samuelhowitt

[samuelhowitt]

Take Your Time - Chrono Trigger

Parts of Chrono Trigger work a little like a magic trick. It’s best to see those in action before learning about how they work. Turn-based role-playing games often have strongly player-driven pacing, especially within the more traditional games. There’s always time to think between each battle decision. Outside of combat they often involve an adventure-game-like structure which goes nowhere…

[samuelhowitt]

Reflections on my Almost Five Years of Final Fantasy

This article will mention story elements of various Final Fantasy games, with major spoilers for Final Fantasy X and XV. Today marks five years since I published my first article about Final Fantasy on this website. On that day I had no idea what that would lead to. From the start of 2020 until around the end of 2024 I was spending a lot of time playing and writing about the Final Fantasy…

[samuelhowitt]

Did We Need All This Space? - Mass Effect: Andromeda

A phrase that annoyed me for a while was whether a game “respected my time”. It’s something I used to hear a lot on videogame podcasts, and admittedly the reason I might not hear it so much now is that I just don’t listen to as many podcasts on the subject these days. I always thought it was directed at games that were simply just long, most often RPGs because those used to be the long ones (it’s…

[samuelhowitt]

Something Conclusive - Mass Effect 3

I respect endings, especially when they’re conclusive. They don’t need to be comprehensive, as it often leads to rushing closure, but I can appreciate the finality of everything being wrapped up. Endings are one of the things I get more excited for within games. They’re hardly ever the best part, but there’s something incredibly appealing about finishing something. Mass Effect 3 is a fairly…

[samuelhowitt]

What is Commander Shepard? - Mass Effect 2

This article contains spoilers for Mass Effect 1 and 2. When I play a videogame with a player-created character, I don’t feel as though I am playing a version of myself. Even when I’ve named them after me, attempted to give them my face, that’s still another person staring back at me. I believe my experience with the Mass Effect series being my earlier experience with that type of play set…

[samuelhowitt]

A Future From the Past - Mass Effect

I hadn’t always been an RPG person. I certainly dabbled in them through my childhood and early teenage years, through games like Pokemon, Golden Sun, and Kingdom Hearts. But I didn’t look for consoles because of the RPGs on them. My Playstation 2 was to play Dragon Ball Z Budokai. The game I most wanted to get a Wii for was Rayman Raving Rabbids. When I got access to my younger brother’s Xbox 360…

[samuelhowitt]

Go Make Some Friends - Dragon Quest II and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake

This article contains major spoilers for Dragon Quest III. With the recent release of Dragon Quest III HD2D Remake, I felt as though I had to be caught up. In recent years I had only played the original Dragon Quest (I have played otherss but that was a long time ago). While there are remakes of the first two arriving next year, it didn’t feel right to jump from one to three. Regardless of its…

[samuelhowitt]

Dealing With a History - World of Final Fantasy

This is it. The last piece of writing I'll do on Final Fantasy for a while. I've had a great time covering the whole series. Thank you to everyone who's been reading it. Now here's my longest piece of writing on a single game so far:

This post contains spoilers for World of Final Fantasy and also a broad spectrum of Final Fantasy. Specific other games spoiled include: Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy XV. There isn’t a single game that could encapsulate Final Fantasy in its entirety. It’s the nature of the whole series. It’s gotten so…

[samuelhowitt]

Never-ending Battles - Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy and Dissidia Final Fantasy NT

There’s a certain pleasure to crossovers, even when the results are often worse than what each piece originates from. A child with toys of different brands would likely play out scenarios of them interacting together. Final Fantasy’s whole gimmick is the separation of universes, so to see the barriers break is an exciting prospect. Kingdom Hearts has teases of that, but they are not the focal…

[samuelhowitt]

[samuelhowitt]

Going on a Hunt - Final Fantasy Explorers

The Nintendo 3DS has long been abandoned by corporate interests. Any modern coverage is either in retrospect or about how simple the system is to modify. This article is going to be the former. The circumstances of this console made the games how they were. Portable consoles lended themselves well to games with a mission-based structure. This was likely a reason for the popularity of Monster…

[samuelhowitt]

Mystic Quest Origin - Final Fantasy Legend III

An important point to consider in the release of the original Final Fantasy in the west is that it was published not by Square themselves, but by Nintendo. It was a strong success and in order to capitalise on that, Square themselves released Makai Toushi Saga for the Game Boy in America, and changed the name to The Final Fantasy Legend. It could be assumed that the smaller scope of this game…

[samuelhowitt]

Looking for the Future - Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

This article contains spoilers for all the Final Fantasy content up to the most recent expansion as of writing, Dawntrail. After 11 years, Final Fantasy XIV came to an ending. In 2021, Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker wrapped up the big story arc the game had been going through since it began. That “ending” centred around the idea of letting things end and came to a conclusion of “what if we still…

[samuelhowitt]

A Portable Saga - Final Fantasy Legend I and II

While the name suggests so, these are technically not Final Fantasy games. In the 90s, Square thought that it would be more appropriate to release Makai Toushi Saga under the name The Final Fantasy Legend, to tie into the series that had already gained some popularity in America. That marketing decision made a trilogy of Game Boy games part of the story of that larger series. This article will…

[samuelhowitt]

Sometimes Failure is Good - Chocobo GP

The original release of Chocobo GP in 2022 was dreadful. This wasn’t because of its quality as a Final Fantasy-themed kart racer, but because of bigger structural problems with the game. A hostile monetisation structure that encouraged a heavy amount of grinding that also discouraged playing other modes. It did so relying on players’ attachment to old characters in the same way that Fortnite…

[samuelhowitt]

Boundless, Terrifying Freedom - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

This article contains major spoilers for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and multiple other games in the franchise that came before it. There was a lot of promise shown at the end of 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake. A genuine possibility that the future parts of this story could play out quite differently than how they did in 1997’s Final Fantasy VII. Major moments of tragedy from the original game…

[samuelhowitt]

Sephiroth, Reborn - Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is taking me a long time, so rather than leave this blog without anything for a while, I decided to take the opportunity to talk about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. You won’t see anything about Rebirth in this article, because I wrote it before it came out in case the game was taking me a long time. I will have a lot to say about it soon though. In the mid-00s it…