Telling Stories: What you don’t see when looking in the mirror
If I had to point to why I enjoyed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so much, I could do worse than pointing to the episode of “Waltz.” In some ways, it’s very much a bottle show – the captain of the series and the character who’s been long set up as a villain facing off against one another and simply letting drama develop. But I particularly love the amount of insight it gives into that villain, a look into the mind of Dukat. We have a character who is sharply analytical and has looked deep within himself to figure out his flaws, only to come up with a conclusion so far from redemption that his subsequent actions are at once deplorable and expected.
And it also gives chilling mirrors of any time that the viewers tried to self-analyze.
The thing about introspection is that it’s tricky to do properly, because as the audience and the author we have a different perspective. We can see what characters are doing wrong when the characters themselves often can’t. So that raises the interesting question of how much introspection is too much and how to put yourself in the right place to see what they would see.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Apparently, collecting all of the Crystals will open the path to the moon, which Golbez thinks is super important. Kain also has the Magma Stone, which he’s sure can be used to enter the Underworld, although he’s not sure how or when or why or any of that stuff. That’s some real good thinking there, Kain. Cid is undeterred, however, claiming the group can just fly around on the Enterprise until they find the right place.
I would have thought the Enterprise got destroyed when the Tower of Zot collapsed, but apparently it has a plot-specific autopilot that brought it back to Baron.
Everyone goes to sleep for the night, I assume in the same bed, and then it’s off to find the next place we have to go. Of course, if you’d already explored and found the town where everyone is apparently part dwarf, you can probably piece together what you have to do next. Time for a quick restock and then a trip to a weird little village with a pit!
That’s not really scary
I’ve heard very good things about this game and pray it does not disappoint me.
It’s Halloween! By which of course I mean it is October, which might as well be a solid month of Halloween for all I care. I say this while also having a wedding anniversary and a professional anniversary in October. Halloween all day every day, from October 1st to October 31st. Possibly a bit further in either direction, too. I like Halloween a lot is what I’m getting at.
But as I settle in for another annual trip through every horror-themed movie, game, and novel I can find that I had held back for October, I know I’m going to run into some of the same stupid and tired crap that I find every single year. There’s a reason that for a long while I disliked horror in general and survival horror in games, and it was simply a result of getting so accustomed to crappy half-baked non-horror stuff that gets shoved along with it that I sort of tuned the whole thing out as terrible. I’m better now, but let’s be frank – what’s following is not really scary.
Telling Stories: Your flaws weave a tale
Let’s start this off with a trivia question: what’s the difference between Iron Man and Batman, other than their powers?
If you think about it, they’re closer than you might think. Both of them are inheritors of immense fortunes while being brilliant in their own right. They both created weapons to fight against injustice and horrible things – sure, Iron Man built a suit of armor while Batman made himself a weapon, but the only reason Batman doesn’t have an armored exoskeleton is because the writers choose not to go that route. Yet you know the characters are very different in so many ways, despite their similarities.
At the core, it’s because of their respective flaws and weaknesses. For all their similarities, Tony Stark’s weaknesses do not belong to Bruce Wayne and vice versa. It’s sort of a supertype of avoiding cabinet flaws as I discussed two weeks ago, wherein a given flaw is directly related to the sort of problems that a character has and what sort of story the character works within.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
While we’ve already had to ditch all of our metallic equipment (i.e. most of the good equipment we’ve got) just to approach the stupid dungeon, there’s one more hoop to jump through – reaching it. That means a trip way to the north to pick up a chocobo capable of crossing rivers, something that’s only vaguely hinted at by the game. It’s easy to miss the very existence of these chocobo forests, so that doesn’t help matter. And, unfortunately, there’s no way to just bring the airship up to the darn thing…
Anyhow. The net upside is that you have to catch a Black Chocobo, which will allow you to fly over, land in the forest, and then get moving. No idea how we’re getting back, but that’s how these things go. Tellah and Yang are quite confident that this cave shouldn’t pose a problem despite the fact that the other half of the party does, in fact, make use of metallic stuff. Also, there’s the fact that Tellah barely has enough MP to sustain casting for long. Also, Yang is kind of terrible. Neither of them thought this plan out at all.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 