Postmortem: Final Fantasy V

Well, beating this game got delayed by everything under the sun, but I finally finished it up last night. I remember this being one of my least favorite FF games. I remember being entirely unimpressed by the stories and characters, although I found the Job System pretty cool and fun.

Well, my impression wasn't all that bad, although I'm pretty sure I underestimated the stories and characters.

Let's get to it!

Good:

• First and foremost, the Job System is one of my favorite systems they've put in a numerical FF game. It has the potential problem (if you think of it as a problem) that all characters are basically interchangable, but it has a lot of fun customization, and you get benefits at the end of the game for basically every class you master. Plus, the classes give a nice variety, although since the melee classes scale better with gear, and you get a lot of good gear at the end of the game from the 12 Legendary Weapons, the melee seem to have an edge.
  
• How awesome is Galuf's sacrifice?
  
• The characters are deeper than I gave them credit for. Galuf's the best character, but the others are at least likable.
• The story at least has one decent twist.

Bad:

• So as much as I said the characters are deeper than I gave them credit for, it's still not the deepest bunch in the world. There are five playable characters in the whole game, which is fine if they're developed well. We learn some information about them that we didn't know before, but very little actual development happens.
• The story's pretty much straightforward. We find out that ExDeath is causing the crystals to shatter. And then, uh, well, we have to stop ExDeath.
• The biggest weakness, in my opinion, of this game is ExDeath. After he gets unleashed, he basically is the evil villain who could finish you off a bunch of times but doesn't. He doesn't have any emotional complexity to him whatsoever (and unlike Kefka, he isn't funny enough to make up for it). He doesn't seem to have much in the way of tribulations; he just kind of ignores the heroes and lets them power up, despite his frequent run-ins with them. Other games do it, but they tend to give reasons why they aren't killing the party (Sephiroth and Cloud with The Reunion, for instance; Ultimeccia never really gets a chance; Kuja has uses for Zidane, etc).

My kneejerk reaction: This is going to move ahead of IV. This will probably still be ahead of X, but I can't see it leaping any of the others. I really like VI-IX, and as much as I liked this more than I remembered, I didn't like it more than I remembered liking those other ones. Solid game, though.

Up Next: Final Fantasy VI

Postmortem: Final Fantasy IV

I just finished Final Fantasy IV. This was one of the first Final Fantasies I ever played (although that was in the FFII version for me), and being as such, I have some pretty good memories of it. Let's go into it:


Good

• This is an unbelievably solid foundation. It's got great framework.
• Rydia's theme is one of my favorite pieces of character music in the entire FF series. The score is strong on the whole, although it's still relatively weak for a FF game.
• Rydia's my favorite character in this game, although Cecil is pretty likable too. She's not hugely developed, although she at least has some inferred dveelopment with respect to forgiving Cecil. Then again, none of the characters are really that well developed.
• The story has nothing particularly objectionable. It's mostly straightforward, but most of the games are. It does have one huge twist, and it's a decent twist (with the Kluya/Golbez/Cecil stuff). Nothing spectacular, but plenty to build from
• It pulls the trick of "the final boss.isn't the person you've been fighting the whole game" without making it seem as if it's a "Hi, I'm the final boss. Let's fight!". I enjoy that trick, as long as it doesn't come from absolutely nowhere.
  

Bad

• Edward. I have some serious complaints about this game, but none registers louder than Edward. He's a useless party member that's basically there to annoy you. I don't think doing this is funny or makes for a good game. I equate this to how much I hate TV Shows that have downright unlikable characters. I don't think it adds anything.
• The level pacing in this game. I feel like most games are best done where the game should be "decently challenging" if you don't go out of your away to avoid or to have lots of random battles. To get it less than decently challenging, you need to do a pretty good chunk more than that. Say what you will, but at some point, it's just not possible to beat the game if the boss's attack one-shots three of your characters, like I did the first time I fought Zeromus. It just was kind of not fun.
  
• The interface in the PSX version of the game is pretty annoying. The memo save is kind of cool, but it's only there because their access of the memory cards is pathetically slow. The worst thing, though, is if you accidentally start a new game from the load screen, you have to wait 20 minutes before you can get into a fight and die, and you have no way to get back. Combine that with the memo save getting cleared if you restart the Playstation, and, well, that's a nasty combo, since you can't simply restart, because you might lose your save.
  
• The characters are pretty stale. They're all kind of black and white (besides Kain, but he's always being controlled when evil) and don't really develop at all. The only real development is Cecil becoming a Paladin, and there's never really any "hard" choices characters have to make. They're just mostly a boring cast of characters. Edge has to be about the least cool ninja I've ever seen.
• The interface needs some help; it could do more things to tell you what different items do. Minor quibble here.
  
• Oh, and Edward.
  

My first impression: I feel like this is going to end up near the bottom of the pile. I like FFVIII far more than most people, which means it's likely to end up in front of FFIV. the rest mostly take the framework that this game built and better it. That's not an insult to this game; it's more of a compliment to the rest..

Up next: FFV.

Final Fantasy Run

As people may or may not be aware, I'm doing a massive replay of the Final Fantasy games. By this, I'm defining as:

Final Fantasy IV - X, Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger (it's that good).

Notable exceptions: Final Fantasy I-III (just a different style of game, and III wasn't released for the PS), Chrono Cross because it never happened.

Maybes: Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.


After I finish each game, I'll be writing up an entry with my thoughts on it. What I liked, what I didn't like, how it compares with my impression from memory, where I think it'll rank in the overall hierarchy when I'm finished.

Since I just finished FFIV, a postmortem for that will follow shortly.

Follow-up on last night's post

This is going to be a very short post, but it's going to chronicle a thought I've been having:

What if we're presented a lot of the scenes out of order or completely out of the context that we think it is. For instance, we see Kinzo scenes at the beginning of every arc, but we also know Kinzo is dead at the beginning of every arc. I know I wondered yesterday about whether we could trust anything that we're shown without Battler in the frame, so this post may not be saying much, but what if, for instance, all of the scenes we see with Kinzo without a definite time context happen, they just happen way in the past.

Now, of course, this doesn't resolve everything. What happens in Arc 4 for the first twilight obviously doesn't get solved by this. Natsuhi also has some 'splaining to do, given that obviously her "you have the one-winged eagle engraved on your heart" conversation couldn't have happened with the real Kinzo, since Eva putting the paper on the door gives context to when that conversation must have occurred. However, it seems resaonable that the sequence at the start of the series with Nanjo, Genji, and Kinzo could have happened earlier.

Six questions that bother me most heading into Chiru

As I mentioned before, I think really deeply about things that often don't merit it. Anime is one of those things, but this post is going to be about an anime that deserves these sorts of deep thoughts. I am, of course, talking about Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, the nomencalture successor of Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai. I've been following the anime for a while. A few episodes before the anime ended (which it did this morning), I was reading the visual novel, but I've still been following along with the anime.

Firstly, the VN is clearly better than the anime adaptation. The anime had to fit itself into a window of time not nearly large enough for what had to get done. I thought for the most part, the first three arcs of the anime held up pretty well. The last arc was enjoyable, but it had such a large number of cuts that I'm really glad I read the VN. At least most of what they cut wasn't terribly important (except the last episode).


All of these thoughts are framed in context of the VN (unless otherwise stated). I'm not protecting from spoilers, so enter at your own risk.


1. Why is the epitaph even important?

It's cool. It gives some mystery to the in-game characters, beyond just the meta-game characters. But what's the point? It's set up to be something really important, but it's essentially ignored from everything we see. The characters in game ignore it (except for arc 3, which I have no idea is true or not). There's a cursory effort spent solving it, but nobody really spends much time, and in the only arc where it is solved, we see very little to give the reader any context at all in which to solve it. We know an atlas seems to be important for dissecting hte first part of the riddle. We also see Kyrie give her dissection of what the epitaph means (where she tries splitting it into first three then four parts). However, we have essentially nothing with which to solve it. Obviously, more on this will come out in Chiru.

Supposedly, it's also something that must describe how the murders must happen. The problem here is that it isn't really literally followed. The first arc is the arc that most closely follows it ,but arcs start diverging after that. The third twilight is only really observed in the first arc. The fourth arc ignores a lot of the twilight parts entirely (the head is gouged twice in the VN, for instance), and it certainly stops seeming like a "resurrection" ceremony.

Just as importantly, the epitaph being solved seems to have no bearing on the game as we understand it now. We've seen it solved once, and that didn't effect that the goal of the arc for meta-Battler was to prove the crimes could be committed by a human. As it stands now, the epitaph is a very confusing red herring: it illuminates nothing and changes nothing, but it sure is tempting to think about.

My feeling on this is that the epitaph has to be important, if only because something that has had that much time devoted to it and seems to be central to the game =has= to be important. I just don't think we have the context to understand why, yet. Maybe we'll see multiple goals for victory: not only does meta-Battler have to prove that these murders could have been carried out by a set of humans, but the epitaph has to be solved before too many (anyone?) people die, giving Ange the happy future she wants.

2.How much that we've seen can we trust?

I've wrestled with this question since the start of the series. I think I'm at the point where I have an answer to this question, but I'm not convinced of its accuracy. My feeling is that we can trust everything that in-game Battler sees/does/hears, and we can trust nothing else. This is why, in my opinion, arc 4 is such a masterful board: Battler gets two different people telling him that magic is happening, and they're people he trusts. But this is a bit of a digression, back to the main point:

I think we can eliminate the thought that everything we see is real. Obviously, if everything we see is real, there is magic, goats, and crazy shit flying all around. I'm willing to just throw that possibility out.

However, if we feel that the only thing we can trust is Battler's vision, then we're left with very little to go on. We're given a bit more in Arc 4 through phone calls and Battler's inspection of the grounds after, but we still don't have very much. I do think it's important to note, though, that before the tenth twilight, there is no occasion where Battler ever observes magic. Given that it feels like part of what the series is trying to say is that anything is possible if everyone who was there believes that it happened, then as long as Battler isn't convinced the magic happens.

The problem is, outside of the context of what in-game Battler sees, there's very little I'm willing to accept as true. I do think, though, that we can say the following (with some textual flourish!):

Everything Battler sees in-game actually happens. Otherwise, we can trust the facts as they are observed by Battler.

It's possible that we'll get more rules as this goes on, but I don't think we have much we can go on beyond that for now.

3. How do the epilogues of these games work?

I think at this point, we can clearly say that there is one beginning and all games start the same. That means everything that happens before in any arc must happen in all arcs. Thus, we get things like:

Shannon smashes the mirror before every arc. Kanon goes to school with Jessica before every arc. And, oh, yeah, Kinzo is dead at the start of every arc.

Far less clear to me, however, is what happens after the events on Rokkenjima. I'm of the opinion that there is one epilogue world that follows all the arcs, and the only parallel that happens is in the different game boards. There's some evidence backing up this theory: most notably, the events in the future shown in arc 4. In this, we find out that someone signing their name as Maria Ushimoriya has left messages in a bottle. Twice. The only problem, of course, was that these messages are contradictory. One of them details the events on Rokkenjima in Arc 1, and the other details them in Arc 2. Eva seems to survive in this future, but she only survives Arc 3 in the first four. There's also the letters (technically these were sent before the games, but) sent to fake addresses with return labels. Obviously these are important, but it's not obvious at all why.

What really happens? I have no idea. Perhaps the real future is a superposition of all of the other futures? I think not, because there seems to be a hint that Battler can change the future if he wins the game. But either all of that other stuff is a giant red herring, or it has to be important. But obviously Battler won't be able to go to 1998 and investigate, which means I can't see us getting more from the future than what we've already been given. Maybe it'll become clear once the game ends, or maybe it'll all be irrelevant. I honestly have no idea.

4. Kyrie Eleison..

And now the topic turns to my favorite of the female adults in this show: Kyrie. Most notably, I want to point out a few things about Kyrie that really interest me. Notably, she has a strange habit for linking in-game Battler to magic, or she disappears in a situation where corpses are relatively easy to fake (I realize that Beato red-texted that there all unidentified corpses are confirmed, but Kyrie still has her face, which means she's not an unidentified corpse. It's a bit loopholey, but, hey, it works). In the other two arcs, she provides some of the only tangible links to magic. From my memory, the first-hand accounts of magic or Beatrice that Battler gets from anyone are something like:

1. In Arc 2, Rosa sees Maria's candy repaired. However, Maria clearly could have been deluded into thinking it was Beatrice if Rosa told her it was, even if Rosa just switched the candy.
   
2. In Arc 2, Kyrie is the one who sees Beatrice in the hall. She is the only non-furniture to actually see Beatrice.
   
3. In Arc 4, Jessica's phone call tells Battler to not try to think and to accept that it's magic.
4. In Arc 4, Kyrie's phone call tells Battler to accept that it's magic.
   

Notice the common thread? I certainly did. I'm not sure what to say about Jessica's call, but the first one is pretty easy to explain without magic, and the only other two involve Kyrie's word of mouth. Remember that there's clearly some strangeness with Battler's birth (I'll get to that in a second), and Kyrie seems like she'd have to be in the know of that somehow.

I'm not going so far as to call Kyrie a culprit, but there's some suspicion there. After all, remember that Beatrice's final mystery is "Who am I?" Does that mean that it's actually one of the 17 people on the island?

5. Rudolf's Unfortuitous Portent

One of the small details that hasn't gotten so much of a mention since arc 1 is something I'm very curious about: notably, before the first twilight in Arc 1, Rudolf tells Battler and Kyrie, acting as serious as he ever does (Battler comments on how surprising this is in the VN), that he thinks he will die that night.

I assume that this gets explained further on, probably in Arc 5, but it's the only time in the whole series that we're given a sense that someone expects this to happen (outside of furniture, obviously). I wish I had more to speculate here. I just have this feeling that this is really important.

6. Battler and his Sin

Speaking of that sin, what could it possibly be? Here's what we know:

The sin I am now demanding that you remember is not between Ushiromiya Battler and Beatrice.
Ushiromiya Battler has a sin
Due to your sin, a great many humans on this island die. No one escapes, all die.
Ushiromiya Battler's mother is Ushiromiya Asumu.
It was from Ushiromiya Asumu that Ushiromiya Battler was born

"It was from Ushiromiya Asumu that I was born" was very notably not red-textable.

You are not Ushiromiya Asumu's son

Ange speculates:


The one who is qualified to be Beato's opponent is 'Kinzo's grandson Ushiromiya Battler', and whether you are 'Asumu's son' or not is no problem. Thus, even if you are not Asumu's son, you can be Kinzo's grandson. As long as you are Rudolf's son!

This seems reasonable. Supposedly the Japanese used here is not actually gender-specific, so it could be just as accurate that these could all be replaced with "Kinzo's grandchild" instead of grandson. I've heard a lot of different theories about this: firstly, it could be that Battler is actually a girl, which makes all of the comments about him being Asumu's son obviously invalid. However, that seems kind of..sneaky to me. Not to dismiss its possibility, but it feels unlikely to me.

This leads us to the events six years ago. Supposedly Battler himself caused some sin. Maybe he accidentally killed the real Battler, and his parents made him assume his identity? I really have no idea what it could be, but it supposedly causes this all to happen. Maybe this is why whoever is really the murderer is killing. Obviously, Kyrie and Rudolf are going to be involved, since they both seem to feel they know Battler's parentage: if it's forged, they should know. My reading of this is that this has to be something Battler did, though. This makes me feel like it was just an accident, but I can't be sure. Obviously we don't have enough information yet to analyze
this, but I feel like it's important enough that it has to be pointed out.


Happy appropriate seasonal greetings, stay safe this Holiday season.

This blog

To those who don't know me: I'm Kevin. I'm a software engineer who works in the Bay Area. I tend to think really deeply about really random, unimportant things. This includes a wide-range of areas, but certainly hits things like software (I do work there, after all), sports (I'm a bad geek), anime (I'm a good geek), video games (see previous), grammar (parallelism), movies, and any wide range of topics (seriously, I'm weird).

Hope you enjoy being lost in my brain. It's a confusing, scary place.