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.
Hard Project: Lord of the Rings
On the plus side, it’s doubtlessly better than the most recent Assassin’s Creed game and its blatant disregard for being even baseline playable.
I’m going to be totally honest here and say that as much as it’s supposedly a part of the subculture, I’ve never much cared for Lord of the Rings. This isn’t a case like Star Wars, where I think the thing as a whole is undeserving of praise; J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have been a fantastic guy, he wrote one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels (The Hobbit), and he did sort of kick of an entire genre. It’s not his fault that later fantasy writers have resorted to making thin pastiches of his original work, and while it is his fault that he found heroic sagas way more interesting than I do, that’s… not really a “fault” thing.
But it’s really, really difficult to make a game set in that universe, despite its popularity. We’ve gotten a lot of magnificent games in the universe already, sure, but this is a unique project insofar as every successful one makes each subsequent one that much harder. We should be thankful for what we have so far, but it’s getting harder to fit in more stuff.
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.
Killing the six-fingered man
They are not what you’re afraid of. But they’ll do.
My favorite story about The Princess Bride is Mandy Patinkin talking about Inigo’s moment of triumph. Because I’ve totally been there.
Patinkin’s story, in brief, is that his father had recently died after a long struggle with cancer. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do in a situation like that, obviously; you love your family member and try to give them strength until the end. But when he was filming Inigo’s confrontation with Rugen, suddenly he didn’t have an abstract concept to wrestle with. Here he was, in character, taking out the man responsible for killing his father. He’s said that it was a little bit like being able to avenge his father.
I know how that feels. Sure, I lost my father to alcoholism, not cancer, and I wasn’t in a movie that allowed me to externalize all of that. But I had my video games, and in places, that was enough. Hell, that’s half of the point of video games, to deal with problems that never get a truly satisfying conclusion any other way.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So far, a lot of stuff has been happening in The After Years, albeit mostly to disconnected individuals. The first four tales were all pretty well self-contained and didn’t really cross over with one another at all. Moving into the fifth tale, though, it’s high time that some of this stuff started pulling together. Not coincidentally, the entire point of this particular tale is to create a larger framework for all of the various cliffhangers that we’re up to.
Unfortunately, it winds up treading over some… uncomfortable territory getting there. As in veering close to a certain (terrible) show about a whole lot of elemental ninja. Please don’t make me type the name.
But let’s leave that to one side. It’s a new year, it’s a new tale, it’s a new adventure. So let’s get started with a bunch of ninja acting like, well, ninja, doing like a ninja do. No, they are not shredding on their electric guitars while riding their totally sweet motorcycles, we’re talking closer to the traditional concept of ninja.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 