Telling Stories: Avoiding cabinet flaws
Once you get the idea in your head that characters should be flawed, you don’t immediately know how to go about making that a thing. So you wind up with characters who have cabinet flaws, and over time you solve those flaws, and then suddenly your character isn’t flawed any longer. You’re right back to boring old square one, but you can’t not address the cabinet flaw, right? The whole reason it’s there just cries out to be addressed and rectified!
Of course, it would probably help if I took a step back and defined what I meant in the first place by a cabinet flaw.
See, the idea of character flaws is easy to comprehend. You want your characters to have problems, to have to struggle to overcome something. At their core, flaws are problems. So you give your character an obvious hole in their abilities, something that they distinctly cannot do rather than will not do. The archetypical example is a paladin who’s ruggedly handsome, brilliant, and fearsome on the battlefield – but per the name, he can’t fix cabinets.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The last time around for this column, things really picked up in Final Fantasy IV. Betrayals, loss, sabotage, and other unpleasant events! It was nifty. For the audience, anyway. For Cecil, it’s kind of a pile of crap, as he’s lost literally everything yet again and now has no idea where in the hell he is. If you told him he had died and gone to hell, it would be pretty believable.
What little good news Cecil has at the moment (i.e. the fact that he’s not dead) is quickly undone once you realize where you are. Remember the very beginning of the game, when Cecil was returning from a successful campaign to steal the crystal from Mysidia? Yep. Here we are, back again. It’s not mentioned at any point if the people in Mysidia tend to hold grudges, but given that plenty of people will cast status spells on you and otherwise ruin poor solitary Cecil’s day, I’m going to go ahead and say that they do.
Hard Project: Front Mission
Oh, they did all right. I don’t trip over my own feet all that often.
I like Front Mission a lot. Except I don’t, not really; I like the tiny amount of it that I’ve played a lot, which amounts to two officially localized games, two other games handled as a fan translation project, and a whole lot of carefully researched side materials. It’s possible that there’s something within the other chunk of the games and supplementary materials that would change my entire viewpoint, I don’t know, but you’d think that there would be more than a fragment of the 11-game-strong series over here.
The entire franchise appears to be consigned to die the death of a small yappy dog now, and while I’m sad about that, I can kind of understand it. Sure, the people in charge had ideas about where to take the franchise next, and that’s a good thing. But the overall scope of the thing is a hard project to take on, and after the by-all-accounts-execrable Front Mission Evolved, perhaps the challenge was just too great for too little reward.
Telling Stories: Fueling the maze-builders
Two weeks ago, I put forth what I think is a fairly simple philosophy for getting storylines moving in games – I don’t build the story. I just lay out tools, and the other people involved happily build the maze themselves with a minimum of prompting from me. I’m proud of the article and think it’s pretty completely on-point. What I didn’t go into depth about was how you do that.
Sure, it’s all well and good to say you assemble tools, but I’m willing to bed that if you put some lumber and some tools in the yard and then hide, you will not find people coming by just to build you a shed.
A lot of it comes down to tricks that work during tabletop roleplaying and are easily ported to roleplaying arcs just as easily, with a few added tricks brought on by the nature of the beast. So once you’ve got a plan in mind, it’s time to start putting your tools in place and using them to let players assemble a maze you never even had to sculpt.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Tellah’s left the party, but in his place, we have Edward. You know, the character who has long been seen as so catastrophically useless that his very uselessness is seen as a punchline. In other words, the game continues to be Cecil and his Amazingly Unhelpful Companions, right down to the fact that Edward joins at a remarkably low level and is thus outpaced by a child in overall progression. Then again, it’s not like he was lining up for battle before his home was assaulted, so I suppose it’s not really his fault.
A bit of grinding is advisable, helped substantially by the fact that the ruins of the castle still contain HP and MP restoration springs for free. Despite that, the world map outside of the castle is home to enemies that shan’t help substantially; it’s better to try and get in a bit of level buffing via the Antlion’s Den. That means hopping on Edward’s complimentary royal hovercraft and taking a ride over rocks and shoals to the northeast. It’s a fairly short trip.
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 