Why I Stopped Playing: Final Fantasy IV DS

I am so sick of this goddamn game.

Of this whole goddamn series, maybe. I've always been a Dragon Warrior guy rather than a Final Fantasy guy, and it's things like the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV vs the DS remake of Dragon Warrior IV that remind me why.

This will be my--let's see, I never had an SNES so I didn't play the game till I was in high school on emulation, then once at some point in college, then the GBA remake, and now this one--my fourth time through the game in one form or another. I know there are guys who have played it a dozen times, but that's just not me.

I'm tired of long drawnout broody storylines. I'm tired of monsters that are by and large generic and uninteresting. (Scarmiglione's graphics in this game are awesome and terrifying: credit where it's due. I don't remember what the others really look like--I could probably conjure up a few of the bosses, but I can't tell you what a single normal enemy looks like.)

I'm tired of obscure and arbitrary sidequests. IV is not as bad as some of the later ones in the series--Final Fantasy X, while a decent game in its main quest, was absolutely *idiotic* in its sidequests--dodge lightning 100 times? win this chocobo race that's partially luck-based with a time of less than zero seconds? FFIVDS, as you may know, features a revolving door of characters, and you can get different characters' abilities for members of your party after they leave, but most of them are not clued at all. It looks like--from the little bit of strategy guides I glanced at--if you give certain ones to certain members you get certain other ones, but the only way you'll reliably figure that out is by reading the guide. I am tired of having to Read the Guide to get the optimal experience. It is insulting: it is saying that I either need the dedication of a tester, the bizarre skewed way of thinking of a Rainman, the ability to read the designer's mind, or a walkthrough to make significant progress.

These games are for the most part not made for normal people to play.

I really want to like Final Fantasy as a whole--just hearing the music of VII gives me inordinately strong flashbacks to senior year of high school when I played it for the first time; there are sections of VIII that I'd love to go through again; and what I saw of XII before I got irrevocably stuck was excellent; but I just don't have the heart any more. You've got to be a certain type of gamer and you've got to have a certain type of mindset or you won't see large swaths of the game; and without the patience to level-grind for hours, you likely won't even beat the final boss.

Commenting in a friend's journal about this post at The Brainy Gamer, I said the following:

I like to joke that I should be given a dispensation against random battles--I've been playing RPGs for about 17 years and should earn my fun--but, really, genre in videogames is about mechanics rather than subject matter. (Survival horror is a borderline exception.) In my old age I'm getting much less patient, I have much less time to game. Years ago, in between college semesters, when I had AT LEAST 5 hours a day to game, spending two solid hours levelling up wasn't even half of my play session. Now, I'm lucky if I get an hour in, and it's more likely that I'll have a couple quick bursts of a half hour here and there. It's quite possible that my play sessions of a week or two could be devoted solely to levelling. And that just isn't fun.

So it's kind of an anti-tautology: I'd like RPGs if it weren't for that pesky levelling-up. (I'd like murder mysteries if there weren't all that crime; I'd like political thrillers if there weren't all that politics; I'd like fantasy if it took place solidly grounded in the real world.) The Holy Grail of gaming would be an action/adventure game with statistical growth, a convoluted story, a well-drawn setting, a sense of exploration, and it'd be over in 10 hours. Too bad the aforementioned autistic tweekers are the ones that people are making games for. It's saddening, and it's the end of an era for me, but yeah, just as I'm outgrowing point-and-click adventures, I'm outgrowing RPGs.

I might go back to this point when I talk about Dragon Quest IV, cause my unabashed love for it is seeming to prove me wrong, but it's starting to feel really unfair. I used to be a gigantic RPG fan--my first published games writing was for the fansite AllRPG.com, which I chose beacuse the vast majority of games I played--and had something to say about--at the time were RPGs. I've played almost all of them, from the sublime to the execrable, I've played LEGALLY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR HA HA HA games which never made it to these shores. But not only do I not have the time any more for them--even if I did, really, it's not fun. It's not fun to walk over every tile clicking A because you need to pixel-hunt for a quest. It's not fun to randomly guess which four chests you're not allowed to open in order to get a powerful weapon. It's not fun to fight the same group of monsters because there's a .5% chance they'll drop a certain item.

Final Fantasy IV s the product of fatigue; it's not a terrible remake by any means, the graphics are solid, the translation is comprehensible, the voice acting isn't bad, it's not unplayable by any means. Maybe if this were my first time with the game, I'd be more charitable. As it were, IV's never been my favorite of the series, I've never been particularly into the characters (blasphemy!, the fanboys cry!)--so after a dozen hours with it, with the certainty of having to face a couple dozen more, I'm just giving up on it. Oh, sure, I'll buy XIII when it comes out, but it's seeming more and more like it's out of a masochistic sense of duty--Final Fantasies are always very high-profile, and I can't legitimately call myself a videogame critic worth my salt if I don't play the newest one--than the feeling like I'll have fun with it. The last time I had fun with a Final Fantasy title--pure, unabashed jeuissance--was Final Fantasy X-2: yes, I said it. The game that gets the most flack and criticism--from people who haven't even played it!--was the most interesting. It's solely because every quest was different: it never devolved into a random mush of grind like all the other titles go. Hour 1 of Final Fantasy IV is the same as Hour 5 is the same as Hour 20 is the same as Hour 40; while the majority of quests in X-2 were indeed straightfoward dungeons, there were enough minigames and interesting little challenges that I didn't get bored: it broke up the monotony excellently. X-2, more than any other Final Fantasy, felt like it was trying to entertain me. That's the point of games: entertainment. Gaming should be more fun than my job, dammit.

The new old school

Oh man, it's a great week to have been a kid in the late '80s-early '90s.

(Actually, any week is a great week for that...I was too young to have gone through the trauma of the videogame crash and old enough to have seen the Golden Age of Nintendo firsthand.)

Two things have come out within this week that have reminded me exactly why I love and play videogames. (After a while, after the sixtieth straight hour of angsty cutscenes in the latest boring Final Fantasy, you begin to forget.) One is the Dragon Warrior/Quest IV remake; the other is Mega Man 9.

I'll post full reviews (and I should probably do a Why I Stopped Playing of the Final Fantasy IV remake while I'm at it) if I ever beat them (Nintendo Hard, people) but for now I'm thrilled as beans. Seriously: run and get them. One is the greatest RPG of all time; the other is a worthy sequel to a generally phenomenal series. (Guess which is which.)

I'm going to stop goddamn blogging. There is gamin' to be done. (To say nothing of the applications to PhD programs I should be filling out.)

I beat a game!!: Super Paper Mario

Mario-related RPGs are a sketchy bag for me: Super Mario RPG is an awesome game any way you slice it, and Superstar Saga was a LOT of fun, what with one of the best localizations I've ever read, a fun and somewhat innovative system: it was a good time for me. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door I found to be tedious and boring, without the same sense of fun that the other games had. I picked up Super Paper Mario on a whim, out of a desire to give my Wii some lovin', and because I had a credit from returning Drakengard.

It's a far from perfect game, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Where the earlier games put platform mechanics onto a traditional RPG structure, SPM does the exact opposite--it puts RPG mechanics onto a platformer. That's not unheard of--many platformers let your characters level up, gives them hit points--but the blend here is excellent. Both your character and the enemies are given hit points, and stomping a goomba doesn't squash him outright but deducts hp based on your attack score. Levels are structured like a platformer--think of Simon's Quest or Zelda 2, but less mazelike--most levels are a straight path from left to right, with a few doors for detours. It's fun. There are jumping puzzles--not as complex as the average Mario game, but it's still a Mario game and you will need to bound back and forth from time to time. Part of me misses playing a regular platformer, and given the choice between the two I'll fire up Mario 3 for the millionth time, but as platformer-light, it's decent.

Actually, now that I'm starting to write it up, I'm having a less positive view of it: my praise seems slightly forced. Let me back up a second.

In a way, the game purports to be The Best of Both Worlds--half platformer, half RPG--but it suffers because it doesn't fully commit to being either. It's platformer in the sense that you're jumping and bopping things; it's an RPG in the sense that it's got a lot of story (and a LOT of text...I don't mind reading at all, and most of the text was funny, but it felt very excessive--if I felt bored with it, I can imagine how someone younger who isn't a strong reader is going to feel.) But the platforming segments feel somehow perfunctory: fighting enemies is pretty fun throughout the whole game, but the jumping isn't nearly as challenging as a Mario game should be. The RPG elements beyond hit points and stuff is confined mainly to dialogue and fetch quests--entertaining if excessive in the first case, and always tedious in the latter.

There are *MANY* levels where I was honestly tempted to give up just because I didn't want to go through an area. It seems padded. One area, Princess Toadstool is magically asleep or something, and you need to find a magical fruit to wake her. It's a vaguely maze-like area that you have to wander through, there are three or four incorrect fruits scattered around, so basically the level consists of exploring for a tree, bringing it back, finding out it's not the right one, exploring for another tree, and so on until you finally get it right. That's not an uncommon occurrence in the game, although it tends to happen more and more during the later levels. The first few chapters are a lot of fun--quick action, interesting level design, *entertaining*, and had the game continued in that vein it would have been a lot stronger.

One of the main gimmicks of the game is the switch from 2-d to 3-d. The main view is of a traditional platformer--2-d plane, moving from left to right--but early on you get a power which lets you shift the view to 3-d, so you're viewing Mario from behind. Items are behind pipes and things. Pathways are hidden in front of the screen. (I ain't so good at describing this bit.) It's good in its execution, and there *will* be a lot of levels where you're stuck and then slap your forehead because you forgot to simply switch perspective. There's a meter which deducts health--a minor amount, but enough to eventually be an inconvenience--if you stay in 3-d mode too long, so you're not able to overuse the system. (I wouldn't anyway--you move more slowly in 3-d for some reason.)

Most of your special abilities--in this case, little creatures called Pixls which follow you around--take the form of keys: one shrinks you, one is a bomb, one lets you ground-pound--and I've never been a fan of powers-as-keys: I think their uses should be a bit more fluid. Some of them--the bomb, for example--are useful as attacks, but the vast majority have no use outside of a few limited and specific situations. That's not terrible, but the other characters you get--Toadstool, Luigi, Bowser--act as keys as well, even though they're ostensibly playable characters. Each has a special move or two, and you'll need them from time to time, but none of them can switch perspectives, which is the most useful skill in the game. They all also move more slowly than Mario, so it really becomes a case of there being a very high jump so you switch to Luigi then switch back, or needing to float over a gap so you switch to the princess then switch back.

The game goes out of its way to feel fresh and interesting though, and I do like unexpected genre changes from time to time. One boss--an otaku who kidnaps a character--has a sequence where you face him in a dating sim. A segment where you have to determine which is a real character and which is a shapeshifting imposter is resolved through a quiz show. One encounter takes the form of a traditional RPG battle. One level is a space shooter. I always like it when a game distracts you with different types of challenges from time to time: it keeps it exciting.

And the game *is* really funny.

It's an uneven experience but a relatively short one--17 hours with no sidequests. But it's a testament to both my lack-of-time and my gaming ADD that it took me two months to beat. A good 10 of those hours were spent over two days, and then I got about an hour in a week. If the game had been less repetitive I would have played harder.