number of post-Room Silent Hill entities. It is raw and it is itself. It can bear the name of Silent Hill without directly making visual references.

And it didn’t even need a Pyramid Head stand-in.

The Legacy of Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is often considered the best horror game ever. It is frequently cited as one of the best video game narratives. It certainly deserves those accolades. I would call it my favorite in the series as well. However, do not take this as a sign of my bias against other entries in the series. That isn’t the point of this section, nor is it to continue gushing about one of the most over-analyzed and celebrated video games.

Silent Hill can not get out of the shadow of Silent Hill 2.

The upcoming remake is cashing in on the iconic Red Pyramid Thing just as games like Silent Hill Homecoming before it. Like the 2006 film Silent Hill before it, which was a soft adaptation of the first game in the series, not Silent Hill 2. Even when the towering monster rapist (look, that’s just what I see in the first scene with Pyramid Head, you can have your interpretation if you want) isn’t in a new Silent Hill, the very basic idea is there. There is a symbolic monster that wants to kill the protagonist. Anita has a flower covered Pyramid Head in The Short Message. Why was it in the movie? Homecoming? Because it was expected by a certain group of people who didn’t buy the other games in the series, I guess. Sales of SH3 and The Room certainly didn’t size up to Silent Hill 2. So what’s a business to do to make money other than copy the successful thing that they did twenty years ago?

I’m rambling. I am. It’s 1AM. So let me put it this way:

Silent Hill 2 is great for all of the ways that it differentiates itself from the other three games that surround it. This can be said for the other three games as well. Art means creating and saying new things with the craft, with the medium being used. Later Silent Hill games were the kinds of products that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty railed against.

Still, the series grinds ever onward, dragging its legacy out to be redressed for another age. Silent Hill is now about playing the hits and hoping the old fans still show up to the concert.

So much of what made the series special seems locked in the past. The production cycle of modern video games is almost completely alien to the processes of the PS1 and PS2 eras. Even the explosive reaction to PT is nearly impossible to recreate in today’s social media landscape, which has evolved away from that of even a decade ago. The technical limitations of the PS1 created so many of the hallmarks of the Silent Hill series, and developers are still mired in those ideas over twenty-five years later, unable to meaningfully iterate on the mere idea of what Silent Hill can be.

For now, it will just be a character and how they are haunted by symbols of trauma.

Sleep Deprived Thoughts on MGS2

NOTE: Forgive me readers, I just wanted to write this before all of it left my brain. There will be wild leaps across subjects. Also, there will be spoilers for a twenty-two year old game.

I rolled credits on a replay of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty last night. It has been around fifteen years since the last time I played it through to the end.

What a beautiful mess of a game.

There are valid criticisms that can be laid against MGS2. It’s overwritten. There is a lot of needless backtracking that is misunderstood as an aspect of the metanarrative. The marketing cycle misled players into believing that they would get another adventure where they get to play the grizzled mullet man they remembered from the first Metal Gear Solid. Much of this is by design, of course, something that wasn’t picked up on when the game initially released in 2001.

I could think of other games that would benefit from a massive interactive documentary.

I can imagine that MGS2 in 2023 benefits from context provided by twenty years worth of think pieces on the series, the rise of the video essay, and even the creation of The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, released by Konami for the PS2 in 2002. Certainly, I didn’t take in every aspect of the inner workings of the narrative when I played the game in late 2008. I took the experience at face value, thriving on the density of Hideo Kojima’s world building and the bleakness of the final hours of the game.

The idea of the game being overwritten hadn’t occurred to me yet. That was pointed out to me by critics of Kojima’s writing and storytelling. They aren’t wrong, of course. Video games being an interactive narrative implies that the game itself should be telling more of the story than the interruptions the game is inundated with. It was a part of the experience that I accepted, though it remained on my mind during my replay of the game over the last couple of weeks (I took a long break before the bomb diffusion section).

While I feel that the metatext of MGS2 has been dissected, I don’t think that enough has been said in defense of the writing. Again, yes, there is definitely too much writing in the game, too much dialogue, too many codec conversations, too many cut scenes. What I have spent much of the last two nights thinking about is how this story could have done what it did with less.

So that I don’t prattle on too long, I will focus this on a topic that I seem to recall annoying people back in the gaming press in 2001: the codec chatter between Colonel Campbell, Raiden, and Rose.

I Need Scissors. 61!

From the first time that Raiden meets Lieutenant JG Plisken some twenty or so minutes into the Shell chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2, Campbell will recount the following to Raiden any time the resurrected Solid Snake is brought up: he was not part of the simulation. This is a break in Campbell’s script, foreshadowing that something is innately wrong with how he communicates with Raiden during the first two acts of the game. Everything else he says is an echo of the events that transpired at Shadow Moses in MGS, a revelation that isn’t clarified to the player until the third act.

Admittedly, this is easier to read into the game on a second play through. The very nature of sequels, something that Kojima was critiquing with this game, cites that a sequel should refine on is predecessor while playing into what fans of the original enjoyed about the first. So much of what Campbell says and does, how Paul Eiding performs the lines, is reflective of the original game, and feels natural to the player. But the foreshadowing is still there, and in the middle of the second act, it becomes a provocation.

As Raiden becomes increasingly suspicious of Campbell and Rose, Campbell reiterates on his comments about the simulation, sparking an outburst from Raiden that see Rose urging him to calm down. The trust between Raiden and his commanding officer has been broken, and isn’t resolved. The fractures in Raiden’s person are growing deeper as the second act pushes on, carrying him into the Sniper Wolf Redux where he defends Emma Emmerich from drone gunfire, snipers, and soldiers alike. What isn’t clear is that Campbell isn’t the only person provoking Raiden, pushing him further and further to the breaking point.

Rose

Rose is difficult for some players to accept. On the surface level, many of her conversations with Raiden do not match the tone of the game. They seem wildly out of place for what is ostensibly a military operation. Campbell never intervenes in these conversations, a fact that I’m only just now thinking of as I write this.

Rose wants her boyfriend to talk about their relationship at a time when he is focuses on his mission. He doesn’t want to dwell on the time they spent watching Godzilla movies, or what April 30th means to their relationship. For Raiden, those topics can wait.

And as the player, it can be easy to align with his point of view. In a game that is already pulling control away from the player for cut scenes and codec conversations at a rate that exceeds even the first game’s verbose jargon-laden chats with Naomi, Campbell, and Mei Ling, having to talk about the shaky relationship that Raiden has with his partner doesn’t seem relevant. Much like Campbell’s comments about the simulation, however, Rose is pressing Raiden.

This is the only screencap I stole from the net.

The third act of Metal Gear Solid 2 does not work nearly as well unless Rose establishes the narrative of her relationship with Raiden along the way. What we should take away from every one of those scenes are an assessment of Raiden as a person divorced from the gameplay. The opening of the Shell chapter and the first half of the following events see him striving to live up to his VR experiences. It’s Rose that pressures the human part of Raiden, to emerge from the cocoon built up by the nebulous Patriots and Solidus.

The downside of all of this is that the ultimate reveals about Raiden’s history are muddied while the reality depicted up to the third act breaks down into the finale. Finding out that Raiden was a child soldier is a contradiction from the opening hours that depict him as a soldier trained by video games rather than experience. It’s a dark twist in the narrative that ties him directly to the villain, and it does prove entertaining as a beat in the story. However, so much is happening by this point, it can be easy for details to get lost in the noise, especially if you’re dining on this particular brand of crazy in the middle of a night where you’re short on sleep. This is also why this little blog post about a video game I like is going to get messier here. I need to go to sleep.

Last Bit About MGS2

But I want to close with a response to a criticism I often see thrown around.

Occasionally, I will see someone defend the Kingdom Hearts series with some variation on the line “it’s just as confusing/convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, but no one complains about that.” First, the statement is just factually incorrect. People have complained about the writing in Metal Gear games for over two decades. But that’s not what I’m interested in responding to.

I think that there is a distinct difference in the complications that are present in each of these series. Kingdom Hearts was launched as a mostly kid-friendly action RPG where you team up with Disney characters to save other Disney characters. As a series, it started clean and neat, only to be disserved by an encyclopedia of terms and half-baked world building that doesn’t come up during 90% of the gameplay. Tetsuya Nomura, as I’ve said in the past, makes fun games, but he’s a poor storyteller, unable to handle the medium he’s working in well enough to layer the story he clearly wants to tell into the series he is famous for – one where he has to also give the cliff’s notes version of a stack of Disney films at the same time.

It is not an easy prospect to handle those disparate ideas, and I do not envy anyone who has to do it. But it is a problem with the way that Nomura decided to evolve the series, and it does make the series difficult to approach, impossible to discuss with a fervent crowd of fans, and frustrating for reasons that aren’t relevant to this conversation.

Hideo Kojima doesn’t have these problems in his games. They are indeed overwritten, explaining a suite of ideas and elaborating on the military shorthand and technojargon as to not leave players out of any the obsessions that Kojima brought to the table. Kojima is an avid reader, a devourer of cinema and music. Reading his book The Creative Gene is an illustration of this love of art, as well as an assessment of where some of his ideas were born.

As a game designer, he designs the game, and as a storyteller, he tells stories. The gameplay reflects the stories he wants to tell, even if the writing could be pared down. There may frequently be a wall between narrative and gameplay, but the information is presented cleanly. Cinematics illustrate the action movie set pieces that have always inspired the series. Lengthy codec conversations delve into the backstories of the characters, grow the intrigue about the unveiling mysteries, and as listed above, always drive the plot forward. For the first three entries in the Metal Gear Solid series, there aren’t any wasted moments.

The answer is actually extremely disappointing.

I can’t say the same of Kingdom Hearts, a series which has its protagonist gawk at an iconic scene from Frozen for five minutes straight for no other reason than the game has to tell the Disney stories. 0

The criticism that MGS and Kingdom Hearts have similar amounts of baggage is a misunderstanding of MGS as a series. Hideo Kojima did not want players to endlessly obsess about things like the identity of the Patriots after Metal Gear Solid 2. He wanted players to leave that game thinking about the passage of information down through generations, not what was coming up in Metal Gear Solid 3.

And yet, we know that he did not get his wish. People and publisher alike pushed Kojima back into the director’s chair, over and over, demanding that Metal Gear continue for as long as it could be profitable.

I’m going to sleep now…

ADDITIONAL TASTY THINGS

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creative-Gene/Hideo-Kojima/9781974725915

Final Fantasy XVI -Bearer of Harsh Criticism

Prologue – Caution

I picked up Star Ocean: The Divine Force for PS5 back in late March. I’d seen the middling reviews, and still figured I’d enjoy it enough to warrant the purchase. It was one of numerous Square-Enix releases that dropped to less-than-great reviews. And, to be completely honest, I bought most of those as well. I have Valkyrie Elysium, Forspoken, and even a copy of Balan Wonderworld sitting on my shelf. You can blame that last one on the excellent video from Austin Eruption and the GameStop clearance price of $5.

I haven’t finished any of those games, mostly just tried them for a bit before going back to things I’ve been working on for ages. Like Soul Hackers 2, a game I’m still inching my way through. But one thing stuck out to me from the night I first put the Star Ocean disc in, and it had nothing to do with the game itself.

This is the status screen for Star Ocean: The Divine Force, and contains the description A Star Ocean 25th Anniversary Commemorative Product. The label stuck in my brain. It’s a terrible description for a work of art. Video games, despite any commercial objectives, are still art, and to see such a reductive phrase being used in this way is…well, let’s just say it – it’s gross. It’s offensive.

I start my review of Final Fantasy XVI with this for a few reasons. First, it’s not a bad indicator of the creative goals of Square-Enix. Someone at the top doesn’t see what they are doing as art. It’s product. It’s content. It’s the same kind of tripe we are hearing from people like David Zaslav at Warner Bros. It is the idea that as long as they get money out of their audience, the output of their studios doesn’t matter. I’ve been critical of Square-Enix for a long time, but I’ve always held out hope that new games would come from the studio that speak to me the way that they have in the past. Occasionally, they still do. And then other times, they are Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Still, I’m willing to meet them halfway. I’m willing to continue trying to play their games despite the fact that they don’t want Final Fantasy to be an RPG series anymore. I’m willing to try despite my skepticism regarding the news that the studio was made to watch the first four seasons of Game of Thrones to “inspire” them – and we will definitely get to that. I played through the game on Action-Focused difficulty, and did not use the assistance items except for to experiment with their usage for the sake of this review.

Okay. Now that I’ve put any of those early comments to rest – let’s talk about Final Fantasy XVI, a game that I enjoyed but have some complicated thoughts about.

I. Swords and Sorcery

For better or worse, most of the gameplay in Final Fantasy XVI is tied up in combat. A blend of character-action spectacle and the over-the-shoulder perspective borrowed from The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the chaotic, particle effect spouting fighting players will engage in over the course of the 40-70 hour game continues the goals set out in Final Fantasy XV. There’s an decent amount of depth to the system, with swappable special attacks set to cool down timers and complex combo potential. It’s a cathartic, weighty system that proves enjoyable whether fighting as Clive or as an Eikon.

The Eikon battles are a new wrinkle to action oriented combat from Square-Enix. Swapping into the body of the hulking Ifrit and casting spells feels right. You can feel the size of the beast and the animation windows for his attacks emphasize that physical weight.

I’m not going to delve into this too much, though. Admittedly, I didn’t get to experience the depth of it very much. The game doesn’t on-board players into a deep mode of gameplay until very late in the game, and there isn’t much incentive in doing so through most of the game because…well…it’s a pretty easy game on the whole.

Players who don’t want to engage with the complexities of the difficulty will rarely see a point to doing so unless going for specific challenges such as the chronolith trials. Even the high level hunts can be blasted through with decently timed dodges and implementation of specific skills. Moreso, they can equip a set of items that handle dodging and combos simply by pressing the attack button on repeat. I thought the game was pretty easy by dodging and parrying attacks while hitting strong foes with the skills I chose to improve across the game, and it carried me through the entire experience. While I am happy that this is the case, and I didn’t have to reinvent the my entire method every few hours, I think there’s something to be said for choosing to have a deeper action combat system and not require the player to engage.

Note, I’m not referring to the accessibility items here. I’m referring to being able to play through comfortably without having to learn the combat well enough to play well. It wasn’t until I experimented with the accessibility items that I saw that there was more complexity to the inputs that could be used, that there was a more intricate level of play that was possible, and it looks brilliant. However, I didn’t figure out how to do it myself, and wouldn’t know exactly where to begin with shifting into that playstyle to be honest. Seventy-plus hours of play puts a lot of muscle memory to work.

It’s fairly disappointing, though, because I would have appreciated the ability to play at that level earlier in the game, to develop a stronger level of control of the system while facing greater challenges. However, despite Action-Focused being this game’s normal difficulty, it isn’t possible to push the difficulty until repeat runs of the game. Dark Souls this is not. This game doesn’t demand much of the average player.

This is all a bit nit-picky, though. Clearly the goal is to be as palatable as possible for the largest possible audience of players while delivering the spectacle of flashy eikon battles and the clashing swords and magic spells that lines the run time in between. Combat difficulty isn’t key to enjoying the experience, nor is it the metric I would use for discussing a roleplaying game – not even one as combat-centered as Dark Souls.

II. Just Watch the Fireworks

Roleplaying games should involve player input beyond combat.

There are a number of ways this can be a part of the gameplay loop. Exploration can yield new items or magics. You can learn more about the world through those same explorations. Maybe you hear something interesting from an NPC and take a trip somewhere to find out more. Perhaps snooping around a castle can lead to a room full of treasure. And these are the facile possibilities.

But the fact is, there isn’t much to be gleaned from much of the world of Final Fantasy XVI outside of what is explicitly said to the character in text. Most NPCs don’t have anything to say to Clive, partially due to the story’s slavery metaphor. There is almost no input to dialogue either, which would have given the player something to do during the dozens of hours of cutscenes and dialogue breaks. The level design is scaled to imply vast locations, but most doors are there for show. Every area in the action stages is built to keep the player on a straight path to their objective with small splinters along the way to collect a bit of unexciting loot. Objects on the screen glow brightly, but float over to Clive, requiring no input. Even then, you’re lucky if it’s a potion. I can’t imagine anyone being excited over the couple of gil those glowing spots usually imply.

Admittedly, some of this marks a sign of the times. Creating small, lived in spaces inside of the larger areas that make up a games world is no longer as simple as the placement of sprites on top of other sprites. 3D art assets require loads more time to create, and the costs associated with productions with as much polish as Final Fantasy XVI are already astronomical, whether measured in labor hours or financial cost. However, the choices made in development mean that there is no roleplaying in this roleplaying game.

While limited narrative input is common in JRPGs, there is usually a wealth of character development choices that players get to make. The gear and magic that the player brings to the combat portion of the game is enough to insert some level of expression to the play, moreso if party management is part of the play. Final Fantasy XVI has party members that follow Clive into battle, but they are mostly there for the visual aspect of having other characters contributing to the chip damage. They are not actively part of how the player is playing the game, their equipment and magics do not change. At best, they keep enemy mobs distracted and occasionally get a kill of their own. At worst, they are invisible to the experience. Neither, however, is particularly involving.

There are a vast number of side quests whose associated cut scenes provide a lot of heavy lifting for the world building, but much like everything else in the game, the play associated with those quests is minor, illusory. You walk between cutscenes and get a small reward. Repeat ad infinitum. It is a far cry from the immersive discoveries made while exploring the world of Final Fantasy IV and meeting the blacksmith who can craft the the Excalibur for Cecil if you can track down the materials, or bringing the MogNet back up in Final Fantasy IX, a process that required a completely separate and seemingly non-related minigame. Nor is it reading Occult Fan magazines in Final Fantasy VIII and learning how to summon big massive demonic train.

I can easily compare the experience to a swords and sorcery version of something like Uncharted. The story is entirely told through cinematic language, and the gameplay loop is centered on its combat. It’s a pleasing experience in the play, but it has all of the flash and glamor of fireworks, and is just as shallow to experience. It is a world built for the spectacle, the action, but the complete lack of verisimilitude steals the immersion.

So, the combat is fun, but the world is flat, and everything is there to service a story. How is the story?

III. Prestige Fantasy

I want to expouse first and foremost that there is much to love about the writing and characterization on display in Final Fantasy XVI before I start beating this game up again. So many of the NPCs are genuinely wonderful to experience, and I found their stories engaging in a way that I’ve not seen from a Final Fantasy NPC in some time. Coming off of Final Fantasy VII Remake, it’s a revelatory experience. While it’s a shallow experience akin to the problems I mentioned in my review of that game, I can say that I liked the cast and their adventures.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that for Clive. And that’s a problem because he’s the main character.

I’ve been thinking this review over since finishing the game, trying to figure out the cleanest way to say all of this without just dwelling on the things that bothered me about the game, it’s story, etc. I can’t say that I had a terrible time with the game. But a lack of meaningful player input paired with a frequently empty protagonist like Clive finds the story grinding against the medium and the themes of the text in some really nasty ways that hurts the total experience. I guess I will start with tone.

As mentioned above, the team at Creative Business Unit III started their production with a screening of the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. Thankfully, they stopped before the show careened into hell. The intent was to imply the type of story that they were assigned to tell: historic and political dark fantasy that skirts the ideas of magic against a realistic conflict, cast with flawed characters.

Why they didn’t just look within at Final Fantasy Tactics, we shall never know.

As a result, we have a story about magic being used to divide the classes, complete with an abused slave class, the bearers and dominants, that get tortured, mutilated, and usually die painful deaths due to their magical curses. During which, we hear our hero talk about how his family didn’t treat their bearers badly. He admonishes the people who continue to murder and abuse bearers even as a freedom fighter for those bearers rather than coming to their active defense. The player doesn’t get to make this decision. They are not an active participant in storytelling. Clive has no agency in the plot. The story happens to him and around him.

However, the rest of the characters in this story do have agency. They act and make the movements that lead the plot forward. They are keeping the story interesting while Clive pretends to be Jon Snow for most of the game, grunting and stabbing things while doing what other people tell him to do. The grand drama plays out across long cut scenes, and it’s presented with all of the grit and gore of a prestige drama. When the story is focused on the characters in micro, it’s fairly engaging even if I spent all of that time with the controller siting on the arm of my chair. It’s fine television.

But this is a video game, and I don’t play games to watch without input for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time.

Final Fantasy XVI seems to want to be a television series first and a game second. It wants to tell an involved story about strife along social divisions, but cant be bothered to allow the medium to help express these ideas. This is a criticism long aimed at Final Fantasy in whole, but it is far more tangible when control is wrenched away so frequently.

It was a poor solution to a problem that Final Fantasy should not have. It is the appropriation of an identity that ultimately clashes with the cornerstones of the series they’ve plastered over. What remains is fan service – a moogle gives you hunts to track down, the dragoons pose, classic games are referenced. Like so much pop culture, it screams “hey, guys, remember this?”

And Final Fantasy deserves so much better.

IV. I Lost the Original Ending

WordPress glitched out like mad when I was trying to post this a few weeks ago. So, now you get a completely new ending.

Final Fantasy XVI is by no means the only RPG I’ve played this year. I replayed seven of its siblings on the Switch over the months prior to release. I’ve played two entries in the Kiseki franchise, and am currently playing Sword and Fairy: Together Forever on PS5, and am kicking around a run of Divinity: Original Sin II.

Many of the quirks in the design of Final Fantasy XVI are present across other narrative focused RPGs from Japan. Hell, Sword and Fairy plays like a mirror universe version of Square-Enix’s bleak epic. They’re not damning enough to write off the entire experience, but they are indicators of the numerous problems that Final Fantasy has been going through over the last fifteen years.

I enjoyed Final Fantasy XVI, but I feel like I can’t recommend it over the other things happening in the genre that it claims to be from. It’s a poor RPG, and a fine action game. It’s a discounted fantasy novel dressed in a sparkling dust cover.

If you want a game with fraught political strife that is fairly recent, play Trails from Zero and Trails into Azure, the Crossbell arc of the Kiseki series. It’s got razor sharp turn based combat with a significant amount of depth and choice behind the mechanics. The characters are richly defined across the combined 160 hours you’ll spend with them, far more than could be expected from their archetypical introductions. The isometric world has a lot to offer, tons of little side adventures and side quests that beautifully weave into the central narrative. They’re two of the best RPGs of the last twenty years, and you can not go wrong. If at any point you said “but it looks anime,” I want you to step back and ask yourself why you would want to play Final Fantasy XVI, a game that is still very anime.

If you need more action to your combat, check out Sword and Fairy: Together Forever. The combat is similar to Final Fantasy XVI in that it’s a mashier affair with skills set on timers and a lot of colorfully animated magic. Where Sword and Fairy succeeds is that the mechanics are more engaging, your party actually matters – you can even play as every one of them! The localized script, however, is very messy, so you might feel like you’re experiencing the story through a sheet of wax paper. It’s still a unique specimen of a game, one worth playing simply for its qualities. Also, it’s the first time this series has ever been formally localized. It’s a Chinese series dating back to PCs from the 90s. Also, it’s a gorgeous game, flush with color and vivid natural settings. Yeah, it’s a messy experience, but one that’s all the more interesting as a result of its flaws.

Want something that directly responds to your actions? Play a western RPG. I keep hearing that Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredible. Go play that.

If you think that Final Fantasy XVI is the pinnacle of the series because it’s finally a dark and has action game combat, then you never really wanted to play a Final Fantasy game. And that’s fine. Just understand that some of us mourn the series continuing to lose its identity for the sake of a wider audience. It’s not about the turn based combat. It’s about the entirety of the experience feeling compromised, ultimately hollow, glossing over all that’s lost with particle effects and quick time event laden boss fights that were dated a decade ago.

Still the best in the series, 23 years and running…

Backlog Burning: Star Wars – Dark Forces

This…this is long overdue.

This 1996 Lucasarts FPS has long been a thorn in my gaming paw, finding its way into my collection twice in two different forms over the course of the twenty years since I first played it. The most recent pickup was the PS1 port, purchased the utterly amazing Play-N-Trade in Lafayette, LA (if any of you guys are reading this, I do miss you guys. You are all excellent people). Prior to that, it was a big box PC release, with a glorious green shaded cover art, a landscape oriented black and white manual, and a single green CD-ROM with a CG Gammorean guard across from the logo. This still seems odd to me. There aren’t that many Gammoreans in the game.

Dark Forces holds a special place both in gaming history and for myself as a gamer. It was a landmark in the genre at its time for featuring multiple floors in its level layout, and the ability to look up and down. Allow me to remind you that this game came out in 1996 – it was still a big deal back then.

But beyond its technical marvels, Dark Forces was my first FPS. It was the first time I played a game where you stare down the barrel of a gun and blast sprites in a simulation of 3D environments. It was the first game I bought for my first PC, which should make obvious how I’d missed the entire Doom phenomenon as it had occurred. It was among the first games I’d ever played in 3D. So, take some of the things I say in this review with a grain of salt – my history with the game colors my experience to a degree, and I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to pull the nostalgia glasses away to address this game’s numerous problems.

Dark Forces tells a then-untold story about mercenary Kyle Katarn, a gruff dude who the Rebellion hires to steal the plans to the Death Star. Kyle is no longer a canonical Star Wars character, if it wasn’t obvious. Following his murderous heist, he is tasked with tracking down a new Imperial weapon called the Dark Trooper, a towering armored droid carrying a giant rocket launcher/plasma rifle. The story is actually pretty good, considering the time period, following a trail of clues that cross the galaxy to destroy not only the new war machines, but also the sources that produce each of the components of the weapon. The enemy variety contains Imperial officers and storm troopers, of course, but extends several classic monsters and underworld figures. A vast selection of weapons means that you have plenty of options for how to deal the damage. And you will need all of them, because Dark Forces is a pretty tough challenge.

It’s even harder if you play it on the PlayStation.

Anyone who reads this blog already knows that I’m more of a console gamer than anything else. I spend far more time with a controller in my hand than a mouse. So, when Brandon pushed for me to play this as one of my six games, I had every intention to polish off the PS1 port. After all, my PC copy is long since lost to the aether, and I needed to make good on that $6.00 purchase I made several years ago.  The learning curve is pretty sharp on the PS1 port, thanks to convoluted controls, so as the difficulty ramped up in the back half of the game, it was taking several weeks to finally muscle through the intricate levels that make up the bulk of Dark Forces.

You’ve never known true gaming panic until you turn the corner and see these guys.

Let me make this as clear as I can for you guys. There are conveyor belt sections in the last level that requires the player to crouch, jump, and navigate a simple maze in order to proceed, and failure means getting dropped into a dark corridor full of storm troopers who will get the jump on you. Pair this with the shaky movement controls that are mapped to the D-Pad (with R1+ directions activating strafing), and Kyle frequently finds himself full of holes.

Each level is a series of complex mazes and switch puzzles, some of which find some logical consistency, some of which will cause you to refer to the map screen with frequency. This is part of what held me up from finishing for such a long time. I can recall playing this game back in 1997, finding the third level nearly impossible to play through. Anoat City features a hub area where players have to select a sewer path to follow, and then use a series of switches to reach their target in a hidden area deep below the gutters. I know you must be shocked to find that the sewer level isn’t fun, but you’ll have to trust me; it’s pretty obnoxious even if you know the solution.

1997 Me got lost in this level so many times…

So with the twin problems of awkward controls and confusing navigation, the fact that I finished this game probably sounds a bit shocking overall. Clearly I’m not that skilled of a gamer, and this one tested skills I don’t frequently break out – namely, those required for playing older shooters. Well, I have one fact that I must reveal about how I endured the challenges of Dark Forces.

I didn’t finish the PS1 version. I switched over to the PC version.

And thank God that I did. The controls on the PC original are quick and intuitive, and even the most irritating parts of the Arc Hammer mission were manageable thanks to controls that don’t require an extra thumb to contend with. I was able to get through incredibly challenging series of Dark Trooper battles near the hangar at the finale on my first run through the PC version. What’s more, I only died once, and that was because I fell into the pit near the start of the level and backed myself into a bad corner when fighting one of the Mk. II Dark Troopers.

Minor gripes aside, Dark Forces has aged rather gracefully. Or, well, the PC version has. While the PS1 port is available on PSN, I can’t exactly recommend it. The PC version can be found over on GOG and Steam, and is worth every penny. It’s a pretty solid Star Wars game from a time when such a label didn’t mean lazy cash in live services shooter. Give it a spin.

I currently lament that my original big box PC copy is lost forever…

Square’s Nostalgia Problem

Long time readers of this blog probably understand the challenges that this topic represents for me writing it. I’ve been playing Squaresoft and Square-Enix games for the better part of eighteen years now, discovering the publisher at the dizzying heights of their run on the original Playstation. Even stating my love for the PS1 era games colors how you could look at how I’m approaching this topic. I have nostalgia. We all have nostalgia. And I’m not attacking that nostalgia so much as I am the rather cynical means that Square-Enix is utilizing the nostalgia that their fans have for their various games across several franchises. Also, let me put the message up front; I’m not ragging on you for liking the games I’m going to talk about here. I am putting forth my issues with those games and why I’m not going to play them. Hear me out, and you may understand where I’m coming from at the end of this.

THAT DISSIDIA COMMERCIAL:

I must admit that this entire article is somewhat reactionary. It’s the culmination of thoughts and feelings I’ve had about one of my favorite series and what used to be my favorite publisher as well, but it was an advertisement for the latest Dissidia games that pushed me to finally put my thoughts down. Chiming in 8-bit voice, the Final Fantasy Overture plays as the camera pans around someone who is sitting on a couch, playing the very first Final Fantasy on an NES, map unfolded on a table in front of him, the Nintendo Power strategy guide right beneath. His son joins him on the couch. Cut to black. Thirty Years of Beloved Heroes is the caption, and the story continues to unfold, showing the life of one such fan. The ad suggests that Dissidia Opera Omnia is a game for fans. That they are the reason it exists. Sure, that may be true, but let’s cut into this a bit.

This is when we want to hear the 8-Bit FF Overture.

I want to start by pointing out how I see Final Fantasy. It is a series of iterative roleplaying games, featuring a new cast for each entry, and new variations on existing mechanics. These aspects of the series were present throughout each of the games that came out during the first fifteen years of the series. Even the numbered entries in the series would continue this tradition. Spin-offs would even fit the bill, with the Tactics series giving players the world of Ivalice through three different lenses. Note, I’m not including the Final Fantasy Adventure/Legends games in this, as those were the roots of the SaGa/Seiken Densetsu games rebranded for localization.

However, this wouldn’t continue for long after the Enix merger. Philosophies changed within the company, and the first direct sequel arrived on the PS2 with Final Fantasy X-2. The idea of unique Final Fantasy games still seemed to be a goal, but the company considered the option to recycle assets to accelerate game production a valid path to releasing games more quickly. Time would eventually show that they were setting an industry standard for companies like Ubisoft. This practice even extended to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, where once GBA stop-gap Chain of Memories found a new life in 3D utilizing assets from the original Kingdom Hearts.

So, for those of us old bastards who have been playing these games since before the Enix merger, there is a standard in place. The idea existed that each game is about a new cast of characters in an entirely new world used to be expected. I don’t have an option but to call this a formula, as that’s what it was. Use existing nomenclature for the magic, ATB combat where applicable, and then make new stuff for everything else. However, as development of Final Fantasy XII stretched on, Square-Enix needed to fill out a release schedule. This is when Final Fantasy VII was milled for a misguided attempt to expand the story across new games and even the feature length disaster Advent Children. The original story was blurred for the sake of fan service.

Perhaps…but not you. Never you. 

Honestly, it took me a long time to replay Final Fantasy VII after the fallout settled from Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Problems like…everything involving Genesis or Angeal in Crisis Core (a game I enjoyed playing when it wasn’t dealing with these two idiots) made me look at the original differently simply because it was too fresh to ignore their existence when playing the original.

But I digress.

This was the first time Square-Enix tried to repackage the memories of gamers, and they succeeded.

…

Well, they made a lot of money. Continued releases in the Compilation surrounded the collective begging of over half the fan base for a remake of Final Fantasy VII, something that wouldn’t be formally announced until 2015. To some of us, the prospect of the new guard remaking a game as treasured as FFVII was freshly terrifying. The idea that Genesis could show up during a story that was already over a decade old and played by millions was disturbing to say the least.

However, the door was open, and Final Fantasy would never be the same again.

The First Crossover

Final Fantasy Dissidia released for the PSP in 2008. Unlike 1998’s Ehrgeiz, which merely featured FFVII characters alongside a new cast of characters, Dissidia featured a complete cast of favored characters from numerous classic Final Fantasy games, set against a new…er…story…about the gods of Cosmos and Chaos warring with each other. The plot seems inconsequential from the outside, and only operates to bring these characters together. This game started a franchise, including three spectacle laden fighting games and a turn based RPG for mobile. It’s a largely inoffensive product, but the formula was then copied for the Theatrhythm games, which use the ongoing battle between Cosmos and Chaos as an excuse for a rhythm game full of classic Nobuo Uematsu orchestrations. Admittedly, I like this game, but the story is completely worthless.

Other mobile games would follow, including the abysmal cash magnet All the Bravest. Most of these games would follow the same trend; cram in sprites of classic Final Fantasy characters on top of a flimsy excuse to have characters from numerous worlds on the same stage. Count the money. While I’ve heard from various people that they’ve at least started making games underneath this marketing scheme, I find the concept of the mega-crossover game both crass and extremely unappealing.

We Remember it for You…Piecemeal

The reality is this…I’ve been on adventures with these characters. I’ve invested hundreds of hours into the lives of these little piles of pixels and polygons, and I’ve felt for way more of them than is probably logical. I already know their stories, and having those stories retold to me in a new context feels…well…lazy.

We’ve been here before, and it didn’t seem so fake.

Let’s bring in another example of Square-Enix repackaging my gaming memories for money: World of Final Fantasy. This 2016 game fell underneath the shadow of the long awaited Final Fantasy XV, a game I was very pleased with despite some issues (that I’ll be discussing on here in the future). It was an odd move by Square-Enix to release these two titles so close together, but I have a theory about why.

Loads of us old farts want turn based Final Fantasy back.

And we aren’t wrong. The fact is that when I think Final Fantasy, I think ATB combat, massive worlds, and the cheesiest melodrama set against total anime stupidity that a Japanese game development team can throw at me. The more serious everyone is taking the world threatening situation, the better. Hell yes, I love Final Fantasy VIII, and I even wrote about why people need to give that game a break in the past.

So, enter World of Final Fantasy, a game that revives classic ATB combat with a new story. Doesn’t that sound like the Final Fantasy we all know and love?

It’s not. It’s a crossover game.

A Sneak Peek of What I Thought of World of Final Fantasy

First off, it’s a pretty good game. I like one of the two new leads – Reynn could carry this game by herself, but the writers thought we needed “comic relief” (a concept that would be fine if the comedy was actually funny instead of obnoxious). The Pokémon-esque additions to ATB combat are surprisingly solid, rewarding high level play for anyone who indulges in the nuances of the system while remaining accessible for the target audience, which for this game is kids. This is all good stuff, and I’m not even kidding here. World of Final Fantasy is a fun game, and I really dig what Tose Software (the team behind the handheld remakes on GBA/DS) accomplished here. It’s a sight better than the last time Square tried their hand at a Kid’s First Final Fantasy because it actually has some depth to the mechanics. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest this is not.

Seriously, the stacking mechanic is fun stuff. It’s a great damned game.

But much like the crossover games above, the story we are given in World of Final Fantasy is mostly a setup for bringing in all of your favorite characters and stories in lieu of a new adventure for the leads. Sure, they have a story, and despite being only about half through the campaign, it’s unfolded in fairly interesting ways for the most part.

But the plot takes the back seat to revised versions of classic Final Fantasy stories when you start any new location, as we are given an excuse to see a modified version of each characters origin story, changed only to fit the events taking place in this game. This leads to each chapters event, some crossover scenes that can be unlocked as a side challenge, and ultimately, the ability to summon that character in combat.

First off, I don’t really find the idea of “collecting my favorite characters” all that appealing because it seems like it would end up being a cheap tactic in lieu of preparing for combat with a good load out of monsters in my party stack. I know, summons have always been in play, but as I’ve gotten older, I get more kicks out of being able to play the game so well that I don’t use the summons anymore. I mean…have you ever played Final Fantasy VII/VIII without using the summon command outside of the Emerald Weapon battle (because to Hell with fighting that thing any other way)? It’s a far more rewarding game. (See: I’m Old)

Second, and far more noteworthy: this tactic of bringing in existing characters and stories feels like World of Final Fantasy is advertising and exploitation in turn. It’s a means to draw younger gamers into the games that came out in the past while cashing in on the nostalgia of older players. It’s cynical, it’s cold, and it shows a stark lack of creativity from a series that once made a school fly during the second act.

EXCEPT FOR THIS THING. KILL IT WITH FIRE.

See my full review of this game some time in the future. I need to get back to it and finish it. Again, it’s a solid game, and worthy of your time despite the reliance on existing material. I still want to know what happened to Reynn’s parents. Lann can burn in hell with this games horrific stuffed animal exposition machine. They don’t deserve to share screen time with Reynn because Reynn get’s shit done!

Connecting My Dots…or is it Pixels?

I was blessed by my amazing wife (and several friends and family members who pitched in, thank you all so very much) with a Nintendo Switch upon launch day. My library of games (stupidly massive as it already is) contains no less than seven RPGs, six of which are Japanese in origin. Four of those games are attempting to revive the feel of classic JRPGs. I’ve reviewed two of them on this blog, I am Setsuna, and The Longest Five Minutes. No, I’m not done throwing out figures, but be patient with me, we’re getting down to the peanut butter and nougat at the center of this delicious Fast Break bar.

Square-Enix is responsible for three of those RPGs, and all of them are attempting to revive the feel of a 16-Bit game. Turn based combat, loads of text boxes, 2D worlds to explore. Each game is an attempt to draw in players who long for those turn based games from the 90s. Two of these games (I am Setsuna and Lost Sphear) have been hit with widely mixed reviews, due to the their lack of innovation, average story telling, and paint-by-numbers level design. Octopath Traveller has received rave reviews for reasons I’m not even ready to discuss because I’m still working my way through it (in short, play it). I’m not even taking Bravely Default into account, because I’ve not played enough of it to know, but Square-Enix is completely capable of making the kind of games that they made back in the 90s. They have delivered on five wholly unique examples of turn-based RPGs, and, in some of these cases, they have been incredibly successful. Octopath can’t even stay on store shelves in Japan. Let’s add that Japan even received the Seiken Densetsu Collection, a massively desired collection of the first three games in that series, one of which has never seen a proper localization.

Just look at this miraculous game. Currently 41 hours in…

And yet, while Octopath Traveller rakes in high review scores, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT launches to middling review scores, poor sales, and is only keeping up presence due to the drip feed of all of your favorite characters at a slow, scheduled pace. While I can’t confirm any sort of sales figures of Opera Omnia, due to it’s availability as a free-to-play game propped up by microtransactions, the fact that it’s been downloaded to over a million Android devices with an Editor’s Choice award, ranking in the top 500, and #161 on the Apple App Store for RPGs suggests that it’s doing better than its console cousin.

Uncommon Ground 

It’s not something that I’ve consciously thought about until recently. It’s more of a reality that settled in on my brain when I recently attended Animazement in Raleigh. There are dozens upon dozens of booths at any of the local conventions that all seem to sell the same products; Pop Vinyl figures and blind box mini toys. It’s the same kind of chintzy crap that I can buy at any GameStop, FYE, and even Barnes and Noble now. There are, in a few cases, detailed statues and the like, which are definitely more interesting than the other products, but for the most part, it’s the cheap disposable toys that cost less than five to ten bucks.

And stores are making a killing off of them.

Pop Vinyl figures are omnipresent at this point. There are blind boxes of countless properties. GameStops are stocking these products and they are selling. I’m not buying, but they are selling. It’s an opportunity to, maybe, just maybe score your favorite character. Which feels pretty lame, and I’m saying this as someone who bought Magic: The Gathering cards for several months (and I have enough of for whenever I want to play a few hands).

It is this section of gaming culture that plays the mobile games. They are the next generation of gamers in the eyes of publishers who frequently see my generation as gamer as becoming obsolete.

The very shape of fandom is alien to me now. Between the shrieking cries of exclusivity coming from ignorant fanboys who are just completely not cool with a woman carrying a Star Wars movie, and the merchandised focused crowds who soak up Pop Vinyl figures en masse, I’m sitting on the outside of it all wondering what the hell I’m doing in this crowd.

I love Star Wars. But I don’t need this kinda crap.

I’m not saying that I’m upset that the crowd is as big as it is – because I’m not. It’s pretty great that we’re living in an age where so many people can find a largely wonderful community in nerdy things because it hasn’t always been that way. Despite the toxic underbelly of so many fandoms, there are so many loving, wonderful people who are there for a good time, and want to share those experiences with others. I know that I’m glad to be around these people because I didn’t get to grow up with that. I had a very small circle of friends, and I got a lot of crap out of people, had a lot of nasty insults thrown my way because I liked weird things and no one understood me. It sucked. And sure, that’s certainly not over. It might even be worse for way too many people, but at least, on a surface level I can see good in the culture despite the horrible things taking place. I’m going to get back on topic now because this isn’t about the politics of fandom so much as it is the marketplace, but I do want to end this section by saying that no matter how you got here, why you like the things you do, I’m glad that you are here. You belong among us, and I want you to be here, no matter how much I may despise your favorite games and anime. This is your culture too, no matter what any –Gate crowd tries to tell you.

A Quick Associated Rant about Anime

I can’t sit back and watch art forms I’ve enjoyed for well over a decade shift into what I deem as mediocre. This isn’t isolated to video games. Anime doesn’t provide the thrills it once did simply because most new series seem to mill the same dumpster; protagonists bearing ridiculous special powers, over-endowed women wearing next to no clothing, paper thin world building, lazy action scenes relying almost entirely on static animation shots, screaming, chibi still shots in lieu of emotion, I could probably go on. I know that fan service has been in anime as long as we’ve been watching it in the West, but one episode of Kill La Kill ruined my patience in the span of about three minutes.

I loved this story so much that I named my Ibanez RG after one of the characters.

Anime used provide a broad selection of interesting stories. Yeah, we had a lot of mecha shows, but there was also stuff like Haibane Renmei, a slice of life story about angelic beings in a purgatory like state. We had The Legend of Black Heaven, an incredibly average show about a middle aged rocker being recruited to fight aliens with the power of rock (no I’m not kidding, go watch it and bask in the silliness). BECK told the story of a teenage rock group coming together before delivering the least satisfying conclusion you could imagine for a music fueled slice of life story. Serial Experiments: Lain meditated on the continuing influence that technology has on our society, and has aged horrifyingly well. The success of shows like Bleach or Inuyasha no doubt snuffed out the appeal of these unique, isolated stories from a marketing perspective. I know that there are occasionally new stories that aren’t just repetitive Shonen series (Joker Game was pretty cool), but I don’t hear people talking about these shows. I hear about Attack on Titan, and Kill La Kill. And for the love of God, do not recommend One Punch Man to me because your suggestion will fall on the deafest of ears.

Banish this show to the darkest part of Hell.

I mention this because the popularity of anime in the West and the rise of the popularity of JRPGs parallel. As voice acting became common in JRPGs, anime replaced most attempts of realistic character models for most games in the genre. This is likely because it’s easier to animate lip movement for cell shaded models rather than realistic models. This also means that the stylistic problems of anime have encroached on JRPGs. Take Trails of Cold Steel for example. Trails is a pretty good JRPG, with an involved combat system, and military academy plot that puts Final Fantasy Type-0 to shame. But one of the first scenes of the game sees focal character Rean meeting his female equal (so far as I’m able to tell at 30% into the game) by tripping and planting his face into her cleavage, and then her getting pissed off because he was a klutz. Considering that I saw this trope utilized in Your Lie in April, I feel well within my right to be frustrated by the laziness of character writing in modern Japanese media.

This isn’t funny. This is also not how humans meet. 

I want to love anime again, and it’s not working. It’s become a medium for shallow ideas rather than the compelling. Filmmakers such as Makoto Shinkai can still deliver (Your Name was a standout film for 2017 regardless of medium), but on the whole, anime does little but break my heart now.

I’m a Massive Hypocrite

I am part of Square’s nostalgia problem: I’m still holding up their older games as the good ones.

I know about three people just nodded and said “well of course you are; the old ones are better,” and we are all absolutely right. The fact is that, aside from Final Fantasy XV – and even that is a bit of a stretch – there hasn’t been a great Final Fantasy game since the PS2 era, and some would even claim it’s been longer. In that time, the legacy of Final Fantasy VII as been diluted into a muddy blend of terrible-to-average spin offs and one genuinely nonsensical fan bait movie, Final Fantasy XIII damaged the brand with a trilogy of mediocre games, and Final Fantasy XIV launched and relaunched due to a disaster of a first version. It’s been a busy decade and change since Final Fantasy XII arrived.

There was a time when people were excited about this.

And in that time, numerous rereleases and updates of the classics have hit store shelves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid for Final Fantasy IV because it’s embarrassing. I even shelled out for the digital releases of VII/IX (I’m really tired of spelling out the titles, I’m sorry) simply because I wanted the extra challenges that the trophies bring along with that ever-so-pleasing ping when they unlocked. I’ve spent way too much breath telling people that they need to play Final Fantasy VI, or that IX is the greatest of the PS1 era.

I’ve even been realigning my massive video game library, trading in rarely played hardware and games to bulk up my PS1 RPG library because I find myself more interested in that era of gaming than I am in the increasingly homogenized modern era of me-too sandbox games and shooters. I’ve picked up several games, a number of which are from Square, and found that they’re holding up exceptionally well after nearly twenty years.

And it’s still growing…

And, at the end of all of this, I’m not sure what Square-Enix actually thinks about gamers like myself. We are a rare and dying breed, too wound up in the games of the past, and dying for a revival of that era of game design. We are having to take rare pickings from their library, carefully pushing aside games like Opera Omnius in order to pick up games like I am Setsuna, accepting flawed titles because it at least somewhat resembles the company at its heyday. It’s taken Octopath Traveller for them to land a game that fits what I’d like from a throwback game, and I’m happy to have given them my hard earned cash for it. But for Square, I can’t help but wonder what it means for the future of the series, for their company.

Because I doubt it will mean a return to form for the company. The industry is far removed from that of the PS1 era, where new and interesting ideas were risks worth taking (Xenogears would absolutely not happen now). Square-Enix is publishing a sole console RPG that is untethered to a legacy franchise in 2018, and it’s already here. In 1998, SquareSoft (note the distinction of a pre-merger Square) released Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi, Xenogears, and Western newcomer SaGa Frontier. Three new IPs. One year.

That’s the Square that I’m nostalgic for.

And Where Does That Leave Us?

Again, I’m not going to ask anyone to give up a game that they like simply because it doesn’t fit my image of what I think should be the standards of the company. I helped forge this beast through the purchase of remasters, rereleases and so on. I made this house what it was for you without knowing it, and truthfully, you are enjoying the thing that I hate to have contributed to.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t hope for change in the future of the studio that I have been so entertained by for the past eighteen years. Hajime Tabata knocked a pretty solid game out with Final Fantasy XV after the game had languished in development hell under the care of Tetsuya Nomura, a director who really doesn’t seem to be capable of the work he keeps being given. Octopath is proving a hit. Tokyo RPG Factor is a thing at all.

I’ve spent over a week revising and expanding this article, and it’s not made me sound any less like a rambling lunatic. However, when I wrote the first draft, I made the claim that I felt like there was no place for me in the JRPG market. That the genre had moved on to trying to appeal to a generation that wasn’t interested in the games that I cut my teeth on throughout the early 2000s. Then, on 8/20/18, GungHo Online announced that they were porting the first entries in the Grandia series to the Nintendo Switch.

I’ve missed this cast so much.

I’m still torn, however. As excited as I am that the Grandia series is resurfacing in any form, it’s a half-measure. I’m thrilled to be able to recommend these superb games to people, but it’s another reissue, another remake. We are still on a slow drip for getting games like Octopath Traveler.

I find some hope in the fact that a publisher sees the potential for a remake of the twenty year old Grandia amidst the seas of Fortnite clones. The Nintendo Switch seems to be a breeding ground for reviving indie titles and classics alike, and I admit that I’m excited every time I see a great game given new life in a hand held, but I won’t be able to claim that we are in this mythical “JRPG Revival” until there are more new games of Octopath caliber. The idea of a JRPG Revival has been tossed around for years, starting with the release of Ni No Kuni back in 2011. I want this to be true, but for now, I don’t think we’re there yet.

Backlog Burning: Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD ReMix

Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD ReMix
Publisher: Square-Enix (2014, 2010, 2005)
Year Purchased: 2017
PS3 version used for review.

Oh yeah, we’re gonna do this whole thing!

First and foremost, I want to put a disclaimer at the head of this article: I don’t hate Kingdom Hearts. I really don’t. In fact, I quite liked the first game in the series. The match was truly made in financial heaven; two entertainment behemoths coming together to milk the trinity of nostalgia, fan service, and accessibility to create a Final Fantasy game about Disney characters made for a fun game that could easily be enjoyed by anyone with two functioning thumbs and a penchant for melodramatic cartoon characters. The gameplay was simple as an RPG could get, the narrative simple enough to follow (Maleficent steals the pure hearts of Disney princesses to open a realm of untold knowledge and power), and is wrapped in enough Disney and Final Fantasy fan service to make your average Baldur’s Gate fan vomit.

And with millions of copies sold, the newly minted Square Enix did what any company would do with a hit: make a sequel. What followed Kingdom Hearts was undoubtedly one of the worst games I have ever finished in my life, Chain of Memories, which served as a sampler of the narrative insanity that was soon to follow.

Yes, I know that this is from 358/2 Days. Yes, I do hate myself for knowing that.

Kingdom Hearts, clearly, wasn’t intended to have sequels. The opening hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 are a clear indicator of this fact.

Note, from this point on, I will not be discussing much of what makes these games different in terms of how they are played. The reality is that Kingdom Hearts is a series of brawlers operating in the context of an RPG. There is little RPG gameplay to be found in this series, and it’s not mechanically sound enough to encourage much in the way of high-level play. The ability crafting system in Birth By Sleep is of merit, however, for giving some level of depth to the systems that are in place, but I still mostly hammered the X button while loading two Curaga’s into my loadout to keep the three protagonists of that game afloat. Oh, and Donald Duck still doesn’t give a damn about your screaming low health indicator.

Mulan was a pretty cool movie…God help us if they do a live action remake.

Now. Kingdom Hearts 2. 

The first hours of the long awaited sequel finds the player in the shoes of newcomer Roxas, who is Sora’s Nobody, while our heroes from the first game are in a state of hibernation to have their memories restored after suffering from post traumatic stress disorder after having to endure Castle Oblivion and poorly designed card game mechanics in Chain of Memories. I am aware that I’ve lost half of my readers as of this last sentence, a combined group of angry Kingdom Hearts fans and people who think that this story stupid at the mention of a Nobody.

And one of these groups is dead-on right, because the concept of a Nobody is a complication that a story about touring the Disney archives doesn’t need. Especially since the narrative of Kingdom Hearts 2 expects me to shed a tear when the blonde haired git gets the axe after five hours of minigames and walking around a bland starter town fighting the same small group of monsters while hanging out with uninteresting characters. When the most interesting thing that happens in the start of your JRPG is a fan favorite from Final Fantasy IX showing up, you’re not doing a good job getting me into your new schtick, Nomura.

“I’m going to design a terrible Batman figure someday!”

Eventually, the plot actually wakes up and puts the party most people actually give a damn about back in the spotlight, and it’s off to a series of new worlds, fighting a collection of Nobodies (or as you should call them, silver heartless), and heartless (saying Black Heartless sounds bloody racist doesn’t it?) and Organization XIII members. Our cartoon trio whittles the cloaked mustache twirlers down in a series of increasingly gimmicky boss fights before making their way to The World That Never Was, a frustratingly named oxymoron of a place where the finale takes place.

If this sounds like a skinny plot for a thirty-five hour role playing game, it’s because it is. It’s one of the thinnest excuses to go adventuring beyond “the barkeep says that a man in town is having trouble with rats in his basement” that I think I’ve ever heard before, and honestly, I’d be up for pest control if I didn’t know the truth about Kingdom Hearts 2.

And if you’re still reading this, you’re either getting ready to blast me in the comments or you’re just having a good time seeing someone criticize this game.

The best part of the entire bloody series.

Kingdom Hearts 2 is shallow enough that the better parts, the real attractions, shine through.

I can honestly not recall a single moment in the second act of the game where the plot makes an impact other than the, admittedly, exciting battle in Hollow Bastion. I do recall replaying bits and pieces of 1930s Disney shorts, sequences from The Lion King and Mulan. I’m not the kind of person who really reminisces of these movies with excitement, but playing Kingdom Hearts is honestly not the worst reminder that Disney used to make excellent movies. Sure, the Pirates of the Caribbean inspired section is pretty awful, but the Tron bit is a blast. I mean, think about the weird layers that having Tron in here implies, given that it’s a movie about a guy in the real world getting sucked into a video game that this video game takes you into. It’s stupid, and I kind of love it.

So, yeah, Kingdom Hearts 2 is a really fun game, and I had a great time playing it, even though the boss fight gimmicks were really irritating. It’s not a bad game, and if you can swallow the mythology that it’s trying to spin, you will probably have a good time. Unless you hate Disney movies and silly Japanese melodrama. But if you don’t dig either of those things, you weren’t going to buy this game anyway, and I’m not sure what you’re looking for here.

I challenge you to find a sillier collection of weapons.

However, Kingdom Hearts 2, much like Chain of Memories before it, is guilty of complicating the simple narrative that started in Kingdom Hearts. That game did a couple of loopy things about a deus ex machina villain possessing a classic Disney antagonist for some symbolic heart theft, but it wasn’t quite as indecipherable as the concept of a Nobody to a newcomer to this series. Mind you, I followed what the game was trying to tell me (when a heart is separated from the body, a nobody is formed, and is a separate entity from the normal human that it spawned from oh sweet Jesus why did I write this out). However, this entire addition to what passes for the Kingdom Hearts mythology has lead to not just a needlessly convoluted pair of sequels (one of which is just terrible if I haven’t made it clear to you and your cat and Square-Enix already). The blood that this game spills in the form of a dead red herring character was later reshaped into the terribly named Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, a work of pure fan service made to make fans of Roxas feel better that they’d been duped into caring about a character that I was ready to have off screen so I could get back with my much older and fun anthropomorphic Disney pals, Donald and Goofy. As best as I can tell from watching the cut scenes included on 1.5HD, 358/ 2 Days is one of the most unnecessary games ever added to a snakes nest of dangling narratives for anyone but the most stalwart of ice cream eating spectators in the world, most of whom I’m sure are probably Kingdom Hearts fans after suffering that moaning Z-list anime for as long as it probably ran for. I’m still not sure what I was supposed to get out of this half-step prequel that took place alongside The Worst Kingdom Hearts Game, but I do know I got some trophies for it. So I guess there’s that.

No doubt you’ve noticed that I got off track trying to describe the mess that series director Tetsuya Nomura made trying to get this story off the ground. He and I share the distinction that neither of us can sum up the mythology of Kingdom Hearts without rambling like crazy people. The difference between us is that I’m sleepily writing about the series to get all of the noise out of my head regarding the plot before going back to working on Dream Drop Distance, while he actually conceived of this train wreck, one game at a time, while ignoring the long anticipated third entry in the part of the series that people actually give a crap about.

But before we get to KH3D…eugh…that joke…Birth by Sleep.

Birth by Sleep is the thirty-five hour answer to the question “what was the deal with the cool keyblade graveyard at the end of Kingdom Hearts 2?”, taking place years before Sora ever picked up that steel key-shaped mallet in a weird shadow realm where he could safely stand on stained glass that accurately depicts his absurdly large shoes. Taking up the role of three characters, Earth, Wind and Fire…I mean Terra, Aqua, and Ventus…players explore the same plot from three points of view across three of the shortest JRPG campaigns to ever be conceived, exploring the same worlds and stories from those three perspectives, and finally fighting one more repetitive teleportation spamming boss in an epilogue that probably should have just been included in Aqua’s campaign. And the game should have also just been longer and about her because Terra and Ventus are quite ignorant, and I’m about to tell you why.

Terra faces Ansem.

To save myself some typing, I’m just going to sum the plot up as such; Birth by Sleep is a pre-Disney buyout fan-remake of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, featuring Terra in the role of Anakin Skywalker, Aqua as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Eraqus as Yoda/Mace Windu (depending on the scene), Xehanort as Emperor Palpatine, and Ventus as…er…Padme, I guess. Now that we’re all caught up on exactly what happens in Birth By Sleep, or after some of you have gone to watch Revenge of the Sith instead of listening to me ramble about Kingdom Hearts of all bloody things, let’s look at the sole reason why this game doesn’t work as well as it could have.

First off, numerous key scenes are repeated in each campaign. Second, the events depicted on each world are the same for each character, just with a slight difference for the sake of each characters personality. This means that Aqua is a heroic character, Terra is getting duped by every villain, and Ventus just kind of stands around and thanks Christ that Cold Mountain has saved his acting career. Doing all three of these campaigns back to back is simultaneously piss-easy thanks to the incredibly useful EXP Walker skill that turns level progression into a joke, and miserably frustrating because I just did that entire thing this morning!

The only adult in this game.

Despite it’s flaws, however, I actually liked Birth by Sleep more than Kingdom Hearts 2. Aside from yet another Heartless stand in (they’re Unversed this time), the tiny worlds made for a nice antidote to the winding repetition of Xenosaga III (whose time is coming soon on this page), and even though I ran over the same ground way too much, it was never long winded enough to really drain me of my patience. It’s fun. It’s probably more fun on the PSP where it originated, capable of being carried around in my pocket to allow me to escape from regular adult problems no matter I could have been standing. If anything, this is the best game of all of the sequels. The plot stands on its own without need of support from the mess made by the other five sequels that existed when it came out. Maybe I just like Revenge of the Sith too much. I don’t have any absolute proof to support my claims here. Because only sith deal in absolutes,  haha obvious Star Wars joke.

If you haven’t noticed by now, you’ll have seen that I’ve given rough recommendations for both of these games. That’s right. Kingdom Hearts is pretty fun. It’s pretty stupid most of the time, so don’t get too excited. The journey underneath all of the impenetrable jargon is about a boy, his talking dog, and the worst wizard in all of fiction going on a trip to several dioramas of better stories to fight alongside the heroes of those tales in a wash of chaotic fights that are over once you’ve spilled all of the jelly beans out of the bad guys guts and collected them to spend them at a moogle’s nearby shop. That’s not a bad setup for a video game. In fact, it’s one that I find appealing enough to have played through four of these bloody games from top to bottom, and continue on through a fifth one so I can be caught up in the screaming insanity that is the plot in order to play that supposed unicorn that is going to leap out of my PS4 later this year.

I’m the only hateful jerk on the internet who detests the idea of Pixar worlds.

I can’t explain to you why I think knowing the lore will matter at all. After all, I have watched all of the cut scene movies from the collections and finished those games, and I still have no idea why in the hell Sora and Riku are suffering from narcolepsy in Dream Drop Distance.

I would like to know who is naming these games, and why they felt the need to drink a bottle of drain cleaner before visiting the marketing department with their final decisions.

Oh, and don’t watch the RE:Coded videos. Just turn your TV off and collect your trophies. Read a book or something. Motor Girl by Terry Moore was really good.  Give that a spin instead.

Backlog Burning – Parasite Eve

 

Parasite Eve
Publisher: SquareSoft (1998)
Console: Playstation (Available on PSN for PS3, PSP, PSVita)
Genre: JRPG/Survival Horror
Estimated Year Purchased: 2003

(Spoilers, Ahoy!)

Parasite Eve is one of the last of my PS1 RPGs that I bought in high school and didn’t finish. That list has dwindled this year, starting with Xenogears (a game I borrowed from Z-Trigger co-host Brandon and purchased for myself while in Louisiana, and finished this year), and continuing with Star Ocean: The Second Story, and Wild Arms 2. And, like that trio of JRPG, I still hold my original save file for Parasite Eve. However, that’s not the one I used to finish a run earlier today. The run I completed today started in 2014, when I was living in Winston Salem. Let’s talk about that 2003 (probably) run first.

I first rented Parasite Eve after getting my PS1 while visiting a friend of mine from elementary school. It seemed like it would be short enough to try to blast through, and it was a game I recognized from the GamePro Playstation Encyclopedia, a magazine I considered my game collecting bible at the time (also, I’d love a new copy; PDF even). The visual style looked great, the combat looked cool, and beyond any of that it was Square responding to the success of Resident Evil!

Parasite Eve told the story of Aya Brea, a New York cop, the lone survivor of a freak incident at an opera where the entire audience spontaneously caught fire. Over the course of six days, she attempts to stop Eve, who shares a history with our heroine. The merging of JRPG turn based combat with the nascent Survival Horror storytelling and level design leads to tense combat where strategic timing for attacks and healing are the key to survival. The gameplay has aged extremely well, and the game is short enough that it never overstays its welcome. The visuals are a fine example of  what the PS1 was capable of, and the music is stellar. Yoko Shimomura fans should take note; this game has a much, much better score than the famed Kingdom Hearts score. The only negative I can really throw at Parasite Eve is that the script, while usually one of the best seen on the PS1, can get a bit overblown. The game is something of a sequel to a novel of the same title written by Hideaki Sena, which was also adapted into a film. Sena, a pharmacologist, knows his biology, and the script reflects this. However, it doesn’t break down the science to us laymen, and it gets hard to wade through from time to time. It’s not so bad that it kills the story, but I do feel like it’s worth mentioning.

My run didn’t go well, and I didn’t get much help from my friend, as he didn’t like JRPGs. Eventually, I got to take another shot after buying a copy from Electronics Boutique, a short walk away from the Target in Wilmington, NC. I remember paying about twenty bucks for my copy, a black label copy with a plain white demo disc (which I’m going to talk about a little later), and being excited to take a proper run on a game that I did enjoy upon rental, even though it threw me more than I could handle at the time.

I can back up what I say next with a glance at my original saves: I had no idea what I was doing upon my original run of Parasite Eve. 

According to the times on that run, I reached the Carrier at the end of day five with about seven hours on the clock. I know that I used up all of my rockets on the T-Rex fight in the museum, and that I had very few medicines, and equally pathetic amounts of ammo. The fact that I made it past Eve and even attempted the battle with the Ultimate Being is pretty astonishing. I’m not saying I was a good gamer or anything. I was terrible at games at the time. I haven’t improved much, but I can piece together winning builds now, which is something I had no idea how to do back then.

This run originally took me a couple of weeks, as I wasn’t playing consistently. I can remember being genuinely shocked when Brandon borrowed the game for a weekend, and brought it back on Monday, telling me that he’d finished it. He couldn’t explain to me why I’d had such a poor run, but he the fact that he did it irked me. I wasn’t able to scratch the surface of the Ultimate Being battle, and he’d finished it off in a weekend. In retrospect, of course, I know that Brandon was just better at games than I was. I mean…he still is. But I can hold my own now.

I would try again on and off for the next several years, but I didn’t take a serious stab at it until 2014, when I started over from scratch while passing time before reuniting with my wife, who had moved to Raleigh to start a job prior to our marriage that November. I had just wrapped up a run of Lunar 2, a game she bought for me at Edward McKay, fulfilling a long held wish to own that gorgeous PS1 masterpiece (a game deserving of its own blog someday, and I wanted to topple another of my PS1 RPGs.

I would work through a carefully played run up until the end of Day 4, and then fell off of playing. I was packing to make the move to Raleigh, and I didn’t have as much time for serious gaming. I want to say that I tried to pick up the run once we settled into our apartment in Raleigh, but I don’t remember any details of that run.

This brings me to 2017, one week ago (mid-November, for future readers sake), and I picked up my run. I continued a strategy that I figured would be pretty foolproof for finishing the game. However, this wasn’t a clean success. I still struggled to deal with some tough moments, like getting stuck in the Warehouse sidequest after fighting the boss, and being incapable of leaving without dying. I had to learn about escaping battle from the manual (which is hilariously embarrasing), and that allowed me to continue after being stuck for two days. Three days after reaching the Museum (Thanksgiving is a hard week in retail), I finished the game.

The strategy I took to this run is fairly…stupid. I didn’t use any stat boosts for any of my weapons or armor until I reached the boss fights against the dinosaurs in the Museum stage of the game. It was a this point that I chose a weapon – a grenade launcher with a whopping seven customization slots – and used every tool I’d collected to stack stats and special abilities onto this one gun, and did the same for the best armor I had in my inventory. I then loaded all of my bonus points onto the attack stat of the gun. Needless to say, dealing damage wasn’t an issue any more, and I bested the last bosses of the game with far less difficulty than I had upon my first attempt.

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t take two attempts to finish Parasite Eve and it’s final encounter. No. I had a different problem.

After fighting the final boss, Parasite Eve pulls a Resident Evil, and forces the player to run through a final set of halls to set the self destruct on the Aircraft Carrier to destroy the Ultimate Being once and for all. On my first attempt to perform this task, Aya decided to walk back to a door where she’d been running from the a blob that wouldn’t scare Steve McQueen, and dies.

I did a lot of swearing after this happened.

But, I went back to it earlier today and finished. Another fantastic JRPG from the finest era of the genre tucked firmly beneath my belt.

Parasite Eve did well enough to warrant a sequel in 2000. I have never played Parasite Eve II, as I do not have a copy. Nor do I have the psuedo-sequel The 3rd Birthday, a much maligned PSP game from 2010. I would like to play them, of course, but I’ll save my comments on their qualities for when I play them. Despite the question of their quality, Parasite Eve demands to be played. Sure, it’s not a scary horror game, as the industry was years away from games that are genuinely terrifying, but it’s a great Survival Horror game from the early days of the genre. It’s also an excellent JRPG, a unique experience from that genre that stands out amidst its contemporaries.

Now, back to that demo disc that I spoke of earlier.

Parasite Eve came packed with a third disc, containing trailers of upcoming SquareSoft games, and a full demo of the extremely ambitious Xenogears. This is where I will admit that I passed up something that day at Electronics Boutique all those years ago just so I could play Xenogears. At the time that I bought my copy of Parasite Eve, Xenogears was out of print and not easy to put hands on. I seem to recall copies of the game running for about fifty bucks, and I didn’t have a job. It was a game that I wanted to play and didn’t think I would ever get a chance to play. Just a taste of this game was enough to sate my interest…for about two hours, in which I stretched my playing of the demo enough to grind Fei’s levels to absurd heights before finally seeing the ending. I fell in love with Xenogears that day, and would replay the demo disc a few times before Brandon bought a Greatest Hits reprint that came out our senior year of high school. I didn’t get my hands on one of these reprints, however. It didn’t come to stores where we lived, and even when I had the money for it, online shopping didn’t happen very often. Strange to look back on that fact.

I don’t recall any of the trailers, so I can’t comment on those. However, I find myself bizarrely nostalgic about the concept of demo discs. They are a byproduct of an era when the internet was painfully slow, the reason why Playstation Magazine was able to steal eight bucks from it’s non-subscribing readers each month, and the reason I learned about games like Intelligent Qube (which I will never own due to a nightmarish aftermarket value). It’s how I got to take Aeris along for the ride when Cloud and Barret took down the Sector 1 Reactor in the Tobal No. 1 Final Fantasy VII demo.

All in all, Parasite Eve has been an excellent piece of my library for almost fifteen years, and I’m glad to know that I could do it again at any time. It’s still a great game, and I hope that someone goes to PSN after reading this, and takes the journey for themselves.