Grappling With Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster

I love Final Fantasy. I've loved it for my entire life to this point, or at least ever since buying FINAL FANTASY during elementary school and pretending to be sick the next day so I could play it (a RUSE that my mother didn't fall for -- she hid the NES controllers before she went to work). When I say I love Final Fantasy I mean that I even enjoy the "bad" entries in the series, the games that stray away from the formula and maybe don't live up to the heights of the best Final Fantasies. Because of the way I'm wired, always wanting to find the good in a game, sometimes the flaws in these games make me work even harder to find and appreciate what they do right: the universe-expanding nature of some of the mainline sequels in particular raise them pretty high in my estimation, and I'm never not going to extoll the virtues of FF10-2 and FF13-2. I think there's even a great game in Lightning Returns, although I haven't quite managed a serious revisit of it yet.

I've now played through the six Pixel Remasters that came out last year, and enjoyed them all to various degrees. I was probably most familiar with FF1 and FF4 before the PRs, although I had played other versions of all six at various points. I think it's safe to say that The Internet As A Whole was most excited for a few of these games (English release of a 2d version of FF3! A new fiesta-ready version of FF5! What are they going to do to FF6's Opera Scene?) But then there's FF2, a game so divisive that friends of mine sometimes replace it with Crono Trigger when discussing the series -- something I used to do with FF12 and Lost Odyssey before I came to love that particular return to Ivalice.

Final Fantasy II is a hard game to like. The idea that you raise your attributes, weapon proficiencies, and spell proficiencies by using them seems like a good idea on the surface, and has worked in other games, but the way it works here just isn't as impactful as the gameplay systems of other games in the series. Taking damage raises your HP after battle, using swords makes you better at using swords, and casting Fire eventually makes you better at casting Fire. But it all feels very out of your control: if you're dominating weaker enemies, your gains slow to a crawl/stop happening. You might encounter an enemy group that you simply can't handle, or you might plow through meaningless enemy groups and gain no additional stat progress, with little rhyme or reason.

In college I played through the original Famicom release with a translation guide, and most of that playthrough was carried along by the novelty of seeing a game that looked so similar to my beloved Final Fantasy, but played so differently -- these days the idea of finding a long lost entry in your favorite series seems more and more unlikely, but in 1997 that was still a possibility. Each subsequent release of FF2 tweaked things to make it more accessible, but it still had that fundamental issue: I just wish it played like the other games. I can put up with the gameplay system... but I just wish I didn't really have to.

When the Pixel Remasters released, I played through FF2 the way I normally do -- mostly playing it straight, telling myself I won't attack my own party to raise their HP, telling myself I'll actually use magic this time, and it was an okay, if slow, experience. The Emperor didn't seem to have received as much of a buff as Chaos did in the first game, although I did rely on Blood Swords like I always do.

But I missed a Steam achievement, and after wrapping up the other Pixel Remasters, I decided to play through FF2 again with an eye to finishing the Bestiary. "But what if this time I do that thing I've seen people recommend, where you grind up your stats on the guards early on in Fynn?" This mostly involved choosing a weapon for everyone to specialize in (I chose Swords for Firion, Staves/Bows for Maria, and Axes for Gus), and then grinding until one character at a time has a high enough Evasion using a Shield to survive the encounter (until either the guard runs away or dies). This raised everybody's stats very high, maxing out their shield skill and the skill of their chosen weapon, giving them very high HP and near to max Evasion. I tried raising some of their spell proficiencies by doing this, but it just felt so tedious and so unhelpful that, like always, I gave it up. Even knowing about the armor penalties for spellcasting, I've just never found a real use for magic in this game.

So here's the thing. After grinding on the guards at Fynn, my stats and skills were so high that I could basically Autobattle my way through the rest of the game. It made the monster closets and the mazes less frustrating... but it was also a cake walk, and not really an especially interesting experience. It also meant that every new character that joins you is just fodder: they'll spend so much time being dead that when each of them dies for story-related reasons it just seems reasonable, like they had it coming. Look how weak they were, after all!

In the old days, maybe I wouldn't have minded, but now there's a timer that tells you how long you've been playing, so unlike back in the day when grinding was just a thing you did, now you know precisely how long it's taken you.

I fought those guards at Fynn for about 12 hours, and I completed the game 10 hours later. Firion and co. escaped from Fynn at the beginning of the game, turned around before even getting the Canoe from Minwu, and then beat up on the guards there for longer than the rest of their adventure would take. Feels kinds bad.

At least this time I found the Iron Giant in Pandaemonium, though. 100% Steam Achievements acquired! But next time I don't think I'll do the Fynn grinding. The story is pretty good for so early in the series, the music is of course fantastic, and I've always liked the Memory/Keyword system. If someone modded in even a basic gameplay system like FF1, I think I'd even enjoy playing it!

Kung Fu (NES)

When I was trying to decide where to begin my journey through the NES game library in my quest to get good at video games again, I wanted to choose a fairly simple game in order to ease into it. Looking at my collection, one game in particular seemed to satisfy the "simple" requirement: Kung Fu, a launch title for the NES by Irem. I didn't know that it was the port of an arcade game called Kung Fu Master, but I did know that it was a side-scrolling beat-em-up with five levels, and even in elementary school it felt like a very short and simple game. The early NES games were classified into 'Series,' and Kung Fu was part of the Action Series; they tended to be fairly straightforward.

Thomas's girlfriend Sylvia has been kidnapped by the mysterious Mr. X and is being held at the top of his dojo. Thomas must journey from right to left (and from left to right on the even-numbered floors), defeat the Kung Fu Masters at the end of each floor, and save Sylvia at the top of the dojo.

One interesting aspect to the gameplay of Kung Fu involves the different point totals you receive for defeating enemies with different moves. Thomas can punch or kick, crouch to do a leg sweep, or do a jump kick. Punches are worth more points than kicks because the enemy needs to get closer for you to perform the move. There are some particularly high-scoring maneuvers: on the second floor, balls fall from the ceiling and erupt into Dragons when they hit the ground. Kicking the Dragons before they disappear results in 2000 points, while kicking normal thugs gives you only 200. There's also a time bonus for quickly making it through a floor, and a health bonus for the health Thomas has remaining. It seemed to me that it was more profitable from a score perspective to hurry through the floors as quickly as possible, rather than "farming" the endless enemies with crouching punches.

After a few attempts, I managed to get to the fourth floor pretty consistently. The poisonous moths that emerge on that floor were no real problem, but the boss was a different story: the Dark Magician. If you kick him in the head, his head falls off and he reveals himself as an illusion, appearing once more, with head intact, a few feet away. The only move that truly damages him is a crouching punch, and in order to safely pull that off you need to do some bobbing and weaving in order to avoid his fireballs, which he throws at a couple different angles.

Mr. X on the fifth floor is a very defensive fighter... but he seems to be weak to sweep kicks, because spamming that move allowed me to defeat him pretty handily. My daughter Naomi was over that morning, and if anything she was even more excited about my victory over Mr. X than I was. Another thing that she was really amazed at: after you win, Sylvia gets kidnapped again and you have to play through the game again! This is pretty standard stuff for games from the early to mid Eighties (and especially for arcade ports), but for a six-year-old today that's apparently a big Plot Twist.

The internet tells me that if you play through the game fifty times, then Mr. X is replaced by Sylvia at the end! I don't know if that's true or not; I might do some research after this to see, but even with a game length of about ten minutes, I don't think I have the patience (or the skill!) to try that feat for myself.

Here's the score for my winning run, which came to an end halfway through the second loop:

10/15/15           LYS            (2-4)          225,420

I'm pretty happy with Kung Fu. It is a pretty simple and fast game, but that makes it snappy, and I could see trying for score on multiple loops being a fun enough diversion.

Bad at Videogames

At some point I became bad at video games. When did this happen? Was it the arrival of adulthood? Was it the moment that I stopped having more time than money, and started having more money than time (even if barely)? Was it just the type of games that I'd play, transitioning into longer-duration RPGs or more forgiving adventures? Time was when I'd rocket through Super Mario Bros. in a single sitting, but I haven't been able to do that in years. What happened?

I'm going to change that! I have a basement filled with NES games, and a working NES. Why not exercise those muscles again?

Well, the basement is a good place for classic games in the spring and summer (with the first floor dedicated to current consoles), but as autumn progresses into winter that's not going to be a great place to spend a lot of time; not with frozen knuckles and frost-bitten reflexes.

So I moved my NES setup upstairs!

Looks great to me!

I think this is going to be a great setup for re-learning my old games, and maybe for introducing my daughter to some of the classics. And when my wife gets back today, I'm sure she'll be totally fine with my having hauled all this old stuff upstairs. Of course she will!

I'll let you know!

Dice approves.

UPDATE: 'Why is there a TV up here? It has to move before the holidays.'

TRANSLATION: She's totally cool with it, you guys! ;)

The Games of Summer

Some games just feel like summer to me. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. Forgotten Worlds (experienced originally on a Sega Genesis, more commonly of late on various collection disks, like Capcom Classics Collection). Chrono Cross. Super Mario Sunshine (for better or worse, mostly worse!).

But I haven't played any of these this summer, at least not yet. No, my time has been taken up with a game that I never would have thought of as a summer game: Batman - Arkham Knight, which takes place on a rainy Halloween and is the very definition of a grim Autumn game. It's fantastic! Full disclosure: I do work in the games division of Warner Bros., though not on anything Batman-related. But it's pretty great, and I even like the Batmobile, which seems to have been a divisive addition. This might be the first Arkham game I try to get the full 100%, and that includes the 243 Riddler Trophies.

I haven't just been brooding on rainy rooftops with Bruce Wayne, though. I've also been diving into Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix with Sora and crew. Maybe I'll get into my thoughts on that (and the other games in the series, which I have yet to play -- there's a lot of KH in my future, if I let there be!) later this summer. Summah-time is the perfect time... for video games!

Pocketful of Final Fantasy: FF1 Memories

I have the first nine Final Fantasy games on my PSP. Young me at twelve years old would never have believed it, on two levels: first that any video game series could reach NINE games (and truthfully it's a lot more than that, now!); and secondly that so many games could fit on a portable device. At twelve years old the original-recipe Gameboy was just about to arrive, in all its two-tone glory, and even the first Final Fantasy would have taxed the system. The original FF to appear on that Gameboy, The Final Fantasy Legend sounds by all accounts to be an odd duck, but not quite in the same league as the NES Final Fantasy.

The FF1 and FF2 on my PSP

Final Fantasy Origins was released on the original Playstation, and contained enhanced versions of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II. The first game was a massive influence on my childhood, but this collection was the first time that the sequel appeared (legally) in America. I'll talk about FF2 in a  future post, but for now my handheld trek through the series begins with the first game. And oh, what a game it is!

In FF1, you form a party of adventurers, each bearing an Orb, and travel to the kingdom of Corneria/Cornelia, depending on the translation you prefer, old or new. I grew up with Corneria, so that's the one I think of, but the Origins version calls it Cornelia. The names I grew up with resonate to this day, so I always begin my journey at Corneria, travel to the Temple of Fiends (not Chaos), eventually confront Kary (not Marilith), and curse the low encounter rate for Warmech (not Death Machine) on the bridge to Tiamat.

The structure of FF1 always impressed me. Like in its near-contemporary, Dragon Warrior, your quest in the beginning of the game is to rescue a Princess. That gets resolved after half an hour or so, but the game keeps going, and turns into a much more grand adventure to light the Orbs by defeating the four Elemental Fiends that threaten the land. These days we often turn our noses up at fetch quests (I feel like I'm guilty of doing that on this very website, in fact) but there was something satisfying about the early chain of Find and Deliver on which you embark in this game:

Crown -> Northwest Castle -> Eye -> Matoya's Cave -> Herb -> Elf Castle -> Mystic Key -> Castle Corneria -> TNT -> Dwarf Cave

Phew! Never has a kid felt so successful as when I untangled that long series and sailed through the TNT-created gap in the western land to reach Melmond. In fact, I have a lot of memories about the original Final Fantasy:

+ In 1990, I bought my copy for the NES at the Crystal Mall in Waterford, CT. I must have been in sixth grade by then, and it was a school night, so I only had a few minutes to play before bedtime. Wouldn't you know it? The very next day, I woke up with a sudden sickness! No school for me, what a sad day. I guess I'll just stay in bed and recuperate. My mom went off to work, and, well, I guess I'll just *have* to play a little Final Fantasy, and... uh oh. She hid the controllers!

+ I remember going to my friend Ben's house in sixth or seventh grade and playing Final Fantasy on his dad's enormous wall-filling TV, the largest TV I had ever seen. These days maybe it wouldn't seem as giant, but at the time it seemed incredible. I remember that Ben's battery-backup save file was at the Earth Cave, and we fought Giants in the Hall of Giants to level up. Eventually we played through the entire game on subsequent afternoons and weekends, because I remember us fighting Chaos, but for some reason the only other dungeon I clearly remember after the Earth Cave is the Waterfall Cave where you get the Cube from the robot.

+ I also remember walking along the bridge to Tiamat to try and encounter Warmech, which Nintendo Power magazine told me was the rarest enemy in the game. I walked along the bridge for what seemed forever, on several different occasions. Eventually I encountered it, and it killed me with NUKE, and I gave up. I would later kill Warmech in one of the remakes, when his appearance chance had been modified. It didn't feel the same, though.

Next time, I'll wrap up with Final Fantasy and move on to Final Fantasy II, widely-regarded as one of the lesser entries in the series. Let's see if that's true!

A Gap in the Collection Filled!

My fascination with video games began with my dad's Apple IIe and the few games we had for it: Zork, Apple Adventure (the Apple port of Colossal Cave), Frogger, Sabotage, Repton (perhaps not originally called 'Repton' -- this was essentially a version of Defender), but the fascination became a straight-up obsession on the Christmas I received a Nintendo Entertainment System. This meant, however, that I missed out on the phenomenon of the Atari 2600. My neighbor Mikey had one, and I remember playing Pole Position and Pitfall II on it, but I never had one of my very own.

Until now!

My future father-in-law is an expert at finding hidden treasures at garage sales and thrift shops, and he unearthed this little beauty: an Atari 2600 with two joysticks (the red one is a third-party stick, the 500XJ Epyx, by Konix), a storage case (check out the faux-wood panelling; very Eighties!), and eight games.

It's been awhile since I've tried to hook anything from this era up to a TV, so it took a little doing and a trip to Radio Shack. Some internet research told me to look for an RCA to Coaxial converter so I could take the A/V output from the Atari and turn it into something my TV's input could understand, but Radio Shack seems to be attempting an image change and their collection of adapters isn't as grand as I remember it being when my dad would bring me there in childhood. I did come back with an RCA to BNC adapter and a BNC to Coaxial adapter, and felt like a smart cookie in the process, so there's at least a happy conclusion to the tale.

The crown jewel of my new collection: Pitfall!

Sarah thought I'd get bored with the Atari after a couple minutes, but actually I'm finding these old games to be quite fun, even if the system itself is older than I am (by one year!). Pitfall is the clear winner, but I've also put quite a lot of time into Moon Patrol and Donkey Kong. It's not the best version of Donkey Kong (it seems to only have two levels, instead of three), but it's a testament to Nintendo game design that even this stripped-down port of the arcade game manages to keep the basics fun and intact. Some of the games are less successful: Video Pinball and Super Challenge Football.

Pictured: Less successful. But I did score a touchdown, somehow!

I remember when I was in sixth or seventh grade, you'd often see Atari games and consoles at garage sales, but with the dawning of the internet age you don't see video games on sale as often; now it's easier to find out how high demand is, and what things are worth, and Amazon and eBay are the prime source for old video games. But every now and then you find a surprise, and now I've filled a gap in my game collection. Huzzah!

PS+ Free Games So Far, PS4

If you have a PS4 and want to play online multiplayer, you'll need to pay for a PS+ subscription. This was one of the announcements that was quietly snuck into the Playstation victory lap last E3, when Microsoft couldn't do much of anything right, and this announcement went mostly unnoticed in the din. Since Killzone: Shadowfall was one of the launch games I intended to pick up (dire single player campaign, but the multiplayer was really well-done) I dropped the money on the PS+ subscription without really thinking about it. Now I can't imagine doing without it -- getting a game or two for free every month is a pretty great way to feel good about the PS+ experience. Here are my impressions of the games that have been offered for PS4 thus far.

Resogun - A video of this game convinced me I had to have a PS4, so you're welcome to guess how I feel about it! A side-scrolling cylindrical shmup inspired by Defender, where you have to Save The Last Humans? Yes, please! It could have used more variety in the levels, which all share the industrial/city sort of look, but this is a very slick game. Voxels, voxels everywhere!

Contrast - There are some neat ideas in this early 1900s shadow-manipulation puzzle adventure, but sometimes the platforming feels a little finicky and I ran into a couple bugs that blocked my progress. It's worth a play for the stylish look and the atmosphere (and a Limbo-inspired section about halfway through), but there's not a lot to come back to once you've played through once.

It's all about manipulating the shadows to reach higher places, like this one.

Don't Starve - An inventory management survival game with the atmosphere of an Edward Gorey illustration. I really like this sort of game, since it's all about managing your resources and paying attention to the clock; you don't want to be stuck away from your fire/home when night falls. My only dissatisfaction with this one is that the opening exploration of the island generally seems to go much the same, without a great deal of variety. I find myself doing mostly the same things and experiencing the same difficulties for a pretty long stretch in the beginning, which means that it can start feeling awfully samey, and keeps me from wanting to start new games as often as I usually would in a game like this.

Outlast - You're an investigative reporter who has received a tip about unpleasant goings-on at the Mount Massive Asylum, and before you know it you're trapped in the place and being hunted by lunatics. It's scary, and tense, and just an awesome experience. This was one of the great PS+ surprises for me -- it wasn't even on my radar beforehand. You have no combat skills, so you need to sneak around in the dark, using the night-vision on your camcorder to see and to avoid the lunatics loose in the asylum. You're also collecting documents and recordings as you go, which builds up the story and gives you a peek inside your character's thoughts. During one amazing sequence outside the walls of the asylum, during a lightning storm, you see a quick flash of *something* in whose existence your character has been doubting, and the document you get has one line: 'God help me. I think I've just seen the Walrider.' Chills! And two thumbs way up. I need to buy the new DLC for this, Whistleblower.

Dead Nation - Didn't really like this one that much. It's a zombie game with a Smash TV feel, but the characters are so tiny and the lighting is so dark that it didn't do much for me. I only played the first couple levels; maybe it gets better later on, or it's preferable to play in co-op.

Mercenary Kings - This game looks like one thing (Metal Slug or Contra) but is actually another thing (Monster Hunter). I've never played Monster Hunter before, but it apparently involves selecting missions to go defeat monsters and grabbing items that you can use to craft weapons that allow you to defeat bigger monsters. That's what Mercenary Kings is too, which seems to be off-putting to people expecting a 2D action game like Metal Slug. The time limit on every mission, the way bosses will run away and appear in another spot in the level after you do a little bit of damage, the way the missions seem to mostly involve grinding for loot drops... these are all design decisions that ramp up the frustration at the expense of the fun. Still, though, I'm having a reasonably good time with it. The key is to only play a mission or two at a time; short play sessions allow you to maximize the fun and keep the repetitive annoyances to a minimum.

It sure looks gorgeous, though!

Stick It To The Man - I didn't think they still made games like this! This is another of the big surprises of PS+, and not a game I expected at all. Reminiscent of classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, in this one you control a guy named Ray who has a pink spaghetti grabber hand coming out of his head -- he can use the hand to peel stickers out of the environment and stick them onto people or things to solve puzzles, and he can also use it to read people's minds. For example, if you need to get by a guard, you might read someone's mind and hear 'Man, I shouldn't have stayed up all night eating burritos! I'm so tired!' That makes a thought bubble with Z...Z...Z... appear over his head, which you can grab, and then you can stick the Z...Z...Z... sticker onto someone else's head to make them fall asleep. It's clever, and funny, and all around I had a blast. A great game!

Memorable characters and funny situations. Also: a cool sticker book art style!

I think the lesson here is that while an individual game may not be to your taste, the net effect of the experience is overall very positive thanks to the variety of the offered games. Just looking at the list up there, you've got two arcade shooters, two quirky adventure/puzzle games, a Rogue-like adventure game, a horror game, and a Monster Hunter-style grinding game. I might have only purchased one or two of these sight-unseen, but most of these proved to be genuinely worthwhile games that I'm very glad I got to experience. Maybe not Dead Nation. I might give it more of a try and see if I can find more of the fun; and if I do and I do you'll probably hear about it. :)