Sort of a miscellaneous intro section this week, since I've covered most of the topics I usually talk about - RPGs, backlogs, Indies - far too recently.

First, I want to talk about what some of my blogger peers are up to on this site. ArbitraryWater's getting into Tales, and I couldn't be happier for him and the long yellow brick anime road that stretches out before him. Talking of Namco joints, JeffRud's been busy chronicling early Namco games in his sequential NamCompendium blog and on the wiki alike, and I'm looking forward to when he starts making heads or tails (or Tales) of the Tower of Druaga, its expanded franchise, and its many callbacks in future Namco games - action JRPGs owe a lot to that game, as does Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda. Meanwhile, ZombiePie is still grappling with the androgynous colossus that is the Final Fantasy franchise, recently covering the very first (and horribly dated) game in the mainline series and soon to be putting together his more detailed take on the divisive Final Fantasy XIII. He and Gino "ThatPinguino" Grieco will presumably have more to say about Hope, Snow, Lightning and the gang on their semi-regular podcast also.

In another area of the site, the extraordinarily busy head engineer Will "wcarle" Carle and his team have rolled out the new wiki submission tools, creating a system that lets you review all your individual edits before sending them out to go live like baby birds leaving the nest. I've been waiting for this new system to arrive, which not only makes large full-page edits easier to compartmentalize but also fixes a number of outstanding issues with the old wiki, and I'm planning on starting a new Wiki Project in the near future to commemorate it, probably once E3 (and my ridiculous E3-related features, like that Trailer Blazer thing I do every year) is over. I'm still trying to narrow down what I want to focus on next: my gaze oscillates between the Mega Drive/Genesis, the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo 64, and the rest of the Japan-exclusive PC Engine CD-ROM library. I'd also like to revisit some of the circa 1989 NES pages I worked on years ago before I was mod, and maybe give the SNES section of the wiki another once over. I'll have more to say on all this once I decide on a project a few months from now.

Did I seriously blog every day this week? You betcha. I have proof, damn it:

• On Monday, we had the first of two episodes of my ongoing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer playthrough for this week, starring Garflink the Hero of Pierule. Because food. Eating. The cat is morbidly overweight. Episode VII: Please, God, No: The Zealand Kilt Theft was a return to form for the flabby tabby, having found the run-revitalizing Titan's Mitt in the previous update. This allowed us to take on Turtle Rock, and from there a wealth of new opportunities presented itself.
• On Tuesday, we continued exploring some of those opportunities in the second half of this week's randomizer double-bill. Backed with the formidable Silver Arrows and the level three sword, Garflink quickly made short work of most of the remaining dungeon bosses. Episode VIII: TalkFleet: An Elephant-Sized Hotdog puts us close to the end of this entertaining (for me, at least) playthrough with various ideas of what to try next. But first! We have to defeat Ganon! And Garflink knows exactly what to do with giant pig wizards: probably porkchop sandwiches. Because food. Eating. The cat is grotesquely corpulent.
• Also on Tuesday, we appraised the first game of this year's May Maturity feature with an Outro blog for Might and Magic: World of Xeen. Though I'm far from done with the game, I've made a significant amount of progress into the first half - which, let's not forget, was originally released as a separate fully-fledged game and is otherwise known as the fourth mainline entry for the Might and Magic franchise - and intend to pop back in whenever I have a gap between when one May Maturity game ends and the next begins. The appraisal goes into what I like about these older CRPGs, particularly the specific rhythm or cycle that you have to perpetuate, and the colorful and humorous appeal of this game and franchise in particular.
• On Wednesday, we followed up World of Xeen with the first classic graphic adventure game for May Maturity 2018: An Intro to The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge. I completed the first two games in this series last year, and was disappointed that I couldn't quite finish the whole trilogy at the time. Instead, I made it a priority this year to see the whole franchise concluded. Early impressions were positive enough, even if it didn't feel like I was making a whole lot of progress. The reasons for that became evident as I played more of the game after that blog went up.
• On Thursday, I took a brief hiatus from evil (but not really) jesters to play an evil (but not really) knight in the great if a little underwhelming Plague of Shadows add-on campaign for Shovel Knight as part of my regular Indie Game of the Week feature. Adapting the original game for a new protagonist, with his own unique moveset and collection of arcane relics, there's a lot of smartly modified level design for this expansion and a cute little story about the sardonic but shy Plague Knight and his comely assistant Mona. Not quite to the level of its forebear or successor (the excellent Specter of Torment from last year), but is still a middle child that shouldn't be overlooked.
• On Friday, I forced myself to conclude The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge in this Outro blog, denouncing its almost antagonistic relationship with the player while still admiring its several clever innovations that it couldn't quite capitalize on effectively. It's a great looking game, dumb pre-rendered backgrounds aside, with a quirky soundtrack and some funny writing, but too much of its core was irrevocably compromised by its insidious puzzles. A bitter send-off to a mostly OK trilogy of adventure games, from a developer that would ascend to new heights just a year later with the first Command & Conquer.

Addenda

Movie: Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016)

Hey, I said I was done with Final Fantasy XV, but I said nothing of its movie spin-off. Part of a multimedia storm to promote Final Fantasy XV's release, Kingsglaive wasn't so much intended to follow Final Fantasy XV and cash in on its success, like most video game movie adaptations, but to support it narratively with some missing backstory before the game even arrived. What that means in practice is that the movie makes little sense without the context the game provides, and vice versa, creating the sort of extremely irritating and dimly-received "jigsaw" model of narrative delivery that I'm hoping no other major multimedia property will ever attempt again.

Without spoiling too much about the movie or the game, Kingsglaive starts shortly before the events of Final Fantasy XV and ends around a specific story moment in-game - I believe it's around chapter three - where something catastrophic happens off-screen and the playable characters only learn about it from reading the newspaper, of all things. It's a huge piece of missing backstory from the game, and the last you hear from several important antagonists until close to the game's conclusion. The developers of the game - and the movie, one assumes - originally planned the story to comprise several games' worth before realizing that it wouldn't be cost-effective for the studio to produce more gigantic JRPGs if FFXV had the the lukewarm reception and underwhelming sales figures that Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels contended with, especially since it had already been in development for like a decade and had essentially become a money-devouring Atomos in their midst that they were in a hurry to push out the door. Instead, they decided to hedge their bets by creating this animated movie to "bolster" a lot of the narrative that they couldn't squeeze into the game, leaving the gate open for subsequent movies and anime OVAs that would continue to spackle the various gaping plot holes the clearly incomplete game left behind. That isn't to say the movie is total chocoboshit, that its CGI isn't generally excellent (though its characters dip into the uncanny valley every so often) or that it can't stand on its own to some extent, just that it would be very hard to care about any of its characters, its worldbuilding, or its half-assed, open-ended conclusion - one that leaves the game to pick up the baton - without having played the game or harboring an intent to do so.

Kingsglaive stars Aaron Paul as Nyx, a generically attractive member of the titular infiltration squad of enchanted operatives working for King Regis of Insomnia, who granted them all a small amount of the power of the kingdom's magical crystal McGuffin just sufficient enough to sling spells and warp around like Noctis does. Nyx is your classic heroic archetype: highly competent, gregarious, and haunted by past mistakes that motivate his single-minded heroism. He's supported by a team of generic Kingsglaive recruits, including "the earnest fat one," "the preppy smart one," "the callously hostile one," and "the girl one," each of whom finds creative ways to exit the movie. There's also Nyx's bodyguard duties to Lunafreya nox Fleuret, the sweetly self-sacrificing Oracle and former Princess of Tenebrae who also happens to be a major character from the video game, rendering the stakes concerning her frequently imperiled well-being largely non-existent. She's voiced by Lena Headey: a great voice actor whose mature and sharp regal tone developed during her many years playing Queen Cersei on Game of Thrones sounds a little weird coming out of a girl barely out of her teens. Rounding out the cast is the pragmatic Kingsglaive commander Drautos, the imposing antagonist heavy General Glauca, a couple of the sinister Imperial bigwigs who also play more significant roles in the game, and Noctis's father King Regis himself, who is voiced by Sean Bean in case you weren't sure beforehand whether or not he was going to survive this movie.

Like Advent Children, the Final Fantasy VII CGI movie, Kingsglaive spins its wheels for a long time with various characters deemed too uninteresting to even appear in the core game as NPCs who stand around remarking on what a lovely day it is, before it eventually becomes an hour-long action cutscene full of flashy teleporting effects and a ludicrously overwrought swordfight between two indistinct CGI characters projected over a chaotic backdrop. The flips and whizzing around would not make it an easy battle to follow at the best of times, and its not made any easier on the eyes by the fact that both characters are dressed in dark greys and black, fighting at night, on top of black and dark grey buildings, while gigantic dark grey statues fight colossal black daemons in the background.

If you're into visually incomprehensible CGI spectacles and find the Transformers movies too offensively stupid, I might recommend Kingsglaive for that reason alone. I might also recommend it if you've played Final Fantasy XV and are wondering what happened to General Glauca - who, let's just say, might be someone Noctis would have a bone to pick with - or how certain off-screen events might've transpired given that the game was unwilling to fill in any details lest it step on the toes of its various companion media. Frankly, I was left uncertain that I should be supporting practices like these. Every Final Fantasy game since the genteel ninth seems to have been hit by some kind of malady of Square Enix's own doing: whether that's Final Fantasy X's ill-advised bubblegum J-Pop sequel prompted by financial troubles rather than earnest artistic endeavor, or Final Fantasy XI's unappealing and grindy MMO aspirations, or Final Fantasy XII's intense scrutiny during development causing the best game scenario writer Square Enix ever had the fortune of recruiting to toss in the towel due to extreme stress, or Final Fantasy XIII's far-too-optimistic decision of going all-in on increasingly off-kilter follow-ups, or Final Fantasy XIV's one hell of a false start. If I end up watching another middling CGI movie or playing some spin-off mobile card game because I needed to get the full width and breadth of a core Final Fantasy entry's story, then I'll be proving definitively that neither I nor Square Enix deserve nice things.

There's no game addenda section this week - May Maturity is taking up my every gaming moment that isn't going into my regular features. Instead, expect to see the Intro blog for the feature's third game go up later today. (Man, why do I do this to myself every year...?)