I am a New Yorker and my father is a sports fan. Growing up, that meant that every car ride was accompanied by WFAN and the ubiquitous talk radio team of Mike and the Mad Dog. The calm, deep, and authoritative voice of Mike Francesa mixed perfectly with the shrill and frantic energy of Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. These two hosts’ bickering about the sports events of the moment were the soundtrack to much of my childhood, and ingrained in me a strong appreciation for talk radio. For hours the two would go back and forth about the Mets, Yankees, Giants, Jets, and maybe they would even acknowledge the existence of the Islanders or Bills, if it was a slow news day. Years of exposure to their program has led to me associating sports talk radio with many fond memories, and as a result there are few things that say, “I’m home,” quite like Mike Francesa berating some listener about the Knicks salary cap situation. Sports talk radio is that little bit of milieu that always resonates with me. Whenever I get to a new town, a good sports radio show can both make me nostalgic for Mike and the Mad Dog and make me feel like I am a little bit closer to home. So it was quite surprising to hear Zanarkand sports radio in the opening minutes of Final Fantasy X.

Final Fantasy X begins in a city called Zanarkand with a blitz-ball game (an underwater combination of American football and European fútbol). The main protagonist of the game, Tidus, is the star blitz-baller (blitz-ballsman? Blitz-ballist?) of the Zanarkand Abes. At the game’s outset, he is on his way to play in the Jecht memorial cup. This ceremonial tournament is played to remember Jecht, Tidus’s father, who disappeared 10 years before the events of the game. All of this setup exposition is conveyed, not through a wall of text or a narrator, but through a Zanarkand sports radio broadcast which plays as you control Tidus on his way to the game. As you run through the sprawling city streets of Zanarkand, an initially somber radio host reminisces about the day Jecht went missing, saying,

I was in a coffee shop, running away from home when I heard the news. Our hero, Jecht, gone. Vanished into thin air! My dad must have been his biggest fan. I knew how sad he'd be. Heck, we all were that day. 'Zanar,' I says to myself.' What are you thinking?' I went running straight back home. We sat up talking 'bout Jecht all night. My dad and I never talked so much.

The game told me about the culture of the Zanarkand in a way that my New York state of mind could understand. The game presents Tidus’s father’s disappearance as an earth-shattering, life-changing event for the people of the city, like Lou Gehrig’s famous speech or any number of uniting sports moments. The impact of Jecht’s disappearance is conveyed through the anecdote of an ordinary sports announcer. I found the game’s opening brought me back to car rides with my dad, just as Zanar used Jecht’s disappearance to reconnect with his father. Jecht’s disappearance is framed as a sports tragedy first, and a magical happening second.

I don’t know of many pure fantasy games that utilize the minutia of modern-day sports culture quite like Final Fantasy X does, but I wish there were more of them. The little touch of adding sports fanaticism to an otherwise fantastical world did a lot to ground the world of Spira for me. It gave me a bit of shorthand to understand the people of Spira; if they have sports radio they can’t be that different. I wonder what Mike and the Mad Dog would have to say about Titus’s team leadership or my work as the general manager of the Besaid Auroks.

I am a New Yorker and my father is a sports fan. Growing up, that meant that every car ride was accompanied by WFAN and the ubiquitous talk radio team of Mike and the Mad Dog. The calm, deep, and authoritative voice of Mike Francesa mixed perfectly with the shrill and frantic energy of Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. These two hosts’ bickering about the sports events of the moment were the soundtrack to much of my childhood, and ingrained in me a strong appreciation for talk radio. For hours the two would go back and forth about the Mets, Yankees, Giants, Jets, and maybe they would even acknowledge the existence of the Islanders or Bills, if it was a slow news day. Years of exposure to their program has led to me associating sports talk radio with many fond memories, and as a result there are few things that say, “I’m home,” quite like Mike Francesa berating some listener about the Knicks salary cap situation. Sports talk radio is that little bit of milieu that always resonates with me. Whenever I get to a new town, a good sports radio show can both make me nostalgic for Mike and the Mad Dog and make me feel like I am a little bit closer to home. So it was quite surprising to hear Zanarkand sports radio in the opening minutes of Final Fantasy X.

Final Fantasy X begins in a city called Zanarkand with a blitz-ball game (an underwater combination of American football and European fútbol). The main protagonist of the game, Tidus, is the star blitz-baller (blitz-ballsman? Blitz-ballist?) of the Zanarkand Abes. At the game’s outset, he is on his way to play in the Jecht memorial cup. This ceremonial tournament is played to remember Jecht, Tidus’s father, who disappeared 10 years before the events of the game. All of this setup exposition is conveyed, not through a wall of text or a narrator, but through a Zanarkand sports radio broadcast which plays as you control Tidus on his way to the game. As you run through the sprawling city streets of Zanarkand, an initially somber radio host reminisces about the day Jecht went missing, saying,

I was in a coffee shop, running away from home when I heard the news. Our hero, Jecht, gone. Vanished into thin air! My dad must have been his biggest fan. I knew how sad he'd be. Heck, we all were that day. 'Zanar,' I says to myself.' What are you thinking?' I went running straight back home. We sat up talking 'bout Jecht all night. My dad and I never talked so much.

The game told me about the culture of the Zanarkand in a way that my New York state of mind could understand. The game presents Tidus’s father’s disappearance as an earth-shattering, life-changing event for the people of the city, like Lou Gehrig’s famous speech or any number of uniting sports moments. The impact of Jecht’s disappearance is conveyed through the anecdote of an ordinary sports announcer. I found the game’s opening brought me back to car rides with my dad, just as Zanar used Jecht’s disappearance to reconnect with his father. Jecht’s disappearance is framed as a sports tragedy first, and a magical happening second.

I don’t know of many pure fantasy games that utilize the minutia of modern-day sports culture quite like Final Fantasy X does, but I wish there were more of them. The little touch of adding sports fanaticism to an otherwise fantastical world did a lot to ground the world of Spira for me. It gave me a bit of shorthand to understand the people of Spira; if they have sports radio they can’t be that different. I wonder what Mike and the Mad Dog would have to say about Titus’s team leadership or my work as the general manager of the Besaid Auroks.

The immortals of Lost Odyssey are effectively human in every way, save their inhuman lifespan. They fall in love. They feel pain. They feel sadness. They feel remorse. They commit and witness every folly that humanity is capable of, and they are forced to accumulate the painful weight of all of that experience with no hope of an end. These immortals are not so much gifted with immortality as cursed by it. Given all of the personal pain that must come from every human relationship they outlive, why would these immortals bother continuing to participate in human society at all? What does someone who has experienced everything have to gain from another fragile connection? “Hanna’s Departure” attempts to provide some answers to these questions, and it does so through the story of Kaim’s relationship with a girl named Hanna.

Hanna was an innkeeper’s daughter who “was frail from birth”, and as such, she was never able to really leave her house much over the course of her short life. Luckily, she was born to innkeepers who lived on the side of a major highway. Through the hundreds of guests at her parents’ inn, Hanna was able to vicariously visit the faraway lands she would never see in person. Even more fortunately, Hanna came to meet the immortal Kaim and his infinite stories. Clearly to Hanna, Kaim was a great source of information about the world beyond her home, but what Kaim – a jaded, immortal mercenary—had to gain from a relationship with a small child is a bit more difficult to discern.

Kaim’s affection for Hanna seems to center around two distinct qualities: her fragility, and her innocence. When Hanna is first introduced in the story, her smile is described as “almost transparent in its whiteness, so fragile—and therefore indescribably beautiful.” What Kaim finds beautiful about Hanna’s smile is not its whiteness or its transparency—it is its fragility that lends it incredible beauty. For an immortal such as Kaim, a brief and precarious life full of wonder must seem like everything he lacks. While Hanna is constantly thirsting for knowledge, Kaim has too many memories he wishes to forget. While she can only imagine the world outside of her home, he has seen the entire globe and found it wanting. Every day in Hanna’s life holds a sense of urgency and weight that Kaim has never known as an immortal. As Kaim sits down to tell Hanna her final story, the narrator says, “He [had] been present at innumerable deaths, and his experience [had] taught him much.” Even sitting by Hanna’s deathbed is not a unique experience for Kaim; he has and will continue to have to sit at the deathbeds of loved ones forever.

Interestingly, the end of Hanna’s story inverts Kaim and Hanna’s relationship. As Hanna dies, Kaim says, “you’ll be leaving on travels of your own soon, Hanna… You’ll be leaving for a world that no one knows, a world that has never entered into any of the stories you have heard so far.” After living several lifetimes’ worth of experiences, Hanna’s trip to the afterlife is one that Kaim can never have. In many ways death is the one journey Kaim would most like to make after surviving so many of his loved ones; instead, “his lonely travels will begin again tomorrow—his long, long travels without end.” On the one hand, as a mortal being it is hard for me to fathom looking forward to death and all of the uncertainty therein. However, for Kaim, the knowledge that death is likely his only hope for reunion with his friends and family causes him to view death as a barred exit, rather than an inescapable end. He articulates this feeling of entrapment when he says, “I can never escape this world. I can never see [Hanna] again.” Kaim clearly believes there is some afterlife to escape to that exists “far beyond the sky”. Kaim’s desire for death is further expressed through the background behind the final paragraphs. The background begins a drab shade brown with a set of closed doors to the right; but, once Hanna “departs,” the doors open and the colors shift to a paradisiacal shade of pink and white. Kaim clearly desires to step through those doors himself and see the paradise that he believes lies beyond.

The second reason that Kaim values Hanna so much is that her innocence allows him to sift through his otherwise unpleasant memories for bright spots. When telling Hanna stories, Kaim “spoke only of things that were beautiful and sweet and lovely.” Of course, Kaim’s experiences as a mercenary are often anything but “beautiful and sweet and lovely.” In fact, when between battles Kaim often drank himself into a stupor in order to forget the things he has seen and felt. Yet, when spending time with Hanna “he felt a far warmer and deeper comfort than he could even obtain from liquor.” This sense of calm and contentment is explained when the narrator says,

He told her many things… About the beautiful flower he discovered on the battlefield. About the bewitching beauty of the mist filling the forest the night before the final battle. About the marvelous taste of the spring water in a ravine where he and his men fled after losing the battle. About a vast, and bottomless blue sky he saw after battle.

In each of these sentences the first half of the sentence encapsulates the pleasant story Kaim is telling Hanna, while the back half of each sentence discloses to the player the darker truth behind each memory. Through repetition the player is forced to understand the ubiquity of combat and the battlefield in Kaim’s life. Though Kaim’s pleasant experiences change, they always circle around him going to, fighting in, or leaving from a battle. When playing the role of a children’s storyteller, Kaim is able to focus on the small beauties he has seen, rather than the bloody context in which he saw them. During his final moments with Hanna, Kaim realizes, “he told Hanna only beautiful stories of the road like this not so much out of concern for her purity, but for his own sake.” While Kaim likely began telling Hanna of his happier memories out of a sense of responsibility to preserve her innocence; he eventually realized that his time with this child was as much therapy for him as it was charity for her.

“Hanna’s Departure” sets the stage for many of the recurring conflicts in the “Thousand Years of Dreams.” Namely, how an immortal perspective can be as much a prison as it is a boon, and how connections with mortals can be a form of new-experience-lifeblood for an immortal. It also shows how even an immortal can find profound fulfillment in the company of others, especially a small, fragile child.

I pulled some of my quotes from http://www.wattpad.com/2096394-forgotten-dreams-of-eternity-lost-odyssey-thousand.

My first entry in my Lost Odyssey analyses is taking a bit longer than I anticipated (those Thousand Years of Dreams stories are denser than I anticipated and I want to do this right) so I thought I would point out one of the cooler little design decisions I have seen recently for my post this week. I am talking about the most selfless and noble of the Rogue Legacy classes, the Miner.

The central conceit of Rogue Legacy is that a family of heroes is attempting to slay an ancient evil contained in a cursed, ever-shifting castle. The castle’s is so ancient and powerful that generation after generation the nameless, heroic family sends one warrior into the castle to attempt to slay the evil within. Every generation three heirs are produced, but only one heir is chosen to enter the castle. Now there are many warrior types that can be chosen, from ninjas to knights to barbarians to mages. Almost all of the potential heirs are trained warriors with some skill or expertise that makes them uniquely suited to conquer the evils of the castle. Each of them has some reasonable expectation that they can return home alive. Almost all of the classes in Rogue Legacy have a tangible combat advantage that allows them to traverse deeper into the castle than their parents before them… all except the miner.

The miner in Rogue Legacy is the only class in the game whose tactical advantage has no personal benefit. Miners in Rogue Legacy are born with lower health and strength than most other classes and they are born with average speed. The one advantage a miner possesses is that they receive bonus gold whenever they find gold in the castle. However, gold gathered in the castle can only be spent outside of the castle, before a castle attempt. This means that the miner’s only advantage over other classes, gold acquisition, can only ever benefit the next generation of hero, never the actual miner who is risking his/her life.

Now from a gameplay perspective it makes perfect sense to have a class who specializes in resource acquisition; but, if you think of the characters in Rogue Legacy as actual people trying to conquer a cursed castle, then miners are either the most selfless or greediest characters in the entire game. Either they are so noble that they are ok with sacrificing their lives so that their children might be better equipped for their own treks through the castle, or they are so greedy they can’t think of anything but money. Imagine what being brought up as a miner would mean! While your brothers and sisters are learning how to spit magic and stop bullets with their voice you are learning how to find more coins in the couch. All of the years of couch training eventually culminating in a trip to the castle that killed your parent, and will almost certainly kill you too. But hey, at least your son or daughter will have a new gym to use in your manor and a shiny god helmet to wear. Not to mention how the spelunker, the advanced version of the miner, only gains a head lamp and some treasure chest markers on their mini-map when they upgrade. Other classes gain the ability to swap spells or hp and mp, but the spelunker just gets a road map to a greater inheritance for their kids.

Let us not take for granted the sacrifices of the miners and the spelunkers. They give their lives so that their children’s children might one day conquer the evil of the castle. They are given so little, but give so much.

Lost Odyssey came and went on the Xbox 360 in what felt like a flash. Somehow a game designed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and orchestrated by Nobuo Uematsu, two of the driving forces behind Final Fantasy’s heyday, has been largely left to the annuls of history and the minds of JRPG superfans. Perhaps the problem was the game’s JRPG-ness on a largely western console. Perhaps the problem was the Mistwalker name on the box, rather than Square-Enix. Perhaps the issue was the Western RPG takeover that was occurring when Lost Odyssey was released, what with Mass Effect, Oblivion, and The Witcher capturing the RPG market. Whatever the reason, Lost Odyssey should not have come and gone. Lost Odyssey broached topics that very few games cover, like the value of mortality and the value of faith. Lost Odyssey approached these topics with a subtlety and weight that I have not seen before or since, and it did so using a tool that games rarely embrace: short stories.

When I say that Lost Odyssey used short stories, I do not mean that it had a bunch of “lore” or story books, like an Elder Scrolls game or a Dragon Age game. The short stories told in Lost Odyssey are called the “Thousand Years of Dreams,” and they are the memories/dreams of Kaim Argonar (with a few exceptions), the game’s main character. Kaim is an immortal with amnesia. Throughout the game, certain stimuli can trigger one of his latent memories from his thousand-year life. These stimuli can be simple, like visiting an inn or seeing a family. They can also be dramatic, like being locked in prison or walking through a wind storm. Regardless of the trigger, once a dream starts, the player is presented with the title of the short story, a background image, and an appropriate soundtrack. These stories are then presented in an almost Powerpoint-like blend of text, animation, background changes, and audio. I know Powerpoint does not necessarily inspire a ton of emotional resonance, but the paragraphs blended with accentuating animation, music, and images provide an added tonal weight to the stories. The music will often shift to somber piano as Kaim witnesses another tragedy, or include the bluster of wind as Kaim talks about people walking against the wind. Text will often fall into place for emphasis, or appear suddenly to mimic a sudden event. The artwork used in the dreams will often mimic the story as well, such as flashing white when Kaim steps into the light after a long time in a jail cell. All of these little touches add an element of showmanship to what could have easily been static text. The end result is a series of didactic vignettes, sharing Kaim’s experiences on his seemingly endless trudge through a mortal world he inhabits, but does not belong to.

All of the trappings in the world would not have mattered if the “Thousand Years of Dreams” were poorly written or poorly translated. Thankfully, each of the stories were written by Kiyoshi Shigematsu with the skill that one would expect of an established author, translated to English exceptionally well by Jay Rubin, a Harvard professor and expert Japanese translator. The result of their collaboration is a series of short stories that show a deftness and understanding of Kaim’s privileged, yet tragic position as an immortal. Kaim is forced to witness the deaths of wives, children, friends, and acquaintances endlessly over the course of his life, with no hope that he will ever meet them in the afterlife, if there even is one. Kaim has been through so many wars as a mercenary, that he understands the difference between allies and enemies is circumstance, not moral authority or correctness. But regardless of all of his loss and perspective, Kaim still participates in the conflicts of the moment. Kaim still creates fleeting relationships that he knows he will outlive. He keeps living and loving like a mortal, despite his own immortality for a thousand years of seeming futility. He becomes more and more jaded, but does not become cynical of mortals and their doings.

In each story, Shigematsu and Rubin manage to give just enough detail to each supporting character as to make them come alive, but still leave enough ambiguity as to display the fading state of Kaim’s memory. Kaim remembers the professions and personalities of acquaintances, but not necessarily their names. Even his own wives and children’s names fade from his memory, yet their last words and his regret about not saying more still remain. The short stories do not bother introducing a bunch of proper nouns for locations or countries, because those proper nouns are not what matter. Too often in JRPG stories the jargon of their worlds overwhelms the human motivations of their characters. In the “Thousand Years of Dreams”, those proper nouns are omitted unless they are somehow crucial to the story at hand. This omission of proper nouns also adds to Kaim’s sense of age since the countries, towns, and people he is talking about could very well not exist anymore. Thus, the “Thousand Years of Dreams” contains a bunch of stories about tiny droplets of time, in an ocean of a life that could be anywhere at any time. The stories are both specific and universal at the same time. It is this very quality that makes Kaim’s stories so relatable and impactful. There is no talk of great battles and deities and heroes and magics most foul. Instead, Kaim tells stories about a little girl he met at an inn.

To shed some light on these exceptional stories, I am going to do a running series of literary analyses on each of the 33 dreams. I encourage everyone to pick up Lost Odyssey and check out this under-played classic.

This week I completed an almost entirely naked run through Dragleic and I have emerged from my vision quest with a new-found respect for the Souls games and no desire to play any other games in this franchise. I figured I would document some of my feelings on this improbably popular game, and perhaps give some tips to help future naked runners.

First things first, my run was 99% naked because I was forced to wear the tattered rags that my character spawned with for a short portion of the Forest of Fallen Giants. I chose to make a deprived character since I was going to play naked anyway and the deprived offers the greatest level of customization for the later game. When I created my character I did not realize that my level 6 stats across the board would prevent me from equipping ANYTHING beyond a dagger for my first couple of levels. With a dagger and no shield (I wouldn’t use a shield anyway, but it wasn’t even an option early on) the mobs of 3-5 enemies that are found early in the Forest of Fallen Giants were a real problem. Over time I learned to deal with the basic soldiers, but the limited damage and reach on my dagger made dealing with multiple hollow knights a near impossibility. It is with this experience in mind that I recommend choosing a real starting class for your naked run (or perhaps don’t make your first run through the game a naked run). The combination of the terrible dagger reach with my 0 armor and low health made the run up to the Last Giant a frustrating test of patience that I would never like to repeat. Not to mention that I couldn't even grind once the enemies de-spawned. That is why I donned those damned rags and ruined my naked run. I continued my naked run before the Last Giant fight, but the damage was done.

I found that the key to my naked, no shield, no blocking run was to pour as many points as possible into strength and just make sure that when I hit an enemy they stayed hit. That meant that my run really was a tale of two runs; pre-great club and post-great club. Before I found the great club in the bottom of the Gutter I was using a combination of a regular club and a greatsword. The poor strength scaling on the greatsword made its slow animation unacceptable. It just didn't hit hard enough for its slowness, and I found its dual-handed heavy attack to be very unreliable when locked-on to enemies. It would often just swing and miss an enemy right in front of me, which in a naked run means certain death. Finding the great club and its 3-hit heavy chain was the tangible turning point in my run from a difficulty standpoint. That club let me break poise, hit hard, and get away, which was exactly what I needed.

I picked up another key lesson in my run during a dark period against the Belfry Gargoyles. That fight taught me how terrible the lock-on is in multi-enemy boss fights (which make up the majority of boss fights) and boss fights with environmental obstacles (the other recurring theme of DS2 boss fights). Locking on in that fight, and really in almost every fight, just eliminates your peripheral vision, which is terrible in a game that loves bottomless pits and attacks from the blind-side. I can attribute a bunch of my deaths to locking on to an enemy, trying to strafe around it, and then either falling into a pit I couldn't see or getting attacked by something off camera. Honestly the sooner you learn to control the camera the better (though I really wonder how many of my problems would be fixed if the camera was pulled back a few feet). Once I mastered the game’s camera (to the extent that camera is master-able, I still can’t see anything when I am backed up against a wall) I was able to fully appreciate how powerful running is in Dark Souls 2. Honestly running around a boss or running away from a boss is so effective that I had almost no issues with my no-block strategy after the Belfry Gargoyles beat locking-on out of me. Most bosses just can’t catch you if you run, and very few of them can effectively target you if you run. This made darting in and out my preferred method of beating bosses.

After beating the four Great Ones and getting my strength above 50, I realized the value of one hit kills and one hit stuns in Dark Souls. Most of the enemies in Dark Souls 2 can really hurt an unarmored character with any attack, but they also leave themselves wide open after attacking. Therefore, the best course of action is to bait one attack and then make sure your enemy can never attack again, either by stun-locking them or one-hit-killing them. The soft cap on strength does mean that putting points in strength beyond level 50 is inefficient on a pure value level; however, the difference between needing one hit or two hits is so huge that I think it is entirely worth investing beyond the soft cap. By the end of the game I was able to kill the final boss in 3 3-hit combos, which just meant less exposure to risk and less room for crazy Dark Souls stuff to happen. I don’t know half of the bosses attack patterns because they did not live long enough to repeat, which is just the way I like it.

I can respect what people like about the Souls games, but I found fighting with the game’s camera, gotcha deaths (opps! I guess there was a boulder rolling down that hill you were climbing. How weird!), and general reliance on overwhelming you with multiple enemies at once to be un-fun. I was mostly upset while playing, and that is just not something I look for in my games. I can appreciate the catharsis that comes from beating a difficult boss after trying a bunch of times, but I also know that the difference between winning and losing is often a matter of the boss picking a few crappy attacks in a row rather than world-enders. If they fix the camera I might reconsider, but these games might not be for me. But hey, at least I got to make my own Captain Caveman, and that’s pretty dope.

Last week I wrote about one of my favorite lost gems, Legend of Legaia, and that got me to peruse my game shelf to see if there were any other relics worth exhuming for a closer look. In my PS1 section I happened upon one of the most unfairly forgotten games that I have played: Threads of Fate (aka Dewprism in Japan). Threads of Fate was produced by Squaresoft, and its gameplay is similar to Brave Fencer Musashi, another PS1 cult classic. The game was a third-person action game at its core; however, some of its story and gameplay elements still stand out to this day, and it is worth checking out if you haven’t had the chance.

Threads of Fate begins by offering the player a deceptively simple question: would you like to play as an enigmatic boy named Rue or a spunky girl named Mint? The game presents this choice like a typical choice between two different characters, like perhaps choosing Luigi in Super Mario Bros 2 instead of Toad or Peach. However, the choice you make at the game’s outset locks you in to one of two parallel storylines for around 10 hours of gameplay. Rue and Mint’s stories overlap at key moments, but their motivations, character interactions, and even antagonists vary wildly. Mint is an obnoxious, deposed princess on a quest for a sacred relic, the Dewprism, which will allow her to overthrow her usurping sister Maya and conquer the world. Rue, on the other hand, is searching for the Dewprism in order to resurrect his friend Claire, a woman who sacrificed herself to protect Rue from his main antagonist, the Doll Master. As you can see, these two protagonists could not be on more different quests for the same object.

As a result of the dual-narrative structure of Threads of Fate, each half of the game has a very different tone. Mint’s journey starts as a purely selfish act of self-aggrandizement with ridiculously over-the-top dialog and character moments. Over the course of her quest, Mint begins to grow into a likeable human being with interests that don’t include herself. On the other end of the spectrum, Rue begins as a fairly soft-spoken character who does not know much about himself. Throughout his story, Rue learns about his past and about his predestined place in the world. Regardless of whose story you choose, each character eventually comes to meet the other, and depending on whose perspective you are playing, their interactions can be quite different. I remember Mint being a lot more obnoxious when playing Rue’s story, while Rue seemed a lot more clueless when playing as Mint. Over the course of each of the halves, the Mint and Rue’s narratives fuse into one united mission at the game’s end, the conclusion of which is not revealed until both stories are completed. Threads of Fate’s dual-narrative structure was truly novel when it came out, and to a certain extent it still is. I haven’t seen any other game that features two largely separate sub-scripts complete with separate cutscenes.

On top of the narrative duality that the game exhibited, there was also the little matter of the actual gameplay. Like the narrative, each half of the game played quite differently. The basic gameplay was a 3D adventure game with some platforming and melee attacks. However, Mint and Rue each possessed a unique power with which to augment their fighting and puzzle-solving abilities.

Mint was a spell caster with access to elemental magic that was limited by her MP gauge. This allowed her to be a fairly straightforward character to use, since she always had access to all of her spells and she always had the same amount of MP to work with. Her skillset was additive, constantly gaining new tools to use.

Rue’s gameplay was a bit more unique, as he was a shape-shifter. Rue could transform into almost any regular enemy in the game after killing it in combat. However, he could only access the last 4 enemies he killed for his transformations. This meant that Rue’s puzzles often began with a monster hunt to actually acquire the form required to solve the puzzle. Each of Rue’s forms had different skills, body sizes, and movement abilities, meaning that Rue’s basic skills were constantly changing, leading to constant adjustment on the part of the player. The one constant that Rue brought to the table was high physical attack damage while in his human form. In a way, he was more straightforward to play than Mint since his physical attacks were so useful. Rue’s monster forms were quite unreliable in boss fights, as some just did not have great damage output and others lacked mobility. Ultimately, the monster forms were more trouble than they were worth in boss fights. Essentially, Mint brought a Swiss-army knife to every fight while Rue brought a pocketknife; she had more tools, but his single tool was more powerful and reliable than hers.

Threads of Fate told two heartfelt, colorful stories of young adventurers learning their way through the world, and the skill the game exhibited in blending two complete narratives into one compelling whole is still remarkable. Threads of Fate is more than just two games crammed together or one game stretched out. It is an actual, honest-to-goodness combination of equal constituent parts. I suppose that is why Squaresoft decided to name the game Threads of Fate in the US rather than Dewprism - it all weaves together nicely.

When I was little I did not own many games for my Playstation. I had some sports games from relatives that did not know me well, some THQ-made licensed games from grandparents with the best of intentions, and some RPGs that I bought for myself - those were my favorites. The vast majority of the RPGs I enjoyed were from Squaresoft’s late-90s hit-factory; however, there was one game that I loved as much as the PS1 Final Fantasies: Legend of Legaia. This seemingly forgotten gem was loaned to me by one of my friends in 1999 and he hasn’t seen it since. Now Legend of Legaia’s story is almost purely JRPG genre fare, complete with teenagers trying to rid a doomed world of darkness; but, there was something about its combat system and its magic system that are still compelling to me.

Legend of Legaia’s combat system was purely turn-based with a unique input system. Rather than simply having a normal menu with options like attack, skills, or magic, Legend of Legaia had ordinary item and magic use with a more complex attack system. Selecting attack took you to a sub menu where you could choose which combination of right/left punches and high/low kicks to form an attack combo. These attack combos could then trigger specific “arts” or special attacks based on the specific combinations; for example, Vahn, the main protagonist, would perform a summersault kick if you entered high/low/high. The lengths of your combos were limited by an attack bar that filled up as you entered commands. This attack bar would vary in length on a per-character basis and it would increase as your characters gained levels, allowing for more and more powerful arts and complex art combos. The number of arts you could perform was limited by an AP or action point meter that prevented you from simply unloading your best attacks every turn. This meter refilled a little by not performing arts on turn, or a lot by defending (the game called it’s defend move “spirit,” but it was essentially the same as defend in most traditional RPGs). On top of refilling your AP meter, defending extended the length of your attack bar for one turn after defending. This balance between attacking, defending, and unloading spirit-boosted super combos made a deeply interesting and re-playable combat system out of what is usually taken for granted in JRPGs.

Rather than creating a bunch of skills that you have to learn as you level up, Legend of Legaia gave you a fighting game-esque combo system and left it up to you how best to use it. Just entering the correct attack commands unlocked new skills, rather than artificially gating a bunch of skills behind a level wall as so many games did. This allowed basic fights to be a place to test out potential combos and discover arts rather than purely repetitive auto-attack-fests. The attack bar also allowed each of the game's three main characters, Vahn, Noa, and Gala, to be defined and unique in combat based purely on the length of their attack bars. Noa was a pure attacker because her bar allowed for long combos. Vahn was in the middle between physical and magical attacks as his bar was in the middle. Gala was best used as a caster because he simply could not unload physical attacks like his companions due to his short attack bar

The second cool system that Legend of Legaia introduced was its magic system. The vast majority of the spells in the game were unlocked by fighting elemental monsters called Seru, the game’s main source of monster chaos. When fighting a Seru, if a character delivered the killing blow with a physical attack, there was a small chance that the character would absorb the Seru and gain the ability to summon it during a battle. This made every fight with a Seru a constant juggling act to give the last-hit to the character that most needed that Seru’s magic. You could not really auto-attack your way through a fight with a Seru, because doing so could cause your characters to miss out on valuable spells. There were even some early Seru bosses that offered you a one-time early chance to gain insanely powerful magic early in the game. The random chance to gain magic again added variety and thought to what could have been a tedious combat system. Furthermore, magic leveled up as it was used, which incentivized you to use it as often as your MP allowed, rather than hoard your MP for boss fights as so many RPGs require.

Legend of Legaia certainly did not rewrite the book on narrative and setting, but its achievements in combat design are a lesson that should not be forgotten. In a way Legend of Legaia asks the question, “what if every character attacked like Sabin from FF6 and learned magic like a Blue Mage from FF5?” I think that it proved that combining those two designs was one hell of an idea.

Clunky, difficult, obtuse, slow, and glitchy: these terms have doomed many a game to the bargain bin and not-top-10 lists across the world. These exact terms also describe the Souls franchise, from Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls to Dark Souls II. Now many of us who have played and enjoyed the games in this franchise have come to terms with these… disagreeable portions of the game, but they certainly exist and in the moment they can drive you batty. These games get under your skin; make you question their fairness, make you curse, and often employ cheap deaths and gimmicks that are often the marker of a lesser product. So why do so many people love these games? Why do so many people put up with the gotcha moments and the nonsense? Many people say it is because the games are “hard but fair” or that they are “rewardingly difficult,” but I would argue that is only true when you get over the initial knowledge hump and stop dying constantly. There are countless other games that are brutally rewarding, but I think that the fact that there is a passionate fan-base that allows the Souls franchise to have a passionate fan-base.

Paradoxical I know, but I believe that the Souls franchise has prospered because it directly encourages its most invested fans to share their knowledge with other players through messages and phantoms or lord their power over less knowledgeable players through invasion. The Souls franchise provides its players with a blank canvas of systems and story as well as the means to share their expertise with others. The games provide an outlet for both the constructively and destructively inclined to show off in ways that other difficult games do not. This allows for the Souls experts to bring Souls neophytes up to speed in-game, rather than through purely supplemental reading. You don’t have to go to an external wiki for hints and tips like you do for The Binding of Isaac or FTL. Now that isn’t to say that in-depth Souls info does not exist, when you add in all of the Souls wikis, faqs, and websites there are more free info treasure troves than just about any cult-classic series out there, more than enough info to get new players up to speed. However, the games themselves actually provided a jump start to a community with their online features and housed them in a game that is 90% info and 10% execution when it comes to succeeding.

In the Souls games much of the challenge is derived by facing the unknown and falling to unexpected attacks or patterns. For example, in every Souls game one of the first grunt enemies is a zombie with a broken sword who flails wildly whenever the player approaches before calming down and then throwing one last, unexpected stab. Now a Souls veteran would know to wait until the enemy is completely done with its attack before engaging; however, a new player could easily be fooled by this early enemy’s deceptive animation into taking a hit or two. Furthermore, most of the enemies in the Souls series are slow and ponderous with huge attack windups that are easily avoidable by someone with a grasp of the control scheme and a little familiarity with action games. Therefore, simply knowing what your enemy is going to do and what your character can do are huge portions of the Souls experience and as such the game lends itself to large communal information sharing, in-game and out.

On top of the ease of communication that the Souls series affords its players, the Souls franchise has built a reputation for difficulty and reward that has allowed it to draw in even more players seeking a challenge. Beating a Souls game has become a sort of badge of honor for its players and at this point almost everyone who follows the game industry knows it. The series either ushered in the current wave of difficult-but-fair games (Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, FTL, and their buddies) or it popped a wheelie on the zeitgeist and came out at just the right time. The recent acceptance of gameplay mechanics like frequent death and deliberate pacing by a growing portion of the gaming audience has allowed the Souls series to thrive in its own niche. Rather than sanding down some of its rough edges with every iteration, it seems like the Souls games just re-arrange their edges and fashion a few new ones to keep people on their toes. While much of the industry was migrating towards ease of entry, ease of play, and ease of understanding the Souls series helped to usher in a design backlash that is currently saturating the indie game market.

The Souls series is far from perfect, but it provides enough of a sandbox and strong enough gameplay to hold up to repeated playthroughs and gameplay styles. However, without its embrace of online play and its position as a bastion of difficulty a-midst a plain oatmeal sea of modern hold-your-hands-and-feet game design, the Souls series could have easily fallen by the wayside. This series is a perfect product for its time: a deeply connected experience in a social era and a challenge in a time where real challenges in games are few and far between.

Hey ya’ll, while I was thinking of blog topics for this week I was a bit stumped. I have a bunch of half ideas that I don’t feel exceptionally strongly about so I got to thinking of a possible topic, and one game and one idea kept coming back to me. The game is Final Fantasy V and the topic is party construction and customization. You see, FFV was the first game in the series that I played that featured FF’s iconic job system. The job system lent that game a level of gameplay freedom and personal choice that was staggering for me to grasp at the time. Not only could you pick which character archetype you wished a character to be, you could also mix and match abilities across jobs: allowing each party member to be truly unique. I always attempted to create teams that were a mix of effective and interesting, often erring to the side of interesting when the two were at odds. I largely used eclectic mixes of character types such as beast masters, geomancers, and time mages (not exactly the standouts of the Final Fantasy franchise). Those were my preferred teams and if you asked me I would say that those are the best classes to use in the game. However, I think that my choices less reflect the inherent shape of the game’s power structure, and more my own values and priorities. For example, I valued that the geomancer and beast master classes had abilities that did not cost mp, but did comparable damage to more straight forward characters like summoner and black mage. Now my choices were also less reliable than the more conventional character classes; however, I realized that I personally love exploiting free resources and strategies that I think are novel or obscure.

I noticed that my party choices in just about every game I have ever played follow a similar pattern. I used an infiltrator specializing in AI hacking (gaining temporary party members? Yes please!) in Mass Effect and prioritized biotics in my team mates, largely forgoing guns beyond the occasional sniper shot. I thought that stealing characters and using “tricky” spells would be better than just shooting guns. My party of choice in FF9 was Zidane, Freya, Amarant, and Garnet. In this case I chose a dragoon/red mage, ninja/samurai/monk, theif, and summoner/white mage and left out the two most obviously powerful characters in the game: Vivi and Steiner (each of them can deal max damage every turn without much trouble). In this case I appreciated the versatility of Garnet, Freya, and Amarant over the clear damage potential of Vivi and Steiner. In Street Fighter 4 I play Hakan because I love his oil mechanic and I love the surprise on my opponent’s face when a red, oily man is flying at them. I know he isn’t the best character in the game, but I love to think that I know something about him that my opponent doesn’t. I always pick characters or abilities that I perceive to be undervalued, clever, or efficient in some way. Therefore, I think that I am at least subconsciously stating my own beliefs and values through how I select and build characters in games. I value exploiting untapped resources, looking at things in a slightly different way than others, and sometimes I just value being unique over being effective. While I thought I was just creating characters and playing games, I have also been painting a picture of how I see myself and see the world around me.

Now with all of that said, I wonder if those of you in the GB community have noticed similar patterns in your playstyles. How do you define yourself through your playstyle?