Challenge Accepted: Deception
It’s super-nice how smart you feel after you successfully unwrap these after just a single try, though.
The central goal of Dynetzzle is to trick you a little bit. Even beyond the obvious challenge, there’s the simple fact that you’re dealing with making a six-sided die every time, which has sides that add up to seven. But that just plain sounds wrong. You can’t get a seven from a single six-sided die without a marker and a willingness to vandalize numbered surfaces, after all. It’s a little thing, but it’s just enough to throw you off your stride and force you to remember that the opposite sides always add up to seven.
Assuming you can work around that little mental block, it’s not a hard game. It needs that block in there to trick you, essentially.
If you’re going to look at games as a series of decisions to make – which I’ve argued in the past – then you have to provide players with a reason to make those wrong decisions. When you don’t have skill as a barrier (i.e. “I know what I want to do here, but I can’t manage it”), you sort of have to fall back on tricking the player into doing something they shouldn’t.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 13
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
It occurs to me at this point that I have been in the world of Final Fantasy IV for 28 columns now. Seriously, this is number 28! It started in August of last year! How did anyone spend this much time working in this world of all the possible settings?
Well, in the case of The After Years, by recycling a whole lot of the first game. But no time to whine about that, we’ve got a final dungeon to explore… soon.
Once you’ve finally had the very final dungeon opened up, you actually do get something else unlocked. Remember all that Adamantite that we were stockpiling all through the game? Turns out that can be used for something, specifically for some powerful equipment. It’s taken us the entire rest of the game to get here, sure, but now we’re finally here and we can go get ourselves some valuable items by turning in seemingly irrelevant items that we had been hoarding through every single tale. Meanwhile, all of the other treasures from the challenge dungeons have been summarily replaced.
Demo Driver 8: Steam and Metal
Some of you will see this and instantly be “that’s my jam!” In that case, well, you’re welcome! Glad to help.
The nice part about top-down scrolling shooters like this is that even a short demo gives you a pretty good picture of what you’re going to be getting. This is not a genre wherein there are big, hidden mysteries right around the corner. I am flying a plane vertically, there are things to be shot, they will try to shoot me down, and so forth. Dodge the stuff that hurts you and hurt the things that would otherwise kill you.
As a result, evaluating the game comes down chiefly to side elements and trying to pick out whether or not the game really delivers a novel enough experience to justify its price tag in the first place, something not helped by the fact that the game’s store page appears to have been handled by someone whose grasp of the English language is only slightly firmer than Kanye West’s grasp of social niceties. Once you get past all of that, though, the game certainly seems to do its level best to deliver on its stated goals. Whether you want those goals is another discussion.
Telling Stories: I have sunk so low
Your character did something very bad, and now she needs to pay the price.
Every character screws up sometimes. I’ve talked extensively in the past about the fact that characters need to be able to make mistakes and fail at various point, and I stand by it; a character who never fails is a character who isn’t interesting to hear about or interact with. You will fail. Just like in real life, your characters will wind up making bad choices, backing the wrong horse, and trusting the wrong person.
Next, the part where she picks up the pieces.
A failure that doesn’t have impact on your character’s life is functionally nothing; you want every failure to have some long-term impact. That means that every failure stings, and things don’t just go back to normal the next morning. Sometimes they don’t ever go back to normal. When something gets broken badly enough, it doesn’t get fixed, and sometimes the broken parts will just be lingering with a character for a good long while.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 12
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I am not sure how to classify the ending sequence of The After Years, I’m really not. Because on the one hand, the game basically decided to just throw everything to the wind and fling the entire group into nothing more than a huge, lingering dungeon crawl to cap off the game. That’s sort of the height of laziness. On the other hand, it’s the first time in all of this installment that we actually get some choice and control over the characters, even if it’s just insofar as setting up the party.
Final Fantasy IV is the only game in the franchise that really took that option out of player hands in the first place, I’ll note, but that’s a different discussion.
Regardless of that, it is what it is, and we have all of the team members assembled in the Lunar Whale as we speed off to the final confrontation. Which seems like a long time for us, the players, because getting to this point has easily taken 40 hours. For the characters this is happening over the span of a couple days. Bit of a difference in scale.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 