General RPGs' Battle Choreography

I've mentioned many times in the past that RPGs, as a whole, are not very entertaining to actually play. Flashy spells and special attacks only distract one momentarily from the fact that each of the several hundred (possibly thousands) of battles you will fight in most RPGs amount to nothing more than moving a cursor through a menu, hitting Confirm, and watching as your characters kill enemies using special, white little numbers that magically appear above the bad guys' heads with each blow. When not actually taking action, everyone usually just stands in one place, staring at each other. And it's not like there's a whole lot of strategy involved most of the time to distract you from the fact that nothing is happening. For most of these games, there are only two strategies that you'll ever need for 99+% for your battles: Heal When You Need To, and Level Up More. If you have trouble in a normal RPG, then your problem is almost invariably solved by better applying one or both of these "strategies."

Action-based RPGs provide some relief from the RPG genre's general tedium, but it's not always much. Action RPGs can be almost as repetitive and tiresome as the normal, menu-based ones. Take, for example, several earlier ones, like Soulblazer, Illusion of Gaia, Tales of Phantasia, and, to a lesser extent, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Each of these games gives you the freedom to run around the field of battle and use a small set of abilities and tools to dispose of your foes. This allows you to create some real strategies for disposing of foes, and you have to develop some actual skill at attacking, dodging, using opportunities in combat well, etc. Still, by the time you've progressed through the game a fair amount, you often find yourself settling into a rut of doing the same old things against enemies that have long since stopped having varied attacks and patterns. And it's not just the older action RPGs where this happens, either; some fairly newer ones like the Knights of the Old Republic games, Kingdom Hears: Chain of Memories, and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army (yes, that is, indeed, a ridiculously long title) have the same problem. I can sum up your strategy for the majority of boss fights in that last one in these steps:

1. Block
2. Attack
3. Repeat
4. Profit Level Up

It's not that I can't take a battle system that's obscenely boring, and it's not like SMTRKVTSA doesn't have a good pace and need some decent skill, but after 16 years and 110 RPGs, I'm looking for a little more than that for my gaming experience.

There have been some RPGs lately, however, that have given me exactly what I've been looking for. The recent Suikodens and Dark Cloud 1 gave me tastes of it with their one-on-one battles. In each case, you get to see your characters having a battle with an enemy that actually LOOKS like a real fight, with you vaguely controlling what they do with your attack choices. They're attacking and blocking and dodging and whatnot, actually fighting, instead of just standing around doing nothing for ages while they wait for a turn. There's some neat choreography to the battles that's genuinely fun to watch.

Of course, in Dark Cloud 1's case, this enjoyment is significantly marred by the fact that you have to be watching what buttons to press to keep fighting successfully, rather than watching what's actually happening, so it's not actually so great. But a good try, at least.

What are really great examples of entertaining fight choreography, though, ones that I hope will be copied in the future in this regard, are The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and especially Kingdom Hearts 2. In these games, not only do you have a pretty wide range of abilities to keep your strategies varied and interesting, but fighting enemies allows you to sometimes use special abilities to counter the specific attacks of the enemy you're facing. This allows for some pretty nifty moves in TLoZWW, like Link jumping forward and spinning in the air to slash enemies right across the skull, and some absolutely kickass moments in KH2 boss fights. The reaction scenes in combat are so cool and fun to watch that I found myself looking forward to boss fights for the opportunity to see what crazy stunts Sora and company would be pulling next. It's not just the same old One Sword Combo Kills All of most action RPGs; these games have battles with action and strategies that are unique to each situation. It's not that you're fighting AN enemy, you're fighting THAT enemy, and different rules apply for different dangers. And of course, as I mentioned, the general moves and attacks used in these specific circumstances are all very fun and neat to watch. And I think that's something that would really benefit RPGs in general these days: skillful, fun, and varying battle choreography. When every enemy is a different experience to fight, you get a game that stays entertaining in its gameplay through to the end. And hey, I may play RPGs for the plots and characters, but it would be nice to play something with those AND that's fun.

Shadow Hearts 3's Characters

Once again, my personal RPG theory (that there is no such thing as an RPG series that will not, sooner or later, terribly disappoint you) has been vindicated with the third and most recent installment of the Shadow Hearts franchise. Set in a very close alternate reality of our world's past, the first two Shadow Hearts games spanned Europe and Asia and brought two great casts through innovative plots which tied in with real world events while maintaining a very healthy amount of creativity in their general direction. You got to fight restless spirits in the Vatican, hand Rasputin his creepy evil ass, visit important locations from Hong Kong to London, and fight alongside people like Princess Anastasia Romanov and Mata Hari. They were fun, funny, and full of deep and touching ideas, moments, and characters. So, when I found out that the third installment would be set in North and South America, feature Native American characters, and at some point involve the legendary vicious gangster Al Capone, I was pretty damn psyched for the best installment yet.

One of these days I'm going to stamp out that vicious, sadistic little spark of hope in me, that without fail only shows up when the worst of disappointments is forthcoming, just to make it all the much worse. Shadow Hearts 3 is a tedious time-waster, a long-winded telling of a story which only has any real significance right near the very end, and even that being somewhat dull and anime-cliche. I mean, hell, I've played RPGs which have been uninspired and boring enough that I find myself just not caring that some mystical fantasy world is doomed to oblivion, but Shadow Hearts 3 is the first time I've ever felt total apathy toward the imminent destruction of my own world.

Nautilus, the company which created the game, seemed to have the good sense not to unleash this mediocrity on us, but XSeed decided to translate it and release it here anyways. This and Wild Arms 4 make up XSeed's record of RPGs translated and published for companies which wouldn't port them overseas themselves. Jeez. To XSeed: come on, there must be some GOOD RPG over in Japan that you could bring us instead. At this rate, I'd have to say you're a strong argument for the idea that ignorance is bliss.

But I digress. It's not outright offensively awful like Grandia 3 or Wild Arms 4 were, so I'm not going to pick apart the whole game like I did with them. I'll stick to just the usual cast ridicule method today.



Johnny: Johnny, our "hero" (I use the term loosely), is a licensed detective, who consistently needs his companions, who are not themselves terribly bright, to explain each and every extremely obvious switch and lever for each and every extremely simple, usually color-coded dungeon puzzle.


Shania: Nautilus was too busy inventing ways for her to be more naked to actually give her a character.


Natan: Also known as Chief Running Stereotype.


Lady: Lady is the main villain in the game. In a startling display of honesty, Nautilus gives her essentially no lines of dialogue, no personality, and no conscious reason to be trying to doom the world. While this makes her a boring, lackluster antagonist about as memorable as a street sign and only half as noticeable, at least they're not trying to cover up their inability to invent a decent villain with dumb motives ("HUR HUR I'LL SAVE EVERYONE FROM BEING UNHAPPY BY KILLING THEM") or something.


Frank: A middle-aged ninja from Brazil who uses cactuses, bus stop signs, and dead fish as swords. The novelty wears off pretty quickly, leaving you with a gag character who's mildly amusing at best.


Hilda: Hilda is a girl who gains weight when she eats too much and gets fat, but loses weight when she eats healthily and stays thin.

...

If you're waiting for a punchline, you just got it. I really, truly cannot think of a better way to ridicule Hilda's gimmick than to just tell you about it.


Ricardo: In most other RPGs, Ricardo might be the low point of the cast. In this one, the fact that he has any history and motivation at all, and that it's not completely half-assed, makes him easily the best character in the mix.

His guitar being a shotgun, flamethrower, and missile launcher kinda balance out whatever seriously redeeming qualities he had, though.


Al Capone: Al Capone is not actually a playable character, nor is he a villain, so including him is kinda a breach in protocol here, but he embodies one of the most annoying aspects of the game so perfectly that I really just had to put him in. I have exhaustively compiled a list of all the things that Nautilus got right in their representation of the infamous 1920s American gangster:

He has an accent.

...

Yeah. As the list above suggests, there's not a whole lot of resemblance (Hell, I can't even say for sure that the accent is right). Rather than take the ruthless, relentless, scarred pioneer of organized crime that the real Al Capone was and go somewhere with him from there, Nautilus takes the name and just does whatever the hell they want, making him into a good-hearted pretty-boy concerned for the well-being and safety of the public. They take a concept with all kinds of potential, and twist it into anime crud. This blatant disregard for accuracy is all OVER the game. Exploring the Grand Canyon? Expect no more than a short walk. Cell phones, television, security metal detectors, and robot guards in 1929? No problem! And for God's sake, I've had more trouble navigating McDonald's Playplaces than I had escaping Alcatrez.

I was expecting--hell, eagerly anticipating--a game that would make interesting, innovative, and (reasonably) accurate use of its cultural backdrop, the way the first two games did. But Nautilus just decided to take their best setting yet and whiz it down their legs here. The disclaimer at the beginning of the game isn't even needed; there's no way anyone could seriously mistake this for a portrayal of anything real.


Mao: There are two kinds of people in this world. People who think that a 6 foot, talking alcoholic cat who uses drunken martial arts and wants to be a movie star is a stupid idea, and people who work at Nautilus.

Final Fantasy 12's Characters

I have yet to figure out why, exactly, FF12 is so incredibly mediocre and uninteresting to me. There's something about it that makes it one of the least interesting RPG experiences I've ever had, beyond the usual suspects of Poor Plot and Boring Characters. The whole thing just feels like a long, tedious roadtrip, with ugly, smelly fellow tourists that you hate through places that bore you. And I just can't quite put my finger on what it is about the game that makes it feel that way. I can make some guesses (that fucking sandsea area often figures heavily into these guesses), but I can't quite explain it just yet.

However, while the main cause for my boredom with FF12 eludes me, one of the minor ones that only worsen the experience is quite blatant: the absurdly dull cast.


Vaan: Vaan is the main character of the game. Or so Square would have you believe. There's actually really nothing about him that would make you think so. His importance to the plot ceases completely about 1/4 of the way into the game, if even that. After that, he just seems to be a generic addition to your party who gets the rare occasion to speak during cutscenes, and during these times has absolutely nothing of significance to say. I guess you could actually say it's a creative new role in an RPG--a main character who is totally irrelevant and unnecessary to the game itself. It's like he's just there for the ride.


Panelo: Panelo is Vaan's friend. And that's...it. Her development and impact on the story are limited to fulfilling that one role. She's an empty and superflous compliment to an empty and superfluous character.


Basch: Basch is a refugee from daytime television. "I didn't do it! It was my EVIL TWIN!" I expect to see this sort of thing in the soap operas my grandmother watches daily, not in my RPGs.


Ashe: "Oh goodness, what a hard thing it is, being a princess. You have all sorts of princess-concerns as you do princess-things in a princess-way at all princess-times!"

It's not that they didn't try with Ashe. They gave her a few moral dilemmas about how far she'd go for power and revenge. But it all just fell pretty flat in delivery. No one around her seemed to really care very much, besides Balthier, and she didn't do any real soul-searching to solve her moral dilemmas. Just sort of decided, "Hm, I think I'm going to be wise instead of giving in to desire for power!"


Vossler: Vossler joins your party for a little while so that he can warn Ashe that her other companions can't be trusted, right before turning her and them over to their enemies.


Larsa: I'm going to forego commenting on Larsa's dull-as-dirt personality here, and instead remark that his existence is a somewhat frightening thing. It's not him that's scary, it's the reaction he gets. Fangirls, my good readers. Squealing, obsessive fangirls. While always a disturbing phenomenon, they are particularly unnerving this time because they are all getting their panties in a twist over a well-groomed 12-year-old. One which, I might add, looks considerably more like a real-life person than most RPG anime-tastic prettyboys.

Thanks a bunch, SquareEnix. Fangirls weren't creepy enough already; we needed PEDOPHILE fangirls.


Vayne: Vayne's the bad guy. Much in the same way Basch is, Vayne is an example of Square taking a very lame and silly excuse for doing bad things ("My imaginary friend Venat made me do it!") and then trying to create a serious character out of it. He's also kind of stupid, in that his goal is to play huge games of international politics and war strategies and such to accomplish a goal (free mankind or humekind or whatever from the manipulations of a bunch of alien ghost things--yeah, every part of this game's plot sounds pretty silly when you sum it up, like that) that Ashe and her little entourage of dull servants are going to do anyway, with a lot less planning and fuss.


Reddas: Reddas is a plot-convenient guy who conveniently shows up to help you, and then even more conveniently dies to help you.


Reks: Reks is Vaan's dead brother whom you very briefly control at the start of the game. In an irony which is both hilarious and depressing, during these first 20 minutes of the game before he's killed off, he is given more development and personality than every single character listed above gets during the rest of the 60+ hour game.


Fran: You know, I have to admit that I wanted to like Fran, going into the game. I'll admit I have a thing for both Viera, and for very, very nearly naked women, and Fran is a perfect specimen of each of these things. And compared to most of the cast, her few moments of deep and interesting characterization during the Eruyt Village bit of the game makes her a shining light of characterization and skillful writing. But in the end, she is just a more shapely version of the same Sack'O'Yawn that everyone else is. She's there for the sole purpose of fanservice and having a character who can conveniently explain some of the silly, far-fetched magical bullshit that the plot's plagued with.


Balthier: When Balthier first joked about being the "leading man," I didn't realize that he was actually 100% correct in this claim. Balthier's got a charismatic and fun personality, his actions have motive and direction, he interacts and guides all his companions through their personal dilemmas, he leads them along through the story rather than just be led by the nose by whatever plot devices come up, and he takes the story's spotlight most frequently through the game from the moment he joins you until the moment the game ends (though I could be wrong on this one thing--it just SEEMED like he did to me, but that might just be because he's the only part of the cast with a personality worth paying attention to). Vaan might be the main character of FF12, but Balthier's the game's protagonist, no two ways about it. I dunno where he came from, either--he'd be a well-developed and original enough character to draw attention even in RPGs with casts known for such, but for FF12, the gap in quality between him and every other character is just absurd. Ah, well. Rock on, Balthier, you are the sole reason to play this game.

General RPGs' Minigames 5

Alright, folks, gonna be a little deviation from the usual Minigames rant today. I'm in a pretty good mood because I finally beat 7th Saga today, which I'd been sporadically restarting, playing for a period ranging from 1 hour to 1 day, and then shutting it off in disgust and not touching for another 4 months+ since roughly the year 1998. Checked the file information to figure that out. And while the end part of the game and the ending was just as shitty as everything else up to that point, and I retract none of my statements in that previous rant, I'm at least pleased to finally have the Boogieman of RPGs over and done with. 7th Saga, Grandia 3, Wild Arms 4, Phantasy Star 3, Lufia 1...I've seen the worst and survived, RPG world! You ain't got shit that can take me down!

Ahem.

Now, I know I rag on minigames a lot. I make no apologies for that, because I frankly think that it's all 100% justified. RPGs don't need'em, RPGs shouldn't have'em. They're almost always pointless, stupid, boring wastes of time. The only reaction they'll usually ever get out of you is to annoy the shit out of you when their poor design or premise based on random numbers keeps you doing them again and again and a-fucking-gain dozens of times because you either HAVE to or you just really, really want the damn super special awesome (yes, I'm stealing Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged's catchphrase) prize for them. If my genre of choice could just drop the shitty, meaningless little button-mashing minute-wasters and casino slot machines and so on, I think that in almost all cases, the resulting RPG would be an at least marginally better and a more enjoyable product. And yes, this might mean that the rare, one-out-of-a-hundred minigame that's actually ENJOYABLE would also be lost, but I honestly believe that it would be a totally acceptable sacrifice to save me from having to play video poker for hours on end in order to get some special one-of-a-kind accessory.

But I'm digressing into what I DON'T want this rant to be. For today, I want to look at some examples where a minigame has been genuinely fun. Examples of minigames which I wish would become the norm, instead of the rare exception.

For starters, there's the motorcyle minigame of Final Fantasy 7. Now, I do dock points from this one due to its being mandatory. These things just shouldn't be such. You shouldn't have to learn a whole different set of skills (though in some cases, "skill" is too strong a word for it) from the ones the game normally needs just to pass through a 5-minute instance of plot advancement, never to use said skills again because they're wholly unnecessary. But aside from that, this minigame's actually really fun. I mean, it's simple--just moving to position and attacking left and right--but it's not so simplistic that it's just stupid (see: every button-mashing minigame in existence). It's fast-paced, there's a definite goal to it, but if you're not terrific at it right from the get-go, you aren't terribly penalized--your friends may end up taking some damage, which will put you at a disadvantage for the ensuing boss fight, but the amount they get hit for by enemy riders is pretty small. Doing a good job is going to make your life easier, but not being very good at the game isn't going to force you to repeat it endlessly until you improve, or give up on some desirable reward for a great performance. And the minigame clearly has a lot of work put into it--the scene shifts as you play, the controls are smooth, there's constant action in it...it's not just some half-assed RPG carnival game where a character stands still and throws a ball at a target for inconsequential rewards. Things are actually HAPPENING during this. Square put some thought and effort into the game, and it shows. It's an honestly fun thing to play.

Reminds me of Super Mario RPG's mine cart minigame, now that I think about it--another case of a mandatory minigame that wound up being actually FUN for a change. Hell, that 5-minute minigame played better than some REAL games on the system did.

What's really ideal, though, I think, is something like the Tales of Dragon Buster minigame from Tales of the Abyss. See, this minigame really is an actual GAME. It's not just some, "Press X and see if you win or not!" crap. From what I understand, Namco remade one of their early games, Dragon Buster, with new graphics, sounds, and character model (putting the Tales of the Abyss main character Luke in the game instead of the original game's hero), and just gives you the option to play it. It's a reasonably short game (though long for a minigame), but it's honestly a lot of fun to play. It controls well, it's not mandatory, it's got a fun old-school premise (beat the dragon and rescue the princess, who turns out to be one of your other Tales of the Abyss characters), there's a bunch of things to find and do in it...it's really pretty much the ideal minigame. It even has a reward system I can approve of. The stuff you can get from it are things you probably want and would find fun to have--a title for Luke that will change his costume to that of the original Dragon Buster character's, and portraits of all the main characters, if you collect the right stuff in your playthroughs. But that's it--the rewards are there for fun alone. You can't get any ultra powerful hyper bacon-topped super mega sword or accessory or something from it. So you don't feel that obligation to beat it the way you might feel for tedious casino minigames, that feeling of "God this is annoying, but on the other hand, having that Sword of Kickassedness would really make things easier for me and satisfy my completionist ways." It's a harmless, fun minigame with nice but intangible rewards (more intangible than any game's rewards, I mean) that you only play if you want to. That's how it should be. If an RPG's gonna have a minigame, it ought to be made enjoyable for the player.

General RPGs' Post-Battle Taunts

Just a quicky today. There's something I've noticed in modern RPGs which is really kinda silly--the post-battle taunts. As more and more RPGs are made with voice acting nowadays--in fact, they nearly all are--you often find a game in which characters will before, during, and after each battle say various phrases. For example, you'll hear a party member say something like, "This won't be much of a challenge!" at the beginning of a battle with obviously hopelessly outmatched common enemies, or hear another party member say something like, "ARGH I'm...sorry..." when they get killed in battle (that's right, BE sorry! It's YOUR fault you just got stabbed through the heart! Stupid jerk!). Cute little addition to the RPG experience, even helps you keep your interest for about an extra 3-5 random battles out of the approximately 2000 you'll encounter overall in the game.

What I don't get, though, is a lot of the little taunts that characters say after battle. Like, I'm playing Tales of the Abyss right now. I just got finished smacking the ever-loving crap out of some random evil tadpole things, and as the battle ends and the menu comes up to tell me how much money and experience and such that I'm being rewarded with for cruelly murdering some unassuming animals in their own natural habitat, Jade says, in that endearingly condescending tone, "Well, you did your best." The tone, of course, implies great, smug insult, because Jade is kinda awesome like that.

What exactly is the point of this practice of post-battle taunting in so many recent RPGs? The monsters the characters taunt are already dead. They can't hear your petty characters' insults. They're DEAD. Wounds to their ego are no longer necessary, I would think. If the monsters could even understand them to begin with, which I'd bet most of them can't.

The really dumb ones are the taunts where the character says something to the tune of, "Try again when you've practiced some more!" Yeah, uh, they can't. Because they're dead. Duh. Are the people who write these scripts thinking at ALL?

General RPGs' Ancient Civilizations

If the number of RPGs you've played is above 3, you know what today's rant is about. You know it because you are intimately familiar with it, having encountered it dozens of times in your game-playing hobby life. It's like the scent of that slightly greasy, questionably employed fellow on the subway who you somehow always get stuck sitting/standing very near during your regular commute to work. You don't know his name, you don't want to know his origins, but you've been shoved up against that filthy, foodstain-spattered jacket of his in a crammed space often enough that you and his body odor have reached an "Old Friend" relationship status. You are familiar not by choice, but rather by forced exposure.

I am speaking, of course, about the Ancient Civilization plot device. You know the one--at some point in any given RPG, your party will invariably wind up exploring some ruin left behind by a long-gone culture which was, bizarrely enough, far more advanced than the current one in at least one, and usually EVERY, way. Now, true, this is an idea commonly used in ALL forms of entertainment, not just RPGs, but it's especially prevalent in them. I'd say it's maybe just a little bit less common in RPGs than Hit Points.

I mean, this theme is EVERYWHERE. If you have to have anything to do with a previous culture in an RPG, you are guaranteed to find out that they were way more advanced than any current country. This isn't just a common cliche, like some of the previous things I've ranted on, such as RPG women's stupid outfits and flying castles and whatnot. It's like a requirement for every RPG's plot to have super-advanced civilizations as its backbone. It doesn't even matter what kind of age the planet/galaxy/whatever the game takes place on/in is going through--you can run into a scattering of immensely powerful artifacts and abilities sealed deep in ancient temples in a fantasy setting, like in Final Fantasy 5, which you'd expect, but hell, you can run into devices left behind by advanced societies with technology far surpassing your own in a super futuristic sci-fi setting, too, such as in Knights of the Old Republic 1. I mean, how much sense, honestly, does it make to have a space-faring race in the Star Wars universe that existed thousands of years before the game's time, which just happens to have had a superior knowledge of both technology and the Force? It's not like technology in the Star Wars universe stands still for millenia. And with Jedi and Sith sporadically running around that whole time, seeking to understand the Force in their own ways, it seems equally silly that some bunch of technology-and-Force-combining aliens who died out hundreds of lifetimes previously would still have had better knowledge than a continuously advancing society thousands of years later.

See, that's what gets me about this cliche. It makes no sense whatsoever. Technology and knowledge do not move BACKWARDS as time passes. What would be known 5000 years ago, be it how to forge some ultimate evil-killing, time-splitting, aura-increasing blade of kickassedness, some special banishing/containing spell that can eliminate the ultimate evil, some special fever-reducing medicine's forumula, or whatever, would almost surely STILL be known, or at the VERY least, rediscovered. At the very most, if the culture had fallen somewhat recently (in RPG terms, this'd be in the last few centuries, rather than the last few millenia), then you could maybe make a case that some of its knowledge could still be lost and not yet rediscovered, since knowledge breakthroughs take time. But trying to tell me that over the course of 2500 years, no magical scholar has yet managed to stumble onto the proper chant for a more powerful attack spell that some idiots living back before the invention of cooked meat managed to master?

If it were just a rare thing, I could let it go. I mean, there're things that ancient cultures on this planet managed to do that are pretty impressive. Last I heard, we'd still have a damn hard time replicating what the Egyptians did with those pyramids, even if we were to employ our incredibly further advanced technology to do so. But every single time? Are we expected to believe in every RPG we play that for the next several centuries after the fall of such and such civilization, everyone in the world was too busy bashing their heads on rocks all day to bother trying in any way to regain the level of knowledge and power that their neighboring such and such society had recently possessed?

And for that matter, there's the matter of why all these clearly far more awesome civilizations disappeared to begin with. You'll only get an explanation of why the esteemed Ugga-Blugh Culture vanished without a trace about a third of the time, at best. The rest of the time, you're just left to imagine what happened to them, and why it is that they had time to build a full half dozen or more temples and towers and such to clumsily safeguard their secrets of destruction before pulling their vanishing act. I mean, since they were busily inventing box-pushing puzzles to hide their favorite weapons and spells and such, they clearly wanted to leave a legacy, implying that they knew they wouldn't be around for much longer. So why the hell not just write down a decent history of themselves and leave it sitting next to whatever apocalypse-causing/preventing crystal they were enshrining that day?

Hell, it's not even like the few times you DO get a reason for why the ancient, sophisticated Mezopotaromaniagyptianese are satisfying. More often than not, they'll have kicked the bucket thanks to the same evil force that you're currently facing off against. Yeah, because it makes a ton of sense for some supposed super civilization to be wiped out by an evil-doer who will by the end of the game be defeated by a group of 3 - 12 moderately stupid teenagers supported by a technologically backwards world that actually considers airships a non-laughable mode of transportation.

Frankly, folks, the whole Ancient Super Civilization plot tool is old. Really, really old. And most often, it's just writers being lazy. How does the villain plan to destroy the world? By using some ancient relic/spell/technology! How will the heroes stop the villain? By using ancient relics/spells/technologies! Where will you spend 1/5 or more of your time in dungeons? In ruins, obtaining ancient relics/spells/technologies! All these essential plot devices are just magically sitting around, waiting to be found and/or stolen, so that writers can show characters and villains and such doing what they want them to be doing, but not have to ever worry about how to get there.

And it's not a problem that's getting any better--hell, it's only seeming to get worse with certain recent games. I mean, much as I love Wild Arms 3, you're crawling around in previous cultures' ruins for something like 80% of your total dungeon experience, without a word breathed once about where the hell these things came from, who built'em, and for what purpose. And then there's Final Fantasy 12--apparently, in some timeline that Square released, FF12 occurs a long time before FFT does, possibly on the same world. Yeah, because it's so believable that people running around in a medieval setting with swords and spears and such were, less than 1300 years prior, waging war in crazy Star Wars-esque flying ships with canons and bombs and such.

Seriously, this nonsense has got to stop. Or at least cut back a little. If the writers for the games we purchase can't honestly think of a better way to advance the plot than by using a quest to obtain some random object of power from some ancient bozos' temple of miraculously preserved traps and robots, then they shouldn't be writing to begin with. Give us some material that makes SENSE.

Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2: Christianity Done Well

I've mentioned in the past (many times) that the Japanese entertainment industry's mild obsession with Christianity is very annoying to me. Whether it's blatantly being misinterpreted by crap like the infamous Evangelion or Xenogears, or just semi-referenced and still completely misunderstood like the Church of St. Eva in Breath of Fire 2, the portrayal of Christianity in the Japanese media forms that I've experienced is just about always incompetently bungled. It's not that I'm up in arms about this because I'm some roaring fundamentalist Christian or something; it just grates on my nerves to see the same mistakes based on complete ignorance repeat over and over and OVER.

I'm told by my friend Jolt, who's pretty much my personal Japanese expert as he's studied the culture and been over there for an extended period of time before, that his take on why this is such a common phenomenon is basically because "it's something cool and shiny and neat to look at and experiment with," and since the religion is virtually nonexistant in the country, there's really no one that's local to be annoyed by the the same dumb, ignorant mistakes repeated over and over again, so no one of significance is going to complain about it.

Recently, though, I've played a couple of RPGs which prove that there's always an exception to the rule: Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2, for the SNES, of the Megami Tensei series, which, apparently, is a pretty damn large series with a lot of installments (you may be familiar with Persona and Digital Devil Saga games, which are parts of this series). And damn, Atlus knew what it was doing when it made these games. I mean, there're parts of these games that make me wonder if the fine designers at Atlus had some psychic hotline to the ghost of John Milton (author of Paradise Lost, one of the greatest works of fiction (fanfiction, actually) ever created). At the very least, these people were doing their homework.

You play as human characters in each game who must choose one of three paths to follow:

Law, the path which endorses divine righteousness, believing in that which is holy and logical. This path follows the spirit and belief of God (even if it does not necessarily follow God Himself).
Chaos, the path which endorses lawless freedom, believing in emotion and instinct. This path follows the fallen angel Lucifer and promotes equal worship for all the lesser deities that God banished and overthrew (represented by various important theological figures from an impressive range of cultures' beliefs).
Neutral, the path which endorses humanity's self-rights, believing that the human race should be free from the interference of otherworldly beings, particularly God and Lucifer. It can be hard to keep to this alignment in the games, and the general concensus is that this is the "right" path to take, though the games go to great lengths to present each path as no more or less correct than the others, simply only seeming so from a certain point of view.

And as you go along, you come across...well, EVERYTHING. Seriously, if it's a being from myth or religion, you've got a good chance to encounter it in these games. You meet the great angel Michael, God's greatest warrior angel. You resurrect Prince Masakado, famed figure of Japanese legend. You chase Puck around at the behest of King Oberon in order to get some of his Sap of Infidelity, which you need to fix his mischief (which is an awesome little tip of the hat to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream). You watch as Thor of Norse legends brings his hammer down on all of Tokyo. From unicorns to Jack Frost to harpies to even Beetlejuice, you'll have random encounters with so many mythical beings from across the world that you could give an entire college's Ancient Literature department hard-ons just by showing them the bestiary.

But, interestingly varied as the beings of these games are, the focus is always on a Christian basis that is astoundingly well-designed. They directly refer to the Bible, they've actually got God and Lucifer in there as characters, and the events of the plots draw direct parallels to fundamental aspects of Christianity and some of the greatest works which examine it. Adam and Eve creating a new world for humanity, a holy virgin being the mother of humanity's savior, the Ark which carries the chosen few above the disaster that God unleashes on the sinful, the Paradise Lost-ish idea of Lucifer, in being the entity who defies God, is the protector of humanity's free will...the games are seriously like an insightful, in-depth analysis of the ideals, beauties, and failures of Christian mythology, and indirectly of religion and faith itself. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that there will come a time when I'm in a discussion concerning some fundamental nature or aspect of Christianity, and I'll use something in these games to emphasize a point. The ideas and characters and events in these games do suffer a bit from not having a huge amount of dialogue and description, but it's enough to present plenty of food for thought if you sit down and consider it all for a little bit of time, and it's all crafted so well that I find myself over-examining some parts the way you find scholars over-examining great works of literature. You know how sometimes a teacher or professor somebody like that will talk about some tiny detail in a classic novel/poem/play/whatever, and come up with this huge, elaborate explanation for why it's hugely significant, when in reality it seems many times more likely that it's just there without any great purpose or significance? I caught myself doing that for these games already--wondering about the fact that the ultimate defensive equipment for Law-sided characters is called Jesus equipment (Jesus Armor, Jesus Greaves, Jesus Helmet, etc). Is it just called that because it's ultimate Law equipment, so obviously naming it for the son of God Himself is appropriately telling of its strength, or is there a subtle extra meaning to it--did Atlus mean to make a reference to the Christian idea that Jesus is (metaphorically) one's armor against the forces of evil, and so made that idea more literal? Probably not. Probably just coincidental. But the fact that I can wonder if such a small thing could have a subtle meaning really speaks of just how awesome and creatively diligent the writers for these games were in creating Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2.

I really am truly impressed with these games. I'm going to make it a point to find and play more games in this series, though, from the little research I've done on the series, it seems that the rest of the games are plot-wise unrelated to these ones, and shift focus from Christian foundations to more general stories. Regardless, though, Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2 are games so intricate and brilliant in their exploration of Christianity that I wouldn't have even expected any such Western-culture-based game of this quality to come from North America or Europe, let alone Japan. Definitely hidden gems, these two.

PS: 2 other points about these games that I just couldn't really relevantly fit into the rest of the rant: A, they have Stephen Hawking in them as a major character, and that is awesome, and B, in Shin Megami Tensei 2, Atlus totally came up with the idea for the Matrix way before the Wachowski brothers did.

General RPGs' Women's Clothing

Yeah, yeah, I know. Not exactly an original topic. People have been pointing out the insanity of Chrono Trigger's Ayla ascending the windy, ice-covered Death Peak mountain in a fur bikini for over 10 years now. I'll do my best to go in a slightly new direction, though.

So, since RPGs came into existance, their characters have worn ridiculous and stupid outfits on their adventures. This is a simple fact of characters of both genders (or, in some cases, neither). I mean, from Link's never-changing Peter Pan cosplay in the Legend of Zelda series to every character Nomura has ever designed, RPG characters wear things that look absurd and are totally impractical about 90% of the time. Go ahead and ask a FF10 cosplayer how long it took just to create a cheap imitation of Lulu's ridiculous belt dress, and then decide how much sense it makes to get and wear clothes like that on a regular basis. It's like every RPG-making company in Japan has some yearly bet going on who can design the character with the weirdest combination of odd clothing mixed with random household crap aimlessly sewn/tied/taped onto it.

With female characters, though, the idiocy of what they wear seems more noticeable. Not necessarily because it looks especially sillier than their male companions' clothes--sure, Legend of Dragoon's Rose's protective armor seems to be made under the assumption that her legs are totally expendable, but on the other hand, her companion Kongol is wearing steel underpants with a huge horned demon face carved into them right over his crotch. No, really.

The true reason Kongol's race is extinct? No mystery there. I'd be fuckin' afraid to copulate with a guy who adorns his junk with a huge steel grinning devil skull if I were a girl, too.

No, the reason that the stupidity of what RPG characters wear seems more apparent for the women is because they invariably are wearing far less than their male companions, even when, often without complaint, they are travelling through frigid, frozen landscapes that Eskimos would wince at.

Now, as I've mentioned before, people have been noting how weird this is for a while. Celes defending Narshe's frozen fields while wearing a swimsuit in FF6, Phantasy Star 4's Rika wearing nearly the same thing exploring an entire ice planet, Tifa climbing up the FF7 equivalent of Mount Everest whilst wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts that would make Lindsay Lohan blush to wear...folks, I live in Massachusetts. I know what cold weather is. I have felt it myself. It is an unpleasant thing. People do not run around when the temperature drops below freezing wearing clothes they might play beach volleyball in. They stop and put on MORE CLOTHES so that they stop chattering and shaking and wishing they were dead because holy frozen fuck it's cold out. And if they don't have the warmer clothes on them (RPG pockets or backpacks or whatever can somehow carry 99 bottles of magical healing potions, but not a spare change of clothes), they turn around, head back to the nearest area of civilization, and purchase some.

But you know, for most games, I forgive them this. No, not because I think it's hot or whatever. I'd only ever make that exception for Breath of Fire 2's Katt, and I don't have to in this case, because I don't think she ever took her totally-not-wearing-pants self through any particularly cold areas. The reason I don't hold the costume nonsense with Celes and Rika and Ayla and so on against the games' creators is that, in many cases, there really wasn't a lot to work with technically. Old games on the SNES and Genesis and further down the evolutionary chain were pretty small, without a lot of space for extra graphics and such. While I think it would certainly have been possible for Square to make a sprite set of Celes wearing a damn coat when she's running around the frigid caves of Narshe, I can concede that back then it would have been a lot of extra work and money to fit in a whole new sprite set for an ultimately trivial purpose.

But come on. This is STILL going on. Nowadays, it's just getting ridiculous. Are you trying to tell me that SquareEnix, the biggest name in the RPG business, cannot find the time, money, and space on a Playstation 2 game to have FF12's Fran change out of her half-armor half-bondage gear outfit into something that at the very least covers more skin than it doesn't when she's traveling through a mountain blizzard? How damn hard could it possibly be for Nippon Ichi to have Phantom Brave's Marona put a jacket on over her little island sundress thing when she's dying of exposure on a fuckin' ice island? I KNOW that the colorful little advanced sprites that make up that game's characters can't be taking up so much room on a PS2 disc that one or two of her wearing some mittens and a scarf are going to push it too far. RPG makers have really gotta stop fretting over what completely unnecessary complications they can add to battle systems that are going to be boring anyway, and start thinking about what little things could make their games make SENSE.

Star Ocean 3's Plot's Worth

As I have mentioned before, Star Ocean 3 is pretty much the first in its series to be blessed with a plot and cast that are not obscenely boring and generally unoriginal. It's not what I'd call a fantastic RPG, but it's solidly good.

A lot of people, however, dislike this game because of the plot's big twist. For those of you unaware of Star Ocean 3's plot and still reading this (shame on you, spoiling yourselves), basically, Fayt (protagonist) and his merry band of heroes must at one point go to the 4th Dimension, where the beings who created their universe (which is ours, just very far in the future--the first in the series was pretty much the boring, badly-done Japanese equivalent to a very long Star Trek Away Mission) reside and threaten their creations in booming voices with all manners of destruction, apocalypse, and so on. When Fayt and company get there, they find a world that is strange, high-tech, but ultimately very similar to their own. They then learn from a passing 4D geek that their entire universe is nothing but a computer program, a game that people here in 4D land play and/or watch when they're bored (which seems to be more often than not).

So there it is. The big plot twist is that our existence is nothing but a higher dimension's MMORPG. Overall, the game could have done a LOT more with exploring the characters' reactions and feelings on this knowledge--you only really get Fayt's perspective on it in any depth, that being "Whatever, we all count and are important anyway! Now let's go save things like a proper bunch of RPG kids, gang! Scooby-dooby-doo!" And the others just sort of follow his lead. But, besides my annoyance that they didn't develop the potential of this idea with their cast, I say kudos to SquareEnix for a pretty interesting idea. I mean, yeah, it's been done before a few times (most notably in The Matrix), but it's still quite innovative.

Generally, though, people really, really dislike it. It seems that the only thing anyone hates about the game is this single aspect of its plot. The complaints I see about it come in 2 varieties.

First off, people don't like this because they think that, were it true, it makes their lives meaningless. Now, I don't know exactly how they reached this conclusion if they actually have played the game. Maybe they just stopped playing once they reached 4D Space, and never picked the controller up again. Because, see, the game goes to great lengths to point out that, yes, everything DOES matter, whether or not it is "real." What's important isn't which universe is real and which isn't, or whether we're all play-things of gods or not. What's important is knowing and protecting what you care about, having faith in your ideals and yourself. If you can think and trust and defend your existence, then it's as genuine as any other's. And the game goes to great lengths to emphasize this--the entire happy ending of the game hinges on the idea that, regardless of its origin or intended purpose, our existence is self-justified and significant. It can't simply be erased by the higher being that created it; in fact, the will and belief of just one young man that his life and the universe in which it exists is true is enough to prove it so. Ultimately, it's a variation of the common Creation Vs. Creator/Man Vs. God/Child Vs. Parent idea that you see in a lot of RPGs (Examples: Okage: Shadow King, Breath of Fire 3, Treasure of the Rudra, Xenogears, and Final Fantasy 12, to a lesser extent). It just has a pretty innovative way of communicating this theme in its Reality = Video Game idea. But make no mistake: that is still just a vehicle for the main theme of promoting human worth. So I really don't understand how people can be complaining about the game telling them that their supposedly artificial lives are worthless, when it goes to great lengths to say just the opposite. Maybe they played the last third of the game with their eyes closed, or something.

Secondly, there are some people who just say it's a dumb idea. The whole universe, just a program? Dumb! Yes, dumb, most certainly. Because a universe which follows concrete laws governing just about all forces, interactions, and reactions of the things within it does not in any way resemble an extremely high-level computer program.

You know what makes a LOT more sense? Believing that one big, all-powerful dude you've never seen and never will made absolutely everything for reasons that are either unknown or which boil down to Him being bored and wanting entertainment. Or heck, why just one deity? You could believe that lots of deities got together and made all creation! They were having a big old creation contest that night on who could construct the best stuff, and they got carried away and ended up creating a whole darned universe in the process. There was probably some booze involved somewhere in the process, too; how else would you account for the duck-billed platypus, or the way camels look? Or hey, here's another one that makes a ton of sense: nothing created the universe! It's just THERE. No real reason for an impossibly huge expanse of great and wonderful things and infinite possibilities. It's just the result of a big explosion--one minute stuff didn't exist, and the next minute it did, and there's no way that it could have been deliberately set up by a higher being because clearly things just randomly explode when they don't exist yet.

My point here is not to perhaps illustrate that I don't know anything beyond the basics of the Big Bang Theory (for all I know, scientists DO have a scientifically-feasible explanation for what exactly was around before the Big Bang happened that would make it possible). It's just to point out that, in the long list of proposed explanations for how everything came to exist, "It's a huge, fantastically complex computer program" is really not nearly as ludicrous or incomplete in terms of pure logic as a lot of the ones the majority of the world accept.

So yeah. I, personally, think that SO3's plot and its clever way of putting a new spin on an old theme is pretty darned neat, and I really don't see what other people's problem with it is. You didn't see geeks getting huffy over The Matrix's similar spin, and that one was a much more depressing possibility.

Wild Arms 4

Today I finished Wild Arms 4, made by Media Vision. Sweet Jesus, do I hate this game. I mean, I HATE this game. This isn't a case of thinking this game is a pile of shit like, say, Phantasy Star 3 or Quest 64. I mean, it IS, to be sure. But this is a case like Grandia 3, where I actively, wholly LOATHE it. So I'm gonna give it the special treatment I gave Grandia 3. Let's go over it, step by step. Spoilers, naturally. But you don't want to play this game anyway, trust me, so go ahead and read.


Plot: Alright, first of all, the general feeling and flow of the game reminds me of Grandia 3 a lot, because 80% of the time as I ran around in dungeons doing puzzles and killing monsters, I felt totally disconnected. I just didn't CARE; it all felt like aimless wandering. Typically, even in a bad game, I get involved in what the characters are doing and follow the plot. Here, though, I dunno, I just had no connection at all to it. I couldn't really guess why that was, though it might have something to do with how the game's length is set up--about a fourth of it is just trying to get to one single town that has trains in it. When you play a game whose plot purpose for that long is "Let's go take a train and run somewhere no one else will ever reach! Unless, of course, they also board a train and follow the same route...but that'll NEVER happen!", feeling a little disconnected from the plot is probably a natural occurence.

On the occasions where I DID care, though...good God, people, this story STINKS. Imagine if you got a whiny, rebellious 14-year-old whose parents just told to take out the trash, gave him a blank sheet of paper, and told him to write a game plot about how evil adults are. Three boxes of dialogue can't go by in this game without one of the characters talking about adults as though they were some strange alien species completely unrelated to them, not really seeming to realize that 5 years from now, THEY will be adults. I mean, maybe the game's trying to make some statement about growing up, like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance did, but I don't see how when every single person over 20 that you run into is carefully tailored to be evil. And it's not just the stupid kids, either--the theme that adults and children are entirely different races that have nothing to do with each other is driven home by all the adults in the game, too. I'm not sure I saw a whole three people who didn't make it a point to mention that they are ADULTS while your characters are CHILDREN. Wakka didn't say "Yah" as many times in all of FF10 as you see this kid-adult idea beaten to death inside 10 hours of WA4.

This is much of why I hate the game, incidentally. I hate it because I keep getting the feeling that it hates me. For my intolerable crime of having lived past 21 years of age.

Graphics: Graphics are nice enough.

Music/Sound/Voice Acting: Voice Acting's okay, though little of it is particularly interesting. I was looking forward to hearing Cam Clark's extremely awesome voice acting, but he did his characters so differently than usual that it didn't sound enough like him to give me that Robotech buzz, so that was disappointing. Music's okay, I guess. I think it tried a little too hard sometimes to get me excited, but in the end, not much was very bad or very good.

Gameplay: Not as many complaints here as a lot of people have about all the platform game elements here. Control could've been a little better with the jumping, but it wasn't as terrible as I'd been led to believe by others. It's still a little out of place in an RPG, though. The battle system is simple enough, but it really doesn't make sense. There are limitations to where you can attack that are silly--why is it that Jude, who uses a gun, can only attack people in places right next to him, but he can't hit someone just a little distance away at an angle? He's got a GUN. All he has to do is point and pull the trigger. Unless the gun only fires bullets for a distance of 4 feet, it SHOULD work.

Wild Arms Series Annoyance: As with the first two Wild Arms games, this one has just about nothing to do with the Wild West premise that the series continues to falsely claim to have. In fact, this one, with its silly anime-meets-Peter-Pan characters and themes, is probably the biggest failure to deliver the promised setting so far.

Also: Seriously, why have a plane where the pilot is in the back seat, behind a passenger? How does having the pilot unable to see the sky ahead make sense? Someone explain it to me.

Cheap Scams: You can load your data from Wild Arms: Altercode F to get bonuses in WA4. For those of you who don't know, WAAF is a recent remake of the original Wild Arms 1. Now, I have WA1. I played it back when it was new. I've been with the series since before it was popular (not that it really is right now, either), and I've been trucking along with it since. So I didn't get WAAF. Since I'd already played the game, I didn't see the need. Do I get a reward for my WA1 saved data, a symbol that I'm one of the dumb saps who've been paying for this stuff since the beginning? No. Of course not. It's only people who go out and buy a cheap, pretty remake that get extra goodies. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Media Vision is now doing business the SquareEnix way--giving you things you already have, taking as much money as they would as though they had given you something new, and, more than likely, laughing as they do.

Stupid Idea: Having a secret shop in a game which you can get the ingredients for the best equipment from...and having that shop take LEVELS from you instead of money. Yes, GREAT idea. It's not like it took me 40 hours of gameplay to get the experience for these levels or anything. Just go ahead and take'em!

Characters:

Jude: Main character. Now, I've mentioned that male protagonists often seem kinda dumb and boring, right? They just meander along doing heroic things for no real reason other than that they're supposed to. Well, Jude is not like that. Oh, Jude IS very stupid, yes. Very, very stupid. 15-year-old with a mind that's about 7 years behind. But he's not BORING and stupid, he's ANNOYING and stupid. Playing the game seems almost like you're babysitting some idiot preteen who, no matter how many times you explain something to him, will never, ever understand it. You TRY to tell him that 2 + 2 = 4. You show him diagrams. You use groups of fruit to simulate the process. But no matter what you do, 2 + 2 will never be 4 for him. For him, 2 + 2 = Grown-Ups Are Evil Hellspawn.

Memorable Jude Moment: Final battle. He gives the last boss a quick lecture on why you can't stop violence by using violence. And I just think...Hello? What the hell are you doing NOW, then? You're telling this guy that you can't use violence to end violence, and to demonstrate how right you are, you and your little pack of hoodlums are going to shoot, scorch, freeze, crush, and slice the living shit out him? How does this make sense? HOW?

Arnaud: I like to affectionately call Arnaud "Captain Moron." Captain Moron's purpose in the group is to be the one with the "razor-sharp wit." This allows him to come up with exceptionally brilliant plans like, "Now that we have what we came for, we should leave, because being in an enemy base is dangerous!" and "Okay, I'm going to do something, and Jude, you come save me when it goes wrong." Through the whole game, Arnaud will not come up with any plan that you couldn't either come up with yourself because it's obvious, or that you couldn't think of something better because it's stupid.

Kresnik: Kresnik is a strong competitor for the "Most Boring Anime Cliched Character Of All Time" award. He's all emo-angsty about convictions and protecting his sister by kidnapping her and all that crap, he uses a silly and impractical weapon, and he rides on a motorcyle. If the Wild Arms series were more popular, you can bet your life that there'd be hordes of idiot fangirls for him, just like there are for all his other clones in various animes and games.

Gung-Ho Guns...I mean, Anten Seven...I mean, Juppongatana...I mean, Brionac! Brionac is what I meant: Brionac is a group of elite fighters who use gimmicks when fighting to become really tough and dangerous opponents. Naturally this is like nothing you've ever seen before, especially not animes like Trigun or Outlaw Star or Rurouni Kenshin or like a billion others. As is typical for such groups, the members are kinda all over the place in terms of power--one dude can actually stop time for a few moments, making him nearly impossible to hit or evade, which is a pretty hugely powerful and dangerous ability, while another guy's special power is...having a gatling gun. One lady can block any attack completely, while on the other hand you have...a couple living dolls who can self-destruct. It's like these groups have some quota of memberships to hand out, and when they stop finding people with genuinely useful abilities, they just recruit any weirdo they happen across on the street.

Hauser: Hauser is the final boss of the game, which is why I'm including him here. That's the only reason, though, because his contribution to the plot otherwise is just about nothing. He has about 4 minutes of screen time altogether, and each of those 4 minutes is stupid--he's basically this super-powerful jackass who wants peace among people, and to achieve that he utterly destroys entire cities and armies that apparently looked at each other the wrong way. Oh yeah, he's also Jude's father (naturally). The game wants to make this very clear, and make you think that it is somehow significant, but in the end, it...really isn't, at all. I don't think Jude even ever figures it out. Unsurprising, of course, given how incredibly stupid the kid is.

Yulie: After the plot making it clear to me that it hates my guts, Yulie is the second reason that I really, really despise this game. She's...ah, fuck it. You know what? I'm not gonna even bother. Go back, find my rant on Grandia 3, and read up on Alfina. Yulie's basically a watered-down version of her, with the tired She's A Bad Cook joke replaced by the equally tired She's A Good Cook Because That's What It Is To Be Female idea.

Okay, and now, the two characters I LIKED. You see, although I liked them, they have the most important part of this rant, because they are the biggest reasons I hate this game. Don't get it? Read on.

Gawn: Gawn is a likeable kind of bachelor-bum dude who freeloads with you for a while, before turning out to be the best warrior on the planet. He's good-natured, he seems to escape the ADULTS WILL BURN IN HELL theme that the other game's characters seem to be stuck with, and he even makes fun of RPG Switch-Pushing Puzzles. He also has some serious and deep stuff to say, too, which is refreshingly insightful.

So what happens? They kill him off. See, it's like this. All through the game, you hear people talking about how Illsveil Prison has a defense system that shoots 10 homing missiles at you if you try to go there. Your characters, whose brains have more holes in them than Chrono Cross's plot, apparently forget this and take a plane trip up there, and are shocked to see a bunch of missiles coming at them. Gawn flies up in a fighter, shoots one down, a second destroys his craft, but he leaps out and starts shooting the incoming missiles with his revolvers, using their force to keep him up in the air. Yes, perhaps a little silly, but it's forgiven because he is pretty cool. So he gets all 10. He shoots them ALL. BUT WAIT--THERE'S SECRETLY AN 11TH MISSILE! And it crashes into him and he dies. Yes, the game hates me so much that it had to kill one of the only two characters I liked by shooting him with a missile that SHOULDN'T EXIST. Fuck you, too, WA4.

Raquel: Raquel is the last member of your party. And she is, strangely enough, AWESOME. I hate to have to sum her up because I can't do her justice, but I'm hoping for your sakes that you never play the game, so this might be your only chance to know anything about her. Raquel is a swordplay genius. A real prodigy. She was forced to train at sword fighting at an early age because of her immense potential, but in general, most of her technique is self-taught. Be that as it may, though, she doesn't really care about sword fighting. Her real interest is in painting, not battle. When Jude and company meet her, she's on a journey to find true beauty in her world, and paint it.

This by itself is a pretty damn nifty and original character idea--you don't often get the Master Swordsman/woman character who doesn't actually care for her skills, and the whole idea of the journey to find beauty has a sort of peacefully epic quality about it. But on top of that, you find out that she's on this journey because she doesn't have much time left in her life to see beauty in a world where she's only experienced ugly conflict and suffering. She's dying of an incurable condition, and at the time that the game takes place in, it seems she's getting pretty close to the end of her time--her body's cold, and her lungs are failing. Yet somehow she still manages to be your main powerhouse attacker, pulling off awesome sword fights even with an unresponsive, dying body.

So, at one point in the game, Captain Moron, who's sweet on Raquel (sadly enough, he's actually one of the BEST options she has to choose from for romantic interests in this game), promises her that once they're done with this hokey saving the world BS, he's going to find a cure for her and let her live. Even if it's Captain Moron giving the speech, it's sweet, and it makes me happy, because, hey, Raquel, who's the only thing keeping me going with this game beyond sheer stubbornness, will live on! Awesome!

Yeah, so, I watch the ending, it says what happens to everyone 10 years in the future, and hey, look at that, Raquel got married to Arnaud, had a kid, found true beauty in the form of her child...oh, yeah, and Arnaud never did find a cure for her and she died. The End!

Media Vision was looking for the perfect way to give the player a final, send-off Fuck You, and they sure as hell found it.


So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. My 99th RPG made me want to shove its makers' faces into a toilet. A toilet that's been used lately. A toilet that's been used lately that wasn't flushed. A toilet that's been used lately and wasn't flushed, and the recent user was some kind of monster that poops out razor blades. I would hold their faces down, press the handle, and my heart would be soothed. I sure as hell hope the 100th, Final Fantasy 12, is good, but really, even if it was pretty awful it'd still be enjoyable just in comparison to what I've just played.