Demo Driver 8: Magic 2014
This is as dramatic as it gets.
Usually, I play a demo all the way through to the end before I make a comment on it. But not this one. I passed the half-hour mark and I was already done, largely because I didn’t need a great deal of introduction to playing a card game that I had already played for several years and have opted out of continuing to play for a variety of reasons.
The easy verdict here is that this is the most recent version of the game, and if you’re looking for a version of Magic: the Gathering that works as close to a box set of the game could possibly work, here is your game. Based on the demo, it provides exactly what it advertises on the tin, which is a faithful digital recreation of the card game as it stood when the game was made, frozen in time and yet with a clean visual interface and implementation of the rules. It manages to hit enough of the genuine game’s notes without being the same game, which is noteworthy. At the same time, it’s also a bit buggy, and it doesn’t exactly do the source material any favors.
You’re probably looking for a bit more, huh?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Things are cascading toward what would appear to be the endgame awfully fast in Final Fantasy IV, although the chances of it actually being the endgame are about nil. For one thing, I’d be really surprised if one of these games ended with characters in the late teens or early twenties in terms of level. Also I’ve still got more elemental fiends to face, I’m sure, and there are a lot of plot elements still unexplained. Plus, you know, I checked.
But we’re still swinging right along in our goal to get an airship, rescue Rosa, kill Golbez, and then… do something? I don’t know if Cecil actually has a plan for the endgame here. Once Yang is kitted out again with some equipment retrieved from the Fat Chocobo and a few more things bought in Baron (you can unlock those stores now), it’s time to move forward! By which I mean it’s time to totally ignore stated objectives and head back toward Mist, because there’s stuff there, even though it makes no sense whatsoever.
Maybe it’s time to stop
If only there were some sort of sign.
One of the nice things about games is that really, there’s nothing that automatically says that the fifth installment of a given franchise is going to be bad. Heck, if a franchise makes it to five installments that’s kind of heartening. You don’t get that many games on the shelf if the first one was a complete train wreck, after all; I might not like the Call of Duty games, but I can at least recognize that they scratched an itch. Sequels for a game franchise can keep going for a very long time.
However, while games don’t suffer from the same issues that you see in movie sequels, you still hit a certain point where the well is dry. If you’re lucky, the series turns into clones of itself; if you’re unlucky, it becomes a shambling undead husk, like the Saw franchise but on your game device of choice. All of these franchises have been around for more than two decades, and they’ve got a lot of goodwill behind them… but it might be time to just give up the ghost and say good night.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The last time around for this column, things really picked up in Final Fantasy IV. Betrayals, loss, sabotage, and other unpleasant events! It was nifty. For the audience, anyway. For Cecil, it’s kind of a pile of crap, as he’s lost literally everything yet again and now has no idea where in the hell he is. If you told him he had died and gone to hell, it would be pretty believable.
What little good news Cecil has at the moment (i.e. the fact that he’s not dead) is quickly undone once you realize where you are. Remember the very beginning of the game, when Cecil was returning from a successful campaign to steal the crystal from Mysidia? Yep. Here we are, back again. It’s not mentioned at any point if the people in Mysidia tend to hold grudges, but given that plenty of people will cast status spells on you and otherwise ruin poor solitary Cecil’s day, I’m going to go ahead and say that they do.
Hard Project: Front Mission
Oh, they did all right. I don’t trip over my own feet all that often.
I like Front Mission a lot. Except I don’t, not really; I like the tiny amount of it that I’ve played a lot, which amounts to two officially localized games, two other games handled as a fan translation project, and a whole lot of carefully researched side materials. It’s possible that there’s something within the other chunk of the games and supplementary materials that would change my entire viewpoint, I don’t know, but you’d think that there would be more than a fragment of the 11-game-strong series over here.
The entire franchise appears to be consigned to die the death of a small yappy dog now, and while I’m sad about that, I can kind of understand it. Sure, the people in charge had ideas about where to take the franchise next, and that’s a good thing. But the overall scope of the thing is a hard project to take on, and after the by-all-accounts-execrable Front Mission Evolved, perhaps the challenge was just too great for too little reward.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 