Rynling R&D

After leaving the opening town of Kalm, I got sidetracked with sidequests. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually managed to complete any of them. The world map is enormous. Even with a chocobo, it takes forever to get anywhere. Since you can fast travel, I think I’m going to go ahead and progress the main story and see how that goes.

Anyway, something that’s stuck with me is how Tifa confronts Cloud after he tells his version of the story about what happened in Nibelheim. She’s basically like, “After I was injured and almost died, I had to go through months of hospital stays and physical therapy, and where the fuck were you?”

Good for her. And also, I appreciate that she admits to dealing with chronic pain despite being very physically fit. Just because you’ve got your shit together doesn’t mean your disability isn’t real.

I started playing the Final Fantasy VII remake, but I stopped because it was boring. I never went back to it, but my husband watched me play the game and apparently still remembers bits and pieces. The hosts of his favorite English Premier League football podcast all are playing Final Fantasy XVI, so he's watching me play that game too. Yesterday evening, as I was playing FFXVI, he asked me what happens to Jessie.

It took me a second to realize he was talking about the character in FFVII. I was like, She dies.

Then he was like, What happens to "sorry about your ass"? I was like, Wedge? He also dies.

He asked about Barret and Tifa, and I told him they'll be fine. Then he asked about Aerith.

I was like, damn. Should I tell him?

Something that I forgot to mention about Paranormasight is that one of the main characters, Tetsuo Tsutsumi, was made specifically for me. It's like Square Enix looked into my heart and said, "So you want Wind Waker Ganondorf in a suit with an acerbic sense of wit who is very good at his job but bad at everything else? Okay boss."

( Read more... )

I'm also in love with one of the other main characters, Harue Shigima, a wealthy but depressed housewife. She has nothing to lose, so she might as well kill people. She's usually thinking about murder, and she's usually right. It would be an honor to be cursed by her.

( Read more... )

And finally, I usually hate high school characters, but the ones in this game are all right. The third playable character, Yakko, is a sweet girl, but I especially like her friend Mio, who is short and round and not conventionally attractive. I wouldn't call Mio a "badass," because no one in this game is like that, but she's completely uninterested in bullshit. I would absolutely read a manga series about Mio's future adventures as a paranormal detective.

I want to add that I very much appreciate when people spoil things for me. I only have so many days on this earth, and I need people to tell me when something is worth my time. For example:

( Read more... )

I write a fair number of reviews, and I think about this issue a lot in very concrete and practical terms. There's always going to be a delicate balance between explaining what's interesting and compelling about a piece of media and allowing your reader the space to experience it for themselves, but I sometimes feel that the hand-wringing over "posting spoilers on the internet" may have gone a bit overboard.

Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition is a drastically simplified version of the game for smartphones that was serialized across ten chapters in 2018. The characters are cute little chibis, and the open world has been replaced by a linear series of small maps. The voice acting remains the same, but there are no cinematic sequences.

( Read more... )

While reading about Final Fantasy VII, I’m also playing it on Nintendo Switch and taking a lot of screenshots. I feel like I’m actually seeing the game for the first time as I realize how much thought and care was put into all of the pre-rendered backgrounds.

According to the FFVII Remake, Barret’s group is an “independent cell” of a larger organization. In the original game, however, you really get the sense that Avalanche is just two very driven people (Barret and Tifa) supported by local hired help (Biggs and Wedge) and one socially awkward computer otaku (Jessie). Also, when Reeve is trying to convince President Shinra not to bring the plate down on Sector 7, he asks if it’s really necessary to destroy an entire section of the city just to take out an organization “with only a few members.”

I wasn’t able to study the details of the game’s pre-rendered backgrounds before, but now I’m realizing that there’s Avalanche graffiti on just about every available surface. When I’d previously played the game, I took note of the more visible pieces of graffiti and assumed that Barret spent a few years staging an underground PR campaign before he worked his way up to bombing a reactor, and that Avalanche enjoyed relatively widespread popular support below the plate. Now that I’m seeing how ubiquitous the Avalanche graffiti is, I guess it would make sense that the organization is larger than just Barret (and the group of hippies in Cosmo Canyon).

I always admired Barret and Tifa for standing up to Shinra and the Turks more or less on their own, but what they’re doing hits a little different if the story is that they’re extremists who left a larger organization in order to take more direct and violent action. I remember reading in an interview released with the FFVII Remake that the original dev team wasn’t thinking too hard about what “terrorism” actually entails back in the mid-1990s, and that subsequent real-world events inspired them to add more nuance to Avalanche’s goals and activities.

Either way, though, I think Barret is right about everything he says. Fuck the Shinra Corporation.

I applied to be a meta writer for Return to the Planet, an upcoming zine about Final Fantasy VII. This was my pitch:

I'd like to write an essay in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 words about the Japanese cultural context of the original release of Final Fantasy VII. Specifically, I think it would be interesting to situate the game within the "Lost Decade" of the 1990s, when the implosion of a real-estate speculation bubble caused the stock market to crash, resulting in an extended economic depression. It was during this time that the intelligentsia in Japan began to question the "Japan Inc." connections between the government and the corporate sector, and I see Final Fantasy VII as one of the defining works in this vein of social critique.

I'd therefore like to write about the game's depiction of the Shinra Corporation as a send-up of Japanese corporate culture, especially with relation to its effects on class inequality and environmental destruction, both of which were major concerns in progressive Japanese media of the 1990s. Essentially, I want to talk about how Barret was right about everything he said.

I think I'd like to write this essay even if I'm not accepted to the zine. If that ends up being the case, I'd probably pitch it to First Person Scholar, and then to a few other places (like Waypoint and Entropy) if they're not interested. Really, though, I'd just like to be on the Discord server for this zine.

Setzer is very gay in this one, just a big walking bisexual disaster.

It’s hard to find a voice for Setzer that isn’t inspired by someone else’s fanfic, so I’m writing him as a version of Balthier, if Balthier were a few years older and not still an insecure child at heart. This is not to hate on Balthier, because I love Balthier and appreciate the subtleties of how he’s written. Rather, I’m trying to be sensitive to the difference between someone in his early twenties and someone in his late twenties.

As a side note, this is exactly how I’d like to write the character Melchior in The Demon King – as someone who’s not super into adventure but sticks around anyway for the drama. He may not be the leading man, but he’s a strong support character and not-so-secretly everyone’s favorite.

For the record, Locke doesn’t appear in this fic. He’s not even mentioned. I’m afraid that, along with Tidus, Locke is one of the very few fictional characters who actually annoys me. I genuinely respect and enjoy the fan versions of the character (both characters, in fact) that people have created, but this is my story and I do what I want.

Meanwhile, I'm writing Terra as being very strange, sort of like a combination between Luna Lovegood and Bjork.

It’s my headcanon that, until she becomes human, Terra is most definitely not human. Not only does she have an uncanny appearance, but there are also significant differences in the way she perceives the world. Like, she can see colors outside the visible spectrum, sure, and then she can also see time. No one would ever know about any of this unless she says something completely bizarre and out of place, which she manages to do infrequently enough that everyone is surprised when it happens.

I wrote earlier that I couldn't say why FFVI in particular has been able to inspire such a large and active fandom community; but, if I had to guess, I would say that it probably has something to do with the richness and diversity of the characters. Every combination is a lot of fun.

Final Fantasy VI – 1994 Developer Interview
http://shmuplations.com/ff6/

Most of my engagement with Final Fantasy VI fandom has been in the form of reading dōjinshi...

(I used to read a lot of dōjinshi, and I couldn't tell you why, but FFVI has a truly extraordinary community of dōjin artists who are still active to this day, even after many of them have gone pro.)

...and people kept referring to various bits of lore that occur nowhere in the game or its official extratextual materials. "Sabin is afraid of squirrels," for example, or "Edgar wears blue because that's the sacred color of Figaro."

I think I may have found the source of some of this lore. The two interviews collected in this post are both super fun to read, and it's wild to think that so many people on the FFVI development team were hired because they were Final Fantasy fans who wanted to work on the next game.

A lot of the dialog in the Final Fantasy VII remake is not well written. It’s like someone turned the original game into a weird cringe comedy, and the game itself is the cringe.

A good example of this is the character Wedge, who is fat. We know he’s fat because that’s (almost) his entire character. Just in case we forget, there’s at least one fat joke every time he’s onscreen.

During the game’s second trip above the plate, Jessie takes Cloud, Biggs, and Wedge to her house in Sector 7 so that Cloud can appropriate her father’s Shinra employee badge while Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge distract her mother. The "nice" suburbs of Sector 7 are soulless and awful, and it turns out that Jessie’s father is in a coma after coming down with mako poisoning. The fact that this easily preventable accident was caused by corporate greed and mismanagement convinced Jessie to give up her dream to become an actress and join Avalanche, but the situation with her father is so dire that she's been lying to her mother to keep her from worrying.

This should be a powerful and sobering moment in the game, but the atmosphere is broken by jokes about how Wedge wants more pizza and hasn’t had enough chips. Because, you know, he’s fat. Aren’t fat people hilarious? It’s too bad Jessie’s father is in a coma, but at least he’s not fat! Ha ha ha!!

I put the game down every time there’s a line that physically hurts me, so I haven’t been making much progress.