Games for Christmas!
This game doesn’t really have anything to do with Christmas, but I did get it for Christmas one year, which seems apropos as I continue falling in love with its second sequel.
Everyone likes getting video games for Christmas. Probably. I’m sure there are some people not really down with the idea, like your cousin who lost an arm in the Console Wars make in ’93, but everyone else likes getting them. But pretty much all of them are kind of inappropriate for the season. How can you appropriately connect your real life to your love of video games in these conditions?
Sure, you could just accept that not every holiday has a game that corresponds nicely with its setting, but that seems like quitting talk to me.
The fact is that very few games actually do focus around the yuletide season, which proves once again that Halloween is the superior holiday, but there are games wherein you can get your Christmas fix. Leaving aside MMOs that are commercially obligated to feature some sort of Christmas celebration so you can hide from your family while still getting presents, let’s take a look at offline offerings to get in your Christmas fun.
A story of the vagrant
You could be forgiven for thinking that this game’s plot intimately involved both of these characters with one another.
Whenever I start writing anything about Vagrant Story, I have to force myself not to start gushing about the elegant perfection of the weapon system. I mean, it’s simple – six monster families, using a weapon on one builds up bonuses against that monster type, and your goal becomes stacking up that bonus while you reforge that weapon into more potent forms over time. But then you consider that weapons have different damage properties, and you want to try and build a weapon using properties that most monsters of that family will be weak against, and then whoo, I’m down the hole again and I wake up to find I’ve ranted about the system for hours.
It’s a simple, elegant, brilliant design. So much of the game is a simple, elegant, brilliant design. On one hand, it’s almost criminal that the game has never received any kind of sequel, even any sort of larger story resolution beyond getting retroactively thrown into the overall Ivalice continuity (although Yasumi Matsuno has gone back and forth on that one). But on the other thand, it’s kind of a good thing. It somehow makes the game work better that it never became iterative, that all of it is contained solely herein, even if you wish there was more.
On popularity
I’m all alone, but I’m giving this presentation even though it scares me.
If you’re doing anything even remotely creative, you have to first be willing to play for an audience of one.
I’m not saying you’ll have an audience of one. I’m not even saying your audience of one is going to be any good. Maybe you have only one person at your show and they’re hooting and hollering and basically treating you like garbage. Maybe someone’s heckling you the whole time you’re up on stage. Even worse, maybe they’re not even paying attention to you, treating you like you’re part of the scenery.
But none of that matters. If you’re going to put yourself out there, the first thing you have to decide is that you can get up on stage for that one person, and damn it, you’re going to give the best performance you possibly can for that one audience member. You are going to perform your fucking heart out. This is going to be the best performance you can possibly give.
In other words, you have to decide that you don’t give the tiniest shit whether or not you’re popular. You’re going to perform either way.
Duration metrics
If discs had anything to do with quality, Vagrant Story would be a worse game than Legend of Dragoon. The mere suggestion is kind of offensive.
I remember the exact moment when I decided that bragging about how many discs your game was on was a pile of crap. It was when I paid money for Legend of Dragoon.
There’s no way around the fact that Legend of Dragoon is a bad game, and at its best moments it’s just Final Fantasy by way of Power Rangers, a line I am reluctant to write because it sounds potentially awesome and I don’t want Legend of Dragoon to sound awesome. But that isn’t the point; the point is that I remember playing the game, looking at the back of the box, and thinking, “Did I just buy this because it was an RPG with four discs?”
My defense would come down to the fact that I was seventeen and dumb as hell. Still, though, it makes you think about how duration is a selling point for games, not just for crap games that Sony desperately wants people to buy but for all sorts of games. Hours of gameplay. Number of levels. Number of classes, companions, combination attacks, areas, and so forth. And that’s kind of nonsense.
Hard Project: Sonic the Hedgehog
When a series resorts to mining out its past, it’s usually because the present is much less interesting.
This may come as a shock to some of our younger readers, and for that I apologize. But you know all of that terrible art on DeviantArt that involves cartoon hedgehogs submitting to Jesus and usually leads directly into some mind-scarring pornography? That’s all based on a series of video games! A series of video games that were originally based around a little blue hedgehog that ran really quickly. You have to understand that the 90s were a different time. (We don’t understand how the porn and the Jesus thing happened, though.)
As funny as that might seem at a glance, the fact of the matter remains that the weird fan culture has become the most relevant part of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise in recent years. Kind of understandably so, even. The franchise has been showing cracks ever since the Dreamcast days, and the current state of affairs is lamentable but hardly unexpected. At this point, making a new game is quite possibly not a good idea, and it’s definitely a hard project.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 