The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Apparently, collecting all of the Crystals will open the path to the moon, which Golbez thinks is super important. Kain also has the Magma Stone, which he’s sure can be used to enter the Underworld, although he’s not sure how or when or why or any of that stuff. That’s some real good thinking there, Kain. Cid is undeterred, however, claiming the group can just fly around on the Enterprise until they find the right place.
I would have thought the Enterprise got destroyed when the Tower of Zot collapsed, but apparently it has a plot-specific autopilot that brought it back to Baron.
Everyone goes to sleep for the night, I assume in the same bed, and then it’s off to find the next place we have to go. Of course, if you’d already explored and found the town where everyone is apparently part dwarf, you can probably piece together what you have to do next. Time for a quick restock and then a trip to a weird little village with a pit!
That’s not really scary
I’ve heard very good things about this game and pray it does not disappoint me.
It’s Halloween! By which of course I mean it is October, which might as well be a solid month of Halloween for all I care. I say this while also having a wedding anniversary and a professional anniversary in October. Halloween all day every day, from October 1st to October 31st. Possibly a bit further in either direction, too. I like Halloween a lot is what I’m getting at.
But as I settle in for another annual trip through every horror-themed movie, game, and novel I can find that I had held back for October, I know I’m going to run into some of the same stupid and tired crap that I find every single year. There’s a reason that for a long while I disliked horror in general and survival horror in games, and it was simply a result of getting so accustomed to crappy half-baked non-horror stuff that gets shoved along with it that I sort of tuned the whole thing out as terrible. I’m better now, but let’s be frank – what’s following is not really scary.
Demo Driver 8: System Protocol One
Not one of the more interesting layouts, but those are kind of impossible to show in a two-dimensional image.
It’s kind of neat how tower defense games, as a genre, have reached a point where they have two distinct sub-genres as a bare minimum. All of them have the same core elements – enemies come from point A and move to point B, make that as difficult as possible for them – but in some games, the path is already laid out. Your job is to place your towers at the right points for optimum damage, as seen in games like Defender’s Quest (which is excellent). Others ask you to build the path, walling your enemies in and creating the most circuitous possible route through walls of cannon fire.
System Protocol One is of the latter variety. I used to think it was my preferred sort of tower defense game, but time has cooled that particular bit of ardor. I wouldn’t say it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination, and it definitely hits the notes it’s aiming for, but I suspect a good portion of my affection comes down to my usual love of anything involving tower defense. Still, it’s an entertaining enough way to spend some time clicking away, so doesn’t that fulfill its purposes?
Telling Stories: Your flaws weave a tale
Let’s start this off with a trivia question: what’s the difference between Iron Man and Batman, other than their powers?
If you think about it, they’re closer than you might think. Both of them are inheritors of immense fortunes while being brilliant in their own right. They both created weapons to fight against injustice and horrible things – sure, Iron Man built a suit of armor while Batman made himself a weapon, but the only reason Batman doesn’t have an armored exoskeleton is because the writers choose not to go that route. Yet you know the characters are very different in so many ways, despite their similarities.
At the core, it’s because of their respective flaws and weaknesses. For all their similarities, Tony Stark’s weaknesses do not belong to Bruce Wayne and vice versa. It’s sort of a supertype of avoiding cabinet flaws as I discussed two weeks ago, wherein a given flaw is directly related to the sort of problems that a character has and what sort of story the character works within.
Easy villains
It’s not as satisfying to say you got yourself into this mess by yourself, but it’s probably more accurate.
I’m leery of anyone who pins the blame for their bad games on someone else.
Most games, especially big ones, are not the product of one person’s ego and hard work. That’s asking a lot. A big-budget game is the result of a whole lot of people working together. In an ideal situation, you have the publisher who handles all of the tedious stuff like funding and promoting, directors who have a unified and fun vision for the end product, and programmers who know how to put everything together. Usually, a few of these people wind up being the face of the project, generally the directors and producers.
But then you get bad games. And an awful lot of big-name directors seem to be unwilling to shoulder any of the blame for those games despite taking all of the credit for the games that people love, never mind that both games were equally reliant upon teams. And that makes me leery of directors blaming publishers or studios or anyone else for a game being crap.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 