Man. All that vitriol I expended, and I don't even have a reason to be bitchy today. Worse yet, I accidentally deleted yesterday's column at about 5 PM today, and can't find my backup copy. Dammit. For those that missed it, it involved a long, exciting-as-melba-toast series of quick and serious questions and answers, followed by me bitching for a little bit about the evils of professionalism, and how I'll be ridiculous and offensive, or die trying. All caught up? Good. Whew. Well, after all that, I thought I'd worked all the anger and piss out of mys system for a good long while.

And then I read the Square release schedule, and the hate is back, baby.

Which brings us to today's letters, a fine smorgasbord indeed, which I'll be answering normally today. All the information is there, but with a dash of je ne said quoi... panache? Oui. Panache, bien sur, mon ami!

Oh, and please note my glee at seeing one part of the 1999 Square schedule. I get into the list as a whole in more detail later, but I feel a deep sense of vindication from seeing FF Collection there, minus FFIV. I wish FFIV was part of it, but considering all the flak GIA has taken for standing by that story, it's nice to be proven right. Now all we need is for FF9 to be a direct sequel to FF8, and all our crackpot theories will be grounded in fact. Heh. Riiiiiiight.

Never heard of such a thing. Wouldn't place a lot of stock in it. Rumor.

Given the current track record, LoM will almost certainly have mod chip protection.

HA! That would be pretty cool if it ever happened. But honestly, there's several billion people out there, and a puny, puny fraction of them have ever heard of GIA. The odds of someone recognizing me, especially given that there's only one picture of me floating around the Internet to date, is pretty much nil.

Okay, first things last: why aren't RPGs more like epic fantasy, you ask? What's so hard about it? Well, it depends on your definition, really. There have been lots of epic fantasy RPGs. They just don't tune to your personal definition.

You're clearly a big fan of epic high fantasy, with magic and mystery, swordplay and all that jazz. Scale and scope of the story is also something you're going for. I can name a dozen RPGs that have massive scope, and all the trappings you ask for. I mean, I have a tough time defining Xenogears as anything but epic fantasy. So what, specifically, floats your boat here? What is your definition of epic fantasy? What makes Shannara epic and Xenogears not? Hell, when I think of epic fantasy, I think of Alice in Wonderland, and I daresay there haven't been many RPGs styled like it (though there have been some cool games of other genres - Cotton!). I'm afraid I'm at an impasse until you define your terms of epic and fantasy more clearly.

Everyone else, feel free to leap in with commentary here. Aaron gets first dibs to clarify himself, naturally, but there's room for lots of letters. What is your definition of epic?

Ah, the Game Boy. A stunningly successful system, it is. Home to the most successful console game of the decade, if not period (Pokemon/Pocket Monsters), seller of a million jillion units, and home to many a classic game. Also, it's conclusive proof that system power isn't everything - if it was, the Game Boy would have been crushed in short order by the Lynx and the TurboExpress. GB: the little system that kicked ass.

In any case, I wouldn't lay serious odds on Square developing for the Game Boy ever again. As with a lot of RPG developers, including Falcom, GameArts, Ancient, and Climax, Square are tech junkies. They thrive on using the best and brightest new devices, and really, really hate cartridges. They want to be the leading, cutting edge of game development, and despite some clear advantages to using the tried and true, like the GB, they prefer the space of CDs, DVDs, and the big beefy processors of current systems.

Of course, if you're really hankering for RPGs on Gameboy, there's still a trickle of them coming from Nintendo (mostly Pokemon-related at this point), Enix (Dragon Quest Monsters 2 is on the way), and a few other developers. But, broadly, Nintendo's lost the support of most of the major RPG developers due to technology issues, which is why Game Boy RPGs are a dying breed, save for Pokemon and DQ Monsters.

As an aside, the Sony PDA isn't to my mind, a real replacement for a Gameboy. It's closer to an old Tiger game, bulked up to the nth degree.

The anti-importing stance is a good point, though the current lockout scheme isn't directed towards handling that at all. It's designed primarily to stop software piracy, playing copies of the games for a fraction of the price. All that aside, the primary reason for not developing the games simultaneously is one of co-ordination. Square has a pretty good market in the US for the Final Fantasy games. A market that's maybe a third the size of the Japanese market for said title. Zelda's US market was equal, if not larger than its Japanese market. Different situation.

More to the point, developing a game so it can get a simultaneous US and Japanese release is a mass of co-ordination problems. It needs to pass inspection and approval twice every step of the way. Twice the writing staff. Communication lines between people who might or might not speak the same language need to be established and kept tight, or development could become very lopsided. Questions over copyrighting. And so forth. It's a tough prospect to develop a video game for one system. It's tough to translate it. But doing one at the same time as the other, when any change in the former could radically change the latter? It's a big, wasteful exercise. Better to take the finished product and translate that, maybe make some improvements, then deal with cross-Pacific co-ordination nightmares.

I'm afraid I've been unable to find such a thing. On the other hand, if you're patient, I'm sure I can pressure some clever, Japanese-savvy reader to work up a spiffy guide to it.

That means you. Anyone who owns the FF Collection, and knows what the menu options mean, write in, and I'll make up an exciting story about you saving the world from waffles to entertain and delight your children.

Not without a Playstation development kit, I should think. Translation would require, at the very minimum, hacking into the main game code, changing all the fonts, finding the places where the proper text is required, squeezing it in, and making sure it all works with your PSX.

Basically, while I freely confess I don't know much at all about translating games, it seems to me that if it was as simple as transplanting the translations into the game with a CD-R, someone would've done so by now. But, hey, if you figure it out, you'd damn well better send me a copy of your translated product right quick.

Car salesman. I've worked at a legal firm, and I know first-hand how annoying they can be, but good lord, the car salesman win it on the basis of the patterns of their blazers alone. Good lord, but their fashion sense is dead.

I mean, honestly, would you buy a car from THIS guy? Does this instill you with the unstoppable sense that yes, you want to put several hundred dollars into his hands?

Ah, a good, old-fashioned shameless plug. You're a child after my own heart, Vinnie.

Nothing Can Stop Mister Domino! is, for my money, the coolest puzzle game put out for a console this past year. Fun, funny, despite the relative shortness of it. It's a true show that it's quality that matters, not quantity. Great game, highly recommended.

If she enjoys Tetris, of course, there's always Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, but I imagine you already know about that.

(Aside: my rant yesterday had nothing to do with Senator Lieberman at all, but hell, I just can't say no to any chance to bash him...)

At halftime, even given that the col was accidentally deleted in the interim, the number of letters supporting a more serious, fact-oriented column clocked in at two. The opposition numbered about sixty-one.

As for the long rants, well, I realize that not everyone them, so I do my best to space them out. However, unless I received concentrated complaints about them, I'm a little more than reluctant to remove such a crucial element of the column. Some people clearly do enjoy and read them, or they wouldn't send them in all the time, no? And others wouldn't ask me to skip the Q&A and comedy stuff and do all debate, as plenty do. The "enough with the long letters" crowd is, if not smaller, then a whole lot less vocal. If I'm fooling myself, then so are a substantial chunk of the letter-writing readership. Hooray for mass hysteria!

Epilogue: I'm now being insistently told that the above letter is clearly sarcastic. Erm. If so, I am a doody-headed moron, who will accept his butt-whupping with solemnity for completely missing the point.

Just about everyone did a double-take, or screamed, or swore bloody murder upon viewing the Square schedule. I mean, for chrissakes, Chocobo Racing? Picking CR over SaGa Frontier 2 or Legend of Mana would be a mistake on par with picking 7th Saga over Dragon Quest V. And I didn't even like DQV. It seems to me that Square's really, really overestimating the selling power of the Final Fantasy franchise. This, by the way, is something I dearly hope the reduced-schedule, restructured Square will stop doing - churning out crap, slapping an FF logo or mascot on it, and shipping it off to sell to the sheep. Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon. CMD 2. Chocobo Racing. The main thrust of Ehrgeiz's ads was the inclusion of FF7 characters. They're starting to make Nintendo look good, in terms of shoehorning "name" characters into half-assed games.

Still, things could be worse. My money is on Square announcing at least Legend of Mana, if not SaGa Frontier 2, having US releases at E3. I mean, hey, they've got to have something exciting to whet the crowd's appetites. The original schedule said there'd be 7 Square EA releases in '99. Either LoM and SaGa 2 are seeing late '99 releases, or more likely, being ported over for early in the year 2000. I also stand by my prediction that Front Mission 3 will be left behind. Sigh. Lastly, disappointed as I am in two of their choices, it could be worse. We could be forced to suffer through the fecal Another Mind. Or the derivative and lame Internal Section. CMD2 is mediocre, but at least it's not offensively poor.

Xenogears, to my knowledge, didn't take much flak from religious groups. It has some less-than-cheery things to say about organized religion, but it's pretty heavily fictionalized. To my knowledge, it seems to be action games that draw the ire of religious right organizations; RPGs are generally left alone, despite some often harsh viewpoints. I don't know why, but hey, why fight it?

Closing comments

Corrections from Brad Williams come regarding my misstatement that all Gameboy Color games work on normal GBs. Klax, Top Gear Pocket, and Road Rash do not work, and apparently none of the remakes, like Super Mario Bros. and R-Type, will work on a normal GB. My bad.

I received a letter regarding my rant yesterday that I'd love to share with all of you, but since I'm rushing this col a bit, and it's sort of involved, I'll leave it until tomorrow, assuming the author agrees to it seeing print (long story there). It's really, really interesting, and probably the most effective and criticism of my column-writing style I've received to date. Cross your fingers. It's worth it.

- Double Agent