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Final Fantasy Month

Last year in December there were a couple of streamers on Twitch playing through Final Fantasy. This was followed by Games Done Quick in January and sooner than I realized, I had a hankering to play Final Fantasy 1 and found myself even trying to learn how to speed run the game.

After a few days into mucking around with it, I thought to myself how cool it would be to go and play through all the Final Fantasy games. I didn’t own all of them, and haven’t played any game in the series since it left Nintendo consoles after 6. But I thought it would be fun to do as the older games in the series were some of my favorite RPGs on console of all time. So I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if in December I go and play through them all?

Why December? Well because in December, I traditionally have a decent amount of time off from work and often find myself playing more video games during this time frame. This year is no different as I will be taking off between Christmas and New Years. I generally have my daughter for an extended period during this time and do some family stuff as well, but will still find myself with some extra time. So a few days into December. I thought to myself… Oh Shit it’s Final Fantasy month! And while I was a little late going into it. I headed forward through the Final Fantasy titles.

So obviously you start with the first in the series. Final Fantasy I long credit with my addiction to Video Games and my love to RPGs. I remember as a child going out and renting Final Fantasy 1 for the standard 2 or 3 day time, and bringing it back 2 or 3 weeks later having thoroughly played through the game and emptied my pocket with late fees. Many games give me nostalgia joy, Final Fantasy 1 is #1 on that list. Nothing beats it.

I decided not to speed run and just to play like a normal person. Not overly optimized either. I ran with a warrior, black belt, red mage and white mage. I will say that though the BB is really weak in the first few levels, they are pretty awesome the further you get with them and I totally want to try an all black belt group at some point just because they are so awesome. Still, it was a fun group.

Final Fantasy isn’t the longest game in the world, took me about a week to run through it with casual play time. Given that I spent a week on FF1, chances of getting through what 17 or 18 games in the series seems very unlikely in a months time. I still hope to at least get to through the NES games, if not the SNES games as well.

The story is pretty basic as well, though honestly, it is also extremely interesting. Bad guy travels back in time 2000 years, creates 4 fiends that in 2000 years sends bad guy back in time again and destroys the world. Process repeats over and over again. Doesn’t seem to be any real motive as to why or anything. And unfortunately most of the story line isn’t really given to you until you defeat the bad guy. Most the game, you walk around doing what you need to do with little idea as to why other than you are supposed to and if you do you will save the world. You get this really long dialog at the end explaining what was going on the whole time and then explaining how the 4 heroes aren’t the real heroes, you are! Ugh. That was hokey. Again, FF1 was a very simplistic game but they were doing some new things and it was a more simple time as well. Shouldn’t count that against the game. I still love the game in all its simplicity.

I plan on updating my progress through the series as I continue to play the games. As of this writing I am currently undertaking Final Fantasy 2… the Japanese version. I did originally want to record or stream my playthroughs, but I still don’t really have the capability of recording console games so not this year, maybe I will have the set up to be able to do that next  year. And I really want to play the original versions. Even in its most truest form, Square likes to muck with their games when they re-release. An example is in FF1, they usually make it so that your heroes attack the next enemy if the one you told them to attack is already dead. I like the strategy involved in how that works in the original, so poo on that.

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YouTube and The Witcher

It has been three months now of playing video games and posting my game play footage to YouTube. I have definitely had my ups and downs whilst doing it, but overall have enjoyed the experience. I am surprised in a lot of ways that I am still persistent in recording and editing and doing all the things that go into video creation, and in fact in many ways am more into it now than I was three months ago.

This past Monday, I went to my computer after work with the intention of recording the latest few episodes of my The Witcher playthrough. I tend to bulk record a few episodes at a time for my non-Minecraft games and Witcher was next up. But I didn’t, instead I went and did some recording for Craft the World instead. I didn’t because, well, I  don’t like the game that much, I don’t enjoy playing it almost at all. Sure, the series has traditionally done the worst of my 4 videos, even worse than the 15 year old Zeus game, but that doesn’t actually bother me that much. I knew it wasn’t going to be that much of a draw going into it.

Going into the game. I did want to play off the release of Witcher 3 by playing through Witcher 1 and Witcher 2 and then going directly into Witcher 3. But honestly, I don’t like the first one so much that I do kind of wonder how 2 even got made.

There’s a lot bad about the game like the  re-use of models so much that they don’t even bother changing the clothes of characters when they change the names. I can excuse this even though the game isn’t old enough for that to really be an excuse, but it was the first game from Projekt CD Red. But the things that actually bother me is stuff like the fact that it literally feels like every female in the game’s main purpose is to have sex with the main character, many times I accidentally stumble into yet another sex scene without even realizing that is where the conversation is going. Maybe it is a translation thing but I feel like I should know where it is headed if that is the result. There is a quest board… which I don’t even care for in MMOs. And many of the quests revolve around kill quests (blech) and various weird mini-games. I only ever have played the mini-games when I am forced into them by the story. There are three main offenders… The Poker Dice (read Yahtzee), fist fighting (which seems to be in every single inn), and the let’s get drunk. I actually feel the time where I had to get drunk and go off and fight was somewhat interesting, but only good once and every time they force you to drink, it feels somehow forced. “I will only tell you the info if you drink with me!!!” Really? How bout I just give you alcohol and you tell me what I wanna know. Wait, why isn’t that an option? You see that theme in all the mini-games too… “I will only tell you the info if you play poker dice with me!!!” Uhh, how bout we pretend I just lost, I pay you some money and you spill the info?

To be fair, there are some cool things about the game too. I like the discovery involved in the alchemy tho I still don’t entirely understand how it works, it’s kind of cool, and it’s kind of cool that you need to learn skills to advance that (even if it isn’t clear). There is also some interesting story going on. But overall, I just haven’t liked it. I think there has been more than one occasion where I have said that I have no idea what I’m doing has anything to do with the ultimate storyline and sometimes I don’t even know why I’m doing what I’m doing other than… quest.

And so I  have just today made the decision to make today’s episode of The Witcher the last episode, at least for awhile. I may  come back to it later. I do kind of want to go through the game as a whole at some point, but right now I feel the need for a break with it. After all, maybe the entire storyline is really good and will make the rest of the game’s issues feel silly. But for now, I’m not having fun, so it is out.

I will say that the decision to discontinue the season had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that today’s episode is the 25th episode of the series. When I was recording it, I didn’t even realize it was going to be the 25th episode as I made no mention of it at all. It’s just kind of that time in my recording. Tomorrow will bring the 25th episode of Minecraft (a fact I knew full well going into it). And I think Zeus is going to be hitting 25 in two episodes. I do feel like 25 episodes might become a standard minimum for me though. I like the number, it basically is equivalent to one season of TV programming (which usally has between 18 and 22 episodes these days). And I like the idea of giving a game a full on shot before I give up on it. 24 episodes at 20 minutes a piece is about 8 hours of gameplay and I think that is a good amount of time to give a game before I decide that I don’t like it.

So what will happen for Witcher’s normal Thursday/Sunday time slots? In short, I don’t know. I am pretty sure at the very least, I will move Craft the World from Wednesday to Thursday. And there is a good chance I move Minecraft into either the Wednesday or Sunday spot. I may actually do a near complete re-work of the schedule to be honest. I am hesitant of penning in Minecraft more than 2 times a week for sure, I have liked the flexibility putting up “bonus” episodes has given me. Which would leave me with a hole in the lineup. I might fill that hole by extending Craft the World to three times a week… Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday.  If I did that it would probably be Minecraft on Monday & Friday and Zeus on Wednesday & Saturday. This would be a pretty big shift for me. So I have some decisions to make over the next couple of days.

Looking forward. I do expect that either Zeus or Craft the World will finish up their first seasons in the next couple of weeks. I do have some ideas for what to replace them with though I am open to suggestions. I do feel the need to take a break before I continue on with both of those games, though I love both of them and definitely will be continuing them both in the future. I just feel I need to keep it fresh to keep it interesting for me.

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What it Takes to be an RPG

Over the last several years I have put a lot of thought into what exactly makes an RPG an RPG. A big reason this has been happening is the inclusion of games that are clearly NOT RPGs into the genre due to the inclusion of Levels and Items in that particular game. Borderlands is probably the biggest example, but I have seen Bioshock Infinite mentioned as an RPG as well, and heck if that is what it takes… SSX is probably an RPG in many people’s eyes as well. So with that, I have talked about what it takes to be an RPG with many friends in Real Life and we have kind of come up with this list of qualifications:

1) Story – An RPG must have a story. There is a caveat here in that early RPG stories are excusable to be near non-existent. Though, early RPGs are almost a proof rather than a counter to this point. Akalabeth for instance has nearly no story, but there is in fact a story. Just having a story in 1979 or 1980 is not a small thing so we do count it every bit as much as modern games even though it wasn’t any better than the story of Super Mario Bros. Presence of a meaningful story (to the times) is a must though, I am hard pressed to think of any RPG without a meaningful story outside of early games in the genre.

2) Non-Questing Items – This implies items whose sole purpose is made for a quest or solving a puzzle, such as a key. In addition to just having items, there should be a choice in the usage of these items. For instance, there not only is a sword, but maybe different types of sword and it is player choice as to which sword to use (even if there is a clear “best” sword to use).

3) Stats – Whether directly viewable by the player or not, there should be stats for the character as well as items, and generally there is a way to manipulate these stats. (Equipping an item to raise your strength for instance.)  In fact, i generally consider the manipulation of stats to be one of the ultimate objectives  of an RPG besides the story. An easy example is that you can play Pokemon, but there is a second level to the game where you are trying to breed and train pokemon to have the best stats possible. This is the manipulation that RPG fans enjoy that a non-RPG with stats often lacks.

4) Indirect Combat – Combat in an RPG has with it the player directing combat rather than the player with direct control of a character within combat. What I mean by this is, with Combat in an RPG, you tell a character to fight a monster with a sword and that character fights said monster using the character’s stats and random chance to win or lose. In combat that has direct control, you as the player directly aim a weapon and click a button where every button click is a usage of the weapon or spell. It is for this reason primarily that games like Zelda, Borderlands, and Gauntlet are not RPGs, but are a different beast. There is a similarity to God-Games here… you are a God influencing your character very strongly, but you are not the character himself.

5) Distinct Protagonists – This is seems like kind of a no duh type of requirement, but there are games out there lacking a distinct protagonist. For instance, Black & White contains no protagonist at all. Protagonists can come in the form of a solo adventurer but in an RPG you rarely will have more than say 6. Usually it is 1 to 4 protagonists.

That is in essence an RPG as I see it. I will note, though I am sure there is room for breaking these rules, I cannot think of a game that breaks any of them outside of the caveat for story. Really, it comes down to feel. Most RPG fans can sit down and play a game and tell if it is an RPG. This is my best attempt at explaining why it is that I can sit down and play Dark Souls and recognize it to not be an RPG even though on the surface it can seem like it. Other games can have aspects of an RPG, and in fact I would say level and items in this day and age should be in pretty much every game. Heck, you can consider Super Mario Bros, to have a second level if you consider being big the second level.

I also feel the need to note that not classifying a game as an RPG is by no means a slam on the game. I talk about certain games not being RPGs with people and for some reason they get very angry about the idea that the game they enjoy is not an RPG. As if their game is somehow worse because of it. Neither of these is true. Borderlands, for instance, is not an RPG, I enjoy playing it from time to time. Zelda is not, and I love that game. Dark Souls is not, and is a great game. Games can be good without being an RPG.  And RPGs can be bad games despite being an RPG. There are a lot of genres out there and all of them have really great games that are totally worth playing. The entire logic behind why we categorize into genres is because people have preferences in games. I for instance have a general dislike for sports games, FPS games, and RTS games. And so when someone classifies an FPS as an RPG, I may be more inclined to get into a game than if it were just a great FPS game. I might try to put up with some of the negatives about the genre just to get the experience.  Hell I always have thought there is no way you could have a game that is an FPS and an RPG so the idea kind of intrigues me. When a game fails to live up to the RPG side of things I am let down. I would rather a game be a great FPS than a crappy RPG and I’m not sure why others would rather it be a crappy RPG just because it is a great FPS.

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Richard Garriott Gets His Crazy Money

Note, this post is being dual-posted to RPGComplex.com as well.

It is like a car crash in the making. How can you not look? That’s how I felt when I saw Shroud of the Avatar go up on Kickstarter. I gleefully put in my $25 in order to get a front seat view at the wreckage that will surely follow. And now more than 22,000 other people have followed suit and given Richard Garriott more than $2 million dollars in order to ensure that this car wreck happens. So far, Garriott has not disappointed. Read More >>