Hard Project: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
I am relatively certain that having this picture on my site will put me on some sort of watchlist, because… well, see the first entry past the cut.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is… well, it’s a cautionary tale about how a bunch of disgusting fans can completely ruin a series by wildly misunderstanding a show’s appeal by trying to deny it to its target audience. But it’s also a charming, sweet, and fun show with a spectacular cast and a lot of wonderful writing. It’s the sort of thing that’s tailor-made for producing a whole lot of great video games, with some episodes seemingly demonstrating exactly what you could do with such a game (there’s a race episode that practically begs for a kart racer).
What we’ve gotten has been… well, a mobile game that does all the things you’d expect a mobile game to do. A CCG that’s pretty fun, but that’s not a video game. Here’s a show fit to burst with all sorts of great characters, tons of opportunities for a game, and yet it sits there without even a simple run-and-bop platformer made. What the heck is holding it back?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I shudder to think at what would happen if the Light Warriors were to put in an application for an airship loan at this point in the game. They’d be laughed out of the office. Our first airship got blown up, we used our second one for about three minutes before getting it chained up by some jerk who may have broken one of the foundations of the planet, and then once we get that back we get it shot down in minutes. The skies here are just evil.
Leaving aside the fact that we can’t keep a flying ship in the air, of course, there is the minor fact that the Light Warriors are trapped somewhere strange after having their ship shot out from underneath them. As we were in a vehicle at the time, everyone is perfectly fine but the ship is destroyed, leaving us kind of up the creek. Boy, I sure hope this doesn’t mean we’re about to all be forced into changing classes for a big gimmick section!
(That is exactly what we’re going to have to do.)
Demo Driver 8: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (#98)
And you find yourself thinking “I could be playing a game that’s just as dude-centric but with Joe Mad designs,” so that’s not a ringing endorsement.
The Castlevania franchise has been in an odd place as years have gone by. It has produced a lot of classic games over the years, lots of stuff well worth playing, and it’s one of the few franchises to pull of a wholesale genre switch successfully. It’s been good, by and large. Sure, not every game has been a thunderous success, but there’s a sense of continuity just the same. And there’s a conscious effort by the people in charge not to just turn Castlevania into a franchise of the same thing every few years – see also the mention of a wholesale genre switch above.
At the same time, one wonders how many stories you’ve really got about shaggy dudes going off to fight Dracula in a big old castle over and over.
I commend Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for what it’s trying to do, totally. I commend it for being a reboot, I commend it for once again trying to reinvent the series in terms of gameplay, and I can’t say that it’s doing a bad job, exactly. But I can say that it’s a game which would have been better served had it come out three years earlier or so, and I can’t say it sports a particularly good demo. Even if it does feature Sir Patrick Stewart.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Everything seemed to be going so well for a while there. We had an airship again after we’d wrecked the first one. We had not only just finished one leg of our supposed quest, we had done so immediately after finishing the prior leg of the quest, very efficient-like. (It’s good to have these things on your resume for future world-saving gigs according to Destined Heroes Quarterly.) We failed to save one shrine maiden! And now here we are, stuck inside of a town with a big lock on our airship.
I supposed we’d better walk back into the town and find out what’s going on, huh?
Well, yes, but we should also take the opportunity to examine the new jobs we got from the Water Crystal, because this is when we start getting into the fun stuff. The first crystal gave us the basic lineup, the second one gave us a few nice outliers, but we’ve got some new jobs to play around with! So let’s take a look at the lot of them.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
My return to the Dwarven Caves saw me welcomed as a hero, which was sure nice, as was the fact that the dwarves opened up their treasure stores for me. Being a heroic sort, I naturally took this as the perfect opportunity to rob the short, hairy men of literally every valuable they had on hand. They wanted me to do it, I was just helping them along! Look, don’t judge me, I’ve got two more crystals to find, this is a difficult job.
The end of our Light Warrior Victory Tour (with special guest Rob the Dwarves) hit something of a down note, though, with some dying guy showing up and informing me that Tokkul was in trouble. Tokkul, that rings a bell… oh, right, that town full of sad people from way back when that I briefly pilfered. And it’s apparently being burned to the ground. Well, it would take a truly heartless individual to just keep plowing ahead and ignore that sort of news.
…no, turns out I’m not quite that heartless. Fine, let’s go save the stupid town.
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 