Telling Stories: Thinking like a television with your characters
Playing my main character in Star Trek Online has been illuminating. She had her own gig for several seasons, and it was interesting, watching her go from a fresh-faced Lieutenant to a Captain through sheer pluck and determination. Season 1 was mostly about her sorting out her crew and how she related to officers frequently trained not to accept a Cardassian in command; season 2, meanwhile, was much more focused around her past and what she actually intended to do with her command. It wasn’t until season 3 that she really started exploring how she interacted with other officers, developing friendships and rivalries; but she left a lot of that behind when she climbed just a little higher. Now she’s in season 4, and she’s learning that it’s quite lonely at the top of the ladder, and perhaps not as focused on what she actually finds important.
Obviously Star Trek Online focuses its updates into what it calls seasons, but just as obviously not what I’m talking about here. Organizing your character’s past and present into seasons and story arcs can be a major boon to playing your characters while keeping a strong sense of their development over time. Even though much of the time you’re going to be imposing order after the fact, it’s still a good way to organize your thoughts and get a good sense of the past without becoming overly bogged down in details.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
You know, I’ve tried really hard to keep this project free of personal quirks. Not in the sense of making this less of a personal experience, but insofar as I recognize that some things I think are cool are just strange on an objective level. Having said that, I still think the ending of Final Fantasy is really neat on a conceptual level.
If you’ve been paying crazy careful attention to the map, you realized that all four Fiends were located at points equidistant from the Temple of Fiends. You don’t even think about how weird it is that the first dungeon in the game is the Temple of Fiends until you’ve been through most of the game. And yet there it is, staring you in the face – the bats surrounding Garland, the black orb right behind him, the nature of its location. It all comes around to the same circle. Garland is the root of everything. Your first boss is your last boss.
Hard Projects: Star Trek
It’s the reviews, sir, and they’re not happy!
There’s no way I could convince anyone reading this that I don’t love Star Trek Online. I wrote a whole piece about it. And it’s all true, Your Honor, I think it’s a great game that comes as close as any game has to capturing the spirit of the series. In fact, it might even seem unfair to list Star Trek here at all, seeing as we’ve been nearly buried under a variety of Star Trek games with varying critical reception. Some are seen as particularly good, some are seen as middling, but very few houses get the license and turn out something execrable.
Yet it’s always a tricky prospect. Star Trek Online languished in development hell for an extended period of time, killing the first studio working on it. Many of the games languish in that impermanent hell toward the bottom of the “acceptable” scale when they hit review time, many of them sliding below that. And nearly every single one faces criticism about its use of the license, with people hand-wringing and asking whether or not the game really fits in with the ethos of Star Trek as a whole.
So what makes this so hard to adapt?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite my best efforts, these installments refuse to be compressed down all that much. I apparently have had quite a bit to say about these games.
But let’s jump right back into the action. After slaying two of the four Fiends and having noted that the remake has a different difficulty curve than the original game (or more faithful remakes), it seems that both the original version and the remake have once more converged upon the same spot. Namely, the part wherein things become quite a bit more dull and slog-like than is entirely necessary.
By this point you have plenty of resources at your disposal and you’re not thrown into a pitched battle for survival every few fights or as a result of a lucky critical hit. Most of the fights can actually be blown through pretty quickly. The downside is that they’re almost constant and don’t offer you much of worth. No useful drops are found, gil is functionally worthless (you’ve got enough to restock and no more shops to spend it in, so you’re taking in far more than you spend), and you wind up wishing to just be done with all the pointless random encounters.
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 