Today and yesterday
Boy, this game was going to be super important and a long-runner until five seconds after it launched and no one cared.
Pop quiz, folks: who can tell me the five nominees and the winner of the 56th Academy Award for Best Picture? No using Google. These were the five best things to come out in the year of my birth, right?
I’m going to guess that you either failed that test or immediately said “this is stupid” and skipped on to the next line, both of which are completely legitimate things to do. Because if you can’t think of the answer… well, obviously the five would-be best movies of 1983 didn’t really stick in your memory, did they? They might have been important at the time, but they might not have lived up to the test of time.
I’m hard-pressed to tell you the best games of 2014, but I have no problem telling you a bunch of games that are still worth playing today with no regard for release date. And games have come and gone on that list over the years, because the truest test of quality is one you only see in hindsight. They’re what keeps being worthwhile years later, and sometimes it seems almost arbitrary what gets immortalized and what gets forgotten.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 8
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
On the seventh tale of this episodic sequel, the premise has officially worn thin. They started out so promising, a chance to really dive into characters in limited settings and expand on the dreary experience of the original game, but as the overarching plot has become more and more relevant each episode increasingly feels like tying up loose ends and moving all of the pieces to their proper spots on the game board. Which, to be fair, is probably why the tales are getting worse over time rather than better.
This tale is the last of the initial offerings from way back in the start; after this, it’s all-in or nothing. And it stars a character who was little more than a footnote in the first game whom I already know has to be in a certain place at a certain time to make Yang’s story work properly. Here, then, is the weakness of episodic stories like this – the interlink of multiple things happening at once is cool, but it deflates a lot of tension when you know that things have to fit together later.
Demo Driver 8: Sacraboar
Almost every single screenshot is made up chiefly of empty space. This is not an accident, nor is it to the game’s credit.
If you’ve read the stuff I write here for a while, you know I have a great deal of love for the ambitious game that tries for lofty goals and winds up falling short. Sacraboar, however, is not such a game.
Oh, it wants to be. It wants to be some sort of never-before-seen combination of gameplay styles, mixing capture-the-flag mechanics in with real-time strategy. Never mind that there are probably two dozen mods doing exactly that right now for StarCraft II, this game was built from the bottom up to facilitate that goal! And it turns out that the goal just isn’t all that fun.
I’m not sure whether the weak skeleton of an RTS or a poor implementation of capture-the-flag gameplay came first, but what you wind up with is a game that’s just plain not fun to play. It manages to combine the worst parts of both inspirations, and the net effect is a game which is most entertaining for the squealing noise heard when you capture the eponymous pig.
Challenge Accepted: First-level hell and the late-game cake
All right, maybe some of them were ants and not scorpions. Split the difference.
The start of Fallout 2 is pretty terrible if you want to play a diplomatic sort. There’s a reason given, yes, but it’s still unbelievably frustrating. You’re thrown into the deep end of a pit and you have to fight your way out, and despite what you might want to be true, very few giant scorpions can be talked out of stinging you and ripping you to shreds. It’s sort of a hiccup in the game, since otherwise you’re completely free to just talk your way out of lots of problems and recruit followers to shoot stuff on the rare occasions that “talking” isn’t a viable option.
Ideally, a game start easy and gets harder, and in some cases it tapers off again toward the end. But sometimes part of the game just swings wildly, becoming much worse or much easier without any sort of warning. A first-level hell is exactly what it sounds like, a game wherein the first level isn’t just hard to clear but actively harder than most of what you’re dealing with afterward, because the tools that would allow you to deal with the game aren’t in your hands yet.
More often than not, a lot of this comes about as a result of choice.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
We’re almost at the end of the initial set of tales offered by the game, although new ones have been popping up as other tales gets cleared away. You really can do them in any order you want, but it sort of blunts the effect without seeing them unfold in the intended order, wonky timeline effects aside. That just leaves two of the least likely starring characters to take center stage, and in this case, it’s the character whose entire life has basically been “support character.”
Of course, the same could be said of Rosa, but the fact is as a character I don’t like Rosa in the least. She’s clearly written as a Token Hot Girl without any attributes or opinions of her own, and the novelty of the game stating that she and Cecil were in a relationship is quickly outweighed by the fact that the writers make her completely a satellite to Cecil’s whims. Porom, on the other hand, has at least some agency and wish of her own. Not as much as I’d like, but still.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 