Am I the only one who's excited about Chrono Trigger being brought over here?

SLS

"Magus is in the Intro and Glenn is a human in an end scene! Yes!! All is good!!!"

After buying Samba and two pairs of accompanying maracas I've had tons of fun being a Samba evangelist to friends and family. My family enjoyed the game so much, I decided the game, while a bit expensive, would make a wonderful Christmas gift to the lot of them. But what do I find when I hit the local EBX, the very same place I bought my two pair a short two months ago? The maracas are discontinued!?! How can this be? Samba 2001's track list was just announced, they can't possibly NOT have maracas available for those that missed out the first time, can they?

My only glimmer of hope... A listing in the EBX computers of a $49.99 pair of "Dreamcast Maracas DC" that didn't have the "discontinued" note next to them. Did Sega discontinue the expensive maracas in order to clear the shelves for a cheaper, more likely to sell variety when Samba 2001 hits? Have you, or your readers, heard anything positive about this situation? Where you even aware of the situation?

Concernedly,

Nathan

Jeremy,

I liked Drew's defense of FFVIII. I loved Drew's defense of FFVIII.

But there's a problem, with it. It's hypocritical. Defending the lack of tragic pasts for FFVIII's characters is something that needs to be done, but doing so in a column in which one had earlier complained that the FFIX characters need more backplot sort of nulls the effect, now doesn't it?

Also, for the record, the game more or less states that Vivi was the prototype for the black mages. It also states that the prototype would last longer than the other black mages. The purpose of showing that he had had kids was to show that his race had a future- do the birds and the bees of the black mage anatomy involved in the proccess really matter?

-Davon

Hello,

I've send this letter to Drew, but since he has got technical problems, he probably didn't recieve it. So...here it is:

I just want to go on with that letter of yesterday about the complexity of the story of games. I like to see complex stories in games or cartoons and such, but sometimes what people call "complex stories" aren't that complex as they are.

You see, this is wrong with a lot of Japanese stories (well, not Japanese, but you know what I mean), is that they really want to put the plot twist in the game, which make you say: "What the ....!". To accomplish that they make the first three quarters of the game (or movie) relativly easy to understand and thereby, most of the also boring, and at the start of the of the last quarter of the game they introduce new element B in the story, that really surpises you, but also confuses you. And to make it worse, they put in element C and D and E and F.

Like in Chrono Cross, beginning of disc 2, they introduce element C, which already leaves you with some questions and then after that there's element D that gets introduced and short after that element E which is connected to Chrono Trigger (element A). What's understandable is the elements A, B, C, D, E seperatly, but what's very hard to see is the links between A and B, B and E, E and C, etc. etc. That is where the complexity lies in and because everything goes so fast, instead of letting element A, B, C, D & E introduced slowly in the game, making it interesting at all times plus making it more understandable. Instead of playing a game twice or looking at a movie twice.

The worst thing are actually the cartoons like the manga "Ghost in the Shell", where I'd rather watch with subtitling (because I'd like to hear the original voices) and Japanese people talk so quick, that I don't have the time to read AND think with subtitles going that fast.

You see, if a story is good, it's good and I don't really need to be shocked like that. It actually makes me wonder: are Japanese people "smarter" than us that this is a common thing there, or does it lie in other things, like the translations?

Laterz,

Douggie

The other day Drew printed a letter stating that for the most part there's no difference between "easy" and "challenging" RPGs other than the degree of level building required. I'm a bit surprised that neither the letter-writer nor Drew mentioned the game which is the most noteworthy exception to this generalization--Final Fantasy 5.

While it's not exceptionally difficult, FF5 is not an easy RPG. Even without considering its infamous optional bosses, it's much harder than any subsequent cardinal FF game (i.e. 6 through 9), and I consider it slightly more challenging than even the vaunted Japan-only "hard type" of FF4 (which I have played and beaten).

And FF5 (unlike FF4HT, by the way) is emphatically not a level-building contest. It's possible to finish the game--including the optional bosses--with character levels in the single digits, and conversely, without the right battle plan for each boss you won't do much better with 3000 HP than with 1000.

By the way, something I really don't understand is the widespread hatred of FF5 among English-speaking Square/FF fans. FF5 is always near the bottom of the chart when someone takes a survey of favourite FFs. Two years ago, that could be put down to the fact that most English-speakers had never played the game, but not now. Today's Squareheads aren't unaware of FF5, they actively dislike it. It's the only cardinal FF apart from FF8 to be regularly nominated in "worst-ever RPG" surveys.

The reason I find this strange (besides the fact that I personally hold FF5 as my all-time favorite game in the series) is that the FF5 scorn is pretty much confined to the group represented by The GIA--English-speaking Square fans. Japanese gamers I've had the opportunity to ask have, without exception, named FF5 as one of the best games, if not the best game, in the series. And most of the PC RPG fans I'm acquainted with (at least those who aren't such snobs as to totally disdain console gaming) name FF5 as one of Square's best works and a credit to the console-RPG subgenre.

Let me make this a public question: What is it about FF5 that makes it a pariah to its own series' biggest fans?

--AWJ--

Hey. I was out of town during the FF9 discussion *sniff* but I did have a few comments and damned if I'm not going to make them known. These are replies and opinions based on letters (and Drew's opinions) throughout the past few days. I sent this to Drew already, but I'm sending it to you too, just in case. 8-)

First off, Amarant. His touch-off with Zidane was one of the most interesting character interactions in the series, in my opinion; it added a lot to scenes which would be fairly lacklustre. The two don't seem to be able to understand each other at all (even at the end of the game) but their extreme interest in trying adds a lot to the plot.

FF9 is currently near the top of my RPG list, simply because it's fun. The characters' personalities bounce off each other like smiley ping-pong balls, the pace is fast and fun; tons of secrets and mini-games abound. It's just entertaining. And every character (yes, even Quina, if you see the right scenes) has hidden levels to their personalities which enhance the experience to no end. I couldn't bring myself to finish FF8 the second time around, but I did FF9 twice STRAIGHT and could do it again if I wanted. It's easy on the brain. 8-)

And Kuja? I loved him. He was not quite as crazy as Kefka and not quite as cool as Sephiroth, but an interesting meld of them both. But his insanity isn't like Kefka's "Hell, I'll destroy everything because I can". He has a real reason for it - first just plain rebellion against his fate, next his incapability of coping with his own demise. It makes him somehow slightly more believable, and it's great that at the end he *almost* repents. He doesn't act in a particularly logical manner (Dr. Evil comments) because he doesn't really want to just beat everyone and everything, but to obtain specific goals throughout the game, all of which he does obtain with or without the trouble caused by Zidane's troupe.

A rant about villains. People want bad guys who do bad things; apparently you can't really hate someone unless they do. News flash: You can hate someone because he is a really big bastard. That's what happened with Kuja. Someone without any interest in human life - that's a villain. He doesn't have to burn down villages or kill main characters to be a villain - his personality is villainous and if you can't see that through the dialogue, that's your fault, not Square's. (And by the way, Kuja made the Black Mages, so everything they did was basically him. There's your destroyed towns.)

Forget about all that, who says there HAS to be a bad guy in a game? Not everything that happens must be orchestrated by a supreme commander. You just want someone to blame, and once you have him you want him to be suitably evil. I think the story worked perfectly fine with Kuja just as himself, not playing the part of The Villain.

I disagree with Garland being a "popup villain" - he's a very large part of the storyline. Necron definitely is, though, but he ties in with the whole nostalgia-memory-series-as-a-whole feeling at the very end. He's just a cool boss with cool music and rather tough unless you did lots of level building.

One of the cool things about FF9 is that there isn't a set goal through most of the game. What people don't realize is that frequently real life is like that. (Minus the eidolons and moogles, of course.) You don't always have a clear goal; you have to walk around, make connections, and eventually things will fall into place and you'll GET a goal. I thought it worked rather well (far better than the chase-Sephiroth clause through most of FF7).

Oh yeah. You mentioned something about video games should start being more subtle (in that Necron was an overly overt manifestation of the game's theme). This from a mailbag man? You should know by now that most people who play a game end up being clueless or drawing the wrong conclusions even from the most obvious storyline... you want to start hiding them in even deeper metaphors now? I shudder to think of it.

And then there's Dr. Uzuki's letter from the 16th... man. For starters, quit the unoriginality thing. There are so many games out that there's bound to be something from other games. You can't tell me the plot isn't better than FF2 because both have people using summon creatures to take over the world. You have to see plots in here-and-now contexts, not try to compare them to other games. Hmph.

Vivi can live so long because he was the "prototype" - he's not a regular black mage. You have to pay more attention. 8-)

Random battles? There IS an "return-to-the-old-times" idea in FF9, and no random battles would be tantamount to sacrilege. I personally didn't find them too annoying; they were pretty challenging for different reasons at different points in the game. I reached the end at level 57 and beat the last guy... there's no point in leveling up more besides trying to beat Ozma (which I STILL haven't done). I never needed leveling up (although I did need Gil sometimes).

Comparing Garland with the beach scene in CC? Please. I've played CC four times and still don't understand that bit, but I got the Garland part first time around; it's not that complicated.

I've rambled on enough, print what you like (or even better, what you don't like.) Later! --Cidolfas

Jeremy,

Sure, I may not be the general authority on the industry's past, present, and current direction, but that doesn't stop me from concocting my own half-assed assumptions and imperatives that I expect the developers in Japan to take.

FFX has already been announced to have a "super-realistic" feel, probably as a counterweight to FFIX's super-deformed aesthetic. What I would really like to see as a complement to the graphical style is an equally realistic cast of characters, motives, and/or reactions to situations. Square hit close to the mark with this in FF8: Squall was, in my estimation, one of the most realistically-motivated characters in any RPG. He wasn't just a "Silent Badass" type like Cloud was (at least, how Cloud was for much of the game).

I would like for RPGs in general to adopt more realistic motives and reactions. In response to Goddard in yesterday's column, being realistic does not mean seeking out the most mundane and trite occurances of everyday life and making a story out of them: it means that the characters in the story react as real people would react to the fantastic situations they're thrust into. (As an example, take Squall's words when Rinoa gave herself up to the enemy, and his companions were trying to convince him to go after her: "It was her decision. I have no right to change that." I can't imagine any other RPG protagonist ever coming close to saying something that hits the mark so cleanly.)

As a secondary and slightly less-important wish, I'd like to see RPGs have more instances in which the heroes lose completely. There's a mistaken notion that if you've just got the will to win, or enough love from your comrades, or whatever, you're going to beat that dragon even if all you have is a big stick and a pot for a helmet. I think Aeris' death is an excellent precursor to what I hope becomes a trend: that sometimes the heroes lose something important. What would have happened if the missiles actually hit the Garden in FFVIII? What if Celes had succeeded in committing suicide? I'm not saying I'd have preferred for either of those instances to occur, but I'm in favor of a more realistic struggle in which both sides lose something, instead of a one-sided "good beats the hell out of bad" thing. FFT was a good example, as far as games go.

-Matt Blackie