General RPGs' AMVs 6

Because I just know you all love and adore these so much. I’ve decided to cut the number of AMVs in these rants down to 8. 13 strikes me as maybe being too much all at once, and 8 is the best number of all, anyway, so it all works out.

I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but please, if you watch any of these, and agree with me that they’re good, just take those few, precious seconds to hit the Thumbs Up button, or better still, leave a quick comment mentioning that you enjoyed it. With so many subpar RPG AMVs out there (like, literally thousands), finding a notably good one is exceedingly rare, and I definitely want those with the skill to make a decent video encouraged to do more.



FINAL FANTASY

Final Fantasy 8: Dancing in the Dark, by ChadVisionAbridged: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhX2wShd2w&feature=plcp
The music used is Dancing in the Dark, by Bruce Springsteen. This is one of those AMVs you just never see coming, but work out surprisingly well. It’s silly but enjoyable, and its coordination between the song’s lyrics and the game’s visuals and text is surprisingly accurate. There’s a cheerful, slightly tongue-in-cheek energy that ChadVisionAbridged has instilled into the game clips that bring them together with the music. I also very much appreciate that this AMV makes excellent use of actual game footage, not just FF8’s FMV sequences--a lot of the connection between the audio and visuals comes from the right application of game footage that most people wouldn’t bother with just because it’s not an FMV. Even considering how statistically rare a good Final Fantasy 8 AMV is, this one is a pleasant surprise. And I just love the end, makes me laugh aloud. Solid AMV, this one.


THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: This is Halloween, by DemonLordChuck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8cUal__hBk
The music used is This is Halloween, from the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. There’s not a whole lot to this AMV, but it has good editing, and frankly, the bizarre, unsettling, and sometimes downright freaky setting and visual tone of this game lend themselves perfectly to the nature and feel of the song. That vague, disturbing sense of wrongness of this game’s world just meshes very well with the song, and makes this video enjoyable and appropriate.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: United We Stand, Divided We Fall, by Enlistedman92: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Mdk2Anrek&feature=plcp
The music used is United We Stand, Divided We Fall, by Two Steps From Hell, and then a tune from the TLoZSS soundtrack at the end. As epic trailers/tributes go, this is about as good as you’re gonna get. The music and game footage meld together excellently to portray the game as an epic adventure. The scenes selected are perfect, and tell the story of the game with good enough flow to be understandable, yet loosely enough that you’re having very little spoiled, as a trailer/tribute more or less should. The editing is done very well, too; I very much liked the parts where the Goddess Sword’s power-ups were put together and where the Triforce appears in parts on Link’s hand. A shame Enlistedman92 isn’t on Nintendo’s payroll, because this is better quality than most professionally-made tributes/trailers. If it weren’t for the totally pointless bit at the end that completely jars you out of the mood that the AMV created, I’d probably keep this video in my personal AMV collection, and devote an entire rant to it. Even still, though, check it out, because it’s awesome.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Kryptonite, by Gurglesnurp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwWFPpbkHCY&feature=plcp
The music used is Kryptonite, by 3 Doors Down. If you can manage to sit through the half-minute intro,* you’ll find this is a very decent, solid AMV. Not perfect by any means, but overall it meshes the video to the lyrics and tune pretty well, the simple editing is done well, and it’s engaging from start to finish. Not much more to say, really, it’s simply a good AMV.


SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3: The Answer, by XcoxmoX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuw59uslUaQ&feature=plcp
The music used is To Die For, by The Birthday Massacre. First of all, ignore the length the video indicates--there’s some odd glitch of sorts on this AMV, such that after it’s done, it starts up again without sound, so the actual length of the music video is only about 5 minutes, not the 10 it says. At any rate, this AMV is not perfect, as there are times when the musical tone doesn’t seem particularly well-synchronized with the game video, and a lot of the lyrics don’t seem to hold much relevance one way or another to it. But overall, the tone of the music works well with the game’s clips, there are times when the lyrics do match up to what’s shown, and I feel that the overall feel of the song works nicely with the overall tone of the video’s progression and events as a whole.


XENOSAGA

Xenosaga 2 + 3: Breath, by ShionStrife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J85LYsk5iAI
The music used is Breath, by Breaking Benjamin. The subject matter of this one, pairing Shion and Jr. up, is ludicrous and dumb, of course, but surprisingly, this video’s actually a pretty solid work. I suppose it just goes to show you how far effective use of game footage and coordination with the song can really go. The scenes match up to the lyrics and the mood of the music extremely well, and are arranged in a terrific way for conveying Hell, it’s done well enough that if someone who was not at all familiar with the Xenosaga games and characters were to watch this, they would probably wholeheartedly believe that there really were some sort of romantic subplot in the game concerning Jr. and Shion.

Xenosaga Series: The Awakening, by Tabichan8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6MgwLiB4JQ
The music used is Prometheus Ring, by Immediate Music. This one’s a KOS-MOS tribute/trailer AMV, and it’s pretty awesome. The scenes are great with the music, the quotes used are perfect for the purpose, and overall, it gets your blood pumping, it shows KOS-MOS as being awesome, and it totally psychs you up for the Xenosaga series by being pretty damn epic. You could easily believe this to be an official trailer from how well it’s done.

Xenosaga Series: The Saga Begins, by GunnerRikku75: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06b5KRhpz_Q
The music used is The Saga Begins, by Weird Al Yankovic. Given that it’s a 5+ minute joke AMV to a joke song cover to a song that is itself bad enough to also be a joke, I’m kind of surprised that this video’s actually pretty darned good. The video clips are well-timed and a good match to the Star Wars-ish lyrics, and it all winds up being a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, which is just what it should be with a Weird Al song









* I feel like I want to make an entire rant devoted just to this one thing, but it’s not RPG-related enough to do so, so I’m gonna just post my complaint here. These stupid, pointless intros to people’s AMVs have got to STOP. If someone wants to quickly stick their name up at the start of the video for 1 to 5 seconds, well, that’s alright. But a ton of AMV makers have these elaborate, 30 - 45 second intro videos to their music videos! It’s distracting, it’s annoying, and frankly such flamboyant narcissism in thinking anyone cares at all makes me very disinclined to even give the actual AMV, when it finally starts, a chance. You are not an acclaimed fucking director or movie studio! You’re putting up fan music videos of video games on Youtube, you self-important twats. Get a grip, stop boring your audience, and get on with the actual AMV already.

Xenosaga 3's Boss Fights

After screwing up my courage for years after the mess that is Xenosaga 2, I finally got around to playing and beating Xenosaga 3 recently. While the phrase “narrative clusterfuck” is a tremendous understatement when describing this game’s plot and characters, and I’m fairly certain I could easily create a list of 50 mistakes Xenosaga 3 makes in its storytelling just off the top of my head, I actually did enjoy it a good deal more than Xenosaga 2, and I’d even say it has some worth and meaning in it...if you really, REALLY go diving in deep for it. But heavier discussions such as those are for another day (or maybe never; if I got started talking about the problems with Xenosaga 3’s story, I might never stop, and I’m saving my “Never Ending Discussion of Why it’s Stupid” energy for an eventual rant on the Synthesis option of Mass Effect 3’s ending). For this rant, I’m just going to pose this annoyed question, instead:

Why the hell can’t the player ever seem to actually win in this game?

I’m talking about the boss fights, specifically. Oh, sure, you get into a boss fight in this game, well, you can pretty much always actually beat the battle itself (kinda have to, or it’s Game Over). I mean...okay, look, there are, basically, 26 bosses in this game, not counting the 2 super special ultra bosses. Now, after winning the boss battle, these are the bosses who are, once the battle is over, completely gone, completely dead/destroyed, or thoroughly defeated and unable to fight more or flee: Sigdrifa, Aludra Calf, ES Nephtali, Mai and Leupold, Pellegri, the three Asura Series 27, Citrine, each of the 4 elemental thingies in Abel’s Ark, ES Gad and ES Joseph, ES Issachar (piloted by Pellegri), ES Levi (piloted by Margulis), and the final boss, Zarathustra. That’s 15 of the boss battles in this game where you actually can beat the boss. Just a little over half.

That means that almost half of the rest of the boss battles in this game end up having the enemy either being quite strong enough to escape, strong enough to keep fighting, or, most often, shrugging the whole fight off and behaving as though they were not hurt at all. The first time your characters fight Margulis in the ES Levi, he is, immediately after the boss battle, still up and ready for more. The Omega Universitas is clearly damaged by your boss fight against it, but more than capable of escaping (which seems pointless; it’s never seen again to my knowledge, so why not just have it get scrapped?). Beat Virgil and Voyager in combat, and each time they’ll obviously be totally unharmed afterwards, taunting the player’s characters about it. Yuriev is only defeated when an outside party steps in after the battle (as was the case with Virgil and Voyager, for that matter). And so on.

I mean, alright, this sort of thing is not exactly unknown to RPGs. It’d take me a while to name a full dozen RPGs in which there are no instances of the plot dictating the heroes be unable, at one point or another, to defeat an enemy. Lavos is supposed to win in the Ocean Palace in Chrono Trigger, Kefka perpetually gets away from every battle he loses in Final Fantasy 6, and and the Exile can’t manage to counter Darth Sion’s regenerative powers during their first battle on Korriban in Knights of the Old Republic 2. And those are all games of distinctive quality. Plot happens, certain individuals can’t be eliminated too early, I get that.

But 11 times in one game? And nearly always these instances occur when the Xenosaga cast is engaging in combat with anyone of any significance. I mean, most of the boss battles in Xenosaga 3 that you CAN beat are just the random filler enemies--large monster-ish things, momentarily misguided good-guy NPCs, flunkies, etc. It seems like any time you actually fight someone that matters, it’s utterly pointless; they’re either going to be totally fine after the boss battle and get away, or they’re going to be totally fine after the boss battle and require defeat through some other story-driven means. What’s the point of fighting the game’s villains at all if you’re never going to be the one to actually defeat them?

Is this a small gripe? Well, yeah. Certainly not worth even the time it’s taken to write this rant. But all the same, it DOES get annoying at a certain point, and I believe that it does lessen the narrative strength of the game (in addition to the countless flaws that already turn Xenosaga 3’s storytelling into a horrible mess, I mean). Because after a certain point of watching deus ex machina get called in for the tenth time to take care of an enemy that you just spent 20 minutes beating on, you start to wonder why the hell you’re being partnered with heroes who can’t actually accomplish their goals themselves, and question the strength of a plot which would necessitate so many of its important conflicts be rendered bogus.

General RPGs' Anime Retellings

Good lord, this was supposed to be a short rant, and just LOOK at it. I’m hopeless. Anyway...

There are a lot of animes that have been born from popular Role Playing Games. Tales of the Abyss, Final Fantasy 7, Star Ocean 2, and many other games have had animated series and/or movies created based upon them. And generally, I’m all for this idea, because 1, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing many of the games I play and enjoy continued in some way (as long as it’s done well, of course), and 2, because to create a new form of art based on a different medium is a sign that the original medium is taken seriously as a potential artform itself (yes, I’m one of the advocates for the consideration of video games as art (or at least, for having the capacity to be art; I’m sure as hell not going to pretend even 10% of them actually do qualify as such)). But what I DON’T like about this phenomenon is the fact that most of these derivative animes and movies wind up being adaptations that retell the game’s events.

Now, let me clarify something--I don’t necessarily dislike adaptations. You take something like the Nolan trilogy of Batman movies. Sure, they’re essentially just adaptations and retellings of ideas from the Batman comic books, but they’re significantly altered and adjusted, becoming different (and remarkable) stories in their own right. They share much similarity to the original source material, but the director takes the stories and characters and uses them in significantly different ways, to tell new stories and explore ideas in unique ways. That kind of adaptation, which significantly departs from the original while staying acceptably true to its ideas, aspects, and direction, that I like. But I also approve of something like the old Fox Kids X-Men cartoon, or the Hunger Games movie, because even though they’re far more literally true to the original works, the mediums are significantly different from the originals. There’s a lot of difference between a comic book or book and a cartoon or movie. You’re reliving the stories in a whole new way, through the vision of the creators of the new adaptation. It’s a significantly new experience.

But that’s not the case with RPG anime adaptations. When an anime retells an RPG’s story, you’re not really creating anything new. RPGs (the Japanese ones, at least, but those are the only ones that this so far applies to) typically have storytelling methods that are already pretty similar to those of anime as it is, and most of the RPGs whose stories have been retold in anime form have been visually advanced enough that the animated version is not really showing you anything different. It’s not like you get anime versions of old 16-bit RPGs, or at least, I’ve yet to find one. The mediums are too similar for the adaptations to be considered a new experience.

So what’s the point? Some animation studio is going to blow thousands and thousands of dollars and hours producing a story that’s already been told? Why? I don’t get it. I already played Tales of the Abyss. I already beat Xenosaga 1. I already completed Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, AND analyzed the hell out of it in my head. Why would I want to just see the same thing all over again? And if that impulse DOES strike me, couldn’t I just, y’know, play the game again?

It’s not like the anime version of a game is going to garner all that much of a new audience to generate new revenue, either. I mean, a movie adaptation of a book, well, I can certainly see the reasoning there--there are a LOT of people who just don’t generally read books, so releasing, say, the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings in movie form is going to garner a huge new audience who didn’t want to read through the original works.* But there’s not a huge divide between anime-watchers and game-players in Japan, and I imagine most of the people who are going to recognize and show significant interest in an anime based on a video game are the people who are already fans of the video game. I guess there must be SOME new people in an audience for an anime version who aren’t gamers, but given how closely the industries are culturally tied over there, I just can’t imagine it being all that many. And if a large portion of your audience are fans of the source material, why show them the same damn thing all over again?

Why not something new? That’s what I want to know. Why not something new. Look, most RPGs last a good 40 to 60 hours, and involve the creation of a whole different world full of unique individuals and histories of varied complexity. If you were a creator, and you had spent so long making the world of your RPG--even a very basic RPG world still takes a lot of time and effort to think up--wouldn’t you WANT to use it more than once? Instead of telling us the same story all over again, animes could detail momentous historical events of the RPG world they’re based on. They could focus on the back stories of the game’s characters. They could show us other perspectives of the events of the game, scenes and side-stories that occur during the game but that we didn’t get a chance to see in the original. Or, most obviously, they could create new adventures for the game’s cast to engage in, taking place some time after the game’s conclusion.**

The Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children movie and the Sakura Wars 5 anime may not have been very good (although if you already liked the silly and somewhat stupid nature of Sakura Wars 5, you probably will actually enjoy its anime sequel), but in my mind, they’re way, way better products than the anime retellings of Disgaea 1 or Tales of the Abyss, even if those had far superior stories and characters. Sure, FF7AC may be a nonsensical load of special effects and gratuitous fight scenes competing with the emo fumblings of a protagonist whose character has actually regressed to where it was partway through the game instead of basing itself on how Cloud had developed by the game’s end, but at least it was (ineptly) trying to tell us a NEW story about the characters and world that we loved, not just rehashing everything we already knew for 2 hours. Sure, Sakura Wars 5 doesn’t make good use of its cast and focuses on the stupid machinations of a reborn Egyptian Pharaoh whose only vaguely interesting quality is that he’s pretty hot for protagonist Shinjiro when Shinjiro’s in drag (and man does Shinjiro seem to dig him back), but it gave us a new adventure for the characters of the game, tried to please its fans with a new story about the characters they enjoyed. I’d still count watching each of them as having been more worthwhile experiences than viewing a single episode of the Xenosaga 1 anime, even though I liked Xenosaga 1’s story.

I also have a couple of minor pet peeves with these anime retellings of RPGs, beyond the principle of it being a waste of time to tell the same story over again in a generally similar format. First of all, the small changes. Even though an anime may just be retelling the story of a game, there are almost inevitably going to be some changes made to events and characters here and there. Not big enough that the events and characters are significantly altered, but still, there will be some slight difference between the original version’s telling and the anime’s, even though the story’s major aspects will be the same. Why do this? It’s not enough to change the anime enough to be a new story, but now I, as an obsessive fan (and don’t kid yourself, there are a LOT of people as obsessive as or more than I am, so I’m not the only one), am never going to know which version of the story’s events is real. If I want to write a fanfic about Xenosaga 1, do I consider Virgil as having died on the Woglinde star ship, as happened in the game, or later on, as happened in the anime? The animation’s change has no significant effect on the overall events of the plot, as Virgil will still die in basically the exact same way, but I’ll never know how the hell this detail was actually supposed to play out, and it’s going to bug me any time I happen to think of it. And you probably know by now just how often and much I think about RPGs.***

And don’t even get me started on the Final Fantasy 7: Last Order anime. The way they changed the scene where Cloud gets stabbed by Sephiroth...it makes me shake with fanboy rage just thinking about it. They just have Sephiroth decide to jump off the reactor platform on his own. They RUINED one of the greatest moments in Final Fantasy 7. Cloud was supposed to get stabbed, then, through sheer strength of will and heroic quality and all that awesome inspiring jazz, he was supposed to grab the sword in him, use it to lift Sephiroth (who’s too surprised to actually let go of the hilt) up into the air, and then throw his ass over the side of the reactor to what they both clearly thought would be Sephiroth’s death (and it did at least knock him off his ass for a few years, forcing him into hiding in the North Crater’s Lifestream center to heal). It was heroic, it was awesome, it was inspiring. It was a victorious turn-around on the villain who had seemed to have clearly won, then suddenly found himself utterly defeated by one of the supposedly helpless victims he’d just run through. But no, now, thanks to this goddamn anime retelling, Cloud’s amazing act of strength and will is diminished, and Sephiroth gets to give a smug little smile and hightail it outta there, which was what he wanted to do to begin with. Yeah, Cloud spooked him a little still, but ultimately Sephiroth is now the one who comes out ahead. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised, since SquareEnix is has a George Lucas-like talent for destroying its own best work, but still.

And what about when one of those small changes is just adding something in that wasn’t there in the original game? Like the Realian girl that was just added out of the blue to the Xenosaga anime. Her role changes more or less nothing important, so again, it still qualifies as us being expected to sit through the same damn story all over again, but the small alterations her presence and character provide are not in the original game, and I have to wonder--why not? Was this addition something that the creator of Xenosaga wanted in her work, in her vision of her story? Is the game that I spent 50+ hours playing NOT all that it was supposed to be? Because that really doesn’t make me very happy to consider.

And as a last little gripe, I admit to feeling childishly resentful about the time difference. I mean, look, a full season of an anime is more or less 26 episodes, right? Some animes go longer and some are shorter, but the standard is 26. If you get a video game turned into an anime, then you’re providing the same story to any newcomer who may not already know it in 13 hours’ time--26 if you get full-hour episodes, but I don’t think I’ve heard of a game anime that has episodes that long. I spent 40+ experiencing that story, as one of the original fans that made the game’s commercial success possible (I assume it wouldn’t get an anime if it weren’t successful). So now any jerk can have the experience in half that time? Less, even? I feel like an idiot for investing so much time into the original product when all I apparently had to do was wait a year or 2, and I could have more or less the same experience without the repetitive random encounters adding an extra few dozen hours on. Like I said, kind of a petty feeling, but I don’t deny it.

Pet peeves aside, though, I seriously dislike the idea that an anime made about an RPG would just be a retelling of the game’s story, and I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. I am not a baby penguin. I do not enjoy my meals regurgitated to me. Whoever makes the decisions on these matters, take the stuff I like, the stuff enough fans liked to warrant further focus, and go forward with it.










* A sentiment which, in that particular case, I can sympathize with. Tolkien had some awesome ideas and creativity, but sweet heavens, he had a ponderous and dry writing style.

** As a note, I would like to say that a new story such as I mention should, of course, still be related to and based on the video game in some way. I’m not looking for something like the Wild Arms: Twilight Venom anime, which, as far as I could tell, had no actual connection to any Wild Arms game and only had any relation to the series through using certain basic concepts like the ARMS weapons and Crimson Noble species (and even then, many of these things seemed only loosely based on the original concepts found in the games). The anime should have some strong, solid relationship to the original games, because otherwise, why the heck name it after the game series to begin with? If you took the words “Wild Arms” out of the title of that anime, you’d sooner think of it as its own show than anything related to the game series.

*** For new readers: It’s a lot. I think about them a lot.

The Mother Series's Auto-Kills

Earthbound (the second game in the Mother series) has many fine features as an RPG, but very few of them related to its ponderous, uninteresting, and slightly awkward gameplay. The game’s interface gets the job done, I suppose, but always just a little slower and less fluidly than it should. Not that that’s important, of course--what’s important is Earthbound’s fun and uniquely bizarre brand of storytelling, and that’s what makes the game a solidly good RPG. But the actual act of playing it to see this storytelling is, I’d have to say, more of a chore than it usually is in the genre. Mother 3 is much the same as its predecessor in this regard, only more so--the storytelling elements of Mother 3 are even better, while the gameplay elements are somewhat worse with the damned timed hit system.

There is, however, one aspect of Earthbound and Mother 3’s gameplay that is excellent--inspired!--and that I really, REALLY wish had caught on with other RPGs: the Auto-Kill encounter. Basically, when your party runs into an enemy in Earthbound and Mother 3, a quick calculation is done by the game, and, as I understand it, if your party’s members were fast and strong enough that they could defeat the enemy party in 1 round before the enemies could take their turns, then the game wouldn’t even bother to initiate the battle. Instead, the game would just tell you that you won, list out the spoils of the combat, and send you along your merry way. As a side benefit, once your party’s strong enough to do this auto-kill on an enemy, that enemy no longer even attempts to initiate combat in the field--sensibly, it runs for its life away from your party when they approach.

I feel like I don’t even need to explain why this is a good thing. Rather than have the player engage endlessly in the excessive tedium of enemy encounters against powerless foes that require no greater strategy to defeat than hitting the A Button 4 times, Earthbound and Mother 3 save you the boredom of fighting enemies that no longer pose any sort of threat (and usually reward no significant experience any longer). This also saves you a bit of time that you can devote to something slightly more important (which would basically be just about anything you could possibly think of to do) than beating on underpowered EXP fodder. How much time, I’m not really sure, but even if it doesn’t add up to much altogether, it at least SEEMS like the system’s saving you a lot of time, probably because of how annoying that time would have been to spend going through the round of combat. Even someone who actually enjoys turn-based RPG menu battles (definitely not me) would be crazy not to appreciate this--if your characters are strong enough to kill the enemy party without once taking a hit, then whatever supposedly enjoyable challenge of the enemy encounter isn’t there to begin with. How long can even the greatest fan of RPG gameplay maintain his enthusiasm with a screen change, introductory line of text, 4 button presses, and the words “You Win!”? That’s really all that these auto-kill encounters would amount to. You get more variety in repetitive motions from a job on an assembly line. And the added bonus that you don’t even have to put up with auto-killable enemies trying to bother you is another time-saving convenience. And for those who want the free experience, the enemies don’t run all that fast, so it’s easy to still catch up and auto-kill them, so there’s really no downside.

Earthbound was, to my knowledge, the first RPG to come up with this auto-kill encounter idea.* What annoys me greatly is that almost none of the hundreds of menu combat RPGs to come from Japan since then have bothered to take advantage of this excellent and yet remarkably simple idea. And certainly those few that have a similar system in place don’t do it as well. The Mario and Luigi games, for example, allow an automatic hit against enemies that Mario or Luigi jumps on in the field, so any enemy weak enough to be killed with a single hit essentially becomes an auto-kill. Very handy, and I much appreciate it--but it still lacks compared to the Mother series, since you still have to go into the battle screen to see it happen, which is still repetitive, and not much more convenient than just going through the battle normally.

Now, I do realize that the auto-kill only really works in this form when you’ve got a game where you see enemies on the field, and battles happen when they touch you. But it seems to me that the system wouldn’t require a whole lot of ingenuity to adapt to random encounters, too. Just have a message come up (like a scrolling ticker or something, not one that interrupts your control) that announces an auto-kill battle victory and lists the spoils. To avoid people taking advantage of this by just running around in circles for an hour racking up the experience points and cash, auto-kill encounters could only give out a fraction of the experience points and money of regular encounters. And to avoid people getting butthurt about being forced to take lesser rewards after a point when they’re level-grinding, there could be an option in the game that allowed the auto-kill system to be turned on and off. See? Not difficult. Hell, some RPGs, like the Suikoden series, already automatically adjust how much experience points characters receive from battles depending on the levels of the characters and the levels of the enemies, so they would employ this idea even more easily. Imagine the hours--DAYS--of an RPG fan’s life that could be saved if every menu-based RPG had an auto-kill feature for all those many low-level enemy encounters one comes upon when revisiting dungeons from earlier in the game. If even half of the menu-combat RPGs I’ve played since Earthbound’s release had such a system, they probably would have, by now, saved me over a week’s worth of time, at least. Think of all the extra gaming I could get in, the TV shows I could watch, the rants I could avoid writing with that extra time!

Yeah, okay, obviously I waste my free time anyway, but even my meaningless hobbies are better ways to while away hours than thousands of mindlessly repetitive enemy encounters. For the love of God, RPG makers of the world, please take a page from the Mother series on this one.













* It should be noted that the Fire Emblem series has had something somewhat similar for just as long if not longer, though. With at least most (possibly all, I’m not sure) FE games, you can turn off battle animations, essentially meaning that when one unit attacks another, you just see the little field units move against each other while their hit points lessen accordingly, instead of going into the longer battle visuals of how the fight takes place. Since it just reduces the time and scope of the conflict whether or not it’s a one-hit-kill scenario and rather than skipping the battle altogether, it’s not really the same as Earthbound’s auto-kill system. But I thought I should mention it so any Fire Emblem fan who one day manages to stumble onto this blog doesn’t yell at me for claiming Earthbound was the first to do anything like this.

Final Fantasy 10 AMV: Monster

Well! It’s been a good while since I encountered an RPG Anime Music Video good enough that it deserves an entire rant by itself. The last one was over a year ago, in fact. Quality’s a hard thing to come by sometimes. Luckily, the long gaps are balanced out by the greatness of the quality works when they do finally come along.

Today we have an AMV made by YuniX2, the first FF10 AMV to get its own spotlight here. With a warning that there will be major spoilers both in the video and the rant, let’s dig right in.


Final Fantasy 10: Monster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMTfbceGNOo


For the Last Time Zoidberg, Look with Your Eyes, Not Your Claws!: The visuals’ quality here is basically as good as if you were watching the game itself (so long as you’re watching this in the highest available Youtube quality). The game’s visuals in general are very good, and even the actual in-game clips have good visual quality and definition, so it looks fine.

The visual artistry* here is nothing major, but YuniX2 does use some tricks that rather nicely add emphasis to the video. As she has told me, she tried to make good use of transitions, make them interesting, and I’d say she definitely succeeds on that point. Aside from effective use of fading one scene into the next, there are some really good moments of transition in this, such as the one at 0:16. The transition here blurs the first scene into the second, making it seem watery, like ripples disrupting a reflected image. This is an effective transition to use because the scene it’s going into IS water, while the lyrics are speaking of water. Not just that, but specifically they’re speaking of something previously solid that has become like water, which is sort of what the scene change shows--a scene of reasonably solid things liquefying into a scene of the sea below surface. That right there is a case of using special effects to create some great synergy. And the visual artistry is present until right up to the end, too, showing up in a great way at 2:49 to 2:55, where a collection of scenes of sadness, what’s been lost, pain, and destruction all flash in succession and then zoom out in a cool fiery effect into the evil Yu Yevon spirit that’s caused them all. Just as good as the water transition at the beginning of the AMV, I’d say, possibly better. There’s all kinds of cinematography bells and whistles here and there in the video like that. They’re employed when they’re called for without being excessive, quick and attention-grabbing without being distracting, and they coordinate well with the current pitch and emotion of the song. You can see the creator’s hand in the video helping bring it all together, but not being overbearing.

An interesting thing I would like to note about this AMV is that a significant number of the scenes it uses are regular game scenes, not from its FMV stock. This is something I really wish more AMV creators would attempt, at least with games in the same or a greater visual league as FF10. The fact of the matter is, every RPG has got limited FMV. You watch 5 AMVs of any given Japanese RPG, and you’ll have most likely seen every CG cutscene the game has to offer at least once, and most of them you’ll probably have seen at least 4 times. There is only so much content a game’s FMVs can offer. Even with a game like Xenosaga 3, which boasted 8 hours total of FMV, every scene quickly becomes very familiar to a regular AMV viewer. Taking visual content from the regular gameplay to supplement the FMV video is great for the viewer, because we’re going to get to see something new and different for a music video, and it’s great for the one making it, because it’s giving the creator many, many more scenes to work with, more options for exploring the music and the ideas the video is meant to convey. And that’s exactly what’s happened here--the non-FMV scenes allow YuniX2 to fully develop her ideas for this AMV, capturing the music’s lyrics and mood far better because the scenes are better suited to do so than the limited number of FMV scenes. I daresay that this music video wouldn’t just be worse without these non-cinematic scenes, it wouldn’t exist to begin with. Good on YuniX2 for taking a step beyond convention in order to do her project right.

Your Music’s Bad and You Should Feel Bad!: This AMV uses the song Monster, by Paramore. Can’t say I have any strong feelings on the song one way or another. Don’t really like it, but I don’t really think it’s bad, either. It sure works great here, though.

So basically, this AMV is, in terms of its musical component, as excellently orchestrated as the Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 AMV I talked about a while back, Sera’s Holding Out for a Hero. The tune itself is followed and emphasized more or less perfectly from start to finish, starting as early as 0:10 (where Yuna begins to fall just as the music begins to drop to set up the first lyrics) and just going through to the end of the video. When the music becomes powerful and erratic at 0:35, so do the video’s images, just as the scenes become more slow and thoughtful at 0:58, when the music returns to a somewhat more tranquil pace. It goes this way for the whole video, with YuniX2 expertly following the music’s twists and turns, accelerations and descents, covering the full emotional gamut that the song offers through the visuals that FF10 can provide.

Of course, just as impressive as the video’s meshing with the actual music of the song is its synchronizing with the song’s lyrics. The video is paired well to the words of the music, very often mirroring the ideas and key words conveyed by the singer, such as at 0:18, when, while the lyrics talk of water and drowning, several of FF10’s many underwater images play, or the parts of the song where the singer talks of wondering, with the clips showing a character looking thoughtful, curious, or apprehensive (0:50 and 2:40 are good examples of this). There’s even a bit at 0:29 when the clips of Yuna appear to be lip-synching to the song, which is amusing, and done surprisingly well.

More than these instances where the lyrics are shown in a literal fashion, I’m impressed with how often meaning and knowledge of the game comes into play with coordinating with the song. This isn’t just an appropriation of visually-fitting scenes to work with the song--this is using the heart of the game’s content to resonate with the music. A lot of scenes work on a symbolic level more than a literal one. You take a moment early on, at 0:12, when the singer talks of someone who was her conscience, and the scene shown is of the Grand Maester Mika surrounded by practitioners of the Teachings of Yevon religion. Mika is the highest authority of the faith, and it was the Teachings of Yevon that orchestrated the cycle of Summoners’ Pilgrimages in Spira. It’s primarily the dogma of Yevon that provides moral guidance to Spirans, particularly to Summoners like Yuna, so in essence, Grand Maester Mika is a very effective symbol of something that was, early on, Yuna’s conscience. If you’re not looking any deeper than surface-level, that scene in the AMV might not seem to fit, but a little understanding of the game and simple thoughtful interpretation makes that moment in the video excellent. And it’s far from the only one. The chorus talking about stopping the whole world from turning into a monster, for example, ingeniously shows scenes of Sin and Anima. Now, in the literal sense, this works, since they’re both obviously monsters, but it works on a much deeper level superbly. Sin is a recurring monster of Spira that is destroyed by the sacrificial act of the Summoner, but this “destruction” is more a transfer--one of the Summoner’s companions is used to destroy Sin, but that person then, after a period during which the world has a break from Sin’s destruction, becomes Sin him or herself. Thus you have the “turning into a monster” bit of the song covered. Anima also works, because Anima is an Aeon (FF10 version of Summoned Monster) created by Seymour’s mother, who died to become an Aeon with the intention of being the Sin-destroying and then Sin-becoming sacrifice--again, “turning into a monster.” This stuff is just peppered through the AMV. The part at 1:19 when the song talks of not being a villain despite another’s accusations, being put to a scene of Yuna’s trial before the Maesters, 2:18 when Seymour transforms into his RPG True Villain Form to taunts that he’s “going to lose it,” and especially the part from 2:49 to 2:55 that I mentioned above, the one that shows scenes depicting the sadness, loss, pain, and destruction of Spira caused by Sin, which culminates with another pledge by the chorus to stop the world from turning into a monster just as Yu Yevon is shown...these are just some of the great examples of this deeper level of video-lyric coordination.

Guy, You Explain: With some great AMVs, the visual component, the game’s scenes, are clearly the most important and compelling aspect of the video, that which the AMV ultimately is centered around and created for. This was the case with the Final Fantasy 9 Porcelain AMV I ranted about a while back, I think. The music was a wonderful way to emphasize the visuals of Final Fantasy 9, conveying the beauty and majesty of the game. With some other great AMVs, the music is end-all be-all of the video, with the visual aspects, the game’s content, being more there to expertly support and embellish the music and the lyrics. Such was the case with the Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 AMV, Sera’s Holding Out for a Hero, which flawlessly employed the game’s footage to show and support the song. But this AMV is more than that--this is one of those rarest of AMVs, one where everything comes together as a whole in equal parts, to convey a story, theme, message, or simple idea that unifies both the song and the game’s content together in total harmony.

The purpose of this video is to tell the story of Yuna. This AMV links the personal journey and character of Yuna to the ideas that the music sings about, and...well, I was going to say that it melds them together, but that doesn’t seem right, because it implies that they weren’t one and the same to begin with. YuniX2’s combination of Monster and Yuna feels more like recognizing a duality than creating it. If you look at the lyrics,** and think about how Yuna would fit into them, the connection between them practically writes itself. Through this song, YuniX2 tells of Yuna’s rejection of the lies of the Teachings of Yevon and their denouncing her, of Yuna’s emotional fall, from which she is picked up by Tidus’s love and support, of her hearing the true wishes of the Fayth to break this cycle of sacrifice, of her standing against Seymour’s machinations, and most importantly, of her resolve to save the people of the world from the vicious sacrifices of Sin’s death and rebirth and of the fact that it’s only after those who fought for and against a better world (Auron, Seymour, the Maesters, and Tidus) that the world can theirs. It’s all there in the song, really, but it takes the skillful touch of the AMV maker to bring out this meaning, these ideas, this story, through game scenes that emphasize and remind us of the truth that Yuna is embodied by this song. The potential is there, and YuniX2 works that potential to its absolute fullest.

This music video is absolutely fantastic. This AMV puts to music a summary of half the awesome ideas, themes, and story components that I love about FF10, and it does so with meaning and skill. This AMV is a real treat to watch, and I really hope that if you do check it out and enjoy it (which I assume, this being the end of the rant, that you have, if you’re reading this), you’ll give the video a Like, and leave a comment about it, because this level of quality deserves recognition.













* I’d like to remind the reader once again, as it’s been a while since the last AMV rant, that my understanding of technical terms for cinematography and such is extremely lacking, so you’ll hopefully forgive me and bear with me if I name something incorrectly here.

** I didn’t want to post’em in the middle of the actual rant, but if you’re wondering, these are the lyrics:

“You were my conscience
So solid, now you're like water
And we started drowning
Not like we'd sink any farther
But I let my heart go
It's somewhere down at the bottom
But I'll get a new one
And come back for the hope that you've stolen

I'll stop the whole world, I'll stop the whole world
From turning into a monster, eating us alive
Don't you ever wonder how we survive?
Well, now that you're gone, the world is ours

I'm only human
I've got a skeleton in me
But I'm not the villain
Despite what you're always preaching
Call me a traitor
I'm just collecting your victims
And they're getting stronger
I hear them calling
(Calling, calling)

I'll stop the whole world, I'll stop the whole world
From turning into a monster, eating us alive
Don't you ever wonder how we survive?
Well, now that you're gone, the world is ours

Well, you thought of strength and solutions
But I like the tension
And not always knowing the answers
But you're gonna lose it
You're gonna lose it

I'll stop the whole world, I'll stop the whole world
From turning into a monster, eating us alive
Don't you ever wonder how we survive?
Well, now that you're gone the world

I'll stop the whole world, I'll stop the whole world
From turning into a monster, eating us alive
Don't you ever wonder how we survive?
Well, now that you're gone, the world is ours”

Y'know, looking at them all together, I'm not actually sure what the hell this song is supposed to be saying when not applied to Yuna.

Chrono Trigger

Have you noticed that my rants just keep getting longer and longer, on average? I have. I wonder if it annoys you as much as it annoys me.

Anyways!

Chrono Trigger is, to me, The RPG. The now and forever. I had enjoyed RPGs up until I played CT, but this game is the one that got me obsessively hooked on the genre for life. In many ways it’s the standard against which I measure the worth of all RPGs. In many ways it’s forever my favorite game. It took somewhere around a decade before I played a better RPG than Chrono Trigger (it was Suikoden 2), and it was only with the greatest reluctance that I admitted to myself that the game could be surpassed.

But WHY was it so good? What parts of it were so good? What made CT such an experience? These are questions I’ve considered for a while. It’s hard, after all, to separate true value from the value our nostalgia and childhood impressions give to the things we loved in our youth. It’s also difficult to extract and organize all the good qualities of a game which blended so expertly so many different positive aspects. But after some contemplation, and the occasional moronic accusation from individuals with poor taste that CT wasn’t actually very good and it’s just nostalgia-goggles that make me think it was, I think I’m about ready to really explain just why Chrono Trigger is such a great RPG.

This one is for you, Trippy.


Time Travel

I think I’ve said this before, but when you use it effectively, time travel makes for a really cool storytelling device in an RPG. Sadly it’s NOT always used effectively, and you can easily get games where it’s almost irrelevant to the storytelling process (Star Ocean 1, Dark Cloud 2), where it comes out of the blue and doesn’t seem to mesh very well with the rest of it (Final Fantasy 9, Valkyrie Profile 2), and games where it’s tossed carelessly around and makes no damn sense (Robotrek, Final Fantasy 8). But when it’s done well, time travel really allows for some great potential in storytelling. For example, The Magic of Scheherazade and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask both have some pretty neat ideas using the concept, and Radiant Historia’s plot based on time travel is, simply put, great.

Chrono Trigger does time travel well. Quite well. I’m not going to say it explores the potential of time travel as well as Radiant Historia does, and of course it raises the idea of paradoxes like most time travel stories must, but overall, the hops between past, present, and future in CT are interesting, and allow for a creative story that not only shows an adventure across time to save a world’s future, combining robots and dinosaurs, medieval knights and high-tech sorcery, but also shows the history of a planet, which by itself becomes fairly interesting once you start seeing its forgotten ages and historical misconceptions. And the time travel is always present--going from one period to the next is a frequent necessity, as tracking down the best way and time to save the world of Chrono Trigger is a clue-driven hunt across the ages. There’s never a time you forget you’re time-traveling in this game, which, VERY strangely to me, is often a problem with time-travel RPGs--Star Ocean 1 and Tales of Phantasia, as examples, are games where the long stretches of gameplay in a single time period makes you forget that the characters aren’t supposed to be in this time period to begin with.

In addition, when you got to a new time period, the game really sells it, which, also surprisingly to me, doesn’t always happen with games using time travel. Tales of Phantasia’s events, for example, occur in the past, present, and future of a single world, but you’d barely know the difference between one time period and the next if the plot didn’t tell you. What’s the point of having one’s characters go to different periods in their world’s history if those periods are all highly similar? With Chrono Trigger, you go to the past, you KNOW you’re in a very different time, because there’s dinosaurs and cave people running through the jungle. You go from there to a different period in the past, and the frozen planet with a sky-based magical empire hovering over it tells you that you ain’t in Kansas any more. And the future? Few post-apocalyptic futures I’ve seen are quite as...well, post-apocalyptic as Chrono Trigger’s. You see the post apocalypse of a lot of movies, shows, games, etc, and, well, things look bad, yeah. The world’s been socked a good one. But you walk around in 2300 AD of Chrono Trigger, and you see a world that has been ruined.

I’d like to also note that the game’s handling of time travel in this is somewhat unique as it’s hard to determine where it’s grounded--science, magic, or the spiritual? Machines like the Gate Key and the Epoch are used to open the holes in time, making it science fiction, and yet, the time gates seem to be a result of incredibly powerful magics having reactions so powerful that time’s fabric is torn, as shown by the first gate appearing from a reaction to the magic pendant, or Lavos’s powerful presence causing the one at Magus’s summoning ceremony. And yet! There is a deliberate sprinkling of the spiritual in there, as well--the CT party theorizes one evening that the true origin of these time portals comes from a regretful deity-like Entity, looking back in sorrow at the world’s history, and through its regret causing the time gates that allow for history to be changed for the better. Sounds like hogwash, I suppose, but then the theory is born out to a certain extent by the inexplicable, single-use gate that takes Lucca back to the moment of her life she regrets the most, giving her an opportunity to put it right--time travel by sheer will of the spirit, it seems, or perhaps the mercy of this Entity, which is still spiritual. And the time freeze performed to save Crono, arguably the most important act of time-warping in the entire game, seems as rooted in spirit (requiring the intense desire of his friends to return him to life) as it is in magic (requiring a magically-created clone)* or science (the Chrono Trigger device itself). Chrono Trigger has a level of ambiguity to its time travel’s basis, which is fairly unique, and quite interesting.

TL;DR Version: Chrono Trigger’s use of time travel was really cool.


The Plot

Ultimately, Chrono Trigger’s plot is somewhat conventional: the smaller, personal events of the main characters eventually rope them into a quest to save the world from a huge, super powerful enemy. At its foundation, it’s not incredibly different or creative.

But you know, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s all in the execution. There’s nothing wrong with a conventional idea if you execute it really well. And like I always do when I say this, I bring up the example of Grandia 2, the top game on my Best RPGs list. Grandia 2 is a game built on plot cliches and driven by cliche character archetypes, but it’s amazingly deep, engaging, and invokes tremendous emotional response, because its writers take common ideas, and use them with extraordinary skill to tell a story that blows your socks off.

And the same is true (though not as strongly) with Chrono Trigger. The characters are engaging, the plot twists are often very unexpected (more on that below), and the creative way the game’s conventional goals are pursued keeps you engrossed in it. The accidental way Crono and company find out about the main bad guy Lavos, the ways they try to get rid of Lavos to avoid direct confrontation with him, the way the characters and time periods are subtly linked as the adventure continues, finding a hidden, forgotten chapter in the planet’s history when a magical empire ruled the world and seeing its fall...there’s excitement and surprise all the way through. CT’s plot is simple, but it’s complex, and it’s standard, but unique.


The Cast

One of the most memorable parts of Chrono Trigger is its collection of characters, and there’s good reason for this--or rather, a few good reasons for this. Some games’ casts are very visually diverse and colorful, but ultimately have very few noteworthy traits or very little dedicated character development to set one character apart from the next. I noted that The Magic of Scheherazade, despite its many other good traits, suffered from this problem, and there are many other RPGs that also do, most notably Chrono Trigger’s own sequel, Chrono Cross.

That’s definitely not the case with CT, though. The characters’ personalities and development are as individualized as their physical appearances. The main characters are often tied very strongly to the events of the plot, allowing the story itself to develop the cast members. There are comparatively few parts of the game where the plot’s course and events do not have strong personal importance to at least one character, and this cohesion between the most important elements of RPG storytelling keeps the characters in focus, as they should be, and makes the plot seem constantly relevant to the cast, which is also important. Too often, RPG plots go through long stretches (sometimes almost the length of the entire game) without really involving the game’s characters past minimal necessity, and as a result you don’t feel as strong a connection to those characters, because their characterization only occurs at short moments, ones that are often more aside from the story than a part of it. Not so with Chrono Trigger, not by a long shot.

The game also takes enough time to go for character development in the small ways, too, which, I’ve found, can be just as important for establishing and endearing a character to the player as the major parts of that character’s development. What I mean by this is that Chrono Trigger has the individuals in the party interact with plot-important conversations (and even sometimes a few unimportant NPC text boxes) and react to events as they happen. This is a fairly common thing in RPGs, of course, but CT did it a little better than the norm, I think, really getting their cast involved with what was going on. And more importantly, when it was time for party members to speak, the characters themselves spoke--the text for the character would be tailored to suit that character’s personality and beliefs. When it was time for a party member to weigh in on something, it wasn’t just a single reaction/line of dialogue that wouldn’t really change regardless of who spoke it, like the later Chrono Cross and its stupid translation system would do, it was THAT person’s reaction to the situation. Even for the many occasions that called for uniform reaction (such as the entire party expressing surprise at something), each character still expresses the thought in their own words. It’s a small thing, I know, but y’know, it may be the major things that develop a character the most in a game, but it’s often the small stuff that really tell you who the character is, and make them memorable to you. For example, the Tales of the Abyss cast would be half as fleshed out and memorable without the constant conversation skits the game provides--those little, optional, and seemingly unimportant talks did wonders to solidify the characters in the player’s mind. Same thing here. And while this idea wasn’t unknown to RPGs by any means by Chrono Trigger’s time, CT still did more with it than was the norm, and thus provided their characters with constant growth and personality confirmation.

And hey, I might want to mention that these characters that were developed so well are, indeed, good and likeable characters. Lucca plays the Team Scientist and Protagonist’s BFF roles remarkably well--she’s obviously very into the scientific aspects of all they do, and does all the requisite sciencing-around (making new devices, explaining some of the weird shit going on, etc), but never falls into the trap that so many other RPG Team Scientists do of being TOO obsessive about it (example: Lexis in the unspeakably horrible Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals remake)--it’s not the ONLY thing going on with her, she’s not just about the one thing. And even better, Lucca very believably portrays a female best friend to Chrono, hitting on a perfect mix of deep affection and intimate familiarity without ever giving the impression of romantic interest (I feel that’s a major problem with characters in stories who are best friends of opposite genders--it always seems like writers feel there HAS to be underlying romantic tensions between them or something). And I like Lucca’s down-to-Earth attitude; she comes off as a very normal person overall, someone you can imagine having as a friend yourself. Marle is surprising to me for how non-annoying she is--she’s basically the Team Cheerleader and Rambunctious Princess, but while she clearly provides moral support for her teammates and yells about not wanting to be defined by her princess-ness, she’s never actually been annoying to me, though those roles usually bug me a little bit. But while Marle’s cheerful and simple, she’s not vapid or brainless, and her pure, good, and helpful nature is actually something of a motivating force for the team. When the team learns of the impending destruction of their world, it’s Marle who, after collapsing from the sheer horror of the situation, first recovers, picks herself up, and proclaims that they need to stop it, to save their world--she even beats protagonist Crono to the punch there. As much as any physical effort the party makes, it’s Marle’s unyielding energy, morality, and faith that a situation can be bettered that gets the party through its journey. Frog is noble and tragic, and seeing him grow past his history is great. And Robo’s search for purpose, and finding it in his friends, is great, as well (though I do think they could have done more with him on that). I suppose Ayla, Crono, and Magus are the low points in the cast--Ayla’s and Magus’s character development are comparatively short and not incredibly compelling, and Crono’s a Silent Protagonist (man do I hate those). But Ayla and Magus are certainly not bad characters, and between Ayla’s amusing comic relief and Magus’s coolness (he’s basically the original RPG badass), they’ve got plenty of appeal. And I have to admit, Crono’s just expressive enough in his actions and reactions that his silence isn’t all that bad, and doesn’t actually detract from the storytelling process.

I will admit, once you get past the main cast, the characters of Chrono Trigger aren’t as interesting. Oh, sure, there are plenty of decent NPCs related to the plot, such as Cyrus, the Gurus, and Schala, but overall, you don’t encounter many that make any strong impact. They mostly just do what they need to for the story and main characters, and that’s it. But when you have a strong set of main characters, as Chrono Trigger does, I suppose that’s really all you NEED NPCs to do. It’s great when you can get a really compelling non-party character, like, say, Joker from the Mass Effect series, or Irving from Wild Arms 2, but as long as the main cast is pulling its weight, nothing will seem noticeably missing, so CT is fine.

As far as villains go, Chrono Trigger is interesting because it’s lacking, but it knows this and takes steps to fix this. The main villain of CT is Lavos, who is only ever encountered a couple times in the entire game, and is an RPG Giant Apocalyptic Monster villain, so there’s no character depth or ability to reflect and through that reflection develop the protagonist with Lavos. In addition, a villain’s rarely having an actual physical presence usually means that a plot is going to suffer from it. The game solves this by having each major arc of the story have a smaller villain whose machinations involve the party and player strongly enough that Lavos’s absence goes unnoticed as we’re caught up with current events. But at the same time, Lavos is never forgotten (which would be just as bad as his presence being missed, since it would lessen his overall dramatic power), as the need to oppose each smaller villain always has its relevance to ultimately stopping Lavos explained. In addition, each of these smaller villains of importance (Magus, Azala, and Zeal--there are others, but they’re more side villains and lackeys, and aren’t really the head of any major story arcs) winds up having significant relevance to Lavos and the role Lavos plays in the course of the planet’s history. This way, Lavos can stay out of the limelight, but is never absent.

I’d also like to note that as a villain, Lavos is about as interesting as he reasonably could be. Big, catastrophe-style villain monsters in RPGs aren’t usually afforded an opportunity for character development (and if Grandia 3’s lame main villain was any indication, maybe they shouldn’t be), but Lavos is, at least, pretty unique. I already went over what I like about Lavos in my Greatest Villains List, so I’ll just let you check that out if you’re interested in the details, and paraphrase here--Lavos is a city-sized alien planet-parasite that seems to feed on the forces of evolution over the course of millions of years which eventually (perhaps at a point where evolution seems to be slowing down without outside influence?) surfaces and rains destruction on the planet. Can’t tell me that’s not fairly cool and unique.


Music

Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack is absolutely fantastic, twice over. The first way it’s great is, of course, obvious. It sounds terrific! There are many wonderful tunes in Chrono Trigger that are just great to listen to. The song that plays when battling Magus is a terrific tune for an epic struggle. The world map music for 1000 AD is lovely, quiet and sweet. And the music associated with forest areas? I’ve heard few more hauntingly beautiful backgrounds.

The other way, and perhaps more important way, that CT’s soundtrack is great is how well it works with the game to set a mood, to portray through sound the feeling of events and places. Of course most RPG music is meant first and foremost to set the mood of the situations and dungeons and such that it plays for, and I’d actually say that most of it succeeds in adequately doing this. But CT’s music is a step above. The desolate music that plays on the world map of the post-apocalyptic 2300 AD is perfect for setting the tone of a ruined world. The simple, throbbing rhythms of locations in the prehistoric age convey the primitive energy of a simple, savage world where humankind is only just beginning its forays into culture (not to mention that the simplistic nature of the music rather neatly reflects the idea of a time before there really would be anything more to music than just that). And then there’s the sinister, quiet background of Magus’s castle which, more than anything else there, gives the dark fortress an epically creepy personality. Chrono Trigger’s music will, more often than not, do more than its part to communicate the atmosphere and emotion of each place and scene of the adventure, and give the game real personality.


Presentation

I really enjoy the general presentation Chrono Trigger gives. In general, the game has a lot of energy and zeal to it, with action, excitement, and a can-do attitude to its cast that carry you along and keep you interested. But at the same time, it doesn’t lack for a quieter side, a darker side, a spiritual side, and an emotional side. The world after Lavos’s day of destruction, the events of the Ocean Palace, they throw a strongly sobering effect into the mix, just as the personal issues of the cast, the plight of Scala, and the effort to save Crono integrate poignant feeling into the narrative. The talk of the Entity and the magnitude of Crono’s resurrection add the touch of the spiritual to the mix, as does the Game Over Ending’s somber final message, telling us that, despite the best efforts of the game’s heroes, “the future refused to change,” which serves to remind the player of what a monumental and grand task this truly is--a quest to change destiny itself. There’s little more to say here, really--CT is a very enjoyable mix of the bright energy of adventure and the soft layers of drama, and few games feel as natural in their own skin as this one. If that makes any sense.


Plot Twists

There were some surprisingly good and original plot twists and unexpected occurrences in Chrono Trigger. I find that the twists of CT’s story can seem to come out of nowhere, but rarely feel like they’re being forced, which is a problem with a lot of story twists I’ve seen--it often seems like the writer/writers is/are trying too hard to surprise in games, shows, movies, books, and so on. With CT, it’s unexpected, but natural.

Take the trial, for instance. Now, I have to say, I don’t think ANY player expected Crono to be arrested and put on trial when he brought Princess Nadia back to her home after their initial time-travel adventure at the beginning of the game. The mindset of RPGs in regards to returning lost royalty, politicians, and other important persons to their home is a lot like the mindset of returning a book to the library--walk in, give it over to the nearest person of authority, and that’s done with. Hell, if an RPG castle set up an after-hours Princess Return Slot over to the side of the main gates, I’m pretty sure most adventurers wouldn’t think twice about just dumping their rescued damsels in it and taking off. But in Chrono Trigger, the guy bringing the recently vanished princess back is actually detained, and required to prove that he didn’t kidnap her to begin with. Totally unexpected in an RPG, but it feels natural, because, hey, it’s kind of similar to how that sort of scenario would actually go down. There SHOULDN’T be a no-consequences drop-off of missing royalty, and there SHOULD be some suspicion cast on the guy who just happened to stroll in unannounced with her days after she’s vanished. Granted it all gets a little out of control for Crono after that, but that’s beside the point. It’s a cool twist.

The more important plot points tend to also have some pretty great twists. For example, who can forget the shock of first seeing the Kingdom of Zeal? Out of nowhere, the game throws the party headfirst into a secret era of their planet’s history when there was a highly advanced magical civilization. It comes out of nowhere! Now let’s face it, Ancient Advanced Civilizations are about as common in RPGs as, say, swords, but how many of them are as surprising as Zeal? I mean, every other time an RPG has ancient cultures that tie relevantly into the plot, those things are completely out in the open and well-established as being a huge part of the planet’s history and the story of the game’s current events. With Zeal, though, the game has, to my recollection, only ONCE ever referenced it before, and that was just a casual, cryptic, vague reference by Spekkio that a long while back everyone had magical powers. This entire age of magical advanced super-society is a complete blank spot in the world’s history, and that, to me, is one hell of a twist. And again, it’s a logic-supported plot twist, as the fall of Zeal that the main party witnesses explains why this piece of history, though a hugely essential part of the past and relating greatly to Lavos, is unknown in any time period in the future. It’s not just a twist for the hell of it, it fits in with everything else.

And oh, yeah, how about that plot twist where the main character dies? There’s an idea that I don’t think many people saw coming. Not a whole lot of games try that one, and even if they did, I doubt they could maintain narrative cohesion and make it seem as natural as CT does.

So yeah. In the end, Chrono Trigger has a heck of a lot of plot twists that are fresh, unique, and unexpected, even 20 years of game storytelling later, and its writers had the skill and instinct to make the twists fit into the plot and seem natural.


The Minor Details

It’s of lesser importance, but I’d nonetheless like to note that the more trivial aspects of Chrono Trigger are solid, as well. The battle system is simple but effective, and I daresay a little less non-fun than most of its turn-based peers. The graphics, for the time, were very impressive, and even if they’re as dated as any other 16-bit game, it’s still quite easy to see and understand everything you need to from the visuals--far more so than with most other RPGs of the era, for that matter. And the special effects are pretty decent, all things considered--there are a lot of different spells and attacks in the game, and they’re often impressively flashy considering how simplistic they are. Lastly, the controls are generally smooth--not Nintendo-level, but more than functional.


Innovative Quirks

The creativity and skill behind Chrono Trigger really shows in its many quirks. The most obvious of these innovations, of course, regard the endings and replay value. While variations in endings were not a completely new concept by Chrono Trigger’s time, CT was, I’m pretty sure, the first RPG to have several clearly defined endings, and it was definitely the first to have a bunch of extra alternate endings ranging from jokes to alternate realities, which could be seen by beating the final boss at various different points in the game. That’s a heck of a neat little feature right there, particularly when one of the special extra endings has the player meet the game’s developers. Another related major innovative quirk was the New Game+ feature. I did a whole rant about what a good idea it was, so that’s another major point in its favor there.

But even beyond the big instances of RPG innovation that Chrono Trigger featured, the little details still make it a fun and unique ride. Moments like the trial, where your seemingly innocent actions in the beginning of the game can suddenly come back to haunt you (an RPG where there are repercussions for just taking an NPC’s lunch right before his eyes? Madness!), or what I can only assume is the first ever Game Over Ending, a sequence that actually plays out if you lose to the final boss that’s extensive and dramatic enough that it’s practically an ending in itself. And speaking of that, the presence of a Bad Ending (the one that plays if you beat the game without resurrecting Crono) is worth mentioning, too. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the first Bad Ending in RPG history--Breath of Fire 1, I remember, had a lesser ending, as well--but it certainly was impressive. There’s more emotion and player impact in CT’s Bad Ending than there is in the best possible ending of the vast majority of RPGs I’ve played!

And also, I really liked the moment in CT where the game actually provides an explanation for why party size is limited to 3 characters, instead of allowing for every character to participate in the adventure at the same time. I mean, come on, how cool is that, really? How many other RPGs even try to give a story-related reason for the seemingly arbitrary limit on party size? A few of them sometimes try a stalling explanation, but that usually falls through sooner or later (example: Final Fantasy 6--once you’ve got more than 4 characters in the party, the game attempts at first to explain that you need to split forces so that there’s at least a couple people guarding Narshe while your party’s running around on adventures, but eventually, once the party gains an airship HQ, the game just stops trying to explain why only 4 of them ever leave it at the same time). With Chrono Trigger, not only is it addressed (any more than 3 people going through a time portal at once will be sent to The End of Time instead of their destination--yes, I know that’s kind of a weak “Because...Magic!” explanation, but at least it’s THERE), but it’s actually worked into the course of the game’s events--the entire reason the party gains access to The End of Time and meets Gaspar (who is plot-relevant later) is because it tried to go forward with too many individuals at once. Yeah, I know it’s a very small thing, but that’s just it--it’s the little details and quirks throughout a game that really show when the game’s developers have gone the extra mile to provide a great product. The innovation in Chrono Trigger is constant, and it proves that the game’s great not just when it needs to be, but through and through.


So there you have it. In the end, Chrono Trigger succeeds wonderfully in every important category, and it introduced countless ideas, big and small, to the RPG genre, and with each one did so with streamlined skill that even today is rarely duplicated, let alone surpassed. This is the sort of game that stays with you for good, that wins your heart with its skill and imagination.














* Well, you can say that it might not be magically created, but the game does note that its creator is a magician, so it seems reasonable to assume magic has something to do with it.

Mass Effect 3's Diana Allers

I do love Mass Effect 3, so long as we pretend that the ending doesn’t exist. The game’s frankly pretty awesome, and filled to the brim with extremely epic and emotional moments. From start to...well, from start to 10-minutes-from-finish, it’s almost everything I could have wanted.

That said, the game has a number of flaws. The ramifications of certain major player choices from previous games aren’t represented as well as they should be (the Rachni Queen and how much use Cerberus got from the Collectors’ base, for example). There should have been more dedicated dialogues with squadmates on the Normandy. The photoshopped Tali picture thing. The marginal roles for half the major characters of ME2. The fact that, despite its amazing execution, the plot is, at its foundations, very weak (more on that in a later rant). A couple of the characters kind of suck (Ashley, James).

Probably the most disappointing for me is how poorly the love interests and romance subplots are handled--none of them get enough time and focus, several of them are bizarre (Liara doesn’t seem to remember whether or not she’s involved with Shepard early in the game, and Ashley fails to believably mix the “I totally love you Shepard” element with the “I’m incapable of believing you’re not Cerberus’s pawn, Shepard” angle that comprises the entirety of her lousy character development), and many of them are almost entirely ignored/forgotten (basically, if you romanced any ME2 character). But while the bad usage of romantic subplots is the thing most disappointing to me, it’s not the thing most ANNOYING to me. No, that would be Diana Allers.

Ye lords, Diana Allers. Where to begin with this repugnant character, who would be on my Most Annoying Characters list but for the fact that she’s sort of optional and plays a very minor part. I guess ultimately what is intolerably repugnant about this character is her voice acting. This is, in all seriousness, the very worst vocal performance I have ever heard in an RPG.

Think about that for a minute. Think about all the RPGs I’ve played (over 200 at this point). RPGs from the Playstation 1 era, when voice acting in video games was just starting and was notoriously terrible. RPGs from SquareEnix, who are very often a generation behind the curve in terms of voice acting. RPGs that used family and friends of the game’s staff for vocals rather than actual actors. RPGs where more or less the entirety of the voice work was grunts, gasps, and “Hey, listen!” The voice acting for Diana Allers is at the bottom of all of that.

It’s almost impossible to describe what’s wrong with it. The expression and inflection of every sentence is entirely off. The overall tone is amazingly terrible--it’s some kind of ungodly vocal chimera, a beast comprised of bored monotone, smug self-satisfaction, awkwardly forced mimicry of human emotion, and an inability to sound like part of a conversation instead of someone ponderously reading lines from a cue card. Words cannot do this voice work justice, so here, listen to this*:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_007p1z6w_o

Scary part? That’s one of her better scenes.

Of course, the fact that the rest of ME3’s vocal work generally ranges from Good to Totally Awesome doesn’t really help this problem, as the terrible vocal performance for Diana Allers is just made that much more apparent when you compare it to the ones put in for Anderson, or The Illusive Man, or Zaeed, or Thane, or Mordin, or Aria, or Kasumi, or Jack, or Wrex, or just about anyone, including NPCs. Even the actresses for Liara and Female Shepard, with the former having sounded for 3 games like she’s said every line while talking in her sleep and the latter having sounded for 3 games like she’s just got home after a 16 hour shift waiting tables at a family restaurant, are leaps and bounds above this. Every time Diana Allers says a line, my desire that I could shove her out an airlock, which is already pretty high just from looking at her, grows.

And yeah, that does bring us to the next part: looking at her. While not nearly so caustic to one’s senses as her unambitious script-reciting, the visual design of Diana Allers is...Jesus, it’s just awful. I’m usually one to take visual character designs with a grain of salt. I agree that female characters in RPGs are often horribly dressed for immoral and sexist reasons (and I’ve done a rant on the subject previously), but typically when I look at them as I play I ignore that aspect so I can concentrate on my perspective of them as a character. I think Tifa from Final Fantasy 7 is the best character in the game, not because of her idiotic outfit or ridiculous breast size, but for her dialogue, actions, background, and development through the game’s story.** But even I have trouble looking at Allers and not immediately wanting to send a mail bomb to Bioware headquarters. I mean, there’s ridiculous RPG female character exploitation, there’s ridiculous comic book female character exploitation, and then there’s THIS. What the hell is she wearing? She’s supposed to be a news show journalist. In what realm of imagination, even crazy sci-fi future fashion land, would she look appropriately dressed to host a news program? Especially when her program is supposed to be doing this huge, incredibly important field reporting of the famous Commander Shepard’s work during the biggest war the galaxy’s ever seen? If you can manage not to gag at her voice acting for long enough to learn anything about her character, you’ll pick up on the idea that Diana Allers is supposed to be a character who takes her journalism very seriously and wants to give the impression of professionalism and respect. You know what might help her just a little with that, Bioware? A FUCKING BRA.

My sole consolation with Bioware’s sexist attempt to pander here is that they failed by overdoing it. I mean, I can’t speak for anyone else (although, if what I’ve seen of the players who post on the Bioware forums is any indication, I do), but when I look at this character, my first thought isn’t “sexy.” It’s “mobile STD factory.”

A tiny additional annoyance with Diana Allers: the fact that her character isn’t even necessary to play the role she fills. While I do think that an on-ship reporter is a good idea for ME3 (one which should have had more use, for that matter; Allers only ever makes a couple of reports) and provides potential for further character development for Shepard and general plot exploration, Allers didn’t need to be the one doing it. The Mass Effect games already had an NPC reporter who had personally worked with Commander Shepard before, Emily Wong, whose personality and investigative focus would have fit the role of onboard reporter absolutely perfectly. We don’t even SEE her in ME3 (apparently Bioware wanted to kill her off-screen, for reasons unknown but probably having to do with writing incompetence), but we do get this irritation? What a lot of crap.

Actually, there’s ANOTHER Mass Effect series reporter that could have come onboard instead of Diana Allers, Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani. Granted, she’s an exceptionally annoying jerk herself, but at least with HER you actually are given the option to punch her in the face when she gets irritating. The chance to clock Diana is tragically never presented to the player.*** And even if that option were not present, she’d still be far preferable to Allers.

I should also note that the character of Diana Allers is pretty bland and empty, too. What little characterization we get for her (not that I’m complaining about less dialogue for her) boils down to, in its entirety, the fact that she’s a reporter and wants to report on things. Near the game’s end she has a momentary, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit of trite, unconvincing character development when her colony is, apparently, destroyed offscreen, but 30 seconds of terrible voice acting and a bland email message later, it’s like it never happened. So it’s not like I’m allowing the presentation of the character to cause me to overlook her worth as a character, or anything. She has none.

So yeah, we’ve got a visual fanservice machine with no depth and the vocal talent of a soggy donut hole who didn’t need to exist at all. That already qualifies Diana Allers as the second most painfully annoying and clearly half-assed aspect of Mass Effect 3.**** What could possibly make her worse?

The answer to that question is learning the background to the character, as I have. You see, Diana Allers is voiced by none other than Jessica Chobot. For those of you who don’t know who that is (I certainly didn’t until ME3), Ms. Chobot is a journalist for IGN, their star player. Jessica Chobot’s fame, it seems, doesn’t really come from her journalistic work, which isn’t that surprising, I suppose, considering that we’re talking about IGN, the Fox News of game journalism. She’s recognized by gamers more because apparently there was this one time she licked a Playstation Portable in a sexy way. Naturally, the ability to get to first base with a portable video game console made her an ideal choice for a role in Bioware’s eyes, as opposed to any other candidate who might, at some point, have actually learned to voice act.

So yeah. This incredibly dislikable character we’re saddled with isn’t even a poor artistic decision gone terribly wrong, like a regularly annoying character would be, or like Bioware would like to convince us the ending was (instead of just the franchise-disrespecting hack job it actually was). This is a fanservice gimmick, designed to boost Chobot’s career (apparently she hasn’t thought of necking with a 3DS yet, or being a reporter for a real journalism outfit) and surprise and titillate the subhuman gaming masses who actually pay attention to IGN.

I suspect the gimmick was also intended to give IGN a little extra incentive to give Mass Effect 3 a good review score, just in case EA’s bribe money wasn’t enough to buy them off, but that is, of course, nothing but speculation. Logical, sensible speculation describing an abundantly obvious reality.

I should clarify that I don’t really mean to attack Chobot personally on this...sort of. I mean, I do own up to attacking her above for A, making her name by sexist fanservice, and B, being on the IGN staff. But I don’t blame her for taking the job of voicing Diana Allers, nor for how bad her performance as such was. If someone from Bioware asked me to voice a character for a Mass Effect game, there’d be only one word passing my lips in response, and it wouldn’t be “no.” They wouldn’t have to pay me for it, even; just the idea of being a ME character would give me shivers of fanboy delight. And I’m sure that I, having no background whatsoever in voice acting or even just regular acting, would probably not do all that great a job, either. I’ve too much pride to imagine I’d have done as badly as Chobot, but doubtless my character would still be a low point in the game’s vocals. Point is, it isn’t HER fault she got tapped for this, and it mostly isn’t her fault she was so lousy at it.

The fault lies with the game’s creators. Their decision to force this meaningless fanservice into a game where it’s not appropriate. Their decision to make Diana Allers look like a Jersey Shore escapee for no good reason. Their decision to create this character instead of using a fan favorite NPC already available. Their decision not to devote any time or effort into making her into a good character. And their decision, after hearing Chobot’s recordings, to go forward with the idea, instead of doing a retake and coaching Ms. Chobot enough to get her to turn in a decent performance, or going with an actual voice actor. Bioware’s decision, Bioware’s fault, Bioware’s shame.

And, as I played the game, MY headache.










* I’d say “spoilers” here, but let’s face it, no one will ever see this normally--and if you DO ever make the choices during Mass Effect 3 that lead to a romance scene with Diana Allers, you are far too contemptible to warn, anyway.

** This works with the opposite gender, too. I don’t hold it against, for example, Kongol of Legend of Dragoon just because he’s wearing nothing but boots, belts, and a loincloth affixed with a giant skull over his junk. I still like his character, and think he had a lot of wasted potential. It’s just not as often a problem for male characters.

*** Bioware, if you’re looking for a quick DLC that people will pay for in droves, THIS IS IT. I predict that the “Shove Allers Out the Airlock” DLC package will break record sales.

**** First place being the ending. You know. Just in case you haven’t picked up on that from my constant harping on it for the last 5 months. I can’t help it. It’s atrocious.

Golden Sun 3's Former Heroes' Aging

So! You’ve got an intellectual property about magical world-saving that was at least moderately successful. You like money, and you want to make more of it. What’re you gonna do? Make a sequel, of course! But the last part of your series was released a good few years ago, and its story was seemingly fully concluded. How do you continue the series in a way that stays true to its origins so you can use the events and characters of your world to their fullest, but also in a fresh, new direction to draw the attention of a new audience?

Why, make the new story all about the children of the original story’s heroes, of course!

Yes, in Golden Sun 3, Nintendo makes the bold decision to follow in the footsteps of adolescent fanfiction writers and Disney direct-to-video sequels, and fills the roles of Protagonist and most of the major cast with the children of the main characters of Golden Sun 1 and 2. I could criticize this for being a pretty standard and cheap way to go about things, but I’m not really going to harp on it, for a couple reasons. First, this trope is, though certainly not foreign to the genre, actually a lot less common in RPG sequels than one could reasonably expect. Second, the entire primary cast of GS1 and 2 are all very bland and unremarkable characters anyway, so if a sequel’s gonna offer me a chance for a re-roll on character personalities, I’m all for it.* So normally, I’d just let this one pass, no need for a rant.

Except that this game does something with this lazy plot direction that nothing else does. In an astounding show of creativity and stupidity, GS3’s writers actually went out of their way to invalidate the entire premise of the Heroes’ Kids Take Over World Saving idea they went with. I was gonna give them a free pass on it, and they went and screwed it up. See, the reason from a writing perspective for starring the kids of the previous heroes I have gone into, but there’s really only one surface reason for passing the hero mantle on to the next generation: the previous generation is too old/too dead to keep up the do-gooding themselves. If the kids are going to be allowed to do the world-saving thing, the parents must be incapable of doing so themselves or else they, as the experienced warriors and ones presumably burdened with an instinctual need to keep their offspring safe, would be out vanquishing bad guys themselves.

Well, the heroes of Golden Sun 1 and 2 are not dead. And they haven’t all been captured or put into magical comas or anything. So the natural reason for them all to be minor side characters instead of the game’s stars is obvious, right? They’re too old now. GS3 takes place 30 years after GS1 and 2, after all, meaning these guys’d be in their mid-40s. In RPG terms, that’s 15 - 20 years too old (and at the same time 20 years too young; once you hit your mid-60s you become viable to fill the spot of Tough As Nails Geezer on a team) to be out adventuring. So no problem, right? Those strong, capable, sleek, experienced fighters of the past are now just a bunch of doughy, slovenly middle-aged chumps, right?

Yeah, not so much. See, according to Golden Sun 3, heroes of the previous games--all 8 of them--have barely aged at all since the end of Golden Sun 2, due to being at ground zero of the magical world-changing end event of GS2. This is a fact that the game takes care to mention more than once, and it’s obvious from looking at Isaac and Garret at the beginning of GS3, as they look like they’re in their late 20s, at oldest. And since you get to see them in action early in the game, while at the same time watch them try to teach their stupid kids the basics about battles and adventuring and such, you can’t even say that they’re too out of practice.

What in the world is Nintendo thinking here? If the heroes of the previous games are concretely established to be still physically fit and knowledgeable enough to be the ones leading the game’s adventure, then what the heck is the point of making the kids take over? Wouldn’t it make even a little more sense for at least a couple of all-powerful parents to join their kids in these world-saving ventures? At the very least, Isaac and Garret could have split forces at the beginning of the game, have one stay put to keep up their all-important plot business and have the other take a jaunt with some of the kids over to the next region or whatever to get the replacement glider machine thingy. That seems a lot more sensible than both parents just sending their sons off to do the errand alone and unsupervised, especially after all the concern the parents had about the kids’ ability to overcome the relatively minor ordeals that the game opens with. Maybe when Golden Sun 4 comes out and continues the story we’ll see the kids and hero parents team up, since the younger generation will then have some experience, but as it stands now, Golden Sun 3’s decision to clearly show the previous generation’s heroes as being more than physically fit to take up adventuring again is puzzling.













* Not that it did much good. Aside from Sveta, GS3’s characters are just as uninteresting as their predecessors, and even Sveta’s only barely noteworthy.

General RPGs' AMVs 5

I reckon y'all know the deal by now with these Anime Music Video rants. Watch these, and if you like'em, then vote'em up or leave a comment expressing your approval, because they often don't have enough recognition. Enjoy.



FALLOUT

Fallout Series: Never Again, by Joylock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1vUUflQos
The music used is Never Again, by Disturbed. Joylock is not a new name around this rant blog; twice before I've put up his Fallout AMVs in these General RPG AMV rants, and I also did a rant exclusively devoted to another of them. As far as Fallout AMVs go, everything he touches seems golden. This one, like all his others, impresses its audience not only by following the ideas, tone, and lyrics of the music with its visual component, but by analyzing the symbolic nature of the Fallout series, its spirit, expressing the nature of the games rather than just their surface elements. In fact, and it bruises my pride a bit to say this, I think Joylock may actually even be better than me at analyzing the depth of the Fallout series, because this entire AMV's premise focuses on an aspect of the series that I hadn't fully realized was there--the fact that the main antagonistic force of every major game to date (so long as you count Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas, which you honestly should, because they're utterly evil dickholes) has always been motivated by a need to, in one way or another, completely exterminate individual, cultural, and/or social diversity. That's a recurring element of the series that I hadn't even considered prior to this AMV, and considering that the series is all about portraying and examining American culture, a culture and country that has traditionally been a champion of individualism and self-determination, it's a very cool little pocket of symbolic depth to discover and mull over! At any rate, this AMV effectively showcases this recurring struggle against forced assimilation throughout the Fallout series both through the music (a song about standing against Nazis and all who would emulate them) and by using the Fallout editing programs for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas to recreate the cast and struggles of Fallout 1 and 2, letting the struggle the AMV shows be well-represented for all the games in which it occurred. The only real problems I have with this video are that Caesar's speech in the beginning is too quiet compared to the ones preceding it, Fallout 2's president doesn't get his speech added in with the other games' antagonists even though I'm pretty sure it had several appropriate lines, and the fact that too much of the video just consists of slow-motion scenes of 2 opposing forces fighting each other at point-blank range. Were it not for these flaws, I probably would have taken this AMV and done a full rant about it. Nevertheless, it's still VERY good.


FINAL FANTASY

Final Fantasy 8: Headlock, by ScaythedByNight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8aAl10n5Pg
The music used is Headlock, by Imogen Heap. There's not a lot to say about this one, really, it's just overall a significantly well-structured AMV. The scenes sync up well with the lyrics often enough, and most often coordinate quite well with the music itself, which is important with Headlock, since the song's strength lies almost entirely with the tune. This AMV causes me to once again be surprised at the way a good music video can make a lousy game seem so much better through the eyes of the AMV. This is just an overall good, solid video.

Final Fantasy 8: My Immortal, by xxFantasyDreamerxx: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkqFlrDmweE
The music used is My Immortal, by Evanescence. Oh for God's sake. I don't believe this. I figured last rant's Rinoa x Squall Celine Dion thing would be a one-time thing, but...sigh. Here we are, another FF8 AMV about Squall and Rinoa. Trust me, no one is more disappointed and angry with me than I am. But what can I do? This AMV is...it's just really good, alright? I hate FF8, I utterly abhor Rinoa and Squall, and the love story between them is so sickeningly meaningless, spontaneous, and dumb that it actually makes the game's plot look sensible by comparison, but...I can't deny that this AMV uses its song and video clips very effectively to paint the game and especially these 2 in a positive light. Just watch it and see for yourself; it's a solid piece of work.

Final Fantasy 10: Tidus's Story, by T0mb0ner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Y4rUSp3AM
The music used is Crawling in the Dark, by Hoobastank, a strong contender in any contest for Worst Band Names Ever. At times this AMV goes a little overboard with overlapping scenes on top of each other, but overall, everything syncs together very well, and is very enjoyable to watch.


THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

The Legend of Zelda Series: Kick Your A, by klab0010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa5j4aiDLTQ
The music used is Kick Your A, an Overclocked Remix by SGX for the game Beatmania 2DX 7th Style. This AMV is interesting in that it uses a fan-made remix for a video game as its music. It works well, though. This AMV's got some problems--there're some visual glitches here and there, and there are times when all the visual editing just gets convoluted and confusing. Nonetheless, it manages to live up to the cool and somewhat epic feel of the music it uses well, showing off The Legend of Zelda series in an engaging tribute.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Breath, by SpeikobraRote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td2P84yqiI8
The music used is Breath, by Breaking Benjamin. For being built on a ridiculous and stupid idea (romantically pairing Link and Ghirahim), this is...surprisingly good. I’ve seen literally hundreds of AMVs devoted to fan pairings, and given their usual level of terrible quality, I wouldn’t have thought one with a couple this absurd would do well (hell, romantic pairing AMVs rarely work when using a game’s ACTUAL coupling choices), but this one’s solid. The lyrics often coordinate well with what’s shown on the screen, the feel of the music works very well with the video component, and the relationship aspect of the AMV isn’t overplayed or shoved in your face--and it’s about as realistic as it can be, too, grounding itself well in animosity and antagonism. Have to admit it, this is a solid product.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Promise of a Lifetime, by 00peachy00: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVnAUvQL458
The song used is Promise of a Lifetime, by Kutless. This one’s a bit silly and sappy at times (not to mention it’s supporting a pairing only a little less odd than the AMV above), but overall, it’s pretty decent, coordinating the feel and events of the video well to the lyrics and tone of the song. It’s rather short and doesn’t use the entire song, but it’s cut well enough that this isn’t particularly noticeable. Not bad, not bad at all.


MASS EFFECT

Mass Effect 2: Tali Tribute, by Vendo233: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYewN3PWS8c
The music used is Time, from the Inception soundtrack. For some reason or another, Mass Effect 2 spawned few traditional AMVs, but a veritable horde of tribute videos, which in this case are basically background music playing over lines of dialogue and scenes which emphasize some character, quality, or emotional theme of the game. I've listed a few of these before here (in fact, one entry was a link to an individual's entire Youtube channel, who had made a good dozen or 2 of the things that were almost all quite good), and here's another notably worthwhile one. The use of dialogue by and referring to Tali, the selection of scenes, and the coordination with the Inception music is done really well here. I admit that this Inception track can make practically anything seem really great, but I nonetheless think this video takes good advantage of its tune and matches scenes and dialogue to its melody very well. Overall, this is a great portrayal of Tali, showing her character, her relationship with Shepard, and her identity as a member of her people. Check it out.


MY LITTLE PONY

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Ponysona 3, by loljailbait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeXawdTRogs
The music used is Burn My Dread, from the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 soundtrack. Okay, so...yeah. I covered my reasons for including a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic AMV in my RPG AMV list the last time I did this, so really, just go back there for the justification. Given how scarily industrious bronies are, I guess that it was a foregone conclusion that after someone made the Ponysona 4 AMV I showed you last time, someone was going to give the same treatment to SMT: Persona 3. Really, I should just copy-paste everything I said last time about Ponysona 4, because it's all pretty much exactly the same--this AMV is accurate to every detail of SMTP3's opening, clever and appropriate in its use of the My Little Pony elements, and basically just a completely perfect blend of the 2 extremely different elements of Ponies and Persona. The creator of this AMV has even helpfully made another video that shows both the AMV and the original SMTP3 opening running at the same time, which is great, because does my job for me in convincing you of just how exact and appropriate everything in this AMV is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP1hI2ZxNGs&feature=channel_video_title . Suffice to say, someone really did everything they could to make this an enjoyable crossover, and I think they succeeded very well.


SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3: Deathbed, by ellyros: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbSlzYjACXw
The music used is Deathbed, by Relient K. Under normal circumstances, I'm not sure this AMV would get on this list--it's decent, but there's plenty of times during its length where the video just seems like filler, and isn't really connected to the song at all. I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion that it wouldn't be on here, but I'd have to think about it. But, look at the length of this AMV. You aren't reading that wrong--this video is over 10 minutes long, and it's not from filler content or anything. This song actually takes about that long, and this AMV follows it through to its end. Quite frankly, the idea that there's actually 10 minutes' worth of FMV footage to use from SMTP3 is surprising to me to begin with (well, I guess there isn't, since some of the video is game footage, but that's just a small part, and feels more like the maker's personal aesthetic choice than anything), and the fact that this AMV manages to competently use the game's footage to connect to and tell the story of this song for so long is rather impressive. I mean, like I said, it's not perfect and there are plenty of parts where the connection kind of fizzles, but the meshing of visual and audio here works more often than it doesn't, and with a length like this, that still means that this video spends more time being a good combination of the game and the song than most AMVs do that are perfectly connected from start to finish.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 + 4: Personal Over, by AXISPW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1J-ufP73g0
The music used is Sunday Lover, by Guano Apes. Not an amazing AMV, but a pretty good one. The visual effects used are sometimes a little much, but are overall employed effectively, and mixed well with the visuals that the games provide. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this does much to link the lyrics to the game footage all that much, but the general sound and flow of the song’s meshed pretty well with the video, and overall the end result is a pleasantly decent AMV.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4: The Fool Calling, by ChaosKnight241: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vToDFE61zn8
The music used is The World Calling, by There for Tomorrow. The start of this is pretty darned cool with the TV and all, really grabs your attention, and the quality of the AMV is good enough to keep it. This one uses clips from both the game and the recently begun anime remake, and connects well with the song's overall tone and feeling. It also connects quite well to the lyrics at times, too, and it ends well, going back to the TV effect it opened with. Good stuff.


THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU

The World Ends with You: Angel with a Shotgun, by DispatchedCrewStudio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kgF6H4qTiM
The music used is Angel with a Shotgun, by The Cab. I continue to be impressed with fans’ ability to make AMVs out of this game’s effective yet limited semi-video footage. This is a pretty awesome AMV, making great use out of the song and video, meshing the two in their tones and changes, coordinating well with the lyrics, effectively telling a story through the AMV, and even doing a good job with using scans of a TWEwY comic of some sort (I assume a fan comic, but I don’t really know) and vocals from the game. My one complaint is that its conclusion seems strange and unnecessarily fangirlish/fanboyish (becoming a Neku x Joshua pairing video relying too much on the comic scans), but other than that, this AMV is really good.