The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 8
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
You’d think that this series would involve more submarines. Exploring the underwater world seems like a natural extension, yet only here and in Final Fantasy VII do you get to slip beneath the waves reliably. Otherwise, the water is an effective barrier to everything you want to do. Ah, well.
You’d also think that having access to a submarine wouldn’t really open up more exploration options, since you can sort of fly right now. Au contraire, dear readers. Unlike most games in the series, airships in Final Fantasy III can’t pass through the majority of mountain ranges, which means that you can’t simply soar everywhere. There are places that are completely inaccessible unless you have a ship that can fly past some low-lying foothills… or a ship that can go under those same mountain ranges. Hmm. I wonder what sort of ship might be able to do that? Oh, right, a submersible airship able to explore strange new lands. Away we go!
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?
Demo Driver 8: Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory (#447)
It would be really nice if even the designers could get a single shot of this game that did not make it look unbelievably messy, because that certainly turned me off.
The vast majority of games are mediocre. We all know this even as we don’t really think about it. Your game collection is, I’m sure, filled with games that you consider actively good rather than lackluster, and it’s easy to sort of extrapolate outward from that. Most of the games you can find aren’t bad, though, nor are they really all that good. They’re just… there. They work. They’re not worth feeling a great deal of joy or sorrow over. They’re mediocre. Filler. Likely impossible to have any strong emotions about either way, even.
Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory is a game that is mediocre in every way, shape, and form. It is yet another puzzle platformer in which you move from screen to screen and try to figure out how to bypass the game’s obstacles to get to the end. It is also another game that falls victim to the “demo cannot sustain half an hour of play” curse that I get all uppity about, but even with that being said I feel I have a relatively solid grasp of the game from my limited play time. It’s neither bad nor good. It’s just there.
Challenge Accepted: Why fake difficulty is still a thing
Fakin’ it.
Fake difficulty isn’t a term of praise. Which is kind of obvious from the name, I know.
If you’re not well-versed in fake difficulty as a named concept, you’ll still know it when you see it. The mandatory stealth section when this game had not required any stealth gameplay before now. The camera angles that shift when you make a jump. The sudden mechanical shift into a whole new sort of game that you may not be any good at. A hunt for an object that would be easy to find… if not for the total lack of distinguishing marks from the background.
TVTropes does a good job listing the many, many flavors of fake difficulty, but it only briefly touches upon the fact that it’s not entirely bad. There are a few reasons it still shows up in games, though, and while some of them are bad, a couple of them are actually better than the alternative. So why is fake difficulty still a thing?
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.)
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 