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.
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.
posted by R. Goodness at 6:26 PM
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