Telling Stories: The metaplot
If you’re playing Final Fantasy XIV, your world got rocked pretty thoroughly a couple weeks back. The conclusion to the game’s big storyline hit, and it has pretty staggering implications for the game as a whole and the setting that you’re roleplaying in. It is, in short, a big deal.
But even though you have to go through all of the quests leading through these events with your character, it by all rights should not be a story that happens to your character.
I don’t mean that in the sense that the events don’t make sense for your character; it’s quite possible that they do. But you cannot reasonably claim to be the most super-important person in all of Eorzea, and even if you do there’s the realize that what happened would make you persona non grata across much of the world. So it’s undeniable that these big events happened, and you need to react to them, but you cannot have been at the heart of them. So how do you react?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The party has a boat again, which is a good thing. It’s impossible to imagine that the fate which befell the last boat will also befall this one, due in no small part to the fact that this boat is not being pulled along by a sea serpent. With this boat, we can hopefully prevent the last crystal from shattering, which would both be the first successful effort that the group had made thus far and also be kind of a failure anyway.
I mean, we’re down to saving a quarter of the world-preserving crystals here, somehow I don’t think the one still working will make the other three better.
Still, no point in not trying, right? Off we go, and to the great surprise of absolutely no one, there are only a handful of locations to go to that we haven’t already visited, thus making the process of locating the Earth Crystal chiefly a matter of finding which one has something relevant to do there. At least it’s consistent?
Demo Driver 8: Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians
Are you? Is there a reason I was supposed to care about this? Were you going to tell me why I should care about it?
I’m not generally a fan of Steam’s recommendation setup simply because, well, it doesn’t work too well. It picks out things that it thinks I’ll like, but it bases those recommendations upon elements that aren’t necessarily delivered with any panache. Case in point: Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians.
Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of pairing music with gameplay. When done correctly, it really marries rhythm to action, something that creates a different gameplay flow than you normally find. So the idea of Beatbuddy, of having an action-adventure game that flows along with the beat, is very appealing to me.
Unfortunately, the game fails to deliver on that promise. Beatbuddy has great music, great visuals, and even largely solid gameplay mechanics with a few downsides. But not only does the music fail to flow along with the gameplay, in many cases the marriage between the two makes the game less fun and playable, rather than more. Which seems pretty notably backward, all right.
Telling Stories: No accounting for taste
You don’t want your characters to like what you like, usually. At least not solely. One of the joys of roleplaying is stepping into the shoes of someone different than yourself, which doesn’t work in the event that your character is basically you with a race-lift and possibly a gender shift. Since one of the things that we use to define ourselves is the existence of distinct tastes from other people.
Of course, the problem there is that you still have to portray the character, despite those differing tastes. You want other people to genuinely believe that yes, your character likes these things, even if you don’t. So how do you make your character like things that you don’t when your frame of reference is so thoroughly based upon what you actually like and find interesting? How do you give a character a new set of tastes being acted out by a person who completely doesn’t share them?
Challenge Accepted: Taking a deeper look at Tetris
Are there better feelings in games?
Tetris is, in every way, one of the simplest games ever devised. It’s also one of the most successful, perhaps the most ubiquitous game ever created. Everyone understands Tetris as a game concept more or less from the womb, and subsequent years have seen endless numbers of ports, adaptations, variants, and so forth. All based off of the very simple, straightforward, and almost trivial challenge – stack lines of blocks, don’t let the lines reach the top.
The simplicity of the game belies the fact that there’s actually a wealth and depth of challenge available in the game. It finds new ways to challenge you, perpetually, so that even though you’ve doubtlessly played the game for ages, every single game becomes a new challenge and something to be anticipated and enjoyed. It engages you on almost every level, and the result is a game that’s fascinating to both play and understand on a deeper level.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 