Revisiting Final Fantasy XIII

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Ok, so this one doesn’t really belong here. Normally when I intend to review a game, it isn’t quite retro, but it isn’t really recent either. My reasoning behind this is that I’m assuming that if your’e reading these posts, you’re either nostalgic, or you’re a gamer that actually hasn’t played these games. Final Fantasy XIII, though, is very near to being the newest in the series, barring XIV, which is an MMO. So what’s the deal?

Simply put, it’s what I’m playing at the moment. I’ve talked my fair amount of trash about FFXIII, but in honesty, I never made it off the first disk the first time around. Now, in fairness, you spend a matter of hours in this samey, crystal environment, and I was bored to tears. That isn’t to say I value visuals over game play, but the game play is so dumbed down in this early portion of the game, it isn’t really fun. The game is holding your hand all the way through, making sure you don’t dribble on yourself.

The game play absolutely gets better further into the game. And by further I mean the end of the second disk. Seriously. I am at the start of the third disk, and only just now are all the different roles available to all the characters. Not to mention that over two disks in, I have not touched the open world, or seen a chocobo outside of a theme park.

That isn’t to say that the game is bad, or that it isn’t fun. However, it definitely wears on you. Not ‘grows on you’, wears on you. Like water carving stone. A steady drizzle of ‘I don’t care about these characters and story’ becoming a torrent of ‘no fucks to give’ which ultimately carves a canyon out of solid rock. In a word, the game’s story and characters lack depth. They come off as flat, two dimensional archetypes that would usually be reserved for bit characters in a short story. There is a cut scene almost every ten minutes in this game. You may see how this could become a problem.

Just as in western popular media, it’s formulaic to a fault, and I am not mesmerized by its country of origin. There are Japanese books, films, and even anime and games I like, but I don’t like them because they are Japanese, I like them because they are good. I am somewhat sad to say, FFXIII would probably have been better without its story. It probably would have been better without voice actors. I dread every moment Vanile opens her mouth. If you happen to think FFXIII is the pinacle of story telling, I encourage you to go read an award winning book, and see the difference.

Final Fantasy the thirteenth is a game, which might mitigate my ire a little bit, if such emphasis wasn’t placed on the story. We’re treated to beautiful cut scene after cut scene. Some are rendered in engine, some are videos, and none of which I can actually bring myself to care about. At this point, it really is the in depth game play which is keeping me going, but my will to finish it has just about run out. I popped the game in today, ran into my first group of enemies, turned off my Xbox before the encounter even occurred, and went to go do something else.

The crystarium is fun, and the game play is fun, but it’s the same the whole way through. It gets old. The levels are your standard jrpg slog, with the admitted benefit that there are no random encounters. Even so, it’s fight, after fight, after fight, with the same mechanics, punctuated only by a story that has had any unique qualities it may have had leeched out by characters cut out of cardboard.

Play it if you’ve got nothing better to do, and that includes playing other games.

Revisting Conker’s Bad Fur Day

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Oh, Conker’s Bad Fur day. I never owned an N64, not until the original xbox was out and I think they were going used for something like thirty dollars. One of my sister’s college friends had it, though, and I remember him showing it to me when I went to visit them. I thought it was the best thing ever, so when Conker: Live and Reloaded came out for the Xbox, I snatched it up!

I remember having a lot of fun with Conker’s Bad Fur Day, from its raunchy and disgusting comedy, all the way to its platforming game play. Fast forward seven years, and me popping it into the 360 for old time’s sake. Unfortunately, it hasn’t stood up as well as I hoped it would. My tastes, as well as my sense of humor, have definitely matured just a little bit. I don’t get as much of a kick these days from seeing a closeup of a cow’s anus as it’s having a fit of shits. I still chuckle on occasion, and there are some characters that I still get a kick out of, like Mr. Scardy Birdy, but for the most part the magical bedlam that was BFD has lost its shine for me.

Misogyny! That’s humor, right? At 27 and married, bouncing on a flower’s boobs has lost its appeal somewhat.

The game play has likewise not stood up well. There is a reason why you don’t see a whole lot of  3D platformers these days. One of those reasons is it’s hard to judge distances. In real life we have depth perception, which allows our brainards to calculate, fairly accurately, how far away something is. Unfortunately that’s a lot trickier to do in 3D. I’ve died many occasions from just misjudging distance, or something as stupid and simple as walking off the edge of a platform.

This is a game which is very much aimed at teenage boys and those in their early 20′s, and it did its number on me when I was younger. I’ve been kind of tolerating it as I play through it again, but to be honest I have no desire to actually beat it or play through it any further than I currently am as of the writing of this post.

That isn’t to say I don’t think it isn’t worth playing. I think it’s worth playing through at least once, regardless of whether you’re a bit older than its target audience or its gender demographic, and that’s relevant because the misogynistic jokes are in there, and they aren’t particularly subtle. Just be aware that its replay value, especially as you get older, just isn’t really there. If you really want to go watch the Great Mighty Poo scene again, you can always look it up on youtube!

Trials and Travails of the Production Artist

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As well as helping write this blog, I’m also a freelance production artist. Production artist is basically a fancy way of saying I’m a generalist. I do environment, I do character, I do animation, whatever you need. I’ve been freelancing in art for almost two years now. I started when I was in school and continued when I exited.

Right now, though, It’s all but impossible. The entertainment industry, thought to be somewhat immune to the recession, has been getting hit hard for the past couple years. Retail game sales in general are down almost 30% what they were last year, and amid this slump, large layoffs are taking place. Just google ‘game industry layoffs’ and pick a year. It’s not a pretty picture.

So what is a freelance artist to do? The job market is saturated not just with recently graduated art students, but people with years and years of experience under their belts, making what was already a competitive but promising industry ultra competitive and not at all promising. I have friends who graduated over a year ago from college, and are very good artists in their own right, who have never touched a job in their intended industry.

And then there’s the pay. Oh, the pay problem. It may or not surprise you that when I attended art school, my projected cost of tuition for four years was a little over $86,000.00. For students entering the school this coming year, that price has gone up to over $100,000.00. To put all that in perspective, you can’t even pay for that with federal financial aid. You have to take out massive amounts of higher interest, private loans, or hope that you can get enough scholarships and grants to close the gap, to the tune of  about $50,000.00. That is ridiculous, and doesn’t even take into consideration things like, you know, living and eating. The average pay rate of an entry level artist in the video game industry is $30,000.00 – $35,000.00, and even if you last long enough to become the head honcho art director, it is very unlikely that your pay will ever reach six figures.

So why is it that even though art education is so expensive, frankly equally expensive if not more than engineering or computer science, artists are payed so much less? The answer lies in the attitudes of our culture. Even though we like art, we just don’t value it. There is a perception that artistry is an inborn talent, and this perception has been perpetuated by the fine art scene for over one hundred years. So, when it comes to being a trade artist, there is already a social bias against acknowledging that what you do is real work, that it is hard, and you had to work hard in order to learn your craft. There is a perception that working in art is more of a passion than a career, and that somehow justifies either paying the artist less, or not paying them at all.

This is evident even at a subconscious and quite hypocritical level for many people. My last employer told me on one occasion that unless someone was willing to pay his standard consulting fee, he wouldn’t give them more than fifteen minutes of his time. And yet, when the studio ran out of money, it was basically expected that we would continue to work on spec projects. Spec being speculative ie: you’ll probably never be paid. Artists are held to a different standard of labor because they are artists, which is completely unethical, but almost universally accepted.

It’s honestly very disheartening.

Revisiting Final Fantasy IX

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Final Fantasy IX box art
             Meeeemories

I first played Final Fantasy IX when it came out, and I actually owned a PSone. A friend and I rented it and traded off turns playing it for an entire weekend. Needless to say, we didn’t manage to beat it in just a couple days, but the memory of the game stuck with me all this time. So, when I dusted off my PS3 for the first time in ages and noticed it for sale on the Playstation Store, I had to buy it, and so far I haven’t been disappointed!

You are undoubtedly familiar with Final Fantasy VII, X, and most recently XIII (although we don’t like to talk about that one…). In my mind, FFIX has a unique place in the more recent series compared to its companion titles, if you can call a game more than a decade old recent. Many of the Final Fantasy games are incredibly heavy handed. Their characters are so angst ridden and flawed that at certain points they just feel awkward. FFIX is markedly less melodramatic, and seems to take itself a little less seriously, which almost twelve years later still makes it a breath of fresh air and worth returning to.

Moogles cussing? Why yes, I think I would enjoy that! (Click for source)

In terms of game play, it does show its age a bit, and I’ve found myself rolling my eyes on occasion when I get multiple random encounters in a single room. On the other hand, the formula by which combat runs in Final Fantasy games really hasn’t changed significantly for, well, ever, so you should find it familiar and comfortable territory. The story and characters are fun and engaging, and help lessen the blow of a rather stale JRPG combat system.

I’m delighted to see these characters on my television again, and the PS3′s HD up-scaling and smoothing really do wonders to make the game look significantly less blocky, although I have to admit they’re still going to look a bit like lego men on your big screen. By contrast, the PSone games we have on disc won’t even play when we have our PS2 hooked up with component cables, and switching to standard AV cables looks pretty much like you think it would ie: a blown up, highly compressed jpeg.

Final Fantasy IX is definitely worth your time, and at $9.99, it’s really not a bad buy. If you’ve been introduced to Final Fantasy only recently, and found yourself burned on the heavy story and heavier characters, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with this title.

Toodles, and happy gaming!

P.S. You may have heard, but it’s Humble Bundle time! The Humble Bundle is a bundle of indie games with you can receive by making a small donation! This year’s bundle has eight games in it, including Bastion and Psychonauts. Why not check it out? You only have a day or two left!