Sonic Colors: Final Thoughts

The thing about Sonic Colors is that I have no idea how good I am at it.

I mean, I beat it and everything. I saw every level and got a bunch of As and Bs for my rankings. But I’m not sure if that’s due to my skill, because for much of the experience it seemed like the game was playing itself. People moan and groan about games like Metal Gear Solid or JRPGs trying to pretend to be movies, but you’ve got something like Sonic Colors which (refreshingly, given this series) has no pretenses in that direction, yet still manages to be an on-rails, autopilot kind of game.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s loads of fun to watch Sonic zip through the levels, and it’s really evocative of the Genesis games, no so much in how they play but in how we envision they played. It’s a kaleidoscopic rollercoaster of a game. However, sometimes it feels like it’s impossible to lose, even if you leave the game for a few minutes to fix up a sandwich. Dying is effectively a non-issue, since there are checkpoints all over the place and each level is only a few minutes long at best. Sonic can homing attack from practically across the screen and it’s trivial to become almost invincible at any moment. The game is actually full of situations that are kind of bullshitty — untelegraphed drops, surprise enemy placement, points of no return, paths and items that are only visible after you can no longer reach them — but because the penalty for failure is so light, it never annoys in a way that a game like Donkey Kong Country Returns sometimes can.

And I’m not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I’m not the sort of super-hardcore gamer who needs constant abuse to feel engaged in his games, and I’m all for games that make the complex seem easy, but Sonic Colors feels content to let me sleepwalk through it, and there’s little satisfaction in conquering such a game. It’s for that reason that I didn’t bother collecting all the little doodads and extras that are part and parcel of the platforming experience these days. In New Super Mario Bros. Wii and DKC Returns, I couldn’t rest until I’d collected every miscellaneous object littered throughout the game, but with Sonic Colors going back for red rings seemed almost like too much trouble.

I bet it would be fun to set aside a week or so and spend it getting S-ranks on every level and collecting all the red rings, but I simply wasn’t in the mood for it right now.

Final Fantasy Tactics is overrated.

I’m not quite done with the game yet, but I am close enough that I’m willing to call it.

A couple of disclaimers that colored my experience with the game, here… First, I am absolutely smack-dab in this game’s target audience. I’m not some guy who bought the game because he liked Final Fantasy VII, nor am I the guy who picks up anything with the Square-Enix logo on it. I love tactical RPGs. I’ve written more words about Fire Emblem than any one man ever should. I put more than a hundred hours into both Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games. I’ve got three more tactical RPGs on the docket after this one. If FFT is aiming for anyone, it’s aiming for me. I love strategy RPGs, I love political fantasy, and I love job systems… How could you go wrong? Frankly, it’s stunning that it took me this long to get to the game.

Secondly, I’ve had people telling me for literally years how great this game is and how none of the sequels measure up. I’ve dropped in on any number of “what is the best Final Fantasy” threads only to have people drop “FFT” like it’s a killing point, and it seems to be more or less universally beloved, while the sequels are more divisive. Given how much I enjoyed the sequels (despite some obvious flaws), I figured this meant I was in for a hell of a time.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I came to the game expecting to be blown away, and I was massively disappointed. Good? Sure. Worth playing? Absolutely. Best FF ever? Clearly better than its sequels? Top ten game ever? No fucking way.

What I think happened here is similar to the original Legend of Zelda, where the original game prominently featured some elements that its progeny, for whatever reason, mostly discarded. The people who were drawn to the original FFT for its ambiguous political plot or extremely flexible job system resented that future games didn’t really follow up on either, and began holding up the original as an example of model game design despite some fairly obvious and fairly severe flaws, in the same way people who think that Zelda should be about unrestricted exploration and punishing combat hold that the original game is the pinnacle of the series. And I understand that sentiment, I really do. But I had more fun with the FFTA games — far more — by any metric you care to use.

When I think of the FFTA games, I think of picking up the game for a few minutes only to play for hours; afternoons or even whole weekends lost to them; experimenting with every class; finding every secret; grinding for the sheer joy of it. When I think of FFT, I think of becoming so beset by frustration or tedium that I frequently had to just set the game aside and play something else for awhile.

Here’s a list of things that I can’t believe actually made it into a retail release of a strategy RPG in this day and age:

1. Unskippable cutscenes. The localization (in War of the Lions, at least) is superb, but I don’t really need to read it every time I restart a battle.
2. A complete inability to back out of a battle once it’s been initiated. There’s no retreat option, no forfeit option, no ability to quit back to the menu, no soft reset. I come from a school of strategy-RPG play (no doubt initiated by my upbringing with the Fire Emblem games) where it’s no chore at all to retry a fight over and over until it goes exactly the way I want it to, but FFT offers no means to do this. To restart a fight once it’s been started your only recourse is to quit back to the main PSP menu and reload the game. There are a number of situations in which you haven’t technically lost yet, but you still don’t want to continue (for example, if one of your party members is crystalized), but the game makes you go through the motions of getting a game over before you can try again. This is unspeakably annoying, especially when combined with…
3. Laughably frequent, and laughably difficult, random encounters. In the FFTA games, random encounters are visible as units running around on the same map as you, and you can avoid them or run from them if you don’t feel like screwing with them. In FFTA, random encounters are truly random, having a chance of occuring whenever you step on a spot on the map that isn’t a town. They’re supposed to have something like a 30% chance of occurring, but in practice it’s more like 80%, so making a journey of any distance usually involves at least three or four fights. If you want to level or build jobs in FFTA there are always a number of quests at your disposal; if you want to level or build jobs in FFT you run circles around the town like it’s 1985 again. The random battles also get progressively more dangerous as the game proceeds and their levels scale to yours, so if you fight too many of them you simultaneously transform the main story into a joke while making the random fights into deadly struggles. But they’re never interesting; it’s always just monsters, who tend to blur together. Unless you’re looking to grind JP fighting random battles is almost never profitable, but you get the impression that the developers wanted it to be 75% of your total playtime. And again, the only way to get out of a random fight if you don’t want to deal with it is to reset the game…
4. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the game didn’t see fit to send you galivanting across the map at the slightest pretext. Certain towns specialize in certain kinds of equipment, so if you’ve changed classes and need to update your heavy armor or got your weapon rent and need to replace it, it’s back six or seven spaces for you. Away quests require you to send your characters on jobs for weeks at a time, time that can only be passed by wandering the world map and getting into fights. (Oh, and the FFTA games allowed you to finish an away quest at any bar; FFT of course does not do this, forcing you to return to the town you started the quest from.) And one town (which is of course an out-of-the-way backwater which isn’t close to anything) is the hub for the game-spanning sidequest and requires you to return there four or five times throughout Chapters 3 and 4, fighting all the way.
5. The camera is awful. It’s impossible to keep the action fully on screen at once no matter what angle you set it to. There are a number of maps which are shaped roughly like canyons, with high terrain on either side and a crevasse in the middle; it’s nearly impossible to see what’s going on in the crevasse. This appears to have been accounted for not at all.
6. Those are all just annoyances; the real problem comes back to the battles. For one thing, you can’t take back moves, which is a staple technique in, oh, pretty much every SRPG ever. Usual strategy is to select a likely square, send your character there, and see if they can do anything profitable there. If they can’t, call them back and send them somewhere else. But no, FFT locks you into a space once you’ve moved there, so if you send a character to a space only to find that they have no good actions from that space (legion were the times I accidentally sent a character to a space diagonal of the one I intended thanks to camera issues), you’re fucked. Don’t cry difficulty or strategy here; FE10 lets you call back moves and it’s way harder and more strategic than FFT just the same. It’s just a poor design decision. But okay, you’ve learned that lesson, and can compensate…
7. If not for the fact that small details can completely derail your strategies. Certain skills are rendered useless by small height differences. Certain skills are useless anyway except in the most favorable cases. Zodiac compatibility can slash your accuracy or damage unexpectedly, enemy characters will be inexplicably immune to certain techniques, the AI blatantly cheats… it just goes on and on. Essentially the game is punishing you for not already knowing it inside and out but resists your efforts to learn it, since so many of these are corner cases that only come up once in a while.
8. Certain jobs are worthless. Is there any reason to play an Archer? How about a Dragoon? Or, really, anyone besides a special character? Others, like Orator or Mystic, are so situational it’s difficult to envision carrying their skills over more straightforward abilities. In addition, you have to spend time in a lot of these classes because they’re prerequisites for other, better classes. In FFTA if you needed to run a character through a mediocre class real quick in order to open up another class, you equipped them with a 100 AP weapon and sent them on an away mission. In FFT, you’re stuck actually using that useless class until you’ve got enough JP built up that you can leave it behind.
9. Moreover, certain skills don’t work the way you’d expect them to. Concentrate makes skills guaranteed to hit, except when it doesn’t. You learn a skill called Brawler that lets every class fight as effectively barehanded as a Monk… but it doesn’t actually, because Monks have a high PA that other classes don’t, so sticking it on a mage to let them get in on the action (a la FFV) doesn’t work.
10. Balance issues… Brave/Faith is borked, as Faith’s a double-edged sword in a number of respects but there’s no drawback at all (except in a few corner cases) to having a high Brave. This makes physical fighters generally better than mages… except for Arithematicians, who snap the game in half, and not even in a fun way. (I had to stop using my Arithematician simply because she was ruining the game for me.) The CPU continues to use beginner classes like Knights and Archers well into the endgame, so the super-flexible class system is put to waste somewhat because not only will the computer not really use it against you, you don’t even really need to use it to beat the computer.

Now, the game has its merits… It’s got a genuinely interesting story backed by a fantastic localization, with multi-dimensional characters and real depth and weight to its world and plot. There’s a ton going on behind the scenes that is only tangentially related to the main plot, and that’s a level of detail you don’t often get in games. It’s too bad it degenerates into magic rocks and sealed demons by the end, but Matsuno’s games usually do, so…

Its class system also seems better than any of its successors. The major problem with the FFTA games is that subdividing the classes by race limits the amount of potential combinations you can try. (This is especially bad in FFTA2, where the classes are ludicrously specialized and a couple of races only have four.) FFT is a lot more open, both in that any unit can spend time in any class and that skills can be learned in any order (although this tends to homogenize your units, as certain skills just aren’t worth getting, so everyone tends to look the same after a while).

The game’s visual design is also excellent, with lots of lovingly detailed sprites and other small elements that really give the game life. One of my favorite scenes in the game is early on, when Wiegraf is putting the screws to his underling in a windmill while a nameless Thief leans against the wall with his arms crossed. You don’t see spritework like this anymore.

(People tell me the soundtrack is an all-time great, but to be honest I’m having trouble clearly recalling a single tune on it, aside from the astoundingly catchy tutorial theme. And I love Sakimoto!)

Really, in the end FFT is a game that I wish would get an honest-to-god remake (as opposed to the straight port + new stuff which is WotL). I can tell that the core of the game is solid gold, but it’s hampered by all this other stuff to the point where I can’t get at it. Strip out the garbage and the tedious bullshit and fix the balance issues, and then we’d really have something to talk about. Until then, I guess I’ve got another game to wonder about when other people start raving. Onto the list with Zelda 1 and Cave Story with you, I guess.

Tuppence

So obviously the big news last night was that the Phillies traded for Hunter Pence, the best player still on the market. I’m of mixed feelings.

First off, Pence (who was alternatively the Braves’ top target or not on their radar at all, trade season being what it is and all) makes the Phillies appreciably better, and they didn’t need the help. He could have been an asset for the Braves. On that front, it’s a disaster.

On the other hand, though, he’s not an elite hitter, being more of a complementary guy. (Of course, it’s the Phillies, so he’ll probably hit .370 the rest of the way.) And the Phillies paid a very dear price to get him, two of their best prospects plus some other stuff. It’s easy to make the argument that this was an overpay — scarcity made Pence out to be some savior, but he’s not, and bowing to the Astros’ demands in this was probably not the wisest idea. Word is Braves GM Frank Wren is flat-out refusing to include any of the Braves’ top four pitching prospects — Julio Teheran, Arodys Vizcaino, Randall Delgado, and Mike Minor — in any potential deal.

Now, in recent days Wren would be absolutely right to do this. Used to be you had to give up grade-A prospects to get a good player in a deal, but recently we’ve found that this isn’t necessary — if you hold the line, often a team will be forced to make a deal for subpar players (see Gonzalez, Adrian). Why give up these high-ceiling guys if you don’t have to?

I do wonder, though, why Wren insists on keeping all four of these guys. I’m totally on board with naming Teheran untouchable, and it would probably be smart to hang on to Vizcaino too, but Delgado and Minor are the very definition of prospects you trade to help the major league team. They’re good enough to be desirable for another team, but probably not so good that you’ll be kicking yourself three years down the line for having let them get away. And if you’re not going to trade them, what are you going to do with them? Assuming they all make it, there’s not enough room of the major league roster to use all of them, even if some are converted to relief. At the same time, the cupboard for hitters is bare in the Braves’ system right now — Freddie Freeman is the last gasp for position players until Edward Salcedo is ready, which could be years. Eventually you’re going to have to trade a pitcher for offensive help.

I understand, too, the idea that if you want to trade these guys it should be for a superstar. Here’s the problem with that: Superstars don’t get traded. For one, the teams that have them are usually good, and thus are buyers, not sellers. Whenever a superstar is traded there are usually extenuating circumstances, usually involving an attitude problem or money. Either the star is in the final year of his contract and the team wants to get something for him, in which case he’s not worth a top prospect; or the team is in financial trouble and needs to slash payroll (which is very rare — witness the Dodgers, a team for which it’s an open question whether they’ll make payroll each month; you haven’t heard their players mentioned much in trade rumors). In any case, that mythical MVP-caliber bat that puts the Braves over the top is simply not out there right now, and if you wait for him you might find that Mike Minor is in his second year of arbitration by then and not quite so desirable a chit anymore.

So I dunno. I hate the Phillies, but you have to give them credit — every time trade season comes around they identify the best player available and put all their efforts towards landing him. They do this even when they’re the best team in the league by leaps and bounds, which is why they stay the best team in the league by leaps and bounds. (It helps to have money in this endeavor, but still.) The Braves, on the other hand, usually content themselves with being “good enough” and make improvements on the fringes, if there. I’m all for hoarding prospects, but the idea that the Braves will be better than the Phils in five years isn’t all that comforting anymore. The Braves have a chance to win now, and prospects are a renewable resource. I’m not saying gut the farm, but you have to put some effort into improving the team, don’t you?

I’ll hold off on making final judgment until the trade deadline has passed, but the odds of the Braves making any kind of impact deal lessen with each passing hour. Most likely they’ll end up with Coco Crisp or somebody then scratch their heads when the Giants eliminate them in four games again. Sigh.

Is this a kissing book?

One of my… let’s call it a “characteristic”, that’s a neutral enough term… is that when it comes to fiction, I always finish what I start. The reason I have so few played-but-uncompleted games in my collection is that I am constitutionally incapable of setting something aside until I’ve seen the end. Once I’ve put a certain amount of time into something, I feel like I’m owed the end, so I’ll push my way through to the finish.

The drawback here is that quality doesn’t come into play. I have no doubt that if someone had tricked me into reading Twilight or Eragon, I’d have read the whole series by now. Sure it sucks, but I have to know what happens.

The irony of having this characteristic while being unable to finish any of my side projects or keep a consistent blogging schedule is not lost on me, I assure you.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I’ve been listening to audiobooks at work over the last several days. Free audiobooks, which should set off warning bells right there. The part of my brain which detects quality is screaming at me to stop, but, well… I’ve come this far, and I’ve got nothing but time on my hands.

I can’t even say that I’m not enjoying them, really. The books tickle the nearly-suppressed part of my subconscious which has an almost childlike infatuation with schlocky airport fantasy. Most of the fantasy I’ve been reading in paper form these days has been of the modern, somewhat nontraditional take on the genre, but this stuff almost wallows in conventions. It’s like I’ve fallen back in time twenty years… and Stockholm Syndrome is taking hold.

One, Murder at Avedon Hill, is a murder mystery, but the author was very obviously weaned on those old SNES RPGs where you had to perform a half-dozen fetch quests before you could get anything accomplished, and so you ended up spending about ten hours just trying to get a bridge fixed by the most roundabout method possible. The book takes a prologue+six chapters before the characters even begin to actively work towards solving the mystery which is the book’s main plot thread. They need a letter of introduction to get into a manor to talk to the lord to convince him to lift a roadblock, but the only person who will write it for them needs a certain kind of moth, which lives in a cave in the wilderness… but only a living moth, which is out of season right now… you get the idea.

I understand the point of all this, of course; it’s a way to set the scene and introduce characters who will be important later on without being too obvious about it. You can’t just line up your major players and have them tell the protagonists who they are and what they do… except the author does that anyway later on, but anyway…

The point I’m driving at here is that fetch quests are effective in games when used well because they’re a method of exposition that allows for player interaction. Instead of just having some asshole tell the player that things are pretty crummy in Shitsville, you contrive some trivial errand that sends the player to Shitsville and they can see just how crummy it is for themselves, and hopefully become more motivated when the time inevitably comes to do something about it. It’s not as effective in literature, where it just feels like padding.

The book’s got other problems as well… there’s the exceedingly irritating perspective-hopping issue I’ve complained about before. It’s got a pretty serious case of the burly detective syndrome, exacerbated by the fact that the two main characters have inexplicably similar-sounding names. It’s also heavy on the infodumping, which would be tolerable if the world did not appear to be stock Tolkeinesque medieval. The mashup between high fantasy and a down-to-earth Law-and-Order police procedural is a strange mix, and one that I’m not entirely sure works particularly well in this case. (I’ve seen it done well, but you kind of have to emphasize the hard-boiled noir aspects of the setting. Placid small-town charm clashes with the tone.) It’s kind of hard to get invested in the search for clues and the grilling of suspects when you have a sneaking suspicion that vampires are behind everything, you know?

The other book… well, I’ll decline to mention the title since I’m about to spoil it rather heavily… has different issues. It’s much better-written than the other, keeping a consistent viewpoint and having fewer noticeable language issues. The major problem here is that its plot twists are all entirely predictable. It’s unbelievably frustrating to work out all the mysteries literally whole books before they come to fruition and having to listen to the characters fumble their way through it. The moment the main female character was first described my immediate thought was “there’s a refrigerator with this woman’s name on it.” It took two full books, but lo and behold. I actually felt bizarrely happy when it finally happened, because it meant I could stop anticipating it every time she stepped out of the main character’s sight. I was fairly certain the author wouldn’t kill her off in sight of the main character, but rather that he would come back from some adventure to find her ripped to shreds or strangled to death with her own hair or something and set him off on a quest of righteous vengeance.

Farewell, [redacted]. You were too good for both this world and this story. But hey, at least in passing you’ll be spared the hokey “revolution against the evil church” plot the book seems to be drifting towards, which is more than you can say for me.

That’s another thing that bothers me about the plot here… The religion here isn’t even secretly evil like most evil churches, it’s obviously evil. It openly condones what amounts to the sacrifice, enslavement, and cannibalism of obviously sentient beings, but what tips people off to the idea that this isn’t A-OK is the revelation that OMG the dragons aren’t really gods!? I dunno, guys, seems like you’d have a bit of resistance even prior to that. It was almost cute watching the book clumsily hint that the high priestess might be evil. Figured it out on first sight, thanks.

The book also does that annoying fantasy thing where it stars nonhumans, and so feels the need to replace the words “man” or “men” (even species-neutral words like “person”) with an equivalent phrase every… single… time. I get that this helps the fantasy flavor, but it’s unbelievably distracting and even a little jarring, since you have to do the mental translation every time it comes up. We already know they’re not speaking English in-universe, so why not extend your translation a bit?

There’s one more that I’ve been listening to off and on, Nina Kimberly the Merciless, which I downloaded just because I was intrigued by the premise (the barbarian hero’s spoiled teenage brat of a daughter trying to follow in his footsteps and live up to his legacy), but I was immediately turned off when the title character’s personality did a complete 180 not two chapters in. She’s supposed to be a fearsome warrior, but hot-tempered and short-sighted. Imagine my surprise when she goes on to lose every fight she participates in and solves most conflicts with level-headed diplomacy. Go figure.

There’s also a clumsy romance which just goes on… and on… and on. I’ll be waiting over here when they’re done giving each other soulful looks across the campfire.

SEND HELP

Thoughts on what I’m playing: The return

1) I beat Mega Man Powered Up using Mega Man after letting it lay fallow on the final stage for almost a week. I had fun with most of the game, but the final stage is such a trainwreck it sapped my will to continue. It consists of a long, twisty corridor with a lot of enemies that takes forever to weave your way through, a moving platform with a jump that is literally pixel-perfect, and a boss which is almost a complete roll of the dice. Some of Wily’s attacks seem literally undodgeable, especially Oil Slider, and others might as well be in certain configurations, like Fire Storm or Ice Slasher when Wily is moving towards you. Your only hope is for Wily to use the harmless Time Slow a lot. There also seems to be a way to keep him locked down in hitstun, but if there’s a rhythm to doing it indefinitely I wasn’t able to work it out. And hey, if you run out of lives you can always spend the next twenty minutes faceplanting into spikes again.

I toyed around a bit with some of the other characters, but by that point I was pretty bored with the game and ready to set it aside.

2) Speaking of frustrating bosses, Ys. I picked up this game because it looked Zeldaesque, and I’m a sucker for anything that even remotely resembles Zelda (except, apparently Okami — at my current rate of progress I’ll probably beat that game sometime in 2040). And it’s fun… mostly. The bosses, though, appear to be exercises in frustration. The first one just had an exceedingly demanding pattern with little room for error, exacerbated by the fact that Adol apparently thinks jumping isn’t cool and will occasionally decline to do it even if you press the button. The second one could disassemble you in seconds and was only balanced by the fact that it was pretty easy to do the same to him.

The third one, though, is absolutely stupid. It doesn’t seem possible to outrun it, it follows you too tightly and quickly to avoid it, and trading hits with it will only take you so far. Even dialing the difficulty down as far as it would go didn’t seem to help — its movements appeared unaltered. I did eventually beat it, but I was clinging to a sliver of health at the time and I have little doubt that it was mostly luck. This is the third boss. How am I ever going to beat this game?

3) In my spare moments I’ve been fiddling around with Maria mode in Symphony. Maria’s an interesting character because she provides a markedly different playstyle than either of the other two playable characters in the game. She lacks both Alucard’s survivability and Richter’s sheer damage output, but she’s by far the most mobile character, able to fly through the rooms at warp speed.

With Maria, the game becomes about not killing monsters, but dodging them. She doesn’t level up, so there’s no need to kill anything. Her attacks deal so little damage that clearing a path is both dangerous and takes forever. She’s got a double jump, a slide, a super jump, a glide, and a single-button infinite-use air dash, though, so if there’s empty space between enemies and the walls chances are Maria can worm her way through those spaces somehow. Stopping to kill an enemy becomes a calculated risk that you do only when you have to, rather than the central aspect of the game, which is a very different flavor of gameplay and one which platformers don’t often take. It reminds me a little of NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits, where the PC was slow, sluggish, and nearly useless on the ground, but possessed almost perfect mobility in the air, which switched up the platforming gameplay considerably. I’d like to play a full, fleshed-out game designed around avoiding enemies in a 2-D space rather than just slicing your way through them.

4) I’m nearly done with Final Fantasy Tactics, but I’ve kind of stalled out near the end… I’ve reached that dead zone where my characters are about as good as they’re going to get and I just have to muster up the willpower to force my way through the last several chapters. It would be good to do it soon, too, because I’ve got Tactics Ogre, Jeanne d’Arc, and Wild ARMs XF waiting to go as far as tactical RPGs, and I can only focus on one of those at a time.

This is probably its own post, but I wasn’t as absorbed by FFT as I’d expected I would be, especially after having my life devoured by the Tactics Advance games. Everyone keeps telling me how much better the original is, and in some ways it still stands far above its progeny… but in others, it’s almost unbelievably primitive. As in, “I can’t believe they didn’t fix this shit when they were remaking it” primitive. Far too often I felt like I was fighting the game engine and user interface rather than the game itself, and that’s an awful feeling to have.

5) Bizarrely, the game I’ve spent the most time on recently is the one I thought I’d “beaten”, Dissidia. Weird thing is, I don’t really have a goal here, either. I’ve experimented with Labyrinth mode… played around a bit with quickbattle… exploited custom rulesets to powerlevel some level 1 characters… even given some thought to tackling the brutal postgame. The game has great pick-up-and-play value, and basically all my gaming these days has come in the form of picking up and playing.

Despite the fact that he’s my best character, I set aside Squall for a while (mostly because using him makes the game too easy) to focus on exploring some other character options. Surprisingly, I fell in love with Terra; her ranged game is a lot of fun and her difficulty killing things fades away once you learn Ultima, which is astonishingly easy to hit with. Yuna, too, becomes amazingly easy once she learns Megaflare, which the CPU opponents seem completely incapable of dodging.

I’ve put a few levels here and there into Cloud and Zidane, who are fun to use even if I can’t quite get a handle on how they’re supposed to play. I’ve tried out the Warrior of Light too, but he completely baffles me — I have no idea how his attacks are supposed to fit together, which is especially infuriating given that the computer flows through these long, graceful combos. I also want to learn Firion, Shantotto, and Prishe, but haven’t touched them in a while.

Here’s how disconnected from the gaming mainstream I feel.

I’d been having such a good experience playing the late-adoption game with the PSP that, when I heard about my quarterly bonus, I considered trying it again with one of the HD Twins. After all, people have been telling me for years that the Wii is a stupid baby system with no games, and if you’re really serious about the hobby, the Xbox 360 or PS3 is where it’s at. Before, I hadn’t been able to support more than one system+portable combination at once, but with the Wii on life support, the DS nearly dead, the 3DS not having a compelling library yet, and PSP games being so cheap as to be nearly worthless, why not close this hole in my gaming experience?

So I went to Metacritic. (Which, yes, I know is not the be-all-end-all, but I still consider it a good resource for figuring out what games I should be aware of and making sure I don’t overlook anything really important.) And proceeded to become incredibly depressed.

The PS360 library is just shooter after shooter after shooter, with the occasional tournament fighter and plastic instrument game thrown in for spice. Even games which, you know, aren’t really shooters (like Portal and Mass Effect) use an FPS interface. I have zero interest whatsoever in shooters, and even less in shooters that look like the sidewalk after a rainstorm, which appears to be all of them, currently. The thing about the PSP was that it was a niche system that clustered around games and genres I liked a lot — RPGs, tactical RPGs, and platformers. The occasional shooter or God of War game was just a bone thrown to the Sony faithful. The Xbox 360 and PS3 are almost the exact opposite, being built on a foundation of games I have almost no interest in and engaging me only on the fringes. Even at cheap, I don’t see a lot there.

To get my money’s worth out of an HD system I’d have to soften my stance on games from “no shooters” to “shooters that are good enough to make me overcome my distaste for shooters”. I mean, you don’t have to get too deep before you’re starting to look at things like Sands of Time HD and the Team ICO collection as potential gets, and I don’t really want to buy a new console for ports of ten-year-old games, even ones I haven’t played and probably should.

“Dusting off the Wii” is so common that it’s become a cliche, as the system is infamous for long software droughts (like the one it’s currently in), but I have a feeling that if I’d gone all-in on a PS360 at launch it’s a cliche that would have applied to me. If you’re cutting out first-person shooters, third-person shooters, survival horror, open-world sandbox games, tournament fighters, and music games… the HD systems start to have a pretty barren release schedule themselves. I’ve no doubt that the systems have deep and varied libraries for many, and perhaps most, people, but they don’t for me. I’m not really looking for people to say “What? No, I had tons of fun with my Xbox, don’t put words in my mouth” or give me recommendations; I’m just trying to express how I feel.

The worst part is that this appears to be the way the industry is headed, if E3 is any indication. This stuff sells, and has become what the “core gamer” expects out of the experience. Even Nintendo appears to be retreating back to this crowd rather than compete for the casual crowd with Apple’s McGames, as every game they announced for the WiiU looks to be of this set — gritty, “mature” action games and shooters with a muted color palette and not an ounce of originality or life between them. If this is where we’re going, where does that leave me, a gamer with no interest in this? I still love games — I don’t feel like I’ve outgrown the hobby or am ready to leave it behind. But I also don’t feel like I should be forced to play genres I hate just for the pleasure of moving characters around a screen and interacting with a game world.

A Tale of Two Mega Men

I beat my first game in over two months late last night, while catching up on Leverage. In fact, I beat two games. One was Dissidia 012, which was the culmination of 50 hours of plugging away at it in small doses here and there. The endgame was disappointingly easy, mostly because Squall ended up being a dreamwrecker. In the last post I went on and on about the Dissidia learning curve, but it turns out that Squall throws that out the window, since he started crushing things from the word go and never really stopped. It almost got boring after a while, because Squall doesn’t have any of the cat-and-mouse or positioning games that the other characters have to play; he just walks up to the other guy, Brave Breaks ‘em, then takes ‘em down in one shot. I stuck him at the front of my party for the final chapter and he ended up carrying me more or less the whole way, ending up twelve levels ahead of the next-highest character (Bartz).

The final boss was supremely disappointing. Backstep, HP Attack, watch credits. That was literally all there was to it.

There’s certainly more to see here, but it appears to be the sort of grindy incremental-gains numbers-for-numbers’-sake type of postgame that all-too frequently turns me off postgames, so it remains to be seen whether I’ll stick with it. The sheer number of things left to buy at the PP Catalog is simultaneously encouraging and daunting. I’d at least like to experiment with the villains, but grinding them up is no easy task.

The other game was Symphony of the Night, which I ended up turning to when I wanted to play something, but wasn’t in the mood for the twitchy pace of Dissidia or the extremely deliberate one of Final Fantasy Tactics. My thoughts on the game from my playthrough earlier this year still hold up, although I kept my promise and set aside my Crissaegrim this time around. I filled up enough of the castle to get the best ending, but I didn’t see everything — for one thing, I’m missing a relic. (The Nose Demon card, I believe.) SotN demands to be replayed, though, so I imagine this portable version will be a frequent sight in my PSP in the years to come.

To fill the void I’ve turned to a pair of Mega Man games: Powered Up and Maverick Hunter X. Believe it or not, I was on the scent of Powered Up even before Brickroad started LPing it. The only NES Mega Man game I haven’t beaten yet is 1, mostly because everyone keeps telling me it’s kind of mediocre — more of a necessary jumping-off point in the vein of Metroid or Dragon Warrior 1 rather than something that actually needs to be played — so I figured that a remake with a ton of neat features, including a buttload of alternate characters (Protip: If you want Tanto to like your game, add multiple playable characters) and a level editor, would be the ticket. Although Maverick Hunter X was on my radar, I hadn’t intended to buy it — unlike Mega Man 1, I’ve played Mega Man X 1 more times than I can count, and the new features didn’t seem worthwhile enough to justify re-buying it when I could just grab it on the Virtual Console. However, I was poking around on the PSN Store late last night and noticed that the game was on sale for five bucks, which more or less made my decision for me. Principle is fine, but five bucks is five bucks.

Contrasting these two games is of great interest to me. They’re similar in a lot of ways — they’re both remakes, they both use a kind of cruddy polygonal graphic style, both bombed hard enough to kill plans to extend them into series. But they’re different, too, both in terms of my experience with them and in their design philosophy. As I mentioned, I have very little experience with Mega Man 1, so I ended up lurching through the levels like a drunken baby, dying to just about everything that looked like it could potentially kill me. Part of that was inexperience, but at least some of it was the result of bad hit detection (Mega Man’s hitbox is quite a bit larger than his character model) and the fact that the screen is zoomed-in relatively close, so you don’t have the expansive view of the level you’re used to. In addition, I was trying to unlock all the Robot Masters as playable characters, which meant I couldn’t use their weaknesses against them (assuming I knew them, which I didn’t).

MHX, on the other hand, I’ve always been kind of iffy about. Initially I resented it, because it resulted in a gimped Mega Man X Collection. The story is, supposedly MMXC was going to be much more comprehensive — Inafune was going to rewrite the story to make it more comprehendable and rebalance some of the more bullshittier parts. (Seeing them make something worthwhile out of X6, on either count, would have been worth the price of admission by itself.) However, he was persuaded to hold off on these updates so they could be implemented in a full-blown remake series, the Maverick Hunter X series for PSP. The first one bombed, though, putting the kibosh on that and leaving us with unchanged ports on the Collection and a remake of the only game in the series that didn’t actually need one. Mega Man 1, you could argue, needed a remake because it was a flawed game. You can’t say that about X1, though — it was golden in 1993 and it remains golden today. There’s nothing there to fix.

Actually playing it, though, all that drama slides away. It feels like coming home. The levels were changed a little bit, but not much (the boots are in Flame Mammoth’s stage now, which merits a new stage order), and I sleuthed through half the Mavericks without dying once in the time it took me to beat my first Robot Master in Powered Up. It was so easy that I’m considering banning weapon use for future playthroughs — I almost felt bad for Spark Mandrill, as he didn’t even get to move as I Shotgun Iced him to death.

You can beat Vile in the intro stage now. I don’t know what’s up with that.

Beyond that, though, it’s interesting how the two fit together. You get the impression that these games are channeling the “true vision” for the series — Mega Man classic as cutesy, goofy, and fun, and Mega Man X as brooding and dramatic. It’s telling to me that the changes to Powered Up are almost exclusively in the name of making the game more varied and fun, while the changes to MHX are in the name of making the story more prominent. That’s fine for the initial entries — you can’t exactly make X1 more fun, as noted — but it becomes an issue down the line with regards to games like X3 or X5 that need serious trimming on the gameplay side, or X6, which needs a complete overhaul. And the story… let’s face it, the X series doesn’t have a good story. It’s the same “blue guy kills robots” stuff from the classic series, it’s just not as self-aware about it. Trying to polish that turd will only take you so far. You can cut “What am I fighting for” but then people might start noticing that the problems with X4′s story go further than a terrible translation and hokey voice acting, you know?

It’s probably good that both series petered out before they got too far. The additions both added were nice gimmicks, but I think they’d have worn out their welcome before too long. (Is anyone beating down the door to play as Top Man or Toad Man? How is playing as Flash Man or Bright Man going to differ from playing as Time Man?) Powered Up’s terrible engine would have reared its ugly head in games that are better on their own, like 2 or 3, and MHX would have found fixing some of the X series’s weaker entries to be a more challenging task than it had anticipated. Better that we get a taste and dream about what might have been rather than become inevitably disappointed by what ended up being.