Defiance and the dancing bear
Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate the show giving us another non-English curse word to pepper speech with while avoiding strict censor guidelines.
The dancing bear joke really isn’t; it’s more of a punchline in search of a setup. It’s simple enough, though. If you see a bear dancing in the circus, you’re not concerned with his form. You’re just impressed that the people training him got him to dance at all. Sure, it’s mostly just shuffling back and forth, but does it really matter as long as it counts as dancing?
A lot of media has the dancing bear problem. Strictly speaking, for instance, it doesn’t matter if the Transformers cartoons are any good, it just matters whether or not they sell toys. Skylanders toys could come to life at night and try to kill your pets, but the important thing is that they tie into the video game. You get the idea. When you’ve got any piece of media tying into something else, you’re starting out with a dancing bear.
Defiance falls into that category quite handily. It’s a show that’s made to tie into an online game running at the same time, with the promise that the two will feed into one another – events in the game are reflected by the show, and vice versa. The problem being, of course, that a show not aimed at supporting a merchandising line can’t survive for long on novelty. It’s not enough to be a dancing bear here; you have to be a bear that turns out to be a pretty good dancer.
Telling Stories: I do not build a maze, I assemble tools
I’m in the midst of planning for a big roleplaying plot right now. That means integrating plots, making a couple of alts, planting the seeds of resolutions that won’t come for quite some time. It starts with an injury, I already know that. And it ends with…
Well, it could end with anything. That’s the whole point of this right now – creating a lot of potential outs. Oh, I have a fairly clear picture of what many of the long-term effects will be, but that’s not the same. There is no ending, just a variety of potential conclusions.
I’ve said many times in the past that roleplaying is not storytelling. This extends to events, storylines, and the like. If you have an ending ready when you have started the event, go back and try again, because you are doing it wrong. A good storyline isn’t about having a specific ending in mind, it’s about putting the pieces out and letting other people assemble the result on their own.
Challenge Accepted: Select difficulty
This is not the vacation I had been expecting.
A curious thing happened on one of my playthroughs of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. I realized that the difficulty I had things set on was actually making my life harder, despite the fact that it was down at Easy.
I’d beaten the game before, and this was just meant as a fun run using the relentlessly overpowered final form that can then be used to play through the game. What made things difficult is that there’s a boss where your goal is to parry her attacks, then grab her machine and delete a virus that’s manipulating her controls. Hack at her actual mech too many times and it’s game over. Between the difficulty setting and my machine, every time I would accidentally hit her instead of parrying her attack, she’d lose a good third of her health – compared to a normal playthrough, where a few misses were unfortunate, but you had to be really trying to kill her.
This was an isolated incident, but it also serves as an interesting introduction to how difficulty levels alter games, sometimes unsuccessfully. While the dream of multiple difficulty levels is that the same content can provide entertainment for different sorts of players, in practice it doesn’t often work out that way.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
There’s no game in the series that’s had a more tortured path coming over to non-Japanese markets than Final Fantasy III, but Final Fantasy IV certainly deserves a nod, especially as it’s the subject of a lot of rumors and aspersions that simply aren’t true. Everyone knows that it was released as Final Fantasy II originally, that the version released in the US was easier than the one released in Japan four months earlier, that a lot of it was censored… you get the idea. And, unfortunately, even with the ability to clear up a lot of misconceptions now, they persist just the same.
Let’s start at the beginning. Final Fantasy IV started development after Final Fantasy III‘s release simultaneously with Final Fantasy V… sort of. Square was working on two titles for the two Nintendo consoles: Final Fantasy IV for the Famicom, Final Fantasy V for the Super Famicom. Limitations of resources meant that the idea of another Famicom game was scrapped, and instead all of the resources were brought over to the retitled Final Fantasy IV. The Famicom game was apparently about 80% done and some elements were supposedly reused, but it’s never been stated what, exactly, got reused. (I have speculations, but that can come later.)
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 