Marlow Briggs and the God of War
I don’t know about you, but I find this a lot more believable than having your superpowered hero come from a culture which was famous for its military discipline and unit organization.
It took me about six hours, start to finish, to get through Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death. Considering that I was playing it at the same time as Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and my usual Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans, it took me a few days of real time, but it is not a particularly bulky game. Not that you’d expect a whole lot from a game that costs you a grand total of five dollars.
But I’m pretty sure I had as much fun with it as games that cost me ten times as much.
In a just world, this would have been the first game of a series that would predate God of War, because I’d much rather be playing the seventh installment of Marlow’s adventure than watching Kratos grimace through a field of inexplicable tits and sneering white guy violence. Alas, we don’t live in that world, we live in this one. But comparing the two is telling, because it’s one of those times when a much cheaper game manages to do everything a more expensive equivalent does with equal panache – and often with traits that the “bigger” title lacks altogether.
Telling Stories: Don’t be so hard on your character
Don’t be hard on your roleplaying characters.
I don’t mean this in the sense that you should give them all whatever they want and make their lives uninterrupted parades of joy, because that shit is boring. No one wants that. Your characters should constantly be facing hardship, struggling, getting knocked down and getting up again. In that sense, you should be brutal to your characters, relentlessly hard on them, unceasingly on-point about what they’re doing right or wrong.
No, what I mean is that you shouldn’t be so hard on the character you made. And yourself, by extension. Don’t berate yourself because your character isn’t as good as they could be, even if your original concept was as gut-shatteringly stupid as “Goku but in World of Warcraft.” Don’t beat yourself up over poor early roleplaying or changing your character over time or having to toss out some retcons here and there or any of the above.
Today and yesterday
Boy, this game was going to be super important and a long-runner until five seconds after it launched and no one cared.
Pop quiz, folks: who can tell me the five nominees and the winner of the 56th Academy Award for Best Picture? No using Google. These were the five best things to come out in the year of my birth, right?
I’m going to guess that you either failed that test or immediately said “this is stupid” and skipped on to the next line, both of which are completely legitimate things to do. Because if you can’t think of the answer… well, obviously the five would-be best movies of 1983 didn’t really stick in your memory, did they? They might have been important at the time, but they might not have lived up to the test of time.
I’m hard-pressed to tell you the best games of 2014, but I have no problem telling you a bunch of games that are still worth playing today with no regard for release date. And games have come and gone on that list over the years, because the truest test of quality is one you only see in hindsight. They’re what keeps being worthwhile years later, and sometimes it seems almost arbitrary what gets immortalized and what gets forgotten.
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.
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 