The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite the fact that Firion and the Attractions failed to pick up any allies, the rebel army presses forward with an assault on Fynn. This is… well… it’s the end of the war, right? Our goal here isn’t to now conquer the nation that invaded us as a result of some retaliatory principle, right?
Oh, who am I kidding. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil men is for good men to do nothing, so we’d better keep running this resistance force like an army until we’ve wiped everyone out. I guess.
Anyhow, Hilda and Gordon have come up with a cunning plan to retake the castle. First, the troops will distract the Empire’s troops, because a disciplined military unit is going to be adequately distracted by an ill-equipped resistance band. Then, Firion and the E Street Band will go into the castle and kill the person in charge of the castle. This will result in victory, because it’s not like the numerically superior force will stick around when the commander is gone.
Hard Project: Superman
Truth, Justice, and Soaring Around Looking Majestic.
Superheroes owe their entire existence to Superman. There are worst places to start off. Sure, we’ve spent the last several years inundated with writers who feel that you can’t relate to Superman or that it’s too difficult to give Superman compelling challenges, but if you can’t think of a good setup to tell stories about an alien who was raised by humans and then decided that he liked people so much he wanted to protect all of them forever? That says more about your lack of imagination than the character.
What’s weird, though, is that we’ve never gotten a good video game based off of the Man of Steel. Not a one.
There have been some tolerable versions of Supes in fighting games here and there, yes, although Injustice loses loads of points right from the word go for buying into the “but what if we made Superman evil” school of thought. But every single game version has been some flavor of disappointment, with Superman 64 essentially being used as a synonym for Worst Game Ever. Why in the hell is that? Why is it so difficult to make a good game based around the Last Son of Krypton?
Demo Driver 8: Reaxxion (#348)
If I get that, I can quit my job! Thanks, Reaxxion!
After nearly 40 years, it might be time to stop trying to remake Breakout. I can understand the appeal, totally, but part of what made it work for so long is the fact that the core of the game is so simple. You can only change so much before it starts to become something else altogether.
If it weren’t already obvious from the statements I just made, Reaxxion is a Breakout clone. Like basically every other version of this entire subgenre, Reaxxion clearly wants to be the remake of Breakout to end all further remakes. And, like basically every other thing that tries to be the final remake of any given subgenre, there’s really no way for anything to possibly achieve this goal.
What Reaxxion does achieve, oddly, is to be nearly entirely different from the game it’s emulating. If I had to compare it to anything, it almost feels like some version of a browser game that broke free of its mooring and somehow managed to form a Steam page.
Challenge Accepted: Selling on the challenge
Yeah, this is going to get worse before it gets better, isn’t it?
Dark Souls doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to difficulty. You will die in this game. You will die over and over, brutally, ripped to shreds by enemies that are there for the explicit purpose of ripping you to shreds. The PC version is subtitled as the Prepare to Die Edition, a not-so-subtle reminder that when you start playing this game death comes for you on swift wings. And swift legs. And swift fins. Basically, everything is going to kill you over and over and you’re going to like it.
Is that challenging?
I’m not asking if the game is really all that hard or not, that’s for reviewers to argue over. (Or, as is more frequently the case, for forum-goers to debate with “oh, it wasn’t that hard” substituting as the gaming equivalent of explaining how many one-armed pushups you can do in an hour.) Rather, it’s a question of how challenging a game can be when its entire purpose is stated right from the start, when you walk in with a solid promise that this game will kill you over and over. Are you getting a challenge, or are you just getting what you paid for?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
At roughly the halfway point of the game, Final Fantasy II has kind of worn out its welcome. This would not be as big of a deal if there was less game left to go.
Part of the problem here is that it doesn’t take many cues from Final Fantasy where perhaps it should. There are parts of the original that I accused of being a slog, and they certainly were, but at least every part of the game made a genuine effort to reward you in some way. Yes, the dungeons could turn into slogs, but at least the enemies rewarded you with experience instead of tedium.
The encounter rate is absurdly high, but the ambush rate is also absurd, leading to a multitude of turns spent watching enemies act and then act again. This includes several enemies with annoying but not actively dangerous special abilities that bog combat down even further, making themselves priority targets just so I won’t have to wait through their animations again. It’s the worst kind of battle where it would take a seriously bad day for you to lose, but you still have to wait to win, like playing against someone in Magic: the Gathering who keeps adding more life without any way to hurt you. Sure, it takes you longer to eat through the wall of health, but who cares?
But I think there’s an even more important element here, and that’s the simple fact that my tactical options are pretty much zero.
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 