fetchquests - Tumblr blog

[fetchquests]

dylan w. birdosaur at the battlestation:kingdom hearts hd 1.5 final mix pt. 2

Goddamn. goddamn. this has been a time. welcome back to another installment of dylan w. birdosaur at the battlestation. i’ve played through quite a bit of kingdom hearts i since the last time i wrote - i’ve gotten about as far as i’ve ever gotten before. i also have a couple job interviews scheduled for the end of the week. i may not get evicted or experience any pain but i also may never finish kingdom hearts the first… ever. about up to the peter pan stage. i remembered after my last post i actually got to the nightmare before christmas stage TWICE. now i’m PAST THAT.

 to put the first six worlds into a frame, none of them really have much of the goofy anime melodrama aside from a small cutscene here and there (and i think most of these were added for the final mix version). it starts in the peter pan stage. it’s directly preceded by the nightmare one. you get to the peter pan stage and you immediately deal with soulsucking and your dark evil twin and captain hook is just sitting there bein a total chiller. that’s what these games are fuckin’ for you know.

 i keep thinking abt. lily’s old post where she compares ff7’s design as being constructed of several weird systems that have very little to do with each other in a way that resembles a theme park. if ff7 was doing that unintentionally this is definitely doing that intentionally. in a lot of ways, it’s like a hyper-corporate version of lsd:dream emulator without random generation.

 even in the individual worlds themselves the design generally makes very little logical sense. i know amongst kingdom hearts that the pinocchio and little mermaid levels are considered the worst because they have the most abstract designs but i actually think they’re probably my favorite for that reason. like, i got so frustrated during the first several levels thinking i would have some guidance in knowing what the fuck to do but i never, ever felt like i had that. i never felt that way when i was 12 either and i had no trouble playing the ps1 final fantasies to completion. so i’m either going to chalk this up to bad design or my brain not working like others. i honestly would like to see someone doing a blind let’s play of this game to see how they deal with it.

 a lot of it is just generally due to lack of tutorial/instruction. like, even now, i keep forgetting that i can upgrade equipment and abilities even tho that’s one of the touchstones of japanese video games. which almost makes me think that this game was designed for kids young enough to not be able to read at one point? but then maybe they changed direction about halfway through so it’s a weird mishmash of design? i could definitely see a kid who couldn’t read playing through most of kingdom hearts 2 because of the complete lack of level design/increased amount of voiced dialogue and cutscenes. i’m going to be keeping this criticism in mind when i go through the rest of the series.

  it can be pretty fun when it commits to creating specific dungeons, i think. the cave of wonders in the aladdin area was a definite highlight. i keep having a nagging thought in the back of my head that i actually own nier:automata and have only played through about a third of it but i’m choosing to do this with my life but i guess i’m motivating myself. there was a guy i know who got banned from gamefaqs, the mars volta forum, the big post rock forum, and the kingdom hearts forum for being too confrontational and he got an 80k tech job after being in community college for eight years because he gave good advice on the android phone subreddit and lied about his experience i hope this can be my future too this is what i’m getting by not caving in and just playing nier this is gorilla mindset an abundance mindset. if i played nier i would have a scarcity mindset. i seen it on american beauty.

i never thought i would think of myself as having a dog fursona because of my childhood fear of them but i keep imagining what my goofsona would be like after watching goofy movie and how cute so many of the incidental characters are. it’s just one of those things.

the discrete locations make this feel kinda grim and lonely honestly in a way that doesn’t feel like it was intentional. like during the opening bit on destiny islands there are no adults anywhere aside from your mom telling you to get dinner right before leaving? the characters never mention adults anywhere. it seems like a really sad existence honestly. like it feels like it has the final fantasy tactics:advance conceit of getting sucked into a game world but without any of the selfawareness. then  it mostly just feels like bad things keep happening to beloved disney characters. i do love the traverse town music and will leave it on while i’m doing other things because it gives me that shimomura sense of inner peace like few other things do..

i earnestly keep thinking about how few of these movies i’ve seen and how little a role disney played in my childhood, which, i think is good probably but i am interested in going back and watching a lot of these movies for the cultural evaluation. it actually seems insane to me that close to everyone i’ve ever dated h8s nightmare before christmas and i also never watched it as a kid so it’s an experience that’s foreign to me outside of the jack skellington beanie. so it has about the same amount of cultural import to me that emily the strange does. i like that. i bought an emily the strange bag to carry my laundry in. it’s fuggen chill.

so yeah out of the movies this covers i have seen the ones in bold

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Hercules (1997)

Tarzan (1999)

Aladdin (1993)

Pinocchio (1940)

Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Peter Pan (1960)

so over half of them are completely foreign experiences to me outside of cultural osmosis. i did watch aladdin and alice a lot as a kid. i thought hercules pretty much sucked even then though. i liked mulan a lot for obvious kid gender reasons but it’s brutal to go back to as an adult. about a year ago i started on a quest to watch every disney animated movie but didn’t get very far. sleeping beauty is a remarkably gorgeous film though. i think it’s probably my favorite. i’m always gonna be a looney tunes gal tho. someone hire me to make the looney tunes/dragon quest crossover. thanks.

did you know that disney world has it’s own government. i might have actually mentioned that in the first post because i keep saying it to literally everyone i’ve had a conversation with in the past month but it does for real and everyone who has citizenship there is a loyal disney employee. i wonder if tetsuya nomura has honorary citizenship at disney world. i wonder if this expedition is gonna turn me into a disney fanatic.

anyway, shit, i’m fucking pumped to get into the really off the wall parts of this game. i’ve always been so curious to see how this segues into what Kingdom Hearts is known for from the relatively understated beginning of this game. peace. we’ll wrap up this show next time around.

[fetchquests]

dylan w. birdosaur at the battlestation:kingdom hearts 1.5 hd final mix: part 1

i swear fellas. i’m all in. i just lost my job. and i’m going to immerse myself into ALL thsi shit until i find steady employment again. it’s just kingdom hearts n job hunt from now on.

this game is another relatively elusive experience for me just like final fantasy xi. i bought it at toys r us like maybe the week it had come out with money i had leftover from my birthday. i wenjt on a shitty family trip to galveston, tx soon afterwards and the kids who were there were obsessed with the copy i brought with me. i didn’t get to play at all during that vacation and by the time i made it back home they had scratched the disc so heavily rendering it unplayable. a couple years later i bought a cheapy used copy and played up to the nightmare before christmas level and stopped after finishing it. like how i stopped watching adventure time after “marceline’s closet”. the episode where the goth vampire girl pees. that’s all i need. i’m a simple girl with simple tastes.

simple and clean somehow bangs harder than i remember even. i think it was responsible for me liking dancepop music. gets me pumped to get into this. it’s just one of those things. i should listen to utada outside of that song.

i feel at the very core of my soul is a very *extremely jello biafra voice* disney… bad but i can’t really hide my affection for goofy and donald. is kingdom hearts a psyop to get kids to reject socialism. i don’t know we’ll. see. this francise always makes me think of marilyn manson doing acid and going to disney world when he lived in florida. i bring this up in regards to kingdom hearts becoming a government psyop because this is kinda making me want to go to disney world with some pals and be like marilyn manson… but i’m still giving my frickin $$$ to disney and the state of florida… oho…. nooooo…. altho i was in a mall in suburban kansas city recently and like. i went into fye. i went into hot topic. i went into fucking spencers. you cant find a jack skellington beanie in any of those stores now. so i’m looking forward to the third game of maybe doing the great good to america in letting kids buy jack skellington beanies at the mall again. i have deep and complex thoughts. im a sentient jack skellington beanie.

honestly curious how this combat holds up in the light of like, nier and nier:automata. for awhile i thought i would never have any reason to return to these games especially the sequel which is hands down the greatest action-rpg combat ever. i actually beat the squall fight towards the beginning that you’re supposed to lose and… it seems like the ideal strategy in a lot of these fights is to run around doing nothing? just like, adding a dodge roll or something would make it so much more fun. opening scene music scary. the music on the island is GREAT and captures a lot of the childish charm that the super mario rpg soundtrack has. i guess i was muting this and listening to like, tool, when i first bought this game. gaaaaaaaah. i’m pretty sure i’m going to legit enjoy this game just because of the huge sense of internal warmth i get from her music. i really did not like how ominous and fake the atmosphere on the opening island is when i first played it but i think i like it on it’s own merits now. the stuff like the little hiding hole that leads into a portal into another world makes give it a legitimate dreamlike feel that doesn’t quite hit the highs of something like the opening of links awakening but i think it’s attempting something similar. i know i wanted something more traditionally warm and twin peaks-y like most good jrpg towns are when i first played it but, yeah, i think this works on it’s own merits and it’s the first real indication of how fucking weird this series is. a big part of this series charm for me is that it’s like the most playable version of a bad licensed game ever. even like, the ludicrousness of the plot feels like a version of a bad licensed game that has *so* much more work put into it than average. it’s really the start of square enix games being spiritually multimillion dollar kusoges.

i forgot that my favorite kratom strain when i was doing thjese writeups two years ago was “deep jungle” which is the name of the tarzan level here. that’s funny to me, again. simple girl got simple tastes etc. definitely prefer the level design of the first game over what i remember the second game being like. in that. there actually is level design here. but most of the first several hours are just a series of fetch quests that never seem like theyre going to end and progression seems to happen at random. so i guess i’m nejoying everything about this game except for actually playing it. i’m looking forward to venturing forth into the disney worlds and hearing a lot of this music for the first time. this is the only game i’m going to allow myself to play while i’m unemployed in order to motivate me to get a job. enjoy… next tyme… on kingsdoms hearts…

[fetchquests]

I’m replaying Final Fantasy XII (Part 2 of ???)

(I wrote a long thing and then DELETED it by accident so hopefully this take is tighter)

I woke up this morning slightly hungover from a birthday celebration, and since my girlfriend is away on a work trip I figured I’d work off the haze with an hour of XII (we only have the one TV, you see). Up until this morning I’ve only been impressed with the racial diversity and surprising lack of overt racism in XII (incremental progress!), but then my characters entered the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea and I encountered the Urutan-Yensa.

Brushing aside the highly dope fact that I racked up a 78 chain combo on these suckers, it was a pretty big letdown to be reminded that XII stole a famously racist Lucasarts depiction of Beouin tribespeople for its primary desert-scape hazard. You could make the argument that their monstrosity separates them from the intelligent races you interact peacefully with, but their use of tools seems to write off that reading.

On the other hand the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea itself is another wonderful iteration of the game’s steampunk reimaginging of the Mediterranean/Arabian/Persian golden era, when the Middle East really was the center of the economic and intellectual world. You spend most of the region wandering a maze-like matrix of rusted old oil rigs, like a Saudi Arabian desert visited 400 years from now.

You’re in Bhujerba right before that, which is detailed and well-populated. Few games of this era do a good job of suggesting that the cities you visit are lived in, and have been lived in for ages.

You see the diversity of the game in that screenshot - the mixing of races is important for the theme and atmosphere of the game, as you can imagine the Middle East in the reference period was also bustling with people from all over.

Unfortunately the main plot mostly omits the non-human races, and that holds doubly true for your party (like why do we even have Penelo? What purpose does she serve? She’s like 4 polygons colored at random and her entire personality could be summed up, ‘Worries about Vaan.’ Why not make her a moogle or some shit?). Your only non-human playable character is Fraan, who of course is problematic in her own right.

I suppose its not surprising that a franchise with such an abysmal track record around gender would make the one non-human playable character a magical, statuesque rabbit woman in dominatrix leather. And would you be shocked if I told you her relationship to the plot is marginal? Still, I’d argue that Fran is one of the better characters in the game: while the other characters bloviate endlessly in a really grave and masculine way, Fran’s lines are without fail direct, concise, and impactful.

I just like Fran. I like the sense that she is bored with the other characters and knows what to do before the rest of them do. I like her relationship with Balthier, which is likewise light on words, as if they’ve worked together so long they can read each others‘ thoughts. And I like that she uses a bow and has relatively high magic stats, making her really powerful early in the game.

I like that expression she wears. It’s blank without being the stock ‘serious bitch in a sci fi environment’ look that a lesser game would give her. She seems simultaneously unflappable and empathetic, which is indeed how she’s portrayed.

The characters with direct connections to the main plot thread, Basch and Ashe and Vossler etc., are uniformly boring straightmen, and the player cipher characters of Vaan and Penelo are poorly articulated and irritating. Balthier and Fran are great cus you get the sense that they’ve had a life before all this, and they’ll have a life afterwards too.

[fetchquests]

I’m replaying Final Fantasy XII (Part 1 of ???)

Full disclosure: I have no idea how many of these I’ll write, I’ll just post about FFXII when I feel like it.

After talking about it for years I finally secured a PS2 and a copy of FFXII for a full replay. I last played XII in college, in the fall of 2006. 9ish years is a long time, but I’m already surprised by how much of the game I recall clearly - I’m starting to recreate my preferred gambit configurations and diving into sidequests entirely.

I bought FFXII the same weak I broke up with my college girlfriend, and I remember in the first week alone I sunk over 24 hours into the game; ultimately I would log over 100 between late October when the game came out and mid-December, when I left for break. Very little of this time could be blamed on post-relationship depression (she wasn’t that special); it’s so easy to lose hours playing XII. The game absolutely nails the kind of concurrent objective structure that keeps nerds glued to Warcraft until its clear getting laid before graduation is out of the question. At any given time you’ve got the story, your hunts, fetch quests, loot hoarding, license building, and level grinding, which oddly I find myself thinking about the least.

About that story: there's so much story and yet it feels so light, it moves at such a nifty clip. Aside from Vaan we learn little of where these characters came from and what motivates them; In lieu of backstory and exposition the characters are articulated through voice and attitude, which is perfect since background exposition is tedious and uninteresting in basically every video game ever made. Vaan, who has the clearest defined background and is the closest to a player surrogate in the game, is the least interesting character. (OK well second least interesting, because there is Penelo whose character is “girl who is obsessed with Vaan” so OK, thanks Square for giving us a female character who is defined exclusively through her relation to a male character.) Balthier, who we learn basically nothing about in the first 10 hours, we immediately know, because his character comes through strong in his diction and mannerisms. And he’s the best character in the game.

I’m tempted to really go #longform on this topic: a major flaw in many video game narratives is confusing labels for character, like say for example assuming that because the character you wrote is a spy, he is ipso facto interesting. Not only is this lazy as fuck, it ignores entirely what is interesting about your source material. Compare Balthier to say Auron from Final Fantasy X: we hear a lot about what a badass, gruff warrior Auron is, but we mostly see him talking endlessly about spirits and other fluffy bullshit. We don’t even hear that Balthier is a sky pirate until over an hour with him, but we see him be a sky pirate, a gentleman scallywag, with every word out of his mouth.

I’ll write about the fighting system, the world/navigation, the enemies etc. in later posts, this one is already way too fucking long.

[fetchquests]

[fetchquests]

square on gender relations 1998: the boy has a wee wee. the girl has a nana. it’s a classic tale. never forget.

sometimes i like to complain about how gross/weird/creepy square enix is now but then i remember stuff like this exists. a scene where upon a couple getting in a fight teh entire cast encourages the dude to RUN UP AND BANG HER BRO. so for all the merits their older games have. they still have the potential to be pretttty grosssss.

i think everytime i’ve ever mentioned how horrifying i found this scene as a kid i felt like i had to add some sort of self-deprecating “man i sure was a progressive 10 year old huh" but fuck that denying shit for real i want to be through with that.

i saw someone on twitter mention the elena/tifa slapfight in ff7 which made me go ~_~ and want to view some of these games through my current lens which i may do at some point. who knows.

has some pretty great music though.

[fetchquests]

[fetchquests]

On Deus Ex: No continues or checkpoints?

Is it true what I'm seeing? There's no checkpoints or continues if you die? You have to be saving all of the time to load? This took by surprise. Also I need a suggestion on what to do, I lost both legs and I wasn't able to jump or run for a long because I didn't find any way to cure my legs in the FIRST LEVEL. Omg. So I decided to kill myself. Any suggestion on how to overcome this?

[fetchquests]

第三のボリューム。

ディスク1

[fetchquests]

[fetchquests]

so i was playing front mission 3 yesterday and i noticed that

=

someone alert peter hook

[fetchquests]

[fetchquests]

[fetchquests]

Donkey Kong WR contender Ben Falls (1 of twelve invited to the Kong Off 2), Hans Kollinger (another 800k+ Donkey Kong contender), Metal Black and Vs. Castlevania WR holder Matt Walters, Doc Mack and Gerry Cantu (co-owners of Galloping Ghost Arcade, Gerry is seated), Macross WR holder Fred Dehart, 2011 GGA Gamer of the Year Matt Rocco, and multiple WR holder George Strain at the Galloping Ghost Arcade in fall of 2012.