If You Give a Gamer a Camera, Part II

...he'll ask to make more gamer movies.

Pow!

As you may or may not remember from this post I made a while back, when I wasn't frantically writing papers in one night or watching my love live crumble into tiny, possibly tasty pieces, my undergraduate days were filled with jogging about holding a borrowed $5000 video camera in my sweaty hands and editing together comical but slightly disturbing student films for a variety of (mostly evil) applications. I took the opportunity to make as many allusions to gaming culture as I could in my work, on the dim hope that someone in the masses who appreciated Nintendo, Sega and the like as much as I do would take notice, and chuckle knowingly to him- or herself.

The following videos are possibly my greatest contribution to society thus far, a truth that would be merely shrug-worthy were it not for the horrifying fact that they're more than six years old. Also, my Ultra Omnisphere 3000 movie, circa 2001, was probably funnier.


Misprint! - A Reporter's Tale
Starring Matt Frey, Sarah Shepherd, Kristy Wormann, Kara Boivin, Shannon Morris and Dave Kotchie/Dave Frey as The Ninja. Featuring the musical stylings of Sandy Devasia and Jessica Jagielski.


As a Media Studies major, I had to come up with some kind of huge, year-long final project in order to receive a small piece of paper stating that I didn't have to go to class anymore. It was akin to the fabled "thesis" students of some majors are forced to write, only my project was allowed to have ninjas. So I wrote a novella (available online here), crunched it down into a gamer-friendly script, and filmed this bad boy in time to walk at my own graduation.

Featuring lovingly crafted allusions to the Silent Hill series, Super Mario Bros., Fatal Fury, Street Fighter II, Duke Nukem 3D, Metal Gear Solid, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Final Fantasy series and more, Misprint! - A Reporter's Tale is sure to make you feel at least slightly uncomfortable. Also, I somehow forgot Earthbound though, and it makes me sad to this day.

Trailer:



The Feature Film:



Out Takes:

The Greatest "Let's Play" of ALL TIME

If there's one thing I love in this world, it's got to be cold-blooded murder.*

*probably not true

I guess Final Fantasy games come in a weak, flabby and distant second. However, if you knew how much I love cold-blooded murder, you'd know that second place on my list of loves ain't too shabby.

My left arm has been giving me trouble since the release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in February, so I've stuck with RPGs lately in an attempt to let it heal. Finishing Final Fantasy III for the Famicom/NES again reminded me of everything I love about the early FF series, and I've since finished FFIII on the DS, magic'd my way through FFI on my cell phone with a party consisting almost entirely of mages, and I plan on picking up the PSP version of FFII again later on in the week. (I also threw in quick playthroughs of both the Dragon Warrior I hack Dragoon X Omega and MOTHER, also known as Earthbound Zero, but you'll be hearing about that later.)

My fondest memories of the FF series fluctuate between the immortal Final Fantasy VI and the first game, but for nostalgic reasons, FFI is probably my favorite. As an old-school gamer, I thought I knew everything there was to know about Final Fantasy I, including the bugged out spells, the nerfed run command, the breakdown of damage distribution over your party, etc.

But then a gentleman named after one of my favorite Earthbound characters proved me wrong.

When Mr. Brickroad teamed up with his buddy McDohl to play simultaneous white and black mage solo games of Final Fantasy I, the resulting blast of AWESOME must have taken out at least three city blocks. Not only did the duo prove that it's possible to solo both kinds of  mages, but they did so in a style that dwarfs the greatness of even cold-blooded murder. As someone who could barely stand finishing FFI with FOUR black mages, my pointy straw hat's off to these fine gentleman.

Place your bets!

As a bonus, the men and women who frequented the forum during its creation process added many more layers of intelligent discourse to the thread. And when they weren't doing that, they were making cheap jokes about genitals.

So it's a win-win situation, really.

I urge you to read this and Brickroad's other Let's Plays. The gentleman is part scholar, part madman and all awesome. If you're a longtime Final Fantasy fan, he will blow you mind right out of your skull. And that's just enough like cold-blooded murder to keep me interested.

Top Games of All Time #4: Final Fantasy (NES)

In the late ‘80s, a small Japanese video game company named Square found itself rocketing towards bankruptcy. After a string of lukewarm releases like 3-D WorldRunner , King’s Knight and Rad Racer (known in the Land of the Rising Sun as Highway Star), things were looking grim. Square Director Hironobu Sakaguchi felt he didn’t have a good action game left in him, so he tore a page out of Dragon Quest’s book and decided that Square’s final project would be fantasy role playing game. If the gambit didn’t pan out, Sakaguchi was reportedly poised to quit making video games and head back to university.

FF1 North American box.

Thankfully for the gaming world, university would not see the likes of Sakaguchi any time soon: Released a week before Christmas 1987, Final Fantasy for the Famicom was the critical hit Square needed to stay afloat. More than 23 years later, the little company that almost drowned in the waves of the Nintendo console market has merged with Enix – the creators of the Dragon Quest series – and is a dominating force in the gaming world, with much of the credit going to Sakaguchi’s not-so-final fantasy game.

Released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 in North America, almost three years after it appeared in Japan (and the same year Square unleashed Final Fantasy III on eager Japanese gamers), Final Fantasy made a moderate impact on a small-but-devoted, RPG-starved American audience. The only thing American console gamers had seen that was anything like FF1 up to that point was the original Dragon Quest game, dubbed Dragon Warrior in the US and released just the year before. Unlike Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy gave the player control of not one, but four warriors of varying ability. What’s more, the player could chose his or her team from six character types, allowing for 126 possible combinations. This is not counting the unofficial trio, duo and solo possibilities for gamers looking for more of a challenge, or the option to forgo the class change option halfway through the game and press on with the young, inexperienced versions of your characters.

For those wondering, that leads to 418 possible combinations.

Herein lies the reason you’re currently reading about the original Final Fantasy and not 1994’s SNES classic Final Fantasy III/VI. After 16 years, my desire to take on Final Fantasy IV again is not nearly as high as my wish to take new and exciting FF1 parties into battle against the four elemental fiends. I’ve finished Final Fantasy in its various incarnations, from the NES original to the PS1, GBA and PSP remakes and even on my cell phone, more than 10 times. And still I want to dig deeper, to ignore the world outside and pour myself into this decades-old video masterpiece.

Battle!

Your party determines everything in FF1, from how long you have to grind (if at all) and how much money you’ll need to how long you can stay out in the wild before having to trudge back to town with your tail between your legs. Four fighters are expensive killbots who, with limited healing options and armor slots, have a tougher time taking down the evil Chaos than you might think. You could go with a party that will have a lot of trouble throughout the adventure, like four white or black mages; or a party who’s lives get progressively more difficult as the game progresses, like two red mages and two black mages; or even a group that overcomes initial adversities to blossom into a well-oiled war machine, like a black belt, a thief and two white mages (I highly recommend this party to those looking for a “ugly duckling” style coming of age experience).

With patience, know-how and a bit of old fashioned luck, any four-member combination (with class change) can finish the game, barring an unwelcome meeting with WarMECH on Tiamat’s bridge or a well-timed CUR4 by Chaos; just be sure to grab the Mas(a)mune sword, bury your hardest hitter at the bottom of the lineup, RUSE/INV2/White Shirt like crazy and pray, pray, pray.

Many of the incarnations of FF1 available in North America.

Things are much easier on the PSP and Gameboy Advance (Dawn of Souls) version of the game; ridiculously easy, in fact. The extras in these “upgraded” iterations feel tacked on and mismatched at best and completely game-breaking at worst. If you’re looking for the true FF1 experience and you’re not a little sissy baby who can’t handle a bit of adversity and leveling, the original NES cart or the PlayStation 1’s Final Fantasy Origins disc are the way to go. Also, Namco’s recent cell phone port of FF1 retains about 90 percent of the challenge of the original, so if you can stand squashed graphics and crippled sound, grab that mobile device and start saving the world.

Classic. Epic. Flock of Birds.

Speaking of the true Final Fantasy experience, players knew they were in for something special when the main credits began rolling only after they conquered the game’s first real challenge. Not many games bothered with cinematic elements in the mid to late 1980s, so when a screen popped up telling the player that the game has now truly begun as he or she crossed the first bridge into the unfamiliar, it really felt like you were about to embark on an epic adventure the likes of which had been hitherto unknown to the world of console gaming. The four Warriors of Light climb a hill as the sun sets in the background, looking back on the castle from whence they came and trudging ahead to the challenges that await them. Just like feeling one gets the first time they plug in The Legend of Zelda, the player suddenly felt like anything is possible. A vast new world was theirs to explore, a feeling that’s hard to shake even two decades later.

Please don't make fun of my cell model.

My current party, on the cell phone version of the game, is a red mage, a black belt, a white mage and a black mage. Yeah, the going is a little tough, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That is, unless I felt like it at the character select screen.

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What are YOUR top games of all time? Leave me a comment with your top three games, in order, and have your opinions heard in a future post here on Wordsmith VG!
 
Tomorrow: We'll Duke it out with one of gaming's baddest anti-heroes!

“Quite possibly the most over-rated game ever made…”

Something’s been bothering me for a long, long time. I’ve had to keep quiet about it at the risk of persecution and belittlement, telling only those closest to me in hushed whispers. But after 13 years, it’s time to break the silence. I don’t care what anyone says anymore; the truth is I hate Final Fantasy VII.

Soo... there's no espers? What about Matoya the witch?

By saying “Final Fantasy VII” and “hate” in the same sentence, a group of otherwise normal people have caught the scent of this blog post and are ready to harvest my vial organs with their oversized swords and spiky cactus hair. But before anyone hunts me down and stuffs materia down my throat until I choke (and simultaneously learn fire magic!), there’s something I want to make clear: I played Final Fantasy VII in its entirety when it first came out in 1997 and in smaller doses over the last 13 years. I’ve had a long time to think about it, and I’m here to make valid points, not to start flame wars. Also, I didn’t like Halo, Metroid Prime or MOTHER 3. Let the flame wars begin!

"I forgot who I am."

Some may exclaim, “Blasphemy! Don’t you know that our Lord and Savior Final Fantasy VII redefined the world of RPGs with its high quality windings and superior flibildigitz?!”

I fully acknowledge what Final Fantasy VII did in the way of mainstreaming the role playing genre in America, but by doing so, it doomed plenty of RPGs for the next five years to an angsty teenage cast and a conflicted, whiny main character. There were also plenty of FFVII copycats flooding the market at the time, bringing little to the genre that wasn’t there before: Consider Crave Entertainment’s Shadow Madness, a 1999 PlayStation 1 offering which was basically Final Fantasy VII starring a pirate named Stinger and a wooden robot named Harv-5. Though, to be sure, Harv-5 was freaking awesome and used to warn everyone that “There will be death.” He also had a super cool straw hat.

Wooden robot. Straw hat. THIS RULES

Uh, sorry, I’m getting off track.

In the same vein, Final Fantasy VII’s eco-emo storyline simultaneously raised and lowered the bar for console RPGs and video games in general. On the plus side, after the success of FFVII, many developers saw the need to make their game worlds more broad and their narratives more epic. On the negative side, Final Fantasy VII’s storyline is so broad and epic that it isn’t very cohesive. First you’re battling the twisted Shinra organization to save the planet, then you’re out to destroy Sephiroth because he’s a jerk or something, and then the whole third disc is devoted solely to kicking Sephiroth’s butt to save the planet, with Shinra all but forgotten. Also Square resorted to giving their main character mega-cliché amnesia, which hurt my head so much that I wished I could forget that part of the game. Amnesia? Really Square? Seriously?


"I'm Popeye the Sailor Man..."

 Okay, so storylines are subjective. If you liked Final Fantasy VII’s tale, there’s not much I can say in response. What I can point out are the triangle graphics. Everyone looks like they have Popeye arms. Yeah, it was 1997. No, I couldn’t stand it then, and I still can’t stand it now. The beautifully-rendered backgrounds are in stark contrast to the character appendages that appear to be more suited to eating spinach than fighting that effeminate swordsman, Alucard. Err, Sephiroth. What would have helped is if all the characters were made of wood; then they could have been round; also, awesome straw hats would have helped conceal some popup.

My biggest problem revolves around Final Fantasy VII’s most daring move. Let me put it to you like this: You know what’s really great? Leveling the crap out of one of your characters only to have her taken away for ever and ever. When Aeris died, I didn’t get sad because I loved her so much etc., instead I sat there in calm disbelief as I watched hours of playtime get a sword through her back. “I guess she’s dead,” I mumbled, hoping her equipment had been moved to the main inventory so that I might sell it to recoup some of my losses. (But speaking of lost time, I guess it turned out okay though, because I was able to play Ducktails on Gameboy whenever used a summon materia.) Too bad no one was carrying any Revive materia or Phoenix Downs, or they could have brought her back to life.

You know, if Aeris’ body had been made of wood, and she had been wearing a keen straw hat, she could have got up, dusted herself off and said, “That all you got? Where’s the next longhaired swordsman at? I’ll punch him right in face.”

I was once called a “whiny [phallus]” because I wrote a negative review for a popular cult game. By that token, every reviewer who dislikes any aspect of any game is whiny. Then I guess I’m whiny, because Final Fantasy VII was a huge disappointment. I applaud Crave Entertainment for having the courage to challenge the RPG behemoth Square and remake FFVII with all wooden robots and straw hats it was missing the first time around. I implore everyone to play the far superior FFVII remake, Shadow Madness. Sure, Crave broke more than they fixed, but hey, it’s all worth it for Harv-5.

Or, you know, you could just play FFVII while wearing a straw hat.

I love this game!