If You Have a Minute...

Y’all should check out this website (or compilation of videos, I guess) about video game lore. It’s basically a series of videos that cover the salient aspects of different video game series in about one minute. There are a few misses, but overall, the art direction, quality, and humor behind each video are stellar. My favorite is the Kingdom Hearts one, which has such a convoluted storyline that the writers barely cover the prequel to the series (not even the first entry!) in over two minutes. Great stuff overall.

A Massive Amount of Content…if You’re Into That

Mass Effect 3 is the end of something great, and the beginning of something amazing.

I’ll keep this completely spoiler free (for the third game at least—for shame if you haven’t played the first two).

I’ll be honest—the ending of Mass Effect 3 didn’t really…well…affect me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great game, and I loved the time I spent with it (and the trilogy), but I think there’s a lot more to the game than just the last 30 minutes of gameplay that garnered so much negative attention over the past several months—an ending that had so much negative feedback that the developers added another ending to the game in order to appease their fans. I thought the ending was fine—you had some degree of choice, and your choices influenced the fate of the entire galaxy (and so did a few regulators, apparently). That’s what was advertised, and that’s what was delivered. You can’t really expect Bioware to create nearly limitless endings for every (relatively) small decision you make, such as saving the Rachni Queen in the first game or choosing between saving Ashley and…that forgettable guy in the first one (can you guess who I saved?). Honestly, did you really expect Bioware to make your romantic pursuit “significant” for the ending cinematics? I hope not.

What Bioware did do was reference every single choice you made over the trilogy. They remembered that you helped out some random Asari girl defeat a rogue Asari on some distant planet. They referred to the Salarian you fought who performed experiments on female Krogans, trying to “cure” the genophage. They reminded you that you helped a human doctor secure medical supplies from a bunch of thieves in order to better treat a suffering population. Bioware remembered the characters you came in contact with, if only in passing, and made each and every contribution that you made to the galaxy, positive and negative, significant in the overall fight against the Reapers. And they did it in style.

When you play Mass Effect 3, you can’t help but notice the top notch visuals—whether they are as large as the panoramic vistas, or as small as the facial expressions on each character. You will sit in front of your screen and stare at the sprawling cities and terrain on the various worlds you visit. You can feel the emotion emanating from Quarians, whose faces you can’t see under their space helmets. Even Elcor, Geth and Hannar, who neither speak in different pitches nor express their emotions physically, are easy to empathize with because of the compelling story elements and unique quirks of every race Bioware included over the past three games.

It’s not just the backdrops and characters that compel you to complete the main game. Bioware makes the story feel personal as you experience the struggle of fighting against the Reapers on multiple levels. You’ll feel the Reapers’ oppression smother you as you travel from galaxy to galaxy, fleeing their ships as they try to chase you down for indoctrination. You’ll feel the desperation of the galaxy as Captain Anderson fills you in on Earth’s situation while you’re out building your assault team to defeat the Reapers. You’ll feel the futility of fighting the Reapers in head to head combat as you battle their massive ships, sometimes armed with nothing more than an orbital laser gun.

In short, the game truly feels epic.

But the single players isn’t where the true fun lies—sure, it had plenty of great moments (that I’ll remember forever), but once I beat it, I wasn’t compelled to play through a second time. No, what’s kept the game stuck in my Xbox over the past five months is the multiplayer.

For those of you who don’t know what the multiplayer’s like, it’s your basic horde mode—you (and a few friends, should you desire) team up to shoot/grenade/use-magic-against computer controlled Cerberus (humans), Geth (robots) or Reapers (aliens) on some planet for…some purpose. The storyline elements in multiplayer are pretty much irrelevant, and the only real tie-in to the single player game is that you’re fighting some force that’s preventing the “good guys” from completing their overall mission—to stop the Reaper threat.

Luckily, the gameplay is insanely fun, and it makes you completely forget about the story elements of the game. Cooperating with a bunch of friends in order to defeat the AI enemy, and succeed, makes it feel like everyone wins—true cooperative gameplay. Every time you complete a mission, you get some amount of credits that can be used to improve weapons, gain access to new characters, or unlock new character models. And that’s where the addiction kicks in—the classic “Pokemon” effect on wanting to “catch ‘em all” and unlock every piece of content available.

Since Bioware keeps releasing new content (most recently two awesome soldiers that look like the villain from Iron-Man 2), (Insert pic comparison of iron man 2 villian and Cerberus character) those that suffer from the Pokemon effect will have plenty to do for a long time.

Believe me when I say Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is addictive—all this is coming from someone who has never liked a single variant on a horde mode before.

Should I buy Mass Effect 3?

100% yes—and it’s not even close. Anyone with a current gen system owes it to themselves to play this (and the first two games in the trilogy). The Mass Effect series is one of the greatest trilogies of the current gaming generation. 

Come to experience the end of Shepard’s epic journey; stay for the beginning of a great multiplayer experience.

Emotional Resonance—a Bridge between Old and New

8-bit graphics will never die. As the polygons of our shooters become smoother and smoother, as we watch the protagonist’s strands of hair sway in the wind of our RPGs, and as meadows in distant lands become littered with unique, individual blades of grass, we will still embrace the graphics of gaming’s first generation—graphics that were a medium for an art form in its infancy. It is instant emotional resonance—conveyed without words, without context, without story.

There’s so much promise in something new—new experiences, new relationships, new jobs, new friends, or new stories.  New can be flashy. New can be exciting.  But new can also be hard to rely on—after all, what if new sucks? What if new isn’t worth it? What if new can’t be built upon?

Sometimes, it’s easiest to stick with old. Old is proven. Old is reliable. Old is successful. But old can also be boring. Old has already been done; it has nothing different to offer. We have already experienced old.

But this doesn’t mean old is worthless. Sometimes, we wish to go back to old—we miss experiences we once had, and want to relive them. Returning to old allows us to recreate past experiences, learn something new thanks to new perspectives, or just to refresh our memories from something we used to know. Nostalgia drives us back to experiences we remember favorably, if only to attempt to relive them.

Is there any way then that we use the groundwork set by something old, combine it with the excitement of something new, and attempt to satisfy our desire for a new, unique experience that uses the success of old, in order to reduce the risk of a failed experience? Yes, there is (at least) one proven successful path to do this—and it is accomplished with the use of emotional resonance.

Emotional resonance is a tool used to evoke an association or strong emotion in an audience—whether that be a literal audience at a play, or a reader of a novel someone’s written, or a player of a video game you’ve created. If you make a connection on an emotional level with your audience, they will become more invested in your medium. However, it is difficult to establish an emotional resonance with a new product; after all, it’s new—you haven’t connected with anyone until the product is already in your audience’s hands. You need to play off an emotion that already exists in your audience, an experience they can relate to or a feeling they’ve felt before.

It is much easier if you use an old component in your new product; say, for example, if you write a fan fiction about Twilight, you can use the already established series to connect with your audience on an emotional level without them even reading a page of your novel. You can take risks on changing the content of your work (such as game play or style) by relying on the old as something people will enjoy. Activision did something similar with Spyro the Dragon, a character from the 90s and early 2000s, by using him as a brand that gamers would recognize, in order to gain a larger audience for Skylanders. This technique was so effective in the case of Skylanders that the game recently outsold Star Wars toys and is one of the most successful brands of 2011. Skylanders has very little to do with Spyro; so little, in fact, that his name is not even included in the sequel. But that wasn’t the point of including Spyro—Activision needed a brand to reach an emotional resonance with an audience and hook them to the game, and once it used Spyro to do so, it then created new experiences with the rest of the Skylanders cast so that the game no longer needed Spyro dragging the new brand down. Spyro was a crutch for Skylanders, one that the series could cast off as soon as it established itself as a successful brand.

So what does all this have to do with 8-bit graphics? Well, 8-bit graphics are the most common form of emotional resonance for today’s gamers. We, as a whole, grew up on a generation of games on the NES, in arcades, on computers, and many of the largest brands of our industry—like Mario, Zelda, Pac-Man, and more—all got their start using 8-bit graphics. Relying on 8-bit graphics as an art form for new games, for example, is a good way to obtain an audience initially and thus increase the probability that you will be able to keep them.

One of the reasons 8-bit graphics will never die is because they are a piece of gaming’s history—a piece that developers can turn to, time and time again, to remind us of gaming’s roots, and reach the audiences that were, or wish to be, a part of that history.

The Gauntlet: Final Fantasy Review

The Gauntlet

As promised, I’ve decided to play and review every single Final Fantasy (except possibly XI, because I hear that one is insane to play and since it’s online only, it will most likely be dead by the time I get to it—if it isn’t already). You can read all about the gauntlet here.

Final Fantasy…or First…Fantasy, I Guess?
Final Fantasy was…good. I enjoyed the time I spent in the game, but there were a few problems, the most severe being that the game was short and poorly paced. I guess since I’ve been raised on things like Suikoden II and Chrono Trigger, I’m used to investing more time in the main story of a video game—so a “short” experience with the main story of a video game created in the 80s is to be expected. If my problems with the game were solely related to the pacing, I’d probably say the game was a “must play” experience (like the above two games—seriously, if you haven’t played those, stop reading this post and go find them).

So for me to recommend a video game to my friends as a “must play” experience, it needs to have (at least) one of the following qualities:

·     1) The game has a “great” story.

·     2) The game has “great” single player gameplay elements.

·     3) The game has “great” multiplayer elements.

Of course, these are subjective—what I think is great you might think is complete crap. But I’m not going to suggest you play a game unless it’s got at least one of the above qualities, and even if the game has one of the above qualities, I still might not tell you that you have to play it.

In the case of Final Fantasy, I thought the gameplay was fun, but the story elements were atrocious. I had absolutely no emotional investment to the kingdom, the protagonists, nor the world the game created. It’s a shame, too—after playing Final Fantasy Dissidia (which was what started this Gauntlet in the first place), I was very excited about meeting and defeating Garland (the antagonist). However, outside of meeting him briefly at the beginning of the game and the final battle against him, his impact on the game was irrelevant—he didn’t show up anywhere else in the main quest. The threat he posed to the kingdom of…whereversville was not made clear to me, and as such, I felt nothing after defeating him. Well, I guess that’s not true—I felt like I could finally start on the next game in the series (which, by the way, is a feeling I can’t wait to experience with Final Fantasy II—but that comes later).

While I felt that the story failed to find that emotional resonance within me, I think the gameplay elements were actually pretty well done. You get to play with four main characters and have four classes to choose from, giving you a ton of different combinations to play the game with. The spells you get to cast are cool, there are some interesting weapons, but a lot of the combat is generic—but since this is one of the games that defined the genre, that’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable. This game was innovation, so any gripes I have with combat are kinda irrelevant. Also, there was one feature of combat that was really, really convenient—you can just hold down the A button to attack the first enemy across from you. So if you target the same enemy with all four of your warriors, and that enemy dies, if there is another enemy, you hit that one instead of skipping your turn or something. This was huge for me, actually, as more recent games than a game made in 1987 make you skip your turn instead (I’m looking at you, Golden Sun!). You can also choose who you attack with each warrior, but when you’re just leveling up, it’s a lot faster to just hold down one button and be done with it.

As for travelling around the world, the game escalates quite quickly with exploration abilities, which is something of a double-edged sword. In Metroid, for example, half the fun is gaining access to different areas by earning the power-ups like the ball bomb or screw attack. In Final Fantasy, you get an airship several hours into the game, which is basically the bomb ball, charge beam, screw attack, super missile and every single visor rolled into one power-up. This is where some of the pacing in the game really fails—there’s no buildup, no suffering, dredging from dungeon to dungeon and town to town, exploring the map at a slow pace or trying to make it back to a town with your last warrior at 1 HP and out of potions. You never experience this plight, and the game as a whole is worse for it. After getting the airship, it’s like you can basically teleport from place to place, and because of that, the exploration loses charm. I loved that I got access to an airship, but it wasn’t good for the experience overall.

As for the graphics, the game was pretty, especially on the PSP, which I feel like after all these years it was made for (or remade for, I suppose). The layout of the dungeons and towns were great for what the game was, too, and they kept the retro feel that I expected. Overall, I was quite pleased with the visual representation and the layout of the game.

So, the final question is this: is Final Fantasy a must play experience? Not…really. If you’re feeling nostalgic, then you could do worse by playing something else. But if you have zero emotional attachment to the world of Final Fantasy, I’m sure you can find a better RPG somewhere else (though probably not from the 80s or early 90s).

You can expect a review of Final Fantasy II to be forthcoming, but that one has been pretty hard to power through. Am I sad that I started this journey? That I imposed this gauntlet upon myself? Well…let’s just say you can ask me that question after I’m done with Final Fantasy II…

~Anthony

The Gauntlet

No, this isn't a post about the classic arcade game of the 80’s and 90’s that took the world (and a few of my friends) by storm. This is a challenge I've decided to impose on myself.

Perhaps you've heard of a game series called Final Fantasy. Perhaps you haven’t (though, if you haven’t, I’m pretty surprised you found your way to my blog—congrats!). For all intents and purposes of this gauntlet, I’m going to assume you have, in fact, heard of Final Fantasy.

Growing up, I was a video game fanatic—I tried to get my hands on every single awesome game and gaming system that existed that I could convince my parents to get me (read: just about one—the Gameboy). I never had an NES, SNES, Genesis, or any other console until the N64 came out (which I spent my hard earned babysitting money on). And by then, the Gamecube was on its way, so I didn’t get as much longevity out of it, because I was very addicted to Smash Brothers Melee.

I’m actually really happy (now) that my parents brought me up this way and didn’t buy every gaming system (or thing) that my childhood self wanted—it prevented me from being (too) spoiled and taught me some important life lessons. An unfortunate side effect of this, however, was that I missed out on a few classic gaming experiences...

The Short List of Games I Haven’t Played

·         The Legend of Zelda: II

·         The original Castlevania

·         Earthbound

·         Super Mario Brothers 3

·         Metroid

And the list continues, mostly covering the important Sony and Nintendo games that defined the 90’s and early 2000’s.

I've caught up on a lot of the classic games that people from my generation grew up on (the first Legend of Zelda, Metroid 2, all the portable Super Mario games, and a slew of others), but the one major series from my childhood that I still haven’t played any of is Final Fantasy.

My first brush in with Final Fantasy came at the (now closed) Virgin Megastore in Union Square. As I descended down the escalator leading to the basement full of video games, I spied a young, blonde, spiky-haired lad on a television screen fighting enemies with an unwieldy, giant broadsword. As he defeated foe after foe that came after him, clad some of most captivating (though probably least effective) armor I’d ever seen, I thought he was the coolest character in existence and wanted to play any and every game he was in (including, as I would find out later, a fighting game called Ehrgeiz). I asked my friend what game was playing on the TV, salivating at the opportunity to play it on my brand new N64.

“Oh, him? That’s Cloud; he’s the protagonist* of Final Fantasy VII. You know, that new PS2 game?”

I immediately became crushed, as I didn’t own a PS2, and thought that I couldn’t play the game even if I had it, because I hadn’t played the first six Final Fantasy games. Years later, I would find out that didn’t matter, but at the time, it was a huge letdown.

An aside on the branding of Final Fantasy

How has Square-Enix not realized yet how terrible they brand Final Fantasy? I can’t imagine I’m the only person who’s been turned away from their series because they didn’t play the first several (now 13) different games that preceded the newest entry in the series. Even though they are stand alone games, they still refer to the older entries in the series. It’s difficult to pick up a copy of XIII and not feel left out of the loop if you haven’t played the twelve games before it. Maybe those consumers will eventually learn that you don’t need to know what happens to protagonist of Final Fantasy II to enjoy the story of Final Fantasy VII, but you end up feeling left out all the same.

This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the new trend of creating sequels to these games, spawning innovative titles such as “Final Fantasy X-2” and “Final Fantasy XIII-2.” How’s a newcomer to the series supposed to handle this without feeling intimidated by the entire process? Hell, it makes sense to me, and I still feel intimidated. Not to mention irate at the stupidity of a game titled XIII-2.

End aside

Let’s flash forward to the present. Now I’ve realized that there’s a lot of history in this industry I haven’t been a part of, and a lot that I have. My parents had an Atari and a PC, so I soaked up as many of those experiences as possible. Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, and the point-and-click adventures of the 90’s were what my childhood was built on. But I missed out on a lot of what Nintendo and Sony had to offer—which is why I’m going to make up for lost time.

The Gauntlet is simple: play and review every single Final Fantasy RPG that currently exists. That means from the original Final Fantasy (released in Japan, though ported to various mediums) all the way to XIII. However, since XI was online only, and I’m assuming that community is dead, I’m going to skip that one (for now). Also I heard it was terrible. Like, a friend of mine spent a year of his life playing it and only gained one level. I have better things to do with my life than that.

The plan is to play them all in order, but I might skip around a bit (XIII is just so pretty!). I’ve heard great things about some, and terrible things about others, but I’m determined to find out, first-hand, what each one is like.

I only wish all Chocobos were this cute. (Insert picture of cute little chocobo).

*Because, at the age of thirteen, we used fancy words like protagonist in every-day speech. We also wore bowler hats and had monocles.

The Beginning

It’s amazing how some six year old, random blog post can still be inspiring to a new reader years and years later.

Maybe you found this site by entering “Video Game Journalism” in your favorite search engine. Maybe you reached it because I told you to come check it out in passing. Or perhaps you’re here because you wanted to head over to IGN.com for the latest coverage on that new video game you’re dying to buy, but you clicked on the wrong link and landed here instead (if it’s the latter, my apologies—it happens to all of us. That can be found here.) But if you’ve got any interest in reading about video games, the struggles of a twenty-something male who has no idea what he’s doing with his life, or just like random pictures of otters (and who doesn’t?) then stick around—I promise I can deliver on at least one of those three.

This site is the definitive chronicle of one man’s journey to break the shackles of his dreary professional life and be a part of something he’s passionate about—hearing himself talk. Specifically, about video games.

And who knows? Maybe six years from now, you’ll be reading this post for the first time, wondering if you’ve got the moxie required to take the risks I did when I started this journey, and how it all worked out in the end.

Here’s hoping I don’t disappoint.