The Unofficial Institute of Official Cheer -
August 17, 2001 - Chris Jones
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed
within this column are those of the participants and the
moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the
GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive
material afoot.
Worship James Lileks, for he has a greater understanding of irony than most men ever dream of.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
After raving about the LoM soundtrack yesterday, I feel compelled to also comment on another recent acquisition: the Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon CD.
In brief: not a great as I thought it'd be.
Actually, I should qualify that. The actual music on the album is fine stuff, well played with instruments that bring out the inherent quality of the original tunes rather better than the original MIDIs ever could. As far as remix albums go, I like it a fair bit better than my previous favorite, Xenogears Creid.
What's disappointing to me here is that it didn't quite hit me the way I expected it to. FF4's my favorite FF from a purely nostalgic standpoint, and this CD's a cool little tribute to it: nice cover art, relatively tasteful packaging, a sweetly rendered tribute to a true RPG classic... and I see it as merely a nice distraction. I can't help but think that 6 or 8 years ago, around the time this was released, I would have loved this CD, and that's what depresses me as much as anything. But in terms of pure music, most of Mitsuda's work is better than this stuff, and there are several PSX games that have richer and more varied instrumentation. So my question is, does the fact that I can recognize all of this mean I've just gotten more mature, or am I just getting old and jaded?
I honestly don't know.
Onward.
| Speaking of nostalgia |
|
Yo Chris!
I know you'll get a ton of letters like this, but... Holy Fucking Fuck! I remember playing DWIV and enjoying it immensely (despite only completing one chapter). It was by far the best DW experience for the NES, perhaps the best GAME for the NES.
Still, I worry about the game being 3D. No, I'm not saying that the new format is a bad thing. I'm saying that people almost certainly will bitch and moan that their "beautiful 2D graphics" will be replaced with "ugly 3D graphics." Granted, the 2D of DWIV was nice for its time, and the 3D of DWIV is kinda ugly, but I just hope people will give it a chance.
-Kung Fu Dude, who remembers the days when people bashed a highly anticipated game based on the fact that the first screen shots were 3D |
You're worried about the game being in 3D? I wouldn't be. From what I can see in those pictures, the graphics here are significantly more polished than what DQ7 looked like at E3, and the entire thing gives off the vibe of a lovingly rendered tribute to a classic game, rather than an attempt to push the series where some fans weren't sure it should go in the first place. Good as the original DQ games are, the remixes always manage to be a bit better, so if you're a fan of the series at all this is one to watch out for.
| Vocal minority |
|
Since a lot of people seem to be confused over the ease of playing Final
Fantasy X in Japanese now that it has voice-acting, I'd like to clear
something up.
In my experience, it's actually a whole lot easier to play now. My Japanese
is very far from perfect, and I have to stop and look up words all the time.
Apparently some people think that this is now a problem because the voices
mean that the text whizzes by too fast, but this is simply not the case.
Why? Because you can pause the game at any time you like, including in the
middle of a line of dialogue.
And if you're smart, you can use the voices to help you. Instead of
spending hours looking up a tiny, squished and pixelated-beyond-recognition
kanji, you can just listen for the reading as the characters say their
lines, and then look up the word. This means your translation becomes much
faster.
Which is not to say that you'll always be able to catch what they say.
Wakka in particular has quite a strong accent, and you can't pause at all in
battles or FMV. But it's better than having no help from voices at all, and
you don't miss too much from missing dialogue in battle. (Missing FMV
dialogue could be a real pain, but I haven't seen much so far.)
So, in actual fact Final Fantasy X is much more comprehensible for those
with a little Japanese ability. I only have a working knowledge of
Japanese, but I've found that the voices give me the speed boost necessary
to realistically play the game, whereas I found Final Fantasy IX just became
pure study.
Thorfinn Tait
Akita, Japan
|
My own lack of Japanese skills and the fact that I haven't played more than a short demo of the game leaves me in a poor position to debate this with you. It may well be the case that those with a more verbal understanding of the language can play through the game more easily than past games, and more power to you if so.
Still, there is one particular bug I can detect here: even just based on what I've personally seen, the game's presentation is more cinematic than ever before, more like watching a TV show than reading a book. While you may be able to pause the game in the middle of a passage of dialog, you're just robbing yourself of the narrative flow that Square's worked so hard to instill, kind of like watching a movie at someone's house where the tape gets paused every five minutes for a snack break.
Of course, there's a large number of importers to whom merely getting through the game is the important part - the actual plot is icing. But as for me, even if I could understand more than a few basic phrases of the language, I'd still want to wait for the full treatment. Why end up spending more for something less than than the full experience?
| Sayuki. Can't think of anything else to call this. |
| Chris,
I'd like to know what people are thinking about Saiyuki so far. I just
got it yesterday, and have managed to put in about four or five hours.
One thing that strikes me about it is how much it looks like Final Fantasy
Tactics. Not really the characters so much as the playing fields. I'm
just grateful there isn't any of that zooming in on individual pixels like
in Vandal Hearts (my wife loved that game for the blood that flew up
twenty feet in the air when someone died, but she was totally turned off
by the way it zoomed in so much on every action). One thing that I do
wish it had was more customization, but then again, I think I'm a bit of a
micromanagement whore. Aside from that it's really fun, and I'm really
glad I managed to find it. Surprisingly, most stores seemed to either not
have it yet or were sold out. I got the only copy left at my local EB
(other than a reserved copy for someone else). This gives me some faith
that it isn't being ignored even though it's a Playstation game arriving
so close to the end of the system's life.
It does freak me out that I've just barely started the game, and I've
already got all six characters. Oh, and it's a nice change to play a
strategy RPG that's not confusing me insanely with all the politics.
And I thought I'd never purchase anything that had any relation at all to
Dragonball. Thankfully the relation here is pretty distant.
So why did I write this? I don't know, maybe I'm just happy I managed to
get Saiyuki and I want to tell the world. And let everyone who liked
Final Fantasy Tactics know that there's another game out there that has a
similar look, though it may still differ in a great many other ways.
Kirk B.
|
I hadn't been thinking much of this game, but Zak's review as roused up my curiosity a bit. Still, I probably won't be giving it a harder look until after I stop doing the column, which leaves it up to you guys to provide Nich some letters on the game tomorrow if you want to see it discussed.
As it is, the fact that I haven't played the game gives me a nice segue into the next letter...
| Shouldn't the DA, you know, actually play games...? |
| Chris
I would like to see a DA who actually plays a lot of games and
finishes a RPG consistently. Maybe then we could discuss the new
frigin' FF before we all forget what we played.
Chris Reed
|
This is a great point, one I wish had been brought up yesterday. Unfortunately, it's an area that I've had problems with in the past, and one you're likely to see pop up again with next DA as well. This column simply takes up too much time to allow people to play many games - hell, most of the time, I felt lucky to get the column, my job, and my school work in all at once. Add in a developing social life on the weekends and your time to play anything but the highest-profile releases gets shot all to hell.
There are a few qualified candidates we've seen who don't have 40-odd hour work weeks to deal with on top of the column, and if one of them gets picked, your wish may come true... but even then, it's doubtful, because 3 hours of game-related stuff a day should be pretty much anybody's limit.
On the other hand, the only new FF that's actually come out under my watch has been FF9, and regardless of if I'd been able to play it any sooner or not, I doubt you'd have gotten any spoiler discussion on it any faster, just because there's too many people who don't rush through a new release in less than a week.
| Double Agent: now with the great taste of wildly contrasting opinions! |
| Heya Chris,
Personally, I blame Sonic for making me miss out on a decade's worth of
Sega games, Genesis to Dreamcast. When the war first broke out between
Nintendo and Sega, it was pretty much boiled down to Mario and Sonic from
a marketing standpoint. Being an easily swayed grade-schooled, I eagerly
played Sonic...
... and I absolutely f'n hated it. I would never touch a Sega system
again until picking up a Dreamcast 3 weeks ago. How's that for
overlooked?
As for DAs, I lean toward challenging, edgy, brutal commentary that takes
issues at hand and goes directly at them. You're right in saying that
style may be a null gain in readers, but I think shaping a debate around
making it palatable to the most people inherently diminishes it somewhat
-- just like people driven away by your intellectual approach wouldn't
necessarily have added to it.
Then again, this comes from someone who was lucky enough to do (or quite
possibly overdo) DA a few times in a Spartan style that was fun to write
and generated a pretty good response. I guess I just feel that if you
can't stand the heat, read a letters column with infantile anime
signatures at the end.
-Ed M.
|
Ed, I greatly despair for your esthetic sense. I was a solid Mario partisan myself all the way up until the N64 - I never owned a Sega system until the Dreamcast, and while I gave Sonic a try at friends' houses, it was never enough to make me want to get it myself - and even I could tell that Sonic was something special. Mario might have been bright, colorful and as fun as anything could possibly be, but Sonic oozed style and cool, not in the sense of the "rebel with 'tude" his marketing portrayed him as, but in the stunning art stylings of his levels and the sheer grace that he moved around with. I wanted to play Mario, but I wanted to be Sonic, simple as that.
And by way of responding to your second point, let me provide an alternate remix of the above response:
Blaming Sonic for your own lack of insight in not embracing Sega is just foolish; you might not have wanted to buy into Sonic for marketing reasons, pro or con, but that's no reason to overlook the tons of other great stuff that was available via Sega, or the inherent coolness of some of Sonic's aspects. Like I said yesterday, it's a shame that there isn't a steady supply of Genesis remakes to make people aware of what they missed out on the first time through, but doubtless your own experiences with the Dreamcast will lead you to see the error of your ways.
Hell, I won't even say people in general should buy the former style over the latter, but I know which one I prefer.
| Great setup, dude |
| Chris,
First off, I bid you a good farewell. I am really quite tempted to, like in
the end of almost any overly-Japanese piece of entertainment such as Anime or
Games, run towards you with my high-pitched voice squealing out tears of
sadness and cry on your shoulder right before you leave in the stoic manner
you're known for. Of course, this is impossible due to the fact that you are
God-knows-how-many miles away, and that I don't like you.
As for the reason I wrote this letter, I want to bring up a game that I feel
was ignored by the general media. Yes, I am fully aware that Wensday's topic
has grown old and weilds a unique smell, but just this moment said game
popped into my mind, and I feel as if it needs to be known. The game is (was)
known as B.O.B., and Electronic Arts game made for both the SNES and Genesis.
The protagonist of this game, who shares the same name as the game, was not
just a yellow robot with a gun for his left hand, but a proverbial gaming
badass who could mop the floor with the likes of Ashley Riot and Solid Snake.
And while he was certainly cartoonish, he still fought and won against the
likes of giant floating hands and evil, magical potatos. And in my book, that
makes him a god amongst gaming heroes.
-Lee, "Let's see Snake hide against those one of those potatos."
|
Mostly I printed this just because I got a big laugh out of the opening paragraph; nicely done.
As for the rest of your letter, I vaguely remember B.O.B., but didn't much go for it precisely because it was a product of EA during the "publish one mediocre title on as many different platforms as possible" days. I don't know why it's taken me so long to put this into words, but such multi-platform releases are exactly the reason why the best gaming experience is had from getting multiple consoles from multiple generations, and playing the cream of the crop on those different consoles.
The ideal situation for a game developer is to make just one game and release it as many times as possible, which gives them maximum profit from minimum work. The problem is, the same code that's easily ported from platform to platform is also usually lacking in the bells and whistles that you get when a company's releasing a game just on one system, to prove that that one system is more worthy of your bucks than all the others. Thus the best games tend to be the exclusive releases on the PSX, or the N64, or the Dreamcast, where the console developer extends full cooperation and support to making game X the best damn game you can get for that particular console... is it any wonder Nintendo's Zeldas and Square's Final Fantasies have always been top-shelf experiences, whereas the PC/PSX/whatever Tomb Raiders have ended up being the same damn thing over and over again?
No. No it is not.
| Mumbo-jumbo is tres amusing |
| Dear Burnt-out Jones,
Mr. Doyle's letter about 'MUMBO-JUMBO' was really funny to me. Partially
because it's really fun to say - mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo bumbo tee hee! -
but partially because that's exactly what a guy who I saw the movie with
said when it was over.
'Too much mumbo jumbo'. This is why so many reviewers supposedly didn't
like it. That's why my acquaintance said he didn't like it. Correct me
if I'm wrong, but... isn't the big M-J pretty much omnipresent in cinema?
Even in movies that receive widespread acclaim. It's been said many times
that the idea of 'human farms' in the Matrix is patently ridiculous. The
cloning talk in Jurassic Park is no better than scientific mumbo jumbo.
And come on - the whole premise of AI was that humanity was creating mecha
because they could last forever without needing any energy(!!). I guess
the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to machines...
The fact that the movies I speak of are all science science fiction (as
opposed to the spiritual sci-fi of TSW) isn't a coincidence. I think it
speaks to a common theme in a lot of our media and culture - science is
allowed to fix anything and be all-powerful. Spirituality is not. People
seem okay with the fact that mecha in AI last forever - technology is a
fixture of our lives, and ALL people, no matter how savvy, treat it as
magic at one time or another and skip over gaping flaws like that. But
you can't try to save the world with 'spirits' or 'dreams', even if
they're given some kind of 30 second scientific background, because
spirituality is mumbo-jumbo and Does Not Belong In A Movie.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see why it's so hard to,
for only a couple hours, accept that sad and angry alien spirits are
roaming the Earth, when accepting that frog DNA + fossilized mosquito =
dinosaur is a piece of cake. I didn't stand up at the end of the movie
and loudly express my doubt of the idea that the Earth was filled with
gooey blue Gaia jelly. It was ridiculous, but it was part of the fiction
of the movie world. And it was COOL and fun to watch. What's so bad
about that?
- Mr. Nip, adding the word 'mumbo-jumbo' to his list of words he hates
|
The thing is, almost all science fiction is based on "mumbo-jumbo", because all science fiction that's at all interesting to make a movie out of tends to have at least one fantastic assumption, ironically enough. We don't go see sf because real science is all that interesting, we go see science fiction because it provides the same old sense of wonder in a shiny new package. Movies that tend to extrapolate real science in believable ways don't do all that great; I loved Gattaca, but most people didn't.
In truth, science fiction is only palatable as a source of wonder if it is smooth and slick and shiny. Techno-jargon on its own is interesting and fun to mess with, while techno jargon with a big chunk of new age dogma stuck in the middle isn't so much fun. Ironically enough, I think people would have bought into the FF Movie's philosophy a lot more if Sakaguchi had listened to what so many were whining about and made the film pure fantasy: Aki-the-white-mage talking about ineffable spirits somehow works much better than Aki-the-scientist talking about ineffable spirits.
That said, I agree with your conclusion - it wasn't that hard to look past the film's faults and find something worthwhile. I just more people would have made the effort.
| Break out that dictionary, kids... *FF9 spoilers* |
| Dear Agent,
I just wanted to share something with you all in here. When I first saw Garland in FF9, I was stunned.
If he says "I will knock you all down" before the game ends, I think I'll cry. [For you unlucky few, it is a stupid translation "error" in FF1 where there's also a badguy named garland, doesn't Square need more imagination]
And the second thingie I wanted to ask, why oh why do companies still have different regions on consoles? It is stupid, if they didn't, alot of happy europeans would finally get to play all the goodies that never make it here (Chrono Cross, Parasite Eve, Final fantasy IV etc.). But I like Nintendo though, who gave me the ability to play Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis on my brand new GBA without any stupid chips.
Are gaming companies completetely into S&M or why don't they just let me import?
Sincerely
Jonas Lindgren, hoping to be the first Swedish double agent.
|
Two suggestions: try looking up the word "homage" and applying it to the game, and in the future, try and give Square a little more credit for knowing what they're doing, ok?
As for the region thing, I can only assume it's to boost market sales: curtailing the efforts of would-be importers means that there are more people waiting for a given localization of a specific game, which makes localizing that particular game more profitable, since more people are buying it, which makes localizations more likely to happen in general.
In other words, say a quarter of the people in Europe can read English well enough to play through FF9, and there's no barriers to them just sticking an American copy in their systems. That means that the market for a European localization of the game is only a fraction of what it could be, which means that the European publisher won't get nearly as much money for going to the trouble of localizing the game and putting it in local shops and such... which means they'll be less likely to localize in general.
Of course, the above logic shouldn't apply to, say, multi-language DVDs, which still have to put up with the same regional BS, but not everything in the business world makes sense, I guess.
| Frothing at the mouth |
| Oh.... Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank
you for posting those cans of Dragon Quest IV. Its my favourite game
(since its the only one I currently own).
You are the best and I am from this day forward I will read your site
every day until of course I have Dragon Warrior VII in my hands and then
in my PS2 and then in my head. Then I gotta rest for a bit.. And maybe get
something to eat... and go to the bathroom and stuff, but EVERY day I will
read it. And I am sure that you have written Enix of Japan every day
saying how much you want to see the game in America (and tell them to make
sure it goes to Europe and Australia... I am single handedly advertising
Dragon Warrior VII to everyone in the Brisbane DALNet IRC channels. I
doubt they like me anymore because I am so excited about the game, but
they at least know about it)
Sadly (for you), when I get my hands on Dragon Warrior IV for PSX, my PS2
will overheat from me playing it so much (ya, that means the fan will
break down too) and I won't be able to read your site. But if I ever see
anything about Dragon Quest V or Dragon Quest VI on your site, I'll read
it everyday and (if I had an email address to someone at enix.co.jp) I
would email them everyday so that they would release those games in
America (well, actually, Canada, since I don't really care what the US
gets for games).
Yay! for Dragon Warrior!
Paul Kangas
PS-If you ever want to donate money to me for buying all these games I
have to buy, feel free to join the Paul Kangas Fan Club!
|
...
The mind boggles.
Closing Comments:
Like I said yesterday, if you want to make some comments to
Nich tomorrow about what you want in the new DA that you didn't feel you could send to me, go nuts. Otherwise, let's try this: what's your favorite game soundtrack (OST)? I'm not talking about the actual game music, I'm talking about the actual disc, packaging, liner notes and all. Yeah, it's kind of a limiting topic, but it should be a good one. See you Monday.
-Chris Jones, wonders if he was ever as rabid for FF as Paul is for Dragon Warrior. Nope, probably not.
|
