IV Down, II To Go

 Perhaps it's because it was my first console, but I have a strong nostalgic connection to the SNES. I actually got an N64 only a year after the Super Nintendo, so for me those eras kind of overlapped (it was a less internet-saturated time, so I wasn't feeling FOMO as much over all the newest games, and the old ones I was discovering were new to me).

Final Fantasy IV, released in the U.S. as II originally, is a huge leap forward for the franchise in many ways I've already detailed on this blog. I do wonder a bit to what extent this is due to technical breakthroughs (surely somewhat) and to what extent it's a reflection of the folks at SquareSoft just getting better at making this kind of game.

IV has a broad cast of characters who each have at least a little personality - this, of course, is something that games have gotten better and better at over the years. I believe it wouldn't be until VI that you got to keep a large stable of characters and swap them out between fights. Here, we have a few characters who show up temporarily, and honestly it's a little surprising to see that some of them don't actually come back as playable characters (Edward, the Bard, seems due for a return, but he simply remains a friendly NPC).

Naturally, the center point of the story is Cecil, the clear main character of the game, and the only one we have from start to finish. Cecil's arc is simple, but cool - he begins as a Dark Knight guilty of brutal acts of conquest, but begins on the journey to redemption when he acts as guardian to the young Rydia after inadvertently killing her mother and destroying her hometown.

His transition to become a Paladin happens a little earlier than I expected (though there's still a fair amount of content before that point).

Still, this game still has a foot in the series' roots, with a focus on elemental crystals at the center of it (though if I recall correctly, there are no such crystals in II). While VI and especially VII moved the series away from traditional medieval fantasy, it's clear that there are some of those genre-bending ideas here (and in previous games, even the first). The third airship you get, the Lunar Whale, is more of a piece of futuristic sci-fi tech, as is the Tower of Babel, which you visit a number of times as climactic dungeons.

This game's progression system actually works pretty much the way that I had assumed most RPGs did, having gotten my start with Super Mario RPG. Characters simply learn spells and abilities as they level (though Rydia gets some of her summons from optional side quests, and at least one from an item drop,) which means that, on one hand, you can't really tailor them to what you particularly want (and given that you have no control over which characters are in your party, you'd better learnt to like what you have) but on the other, they're going to be able to do their job and do it right.

I also think they did a pretty good job in making spellcasters feel like they have enough MP to actually cast spells, while still forcing you to manage the resource, especially in long-haul dungeons. The addition of save points where you can use Tents and Cottages is a fantastic change here - the final dungeon has, if I recall correctly, two save points. While you can't resupply (I did use Teleport a couple times to go back and get more items, being better able to get down there with higher levels and fewer side-paths needed to take) it's a great opportunity to take a break.

I'll also hand it to the game in that it has a big twist that actually makes sense because it echoes a previous twist.

So, now I'm looking forward to checking out the new and improved Jobs system in V, and getting excited to fully delve into VI.

Nearing FFIV's Conclusion

 I realize I've been blowing through these games. In part I think that's because, as someone who has lived through the evolution of the genre, I've got a better handle on how games like these work - like that it's good to dump a bunch of gil on potions to heal up between fights, for example. I've also been pretty good at recognizing how certain enemies work - a number of "Grenade" enemies, I discovered, would detonate after taking any lightning damage and destroy not just themselves but also all the other monsters you're fighting, making fights with them trivial (as long as you could survive long enough for someone to get their spell off). Similarly, I figured out fairly early on in one of the last dungeons that some enemies would essentially get the "Confuse" effect if you hit them with lightning, so I could make those encounters a lot easier.

As I said with my first post about the game, IV seems like the first Final Fantasy game that really feels like what I've come to expect from the genre. There were gestures toward something approaching a plot in II and III, but here we've got characters that have arcs, a decent amount of levity (though also some darkness - darkness that the game, in its final act, seems to kind of take back).

The Active Time Battle system certainly takes getting used to - I definitely spent some of the early game gawking at the screen when I had characters ready to go.

I also think that, much as I had wished in the previous entries, there are fewer random encounters, but they feel more impactful. This does mean that my healer (primarily Rosa by the end) is getting a real workout. That said, it also feels like the spellcasters have a deep enough MP pool that you can generally cast a spell on each turn, and it only starts to feel limiting in big marathon areas (though with save points where you can pop a Tent or a Cottage in most dungeons, even this isn't such a bad thing).

Essentially, of this run of the entire series, IV is clearly the best game so far, but naturally one has to recognize that they needed the first three to get to this one.

I do suspect technical capabilities played a role in making a more sophisticated game as well - I don't know what the data capacity of an SNES cartridge is like compared to that of an NES one, but I suspect there was more room for dialogue, which naturally helps flesh out the characters.

Indeed, I've marveled at the amount of music in FF7 Rebirth, and I think that's in large part due to the fact that we've gotten to a point where it's not a terrible burden to have a 100GB game. Audio, comparatively speaking, is minuscule, so the challenge is not fitting it in, but producing it in the first place.

Anyway, I'm at a point where I'm pretty sure I can go to the game's final dungeon, but I have a number of side quests to take care of. One might be moot - looking it up online (sue me) it seems the point of going to one of them is to discover that a character you thought was dead is alive, but I've already seen the guy. The other is largely to enhanced Rydia's summoning capabilities - getting extra summons like Leviathan and eventually Bahamut (I went through a later dungeon where I had to fight through three Behemoths - easily some of the hardest enemies I've fought in the game - only to discover that I hadn't done the necessary prerequisite quest).

After this, I know that V re-introduces the Job System as seen in III, but I'm told implements it better (Here's what I'd love to see: make it less of a pain to level up a new job, don't give us jobs at the end of the game that make all the previous ones irrelevant, and maybe limit what jobs certain characters can choose - I'd love to see, say, a character who only gets to pick offensive spellcasting Jobs or one who's all tanky, melee-focused ones, to retain something of a personality).

Of course, this is all building to VI, which seems to be in contention with VII as the best of the series. That one I have played a bit of, and I'm excited to see how it feels.

And, if I feel up to it, I might get whatever latest remaster of the original VII is available. Naturally, I've got a bit of a sense of that one having played through the two existing thirds of the Remake trilogy, but it would be cool to see the original "text."

FFVIIR Through the Lens of the Early Games

 I'd guess I'm about half to two thirds of the way through Final Fantasy IV, which feels like it's really zipping right along (it seems to be relatively linear, for one thing). The inspiration for getting all these Pixel Remasters was, of course, the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second part of the FFVII trilogy.

I've been massively impressed with the Remake trilogy. There's exceptional polish and really compelling gameplay in what was clearly a labor of love for those who made it. In fact, it's so good that last year's Final Fantasy XVI feels all the more underwhelming in comparison (I know that there are some who are very happy with the game, but returning to bang out a few more sidequests before the game's conclusion after finishing Rebirth, the game's glaring flaws were thrown into sharp relief).

In fact, perhaps it would be best to kind of triangulate between these three categories. Ever since XII (I'm setting aside the two MMOs just because I think a game like that naturally can't work the same way a single-player game does) there has not been a single new main-line Final Fantasy game to use the traditional JRPG combat set-up, where you have a battle screen and your party of characters lined up on one side and the monsters on the other.

And... I'm honestly finding myself a little more sympathetic with that decision, even if I really didn't like the implementation that XII used.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe X is actually the only Final Fantasy game in the entire series to use what I'd consider a traditional turn-based system. Games I through III are closer to that, but you actually queue up each of the characters' actions for the round ahead of time, and it's somewhat randomized as to what order in which they act (this actually screwed me a bit on the final boss of III, because I forgot that I'd want to hit my healer with an Elixir when they had the MP to cast Curaja twice rather than once, and wound up missing a turn of healing and thus not being able to both revive and heal up one of my two martial characters before the boss' giant AoE blast that they do every round hit).

IV introduces the Active Time Battle system, which is something that I've never been entirely comfortable with. In the first three games, there's arguably no reason you ever need to pause the game, as none of your inputs are time-sensitive. But in IV, instead, you have these meters that fill up and once they do, you get that character's menu. The action does not pause unless you've selected one of the options, like Attack or Black Magic, etc. Thus, if you hesitate (or even just lose focus and don't realize you can do something) you can find yourself taking more damage and making the fight harder.

This system would persist through I believe IX, which created a bit more pressure and honestly introduces a greater risk of sloppiness, forcing you to think quickly as to what you want to do. In fact, the ATB system would also be the basis for Chrono Trigger's combat system, which added the clever wrinkle of combo-attacks that require you to wait until both (or all three) characters are active and ready to go.

Flashing forward to 2020, and the launch of Final Fantasy VII Remake, you have something that calls itself the Active Time Battle system, even though it's transparently a very different system. And yet... it's also kind of similar.

The obvious distinction is that the 7R (there, that's probably the quickest abbreviation) games use action-style gameplay that requires you to consider positioning and gives you a number of commands, dodges, blocks, and such, along with enemies that will send out attacks in discrete locations, allowing you to move out of the way and such. There's a somewhat undercooked pure-action game right there (and here my criticism of XVI is showing) but while you can do a significant portion of your damage in this real-time action gameplay, its primary purpose is to build up ATB charges, which you then use to perform the kind of actions you would in the old Final Fantasy games (except "Attack," though every character has several non-spellcasting ability options, similar to a Dragoon's Jump or a Monk's Kick).

This hybrid of action and menu-navigation-based gameplay really feels to me like the perfect update to the Final Fantasy formula. Because while I've felt nostalgic for the old turn-based (even if, contrary to my assumptions, none but X have had actual truly turn-based combat systems) combat, the truth is that it does get a little repetitive and... maybe boring? Granted, you're reading the words of a person who is playing through the fourth title from this series in a row, so I've been steeping in random encounters for many hours in close succession.

Still, I think it's all worth bearing in mind that in Square Enix's now 23-year quest to find some new core gameplay system, I think the 7R system has the legs to give them many titles in the future (I don't know if it's a rights thing or something, but boy would a Chrono-series sequel using this system work fantastically).

Anticipating and Imagining Tweaks to the Soulknife

 The Soulknife is my favorite Rogue subclass, and so I'm fairly excited to see the subclass getting a revision in this year's Player's Handbook (I'll be sad if this means the Swashbuckler gets cut - honestly, I wouldn't shed a tear if the Assassin got cut instead, though I think the Assassin really deserves a good rework to be an actually good subclass).

The Soulknife is super cool, but there are some rules hiccups and balancing issues caused by the way that the rules are written.

Let's talk about the big one first:

Soulknives are built around Psychic Blades, which are effectively hybrid melee/ranged conjured weapons that deal a damage type that very few things resist (Psychic) and from which the Soulknife cannot be disarmed. It also doesn't leave visible wounds, allowing for some great plausible deniability if the Rogue needs to go take down an NPC without leaving any evidence. With a flat 60-foot range, you no longer suffer disadvantage that you might from throwing a dagger at a similar distance, as well, and the main-hand one does a d6.

The weapons are conjured when you take the Attack action - and this is where the first big problems come up. The weapons vanish after they hit or miss, which means that after you've made your attack, your hand is once again empty. Because it takes the Attack action to conjure the blades, this means that you won't be able to have those Psychic Blades in hand for any reaction-based attack - most obviously an Opportunity Attack, but also in situations such as if you have a Battle Master with Commander's Strike.

The fix here is easy, though: simply have the blades appear whenever you make a melee attack and are not carrying a weapon (or, probably better to say you "can" have the blades appear, as you might have some reason to want to make an Unarmed Strike). Another option would be to say that the blades persist indefinitely, and can be dismissed at no action cost.

The next issue is one that I think could be solved with special magic items:

We've already seen Monks receive an item, the Wraps of Unarmed Prowess, which correct the lack of +X weapons for their unarmed strikes. But as far as I know, there aren't equivalents for subclass-derived weapon attacks, such as the Natural Weapons (which aren't technically unarmed strikes) for the Beast Barbarian or the Psychic Blades for the Soulknife.

I'll contend that this is less of an issue for Soulknives, given that at least in terms of damage, they're relying less on their modifiers to the damage roll than other classes. But in terms of their accuracy, it would be good to let them keep pace with other Rogues (and not have to rely on Homing Strikes to make up for this deficit).

These two changes I think are all that are needed to fix the clear problems with the subclass.

But let's dream a little bigger:

Cunning Strikes is a new Rogue feature that allow you to sacrifice dice from your Sneak Attack hits to fuel additional effects. A few of the subclasses for the Rogue introduced after this addition also gain new Cunning Strike options. In my mind, this feels like a great way to give every subclass a way to interact with this very cool feature.

High-level Soulknives can potentially stun a target with their Psychic Blade sneak attacks, but I could also see this transforming into a Cunning Strikes option (though perhaps that would be too powerful without a resource limiter). But I could see doing things like Dazing targets, maybe inflicting a confusion-like effect, or other mind-altering hinderances.

And there we have it - I'm really looking forward to the new core books, and I hope we'll get some hints at what kind of tweaks are coming in the next few days.

PHB24 on the Path to Finalization, with Some Revelations

 With the Unearthed Arcana process complete, and the first of the new core rulebooks due to arrive in early Fall, WotC released a video talking about coming to the final stages of editing and formatting the new Player's Handbook before it gets sent off to the printers.

While we're naturally not going to get details on every bit of text in the book, the interview (hosted as usual by Todd Kenreck and featuring Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford) did serve up some interesting details.

Naturally, we've seen different subclasses suggested and cut from various classes. I believe the plan is still to have four subclasses per class in the book - an upgrade for most, other than the Cleric and Wizard.

Previously, the design goal as stated was to have these subclasses reflect dichotomies, at least as best as they could. For example, you have Illusionists and Diviners for Wizards, those who conceal and those who reveal, and then Evokers and Abjurers, those who assault and those who protect.

At the same time, my contention has always been that the Player's Handbook options should represent the most classic, archetypal versions of these class tropes.

So, it comes as a bit of a surprise to see that the Soulknife is now being included as one of the base options for the Rogue - don't get me wrong, the Soulknife is my favorite Rogue subclass (and one that I'll be using when my Rogue hits level 3 in our Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign,) but to my mind, the Swashbuckler is the most obvious subclass among all classes to add to the Player's Handbook, being a subclass that represents an archetype that is so foundational to the fantasy genre (I realize the story of Robin Hood is not technically fantasy, but it's certainly one of the stories that set the tone for the genre, Arthurian legend being probably the other most central influence).

Now, if this means that Rogues get five subclasses, then no problem.

We had already known that the Brawler Fighter was out - I actually didn't hate it conceptually, though my biggest issue with it was that it felt like it was getting to do things that Monks should be able to - and now we know what is replacing it to fill that fourth Fighter subclass slot: the Psi Warrior.

And yes, this means that we're going to be seeing all four psionic subclasses in the PHB: the Aberrant Mind, the Great Old One patron, the Psi Warrior, and the Soul Knife.

That's really all we have revelation-wise.

Regarding the Psi Warrior, I've never been too excited by it because of the existence of the Eldritch Knight and the Rune Knight, and honestly haven't thought much about how to use it. I don't really have a sense of how popular it is. I have a few players who basically refuse to play non-spellcasters, which limits the number of people trying out martial classes (also, I run long campaigns - we're over four years into the current one, with almost surely at least one more year left in it, so the classes people picked in 2020 remain in use. At the least I've gotten a ton of exposure to Artillerist Artificers, Grave Clerics, Storm Sorcerers - we have two - Whisper Bards, and Ancestral Guardian Barbarians).

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what other changes will be revealed before we have the books in hand. They have said that the Tasha's subclasses are getting some reworks, despite appearing without any changes in the playtest. I'm especially curious to see how the bonus spells for the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul turn out - I like giving Sorcerers more spells (especially some more situational utility spells, which Sorcerers usually can't afford to pick up with their level-ups) and would rather see this extended to the old subclasses than having them removed from the newer ones (especially because Aberrant Minds would need a significant rework if they didn't have their Psionic spell list).

Final Fantasy IV Is Immediately a Massive Leap Forward

 Having finished all three of the NES-era (or I suppose I should say Famicom-era, given that only the first was released on the NES in the states) Final Fantasy games, I have moved on to IV, which was released on the SNES in the US as Final Fantasy II.

The one area where this version doesn't seem that much improved is its graphics - which is purely because I've been playing the "Pixel Remaster" versions of these games, which upgraded I-III with SNES-style 16-bit graphics. So IV doesn't look all that much better, which is fine. One thing I have considered doing is reverting the Background Music to its original version, rather than the modern orchestration, because 16-bit sound got way, way better than the simplistic 8-bit music.

But let's talk about changes:

First off, this has introduced the Active Time Battle system, which is certainly an adjustment to make. In the first three games, there's actually not really any reason for a pause button because nothing is time-sensitive. Not so now! You've got to get good at quickly navigating command menus. The only game I've played a significant portion of which such as system was Chrono Trigger, and that was about 18 years ago, so it's going to be an adjustment.

Perhaps the most welcome improvement here is the story. From the start, there's a more sophisticated cast of characters and more time spent on dialogue and scenes that flesh these people out than we've gotten before. FFII did give the characters some specificity, but just barely. Now, however, it feels like a real character-driven story is possible.

Our central character is Cecil, introduced already as a powerful Dark Knight and head of the Red Wings, the airship-based air force of the city-state of Baron, which has been engaging in an aggressive series of conquests to capture the elemental crystals (yes, we have elemental crystals again). Cecil and his soldiers are straight up murderous conquerors, but this weighs on his and some of his men's consciences. However, perhaps because of this doubt or, more likely, some court intrigue, Cecil is divested of his rank and sent with his Dragoon friend Kain to deliver an item to the town of Mist. Kain is your second party member to start with, but I'm given to understand that the characters in this come and go with the story, and Kain is not there for terribly long. I don't have a great read on Kain - he seems to share some of Cecil's doubts about Baron's imperialism, but shows hints of carrying a ruthlessness that Cecil seems to want to avoid.

To get to Mist, the two need to fight through a cave guarded by a Mist Dragon, which is your first boss. Upon arriving in the town, though, the item they were sent to deliver turns out to be a weapon, which unleashes a number of Bomb monsters on the town, massacring it. The sole survivor the two find is a little girl whose mother was a Summoner, and by killing the Mist Dragon she had summoned, Cecil and Kain inadvertently killed her. Kain says that the king decreed that all Summoners have to die for the safety of Baron, but Cecil tries to stop him - only for the girl to summon Titan and seemingly kill Kain and leave Cecil and the unconscious girl trapped on the other side of a rock slide.

Cecil takes the girl to a desert town to let her recuperate, but a group of soldiers from Baron come to take her, and Cecil fights them off. The girl, whose name is Rydia, joins the party as a Summoner - having access to summon spells (just one for now) and some Black and White magic. While Cecil begins at level 10 or so, Rydia is just a kid, so in the early parts of traveling with her, it very much is a knight protecting a vulnerable girl, but as she levels up, she starts to be a real asset.

Cecil discovers that his friend and likely romantic interest (if only he weren't barred from such things as a Dark Knight!) Rosa is in the desert town and sick with some poison that needs a rare antidote. Traveling with Rydia, they encounter an old man from the town, Sage Tellah, who is trying to retrieve his daughter after a bard seduced her and whisked her away. Tellah is more powerful than either of them, clearly very experienced, with a lot of magic an a "Recall" ability that seems to cast a random spell (with a chance to fail.) I think this doesn't consume MP, which is good.

Anyway, the group goes to Damcyan, where Tellah's daughter went with the bard, only for the city to be bombarded by Baron's Red Wings before they get there. Tellah's daughter is mortally wounded, and the bard turns out to be Damcyan's prince, Edward. Edward is consumed with grief, especially for his responsibility in getting Anne killed, while Tellah storms off to take vengeance on Golbez, the new commander of the Red Wings (whom Cecil has never heard of). Edward joins the party, and provides a hovercraft (because sure) to let you enter the Antlion Cave where the antidote for Rosa can be found. Edward's mechanics reinforce the idea that he's not a fighter - he can Sing, which creates various status effects on foes, Heal, which is a nice MP-free group heal (if a little weak) or Hide, where he just briefly goes off screen for safety until he can return on the next turn.

When you bring the antidote back to Rosa, she recovers and joins as a White Mage, but there's also a scene that night where Edward leaves the inn to play music and process his grief, only to be attacked by a Sahagin, and where Anna's spirit encourages him to fight.

I mean - look, we're grading on a curve here, but holy crap is this more characterization than I've gotten at all in the series so far (not counting later games I've played, obviously).

I wonder if, on a technical level, the capacity just for more data on an SNES cartridge allowed for them to put more writing in the game, or if perhaps the company had actually started hiring people whose task it was to actually write dialogue for the games, or if they just got better at this. But we're talking about a giant leap in terms of storytelling.

The progress system here is also fairly simple - you get XP to level up, and spellcasters automatically learn spells with their levels. So you don't have to worry about finding all the right magic shops to buy the spells you want.

Currently I haven't found any Ether for sale, which makes me think I should probably try to be conservative with spell use - Tents, on the other hand, seem to be easily found, so that might be the new thing to invest in, and that will replenish MP.

On top of that, some dungeons now have save points in them, where you can use Tents as well (something I'm familiar with from Chrono Trigger and from the maybe fifth or quarter of FFVI I've played).

Really, the main thing I now need to worry about is not sitting too long trying to decide what a character should do, thanks to ATB. I think - I think - that the game pauses once you're in, say, the "White Magic" menu, but it's not when you simply have the base options available.

Final Fantasy III Down, III to Go

 Yeah, the numerals are starting to get awkward.

Of the NES-era Final Fantasy games, I think I can safely say that III is my favorite, but it's not without its flaws.

Still, there are big things to recommend it: the Jobs system is, if nothing else, a cool aesthetic transformation. I think the fact that you only have four characters makes it slightly awkward. Furthermore, upon unlocking the Sage and Ninja jobs - the Ninja can equip all weapons and armor and the Sage can use all spells - has the unfortunate effect of basically rendering the rest of the jobs irrelevant in the last stretch of the game.

The other hiccup in the Jobs system is the tediousness of getting up to speed with a new job. Leveling a job requires you to take five total actions (which can include just "Defend") while in that job, but also cap at a single job level per encounter. This means that you might find yourself tempted to spend a long time in some low-level area hitting "defend" for five rounds and then wiping out the monsters, and repeating this ad nauseum.

There's a bit of push-pull I feel on the story. Unlike II, which went somewhat dark with its evil emperor conquering and massacring, this returned to four generic heroes (with the top-position character really being the "player character,") and a pretty standard "chosen one" story involving the restoration of four elemental crystals.

Still, there's definitely more here than in the first game, and some very cool concepts show up: for example, there are two world maps. You spend the first part of the game in a somewhat small world map, but when you reach the edge of it you discover that it's actually a continent floating high above the world. The world opens up a lot more after you leave here and restore the Water Crystal, which raises the sunken continents back to the surface and restores their people.

Also, crazily, you get four airships over the course of the game - the first is in a small valley that serves as the game's "kiddie pool," and you sacrifice that airship very quickly to destroy a boulder blocking the path. Then, you get another ship that is shot down over the city of Saronia (the series' first crack at a big city works by making it effectively four separate villages on the overworld map). You then can't leave the city until you deal with the evil advisor to the king, and in thanks, the crown prince gives you a speedier little ship that eventually gains the ability to convert into a submarine (though there are only a couple locations you need the sub to go to). The final ship is a big air-galleon that is my favorite, because it becomes a little mobile base, letting you resupply and rest anywhere you take it.

The final boss is a bit of a disappointment: the Cloud of Darkness just spams a giant AoE damage ability that more or less tests if your healer can spam Curaja every turn on the party (I miscalculated when I'd have to hit her with an Elixir to replenish her spell slots, which led to a kind of tempo-cycle where I could not revive and keep my top melee guy alive, so ironically I beat the game with everyone but the "face" of the party up).

One thing that shocks me is that apparently at no point until X, and then only in X, did the game use a normal freaking turn-based combat system. I through III use this thing where you have to queue up all of your characters' actions ahead of time (which sucks when you want to, say, revive someone and then heal them with a potion or buff them with Protection) whereas IV I believe introduces the "Active Time Battle" system, where you have to get fast at navigating those menus. Having gotten my start with Mario RPG, I'd always assumed that there were some Final Fantasy games that simply told you whose character's turn it was, let you select and action, and then had them immediately take that action. And given that X was my first Final Fantasy game, I assumed that that system was present in the other games (at least before XI's MMO and XII's move to their weird "gambit" system that I detested).

Anyway, I'll be curious to see how the SNES titles look and feel. The Pixel Remasters have, of course, made the old NES ones look like they were on the SNES, so I suspect there will be a less dramatic shift. I might consider going back to work on VII Rebirth's Hard Mode (I've just arrived at Cosmo Canyon in that run).

Hitting the Final Stretch of FFIII

 Having unlocked the Sage and the Ninja jobs, I think I must be near the end of Final Fantasy III (though I bet the final dungeon is massive). I acquired these in the Lost City of Eureka, which you need to complete a fairly intense dungeon just to unlock, and then another just to get into. Eureka also has a number of boss fights against what I'm given to understand are the ultimate weapons in the game.

My set-up going into the rest of the game is my tank character as a knight wielding Excalibur and Ragnarok, my Black and White Mages having done a little time as a Magus and Devout, respectively, are now both Sages, and I've got my fourth character (who has spent most of the game as a Black Belt) going Ninja, wielding Masamune and the Moonring Disk or whatever it's called.

While the Jobs are certainly the big innovation for III, the system is a little awkward - each time you unlock new classes, if you want to try them, you're kind of at square one. This feels pretty fair when it's a radical departure, like when you get the Ranger or the Thief or the Evoker, but when there are classes that are clearly meant to be upgrades to existing ones, such as the Magus for the Black Mage or the Summoner for the Evoker, it feels kind of crappy to start over at Job level 1, which I think can mean that your power dips a little.

Interestingly, when it comes to the Evoker and the Summoner, you use the same summoning spells, but the Evoker gets a random (though I think also contingent on the current state of battle) attack by their summon between two options - Ifrit might blast a single target with Hellfire or they might do an AoE heal on the party. But with the Summoner, all the summons just do one thing, which seems to always be an AoE damage ability - ones that will come to be their signature abilities like Shiva's Diamond Dust. (Also, for both classes, notably, other than the high-level summons that you need to beat in order to obtain, you actually get the same number of spell slots for each level above first. Thus, your Chocobo summon can fill the role of your cheap spell, but Shiva, Ramuh, Ifrit, and Titan are all basically equal in terms of your resources to cast them.)

Of course, we had class/job upgrades in the original Final Fantasy, but this was a single quest that just upgraded all four of your characters and it was a strict bonus - nothing to catch up on. You went from being a level whatever Black Mage to that same level Black Wizard.

There's a ton of fun to the flavor of these jobs, and I love how they start getting unique abilities (using the Monk's Kick could be pretty fun).

But overall, I think in these early days, the developers relied too much on the idea of grinding. That's, of course, something that game design has gotten better with (though I'll concede that as much as I love my Soulsborne games, I don't think I've ever played one in which I didn't try to do at least a little level grinding).

Anyway, the world of III is definitely more interesting than the previous two. The story's still not quite as interesting as later games would have (though I'll concede that I've got rose-colored glasses) but there are some really cool ideas here. My favorite is that the Invincible, the fourth airship you get (yeah, four of them!) function as your own little mobile town with a bed to sleep in for free, vending machines for items and lots of good weapons, armor, and spells, and if you're attacked by flying creatures on the Invincible, the battle starts with the ship barraging your foes with cannons, doing a modest but decent amount of damage to them. And you still have the Nautilus, the high-speed airship that can convert into a submarine.

Right now I'm trying to back out of what feels like the lead-up to the end of the game so that I can go find the Odin summon (I had gotten Bahamut and Leviathan, but missed Odin and was very disappointed when I got to the Sages at the end of Eureka and one of them said "hey, you've got to go get this other thing to get what I have to give you." That said, going through Eureka again should help me generate the funds to get better armor for my Ninja and possibly stock up on Shurikens (which are freaking expensive - I hope that means they're powerful).

MCDM's Evolving RPG

 So, I probably should have been a Patreon backer rather than a Backerkit one, given that I am curious about the nuts and bolts of development. As such, I'm only able to glean what changes are happening thanks to the MCDM YouTube page and Matt Colville's Twitter account.

In other words, the stuff I'm receiving here might be a bit off, but I'll try to comment one what I understand to be the latest developments in the game, and this is your invitation to take this big old grain of salt with it.

One of the changes that I'm not sold on is the change to damage ranges.

The RPG (which still lacks even a working name beyond "the MCDM RPG") famously eschews attack rolls. In combat, you simply do an amount of damage based on your rolls, and monsters do so against you. The idea is that you shouldn't hit that feeling of "cool, I just waited ten minutes to get a turn and I accomplished nothing."

This idea in and of itself is one I have largely positive feelings about - I've had those turns where I don't land a hit and it feels crappy (that said, using the Shield spell to give my Eldritch Knight an AC of 27 felt really good - but perhaps not so great for my DM). The only concern I have about that is the way that this creates constant bookkeeping - when an attack misses, it's an opportunity to not have to adjust a creature's HP.

The problem that the folks at MCDM were having, though, was that they had to give everything boats of HP because the damage flow was constant.

The other issue they had was that everyone was doing the same amount of damage - the game is (was) built around a 2d6 roll - the most common dice roll in all of gaming, not just RPGs (well, maybe 1d6 is) - and you'd add a modifier to that to get the damage you dealt. The 2d6 basically acted as the game's d20, but also as its damage rolls, and that led to a difficulty in distinguishing between abilities different classes had and even abilities within a class.

I know that in some earlier iteration of the game at least, you had boons and banes - adding or subtracting d4s to these rolls - and impact dice - adding or subtracting d8s - so you might, for example, have some less powerful ability that only added your Might to the roll but also built up some resource, and then you might spend a couple points of that resource to add an impact die or two, and perhaps add another stat as well. This certainly allowed for some variation, but I can imagine that it starts to get limited when you want new features and abilities to allow your character to hit the cap of level 10.

The new idea they're testing does something pretty significant: your roll no longer determines the damage you deal directly. Instead, each ability has a damage range - on 2d6, you might deal, say, 3 damage on a roll of 2-6, 5 damage on a roll of 7-12, and 7 damage on a roll of 13 or 14.

I see big upsides and big downsides to this solution.

The upside of course is that you can really dial in the power of these abilities. Maybe you want a really reliable if not terribly powerful attack - a "Tactical Strike" for the Tactician. You might make the damage ranges very close to one other - just 4, 5, or 6 damage, so whatever you roll is going to be reasonable but you're probably doing it mainly to gain resources or some other benefit. But then, maybe you have a "Chaos Burst" on your... Elementalist or something, and you could have a really broad range - dealing 5, 10, or 20 damage. You could adjust the ranges as well - maybe there's some ability where you're much more likely to do the middle damage amount but on a very low or very high roll you get these extreme results, or maybe there's an ability where you've got equal chances to deal its various amounts of damage.

The biggest downside, however, that I see is that this is going to crowd the character sheet like crazy. And I think it will require far greater mental investment to understand an ability. A 5E Fireball deals 8d6 damage in a 20-ft sphere. That's straight off the dome for me at this stage. But if I had to remember that it could do 14 damage if you rolls a 4 or lower on 2d6, 28 if you rolls 5-8, and 42 damage if you rolled 9 or higher... that's a lot of mental real estate.

 I suppose the question I have is this: why do we even need to have all of these abilities roll the same dice?

I get that you want to have a common selection of dice for your binary (boolean?) rolls, but if we're tossing out the attack roll, why do we even need to retain something like a d20 roll in combat?

Naturally, the removal of an attack roll in combat also removes the need for multiple attacks (sure, you'd like to have damage spill over if you down a foe, such as if you kill a monster with your first attack and then attack a second one - but that could be a particular attack or class of attacks) so you'll want these die rolls to go up as your character gets more powerful (I also think removing the notion of a generic attack in favor of class-based abilities - somewhat like in World of Warcraft where Paladins have Crusader Strike and Demon Hunters have Demon Bite - both of which are basic filler "this is to generate the resources for more interesting abilities" - gives you more leeway to change what dice you roll) but I don't see why we can't have fun with all the polyhedral dice that people have anyway.

If you want consistent, more predictable damage, you make something where you roll a bunch of d4s or d6s. If you want swingier damage, you use fewer but higher-capped dice. 2d6 has a bit of a bell curve where you're much more likely to roll a 7 whereas on a d12 no result is more likely than another.

Final Fantasy III's Jobs System

 I've begun (and, frankly, made significant progress through) Final Fantasy III.

If FFII chose to tell a darker story and eschew classes in favor of a gradual skill-based progression system, the third game in the entry seems to pull the ripcord and go in the utter opposite direction. Once again you have four characters from the start who don't really have any distinctive personality - the first character in your lineup simply speaks for the rest - and the story is once again about four elemental crystals and some kind of balance between light and darkness. Also, shockingly, spell slots are back.

When the game starts, the four party members are all "Onion Knights," which is apparently an idiomatic expression in Japanese referring to, essentially, "newbies." (I think it's kind of "green" like a green onion, roughly.) However, shortly after the game begins, you encounter the Air Crystal and unlock the first "jobs," aka classes. These are the Warrior, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage - five of the six options from the original game.

These jobs can be swapped between any time outside of combat, meaning that your characters can play different roles quite easily. Every five actions you take in combat, your "job level" with the current job that character has will level up (though I think you can never gain more than one job level per encounter - otherwise it would be tempting to go to a low-level area, have a Viking spam "draw attacks" and the rest of the party defend and just turn on the auto-battler and go get a sandwich).

What these job levels do... is something I don't entirely understand. Having had two of my characters stay as Black and White Mages for the vast majority of the game (I swapped the Black Mage briefly to a Geomancer) they've done a decent job accruing spell slots. My top-position character started as a Warrior with brief forays into Monk, then went Knight upon getting access to the second set of classes, and now I'm kind of swapping him between Viking, Dragoon, and Knight. My bottom-position character has swapped the most, starting as a Red Mage, then spending a lot of time as a Black Belt.

I think what it does is A: improve the kind of thing that the class is supposed to be good at and B: determines which stats improve as you level up.

I'm not sure if this is a game where you can kind of trap yourself with bad choices - the wisdom I've seen online is that you should feel free to swap jobs whenever you want. One thing I'll caution is that if you swap from a spellcasting class to a non-spellcaster, you'll lose your spell slots and not get them back when you switch again.

Plot-wise there's definitely more going on than the first game, though it's not a huge leap from the story of the second game. One thing I greatly appreciate is that there are somewhat fewer random encounters, but they're also a little more challenging (which was a big note I had for the second game).

The biggest downside is that I think this game encourages (and maybe requires) a lot of grinding. The first game maybe needed some near the Marsh Cave early on, but I felt quite powerful about a third of the way into the game. Here, not only is the experimental nature of the Jobs something that will encourage you to grind a lot to try them out, but also, maintaining equipment for all of your jobs will drain your gil like nobody's business. A dungeon I went into recently seemed designed to kill my White Mage, but with generous use of Phoenix Downs I pushed my way through.

Swapping jobs will automatically equip you with "optimal" gear, but sometimes this can be a little counter-productive. For example, the Viking class, if you use it for its "Draw Attacks" feature (which admittedly seemed to work far better when I first got it - I wonder if its chance to succeed improves as you level the class) it could be reasonable for you to dual-wield shields, but in my experience, the game always has you dual-wield weapons (now, granted, I think Vikings get such serious damage reduction that you might still be fine dual-wielding - as long as the attacks are physical, I basically always take just 1 damage).

Another slight annoyance is that some jobs you get aren't really "online" when you get them. For example, Invokers (or is it Evokers?) are the first job to introduce summoning to the game, with folks like Shiva, Ifrit, and Ramuh making their debuts in the series, but you don't actually have access to any of the summoning spells when you get the class. Likewise, while the Dark Knight claims that it can wield boomerangs and swords, it seems that the actual selection of weapons they have is far more limited - and at least at the point I'm at, I can't find a single one of them.

Still, overall, I've been really enjoying this one. The world is far bigger - after you explore much of what you'd expect is the world map, you discover that it's actually a floating continent, and there's a whole second world map below. I've also been through three airships, and have started getting hints about a fourth one. The current one can go underwater (though there's not been a ton of underwater stuff to explore other than a dungeon).

What I've heard is that V expands upon the introduced Job system seen here and does it better. I'll have to wait and see that, but I do really love that non-spellcasters are starting to get more interesting abilities.

II Down, IV to Go

 Well, that's another Final Fantasy game beaten.

While I have a vague, if underdeveloped, interest in maybe revisiting the original Final Fantasy to try out the Thief and Red Mage classes, this is a game that, to be honest, I'm glad to see in the rear view mirror.

And the reason for that is almost purely mechanical: it all came to a head in the final boss fight.

When I reached the Emperor in the depths of hell (yeah, there wasn't a lot of particularly ambitious worldbuilding in the early days, though I will say II has more of a coherent story than the original) I discovered too late that because my Berserk spell and my Basuna spell and my Haste spell were not high enough, I could basically only do damage with Firion wielding Masamune and Maria pelting him with Ultimas - each of these landing for pitiful damage, but at least some at all. Thus, Guy and Leon were basically useless. And then, the Emperor cast Slow on Firion, meaning that he was now doing precisely zero damage.

I still won - I didn't have any total wipes the whole time I played. But that final boss felt like trying to knock down a brick wall with a pool noodle.

Plot-wise, though, II introduces some elements to the series that will become staples: we have an evil empire, and even a subversion in that a new villain rises up to replace the emperor (only for that to be doubly subverted when the emperor returns from death to become the main villain once again).

Over the course of the game, the fourth character slot becomes a home for a rotating cast of characters, most of whom meet grim fates. There are recurring villains - not that they have a ton of personality, but when you find the zombified version of an arrogant airship captain in Pandemonium Palace, it feels pretty satisfying to take him down.

But overall, the progression system really holds this one back. Likewise, even if the series eventually moves on from classes (or "jobs") I actually could have used a clear pointer of what each character was meant to be best at - I found myself giving Maria all the magic stuff, so she wound up having to carry the party. Guy I made a dual-wielding heavy-hitter, kind of a Barbarian, which was great in 99% of situations until I hit that final boss and he couldn't deal nearly any damage.

Anyway.

The game is certainly a step up in difficulty, though I think that is, again, kind of the fault of the progression system. Combat, like in the first game, is turn-based and has you enter all of your party's commands at the top of a round, then executing those commands in a randomized order (there are stats like Agility that don't seem to have any explanation). Once again, the damage of an attack is strongly tied to the number of hits that you make, and I think this is directly tied to your skill in that kind of weapon - for example, if you have a skill of five in swords, by default when you attack with a sword you'll do 5 attacks (these are all compounded into a single damage number, like they were in the first game). You can also equip a weapon in each hand, which causes your character to attack with each of them on their turn (I don't know exactly how or even if there's much of a damage penalty to doing this). Damage, I feel, is a lot swingier in this game than in the previous one.

Spells are all leveled up individually, but unlike in I, you just get a single spell of each element: your Fire spell will upgrade gradually as you cast it. And there's no distinction between single-target and multi-target spells (which I think continue on into later games,) so you can simply select to the far left to target every monster, or far right to target the whole party. The damage then gets split between the targets.

I suspect that the defense system is subtractive, as, unless the monster has a serious vulnerability to a type of damage, you'll often see pretty pitiful damage when you spread it across the battlefield as opposed to hitting a single target - like, less damage than you'd get if you divided the damage of a single-target spell. This, of course, makes the necessity of hitting as hard as possible really important (and why the final boss was such a slog for me).

I got through the game with little grinding - other than a period in which I had a petrified Guy and would draw out fights to cast Esuna on him over and over.

Oh, also, the distinction between Esuna and Basuna was a pain - Esuna only clears status ailments that persist beyond combat, an Basuna only clears those that end at the end of combat. Why these need to be separate spells? I guess I should get in a time machine and complain.

I'm eager to try the third game, which I understand to be the one to introduce "Jobs," Final Fantasy's more easily-swappable version of character classes. I think I'm going to read up on how to prepare for that game because I think my party wasn't really put together well in II (if I had to do it again, and I probably won't, I'd dedicate one of the core 3 to being a Black Mage, one to being a White Mage, and the third to being pure physical damage dealing. And I'd be casting Berserk every freaking combat.)

The Dark Place and Time

 If you squint, you can start to put together a timeline for the events of Alan Wake II.

I hadn't really caught this on my first go-around, nor even when playing through the Final Draft. But there's a chain of causality that connects the live-action scenes following each of Alan's journeys through the Dark Place version of his and Alice's apartment and subsequent horror within the Writer's Room.

But maybe we need to talk about layers first.

Final Fantasy II's Mixed Evolution

 In my project to play through the original six Final Fantasy games (the Pixel Remaster versions, so not the "real" versions, I suppose) it's been kind of enlightening to see how the series started and has developed.

The first game, of course, as I've said before, is almost a "proof of concept." You start the game with a full party you'll have for the entirety, and the four characters don't really have any personality - just four plucky heroes show up with crystals to fix the world. You fight monsters and gain XP, and as you gain XP, you level up, with various stats going up based on the class you're playing. Evidently, it's best to "upgrade" your class by completing the quest for Bahamut as soon as you can, because this improves the rate at which your stats improve with each level.

Now, I'd always been aware that Final Fantasy games tend to reinvent themselves with each entry. Even if there are lots of familiar aesthetics and overall structures to combat (at least in early days,) you go from equipping Magicite in VI to using Materia in VII, and then something called the "Junction" system in VIII that I haven't really wrapped by head around (I haven't played any version of that).

What I hadn't really realized was that this reinvention happened from the very start - II's leveling system works very differently than the first game's.

Indeed, one of the common distinctions between RPG styles is the "class based" and "skill based" system. In a class-based RPG, you pick a character class when you start, and that basically shapes the way that your character progresses. There might be choices to make, and in something like D&D, you can multiclass, but the classes are basically a full kit of capabilities that you can feel pretty confident you'll have access to as you level up.

In skill-based RPG systems, there's far more granular control over how the character develops. And you can mix and match skills to your heart's content. The price you pay is that this often blurs the lines between classes. If everyone can pick up the same fire spells, your Lavamancer isn't going to be all that different from your Dragon Knight.

Still, the best of these games can make these choices feel like big ones. I'm a big fan of Elden Ring, and that's a game where even my Intelligence and a bit of Strength character feels very distinct from my Dexterity/Intelligence character. That's due in large part, I think, to how the different weapons and spells in that game can feel very different.

It's a little backwards to think of Final Fantasy II's leveling system as being "like Elder Scrolls" given that the first Elder Scrolls game came out six years after Final Fantasy II, but in terms of my experience, I played my first Elder Scrolls game about 18 years ago (it was Oblivion) and am just getting to know this one.

Indeed, I think Elder Scrolls is the better comparison than Elden Ring and its Souls-like predecessors, because unlike Elden Ring, in both Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy II, you only level up a skill by using it.

This can actually introduce some frustrations, and I think the clearest is that of Esuna.

Esuna is a classic FF spell that clears status effects. In Rebirth, you get this from a "Cleansing Materia" that starts out only with "Poisona," which, you guessed it, clears Poison (ironically, the "Poison Materia" that actually lets you inflict poison on foes lets you get the Bio, Bioa, and Bioga spells, which do what you'd probably guess a spell called Poison would do). After you've leveled up that Materia, it unlocks the Esuna spell, which clears basically all status debuffs.

Esuna exists in Final Fantasy II, as well as an alternate version called Basuna - the former clears effects that will persist beyond the battle in which they are inflicted, while the latter clears those that will naturally clear up after a fight is over. In other words, Esuna is probably the more important spell to have.

In II, you can find tomes to teach your characters spells - they can learn up to 16 spells, but there aren't like "higher level" versions of these tomes. The spells level up when you cast them enough times So, Fire becomes Fire II, Fire III, Fire IV, etc. (and in the pixel remaster at least, the visuals get upgraded at certain levels). For damage spells and healing spells and buffs and such, it's all pretty reasonable - you deal more damage the higher level the spell is. The spells actually also get more expensive the higher level they are, but casting spells will also increase your total MP, so it doesn't seem to be too punishing to get any spells particularly high.

It does, however, make leveling up a new spell quite difficult - I got Holy for one of my characters, and it's just pathetic compared to her Fire spells. There might be some other mechanics I don't totally understand (I don't know if Black and White magic have different stats associated with them - instead I just have one character who seems to be the best at all magic).

But when it comes to Esuna... boy.

Because Esuna's use is not numerical, the only way it grows stronger is that it becomes capable of curing more and more serious ailments. Now, you can level up some spells outside of combat - Cure, the main healing spell (the only healing spell?) will improve even if used between fights, but I think you can only cast it when a character it's targeting is below their max health. That's a pretty common situation, though, so it's fine.

Esuna, when cast out of combat, can only be cast on a character with a status ailment. And only one that it can, at its current level, cure.

Are you seeing the problem?

See, I was playing earlier today and Guy, one of the three permanent party members (at least so far, but I'm pretty far into the game) got petrified. I had Gold Needles if I needed them, but I wanted to get Maria's Esuna spell powerful enough to cure it.

And it was like level 1.

So, pretty much the only way I could do this was to do so in battle. Esuna would "Miss" when it hit Guy, but behind the scenes, the little progress tracker would tick forward and gradually get Esuna closer to leveling up. Outside of combat, I couldn't cast the spell on him because it wasn't powerful enough to clear the debuff.

Very, very slowly, fighting Black Flans and Red Jellies or whatever they were called, killing all but one to have it drain my party's HP as slowly as I could, I'd cast this spell over and over to no avail, hoping that when I decided I'd done it enough, I'd see the spell level up on the victory screen.

I had to get the spell to level 6 - with an understanding that I think even my most-used spells will probably be around 10 when I finish the game.

This is... this is not a great way to do things.

Final Fantasy II's Elder-Scrolls-like Progression System

 In my hubristic quest to play through the first six (at least) Final Fantasy games, I've now begun Final Fantasy II. From the get-go, we've got more of a plot, and an element that is going to be a mainstay of the series: the evil empire. Our heroes, now given names and a hint of personality and backstory, are young orphans trying to aid the resistance against the empire, aiding the exiled princess and dying king of their homeland.

Mechanically, there's a big change: characters don't have classes nor even levels - instead, each time you use something, be it a spell or a weapon or even just "getting hit" you gradually build up a meter that will level it up.

This means that, technically, your characters can play any role, though their starting stats might push you in one direction or another. Indeed, now that I think about this, I feel a little bad for going with the gender conventions and making the female character the spellcaster.

This type of leveling is...

Ok, to be frank, I don't love it.

It's very similar to the Elder Scrolls series, where you totally "level by doing." The problem is that every single spell works this way - if you want your Esuna to get better (though I don't even really know what it means to "be better" other than potentially being less likely to fail?) you need to cast it over and over. This will likely mean doing so a lot out of combat (I hope that it even works that way) on perfectly healthy characters (I hope that it even works that way). Spells get more expensive as you level them - one MP per spell level - but you also gain more MP by spending MP.

I think this works in a game like Elder Scrolls because there are so many ways to play a game like that (I had a friend who didn't do any quests - he just hunted animals to make better and better hide and leather armor). But here it feels a little like I need to be careful not to let any of my skills fall behind. This also means casting a lot more spells, which meant when I got to the first boss I had barely any MP left - ironically I had to make my melee characters do most of the spellcasting.

Another change, and one that is probably welcome but also comes with consequences, is that the same spell can target a single target or multiple, but it appears to be divided between the targets or at least take a penalty. I don't think I'm going to get a "Fira" because I think Fire will just level up to Fire 2 and Fire 3, etc., and you can just select all the enemies to cast it as an AOE.

Another oddity is that, while there's more plot and dialogue, I also think the game does a worse job of giving you a sense of where to go. In the first game, it's actually pretty hard to blunder into areas that are too high-level for you because of the way that it restricts movement (and by the time you have the airship, the overworld is basically all of an appropriate level for you). Here, though, I went a little too far west and had Guy get one-shot by an Adamantoise, and later got both him and Firion killed by a group of ghosts (luckily, this go around resurrections are free at the temples).

It also appears that the fourth character slot is more or less for temporary party members. Firion, Maria, and Guy so far seem to be permanent, but I've had a couple people pop in and out in that fourth slot.

As will tend to be the case going forward, the characters have unique sprites, rather than the basic ones provided by their classes (I know the iconic Black Mage with the shadowed face will show up again - at least in the Pixel Remaster, they're still the spell vendors - gone are separate stores for white and black magic).

Anyway, I'm only a couple hours in, and now seem to be working on destroying the Dreadnought - the Empire's airship that has bombarded all the friendly cities and left big craters in them.

Ultimate Party Animal

 Well, the patch to fix the "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" side-quest in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has landed. I had to re-attain the record for G-Bike, which led to a Queen's Blood game followed by a final 3D Brawler match (well, not so final - beating the Shinra Middle Manager unlocks a fight versus Sephiroth in it).

However, it turns out that this quest did not hold the last bit of party XP required to hit party level 10 for me.

For that, I first had to beat the Gears and Gambits games in Cosmo Canyon on hard mode - something I had zero shame in looking up a guide for - and then doing the same with Fort Condor (which... I also looked up a guide for. Look, RTSes have never been my strong suit).

However, that still wasn't enough. Because I've now got to do the Cactuar Crush... you guessed it, hard modes.

This should finish it - after beating the first one, I have 15 XP left to hit party level 10, and each awards 5 XP, so I just have these three challenges left.

Once all that is accomplished, I'll continue my Hard Mode playthrough (in this case the overall game's hard mode). I believe the last party level unlocks a feature on everyones' Folios that causes them to fill the limit gauge (I assume partially fill it, otherwise it'd be utterly busted) with each expenditure of ATB. We'll see how much it does that, but getting more Limit Breaks over the course of a difficult boss fight is sure to be useful.

We'll see if I actually make it all the way through on Hard Mode. I've been loving this game, but I now have an ambition to clear all the old-school Final Fantasy games I got (as I said in the previous post, I just beat the first one).

Still, being able to check the Ultimate Party Animal title off the list certainly feels good.

Also, upon returning to Hard Mode (which I should be able to now - I didn't want to do it in the middle of the side quest for fear of losing my progress) I can get the materials to make the Genji gear, which I think I could put to good use (the one that reduces incoming and outgoing damage might be really powerful on Barret, as I've already got him set up to tank with Lifesaver and the gun with the automatic protect spell every time he overcharges).

Final Fantasy I Down, V to Go

 I've now finished the original Final Fantasy in its PS5 (maybe PS4) "Pixel Remaster" version.

Like a lot of NES-era games, this feels kind of like a proof of concept. I know the Pixel Remaster has a few tweaks to make the game a little more like its later counterparts - Phoenix Down, for example, did not exist in the original, so the only way to revive a party member was to go to a town temple and have a priest resurrect them, or to use the Life spell. What I wonder, though, is whether Ether was also a later edition. Being able to restore your casters' spell slots mid-dungeon absolutely made the game easier, and I think it would be a lot more challenging (and frankly, tedious) if you couldn't re-up your Firagas, Holies, and Flares.

My party composition was only slightly changed from the default - I replaced the Thief with a Monk. My Monk, Jador, was a little slow to get up to speed, and was certainly less durable than my warrior, Coran, but once he got to the point where the Iron Nunchaku wasn't any better than his unarmed attacks, he kind of took off, and only when I was able to get Coran some really amazing weapons like Excalibur or Masamune (the latter only available in the final dungeon, and the former basically right before it) could he keep up.

In terms of difficulty, the game feels way easier than other titles. I don't know if this is due to some rebalancing or if, simply, as someone who grew up on JRPGs, the strategies are second nature to me at this point. Even the major bosses, the four Fiends, seemed to only last 3-4 rounds, whereas any other fight rarely took more than two.

Indeed, the only time I felt genuinely threatened was when facing off against Chaos, the game's final boss. Even then, the fight went relatively smoothly - I kept Haste and Temper up on the two melee characters, used Protera and Invisira to increase the party's defenses (not sure what the damage would have been like without them) and once I had everything up and running (occasionally re-casting Haste as Chaos would cast Slow on some characters) I'd spam Flare. This was the first fight in which my White Wizard Kula felt like she had to be healing more often than not, but with 8 or 9 spell slots at each level, it wasn't hard to spam Healga or whatever it was called.

I think if I were to redesign this, I might make enemy encounters about three times less frequent and about three times more difficult. Until you get the airship, there's no way to travel across the map without encountering monsters about every five steps. So, you get fight after fight after fight in which the battle music barely even plays before you've either obliterated the monsters with quick attacks or a single big spell. Pretty early on, my melee characters were almost guaranteed to one-shot any non-boss enemy they hit, except for the odd ooze that didn't much physical damage.

This is also the old-school quest design in which the only clue to where you should go next tends to be a single NPC in a single town somewhere on the map - I will confess here that I did look up online guides, for example, to make sure that I got the class upgrades as soon as I could. This did result in me accidentally almost skipping Mt. Gulg - I was about to start the Wind Palace before realizing I could have gone to the Mt. Gulg as soon as I had acquired the canoe, so it was an exercise in utterly massacring every monster that popped up - even my Wizards could generally melee them down.

While this entry in the series feels strangely sparse in terms of story, I can also see how players back in 1987 (when I was a year old) must have felt like this was the closest they could get to playing D&D as a video game. It's certainly not ambiguous that the folks at Squaresoft were basically taking elements whole-cloth from D&D - the bestiary is more or less just the D&D Monster Manual, and the game even uses D&D's "Vancian Magic" system, where you have different pools of magic for each level of spell. Mind you, I'm not even that fond of that system in D&D itself, and here it's even more awkward. (I'm a 5E native, so I don't know if "upcasting" was allowed back in the day - it's not in FF1). The four major bosses prior to the final boss are the Lich, the Marilith, the Kraken, and Tiamat, which are all legendary monsters except the Marilith (and Tiamat is actually a goddess whose avatars can be fought in 5E - there's a straight Tiamat stat block for her as the final boss of a big adventure that lists her as a fiend, but a more recent book with an "Aspect" of her that has her as a dragon, which I think seems more appropriate). 

One of the oddities of the game is that it sort of suddenly develops a plot when you confront the final boss - the reveal that there's a whole time loop, and that the rebel knight Garland somehow got sent back in time to become Chaos, who then sent the four fiends forward into the future to ensure he is transported into the past.

Really, the time travel aspect of the game kind of comes out of nowhere.

While the game is largely traditional fantasy, with elves and dwarves and dragons, there is a little hint at the technological aspects that would become far more prominent starting in VI, which is that a fallen civilization built this floating fortress, and some of the monsters you fight in it are clearly robots.

Anyway, next I'll be starting up II and see where that one takes me. My total play time for this was about 13 hours - piddling for a modern Final Fantasy game (Rebirth took me about 100 hours to complete, which did include all the World Intel and all but the last sidequest - still waiting on the patch to fix that one). I'm expecting that the duration will grow with later entries, especially when we get to the SNES games (which I think start with IV).

Going Old School with Final Fantasy I

 Well, the JRPG kick has officially gone into overdrive. I've purchased the Pixel Remaster bundle of Final Fantasies I-VI for my PS5. I've heard, admittedly, mixed reviews of these remakes, but it seems a good way to get to experience these classic games.

I've played a few hours of the original Final Fantasy, and it's interesting to see the way things started off. As a disclaimer, the Pixel Remaster actually makes the game look more like it's from the SNES era than its original NES incarnation. The character sprites would fit in reasonably with Locke, Celes, and Terra (and Crono) and the battle screen is pretty similar to 6.

There are some oddities, though: the text and text boxes are not at all pixelated in the same way. And the music seems fully orchestrated (or if not, done with really impressive modern synthesizers).

Final Fantasy games are, of course, known for their complex plots and compelling characters. But boy howdy had they not really figured that part out yet. The four party members are all there from the start and have no canonical names (I've named them after deities from my homebrew D&D setting) and you can pick between their classes when you start the game. The default is Warrior, Thief, White Mage and Black Mage. I swapped out the Thief for a Monk - I know eventually I'm supposed to unequip the monk's weapon, but I think I'm not quite at that point yet. Anyway, you can also have a Red Mage, which I think is a little bit like a Bard in D&D in that it gets a little of everything.

"Plot" wise, so far at least the game is a pretty boilerplate series of nested quests. I fought the rogue knight (who, spoiler alert, winds up coming back as the final boss of the game) to rescue the princess of Cornelia, which then got the king to have a bridge built so that I could go to a town, beat up some pirates, take their ship, sail to Elfheim, where the prince was stuck in a cursed slumber. So I check out some ruins where the "elf king" says he's trapped unless he can get his crown back, which sends me into a pretty intense dungeon in the marshes. I fight some legally-not-mind-flayers to get the crown, bring it back to the king, he turns out to be the dark elf king who cursed the prince in the first place, but when I kill him, I get this crystal eye back. So I bring that eye to a friendly blind witch I'd encountered earlier and she gives me a "Jolt Potion," which, when brought back to the prince, wakes him up. He now gives me a "Mystic Key" that opens a massive number of doors across the world I've encountered, and will presumably allow me to progress further (though I know of a few locations I'll want to use that key in, including the deepest part of that pretty intense dungeon in the marsh that I'd gotten the crown in).

Gameplay-wise, you basically get a random encounter every time you take your fifth step. Combat is sort of turn-based. You actually enter all of your party's commands at the same time - a sort of "top of the round" moment, but the order in which they go is somewhat randomized (I think there's some stat like speed or agility that governs it.) Thus, if you are set to attack a monster that's already been killed, you wind up defaulting to whatever the game would point you to first. I think there was a similar idea in Chrono Trigger (minus the "queueing up all the turns at once" idea).

Fascinatingly, the Mages' spellcasting actually works a bit like D&D - you have a certain number of MP for each level of spell (but you can't up-cast lower-level spells). Each Mage can learn up to three spells of any given level, and will need to "forget" them to learn others in that slot. Generally, I've found that it's best to be conservative with spells (not unlike in D&D) which does, unfortunately, lead you to kind of just spamming the "attack" action on all of your characters, with the Mages usually doing very minor damage.

As with so many games from the 1980s, and particularly those that were the first entry in what is now a long-running, beloved series, there's a lot of elements here that feel like more of a proof-of-concept than what we'd expect of a full game.

Still, obviously it was innovative enough to launch one of gaming's biggest franchises, and they'd continue to revise and reform their design philosophy.

Three hours in (I believe) I think I've explored nearly half the map, so I'm not expecting this to take the amount of time I usually expect a Final Fantasy game to do (I think I beat Rebirth at the hundred-hour mark).

And I'll be curious to see when the games start really feeling like the fully-formed versions of themselves. Before today, the oldest Final Fantasy game I'd played was VI.

Returning to FFXVI after Rebirth

 I'm at a stage where the one two things I have to do in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth other than continuing on through my Hard Mode run (where I've just gotten to Cosmo Canyon) will require a patch to fix a bug (I've returned to the normal difficulty levels to clear out some Musclehead Coliseum fights and Chadley virtual encounters) because the sidequest "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" currently won't give you credit for beating the UPA's high score on G-Bike or whatever it's called. Square has evidently acknowledged this bug and are working on a fix, but for now rather than beat my head against the various mini-games that grant Dark Matter so that I can upgrade all the unique trinkets and thus max out my crafting skill to then allow me to make the Genji pieces, I've decided that I should probably get around to actually finishing Final Fantasy XVI.

But the contrast has not been kind to XVI.

It's remarkable to me how much XVI feels like a game from many years ago. While the character models and visual effects are great, the animation in dialogue scenes is really stiff. Compared with the NPCs (and player characters) in VII Rebirth, who have exaggerated, anime-like expressions and movements, I keep coming across scenes in which Clive is talking to some friendly merchant or community leader, and they're just locked off, his mouth flapping with what is genuinely a great vocal performance, but without the animation to match it.

The side quests in XVI are there to flesh out the world, often really reinforcing how brutal and rough that world is. And plot-wise, there's a high drama here to be sure. But there's really, really weird pacing. Seemingly every dialogue scene has a couple-second-long establishing shot showing the characters standing around before they get to the important task of... actually playing out the scene.

I guess what's funny to me about this is that, as a numbered entry in this legendary video game series, XVI feels like the side project compared to the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. And I don't want to be insulting to the people who worked hard on XVI - clearly a lot of people put a ton of effort into building that world, designing the look of it, scoring it, writing the complex (if a little brooding and bleak) story. But you just get the sense that Square Enix really held their most experienced people in reserve to remake VII.

The VII remakes so far have been the most ambitious attempt to remake a video game I've ever encountered, and have honestly rejuvenated a love I have for JRPGs.

Naturally, XVI's biggest departure is that it has fully transitioned into being an action game. There are levels and stats, of course, but the progression systems are simpler than games like God of War that never pretended to be anything other than an action game (though I'd argue that at least the Norse-era God of War games are environmental puzzle games with combat interspersed - and I say this as a compliment).

Now, maybe I've just defaulted to builds that reinforce this, but I keep feeling like XVI lacks any real strategy when it comes to the combat - it's reflexive, making sure to dodge at the right time. But I basically just unload all of my special abilities in a rotation and by the time I've used them all I've usually got the first one I used back and ready to be used again.

By comparison, VIIR creates this beautiful melding of action-oriented combat (the ability to dodge and block attacks, having to think about positioning) with the command-sequence combat of the old turn-based system. (I know that you can create button commands for various abilities, but I think anyone who uses them is a philistine! You use that slow-down menu every time you're going to do a Focused Strike, mister!)

When I'm engaged in VIIR's combat, sure, there are patterns and rotations I'll use, but there's enough variety in enemies and how they interact with the characters that there are some real considerations to make - I think the way that lots of monsters have complicated things you have to do to pressure them, for example, really opens up design space for interesting monsters. And things like Synergy Abilities and Limit Breaks, along with limited MP, create trade-off strategic choices that make you consider your strategy in the thick of battle. Hell, just having to earn your ATB charges creates moments of choice - is saving the MP on casting Cura worth a second ATB charge to get a free Pray off? Sure, Barret's down pretty low (because he's been using Lifesaver) but Tifa's at like 75% and Cloud's fully topped off.

It's frustrating, because there's so much about XVI that should make it an amazing game. The Kaiju-style fights are cinematic and epic (though arguably some go on too long - is a 40-minute boss fight epic or just tedious?) and while the characters are a mixed bag, I really like Clive, and obviously Cid.

The return to medieval fantasy is... ok, I'll be honest, I don't really care for it. But it is an interesting change of pace.

It's interesting: I have mixed feelings about the number of minigames in Rebirth. The core gameplay of its combat system is satisfying enough that I found times when, for example, I was forced (maybe more accurately pushed) into playing a whole Queen's Blood tournament on a cruise ship, that I wished I could just get back to fighting monsters.

But returning to XVI, where there basically aren't any minigames whatsoever, it leaves the various side quests and much of the main quest feeling like the same stuff over and over. You cannot complain that Rebirth lacks variety.

I also think that Rebirth, and FFVII in general, has as perhaps its greatest strength a great party of adventurers that you just like to hang out with. As my roommate was playing the game earlier this evening, I was drawn to compare Rebirth in particular as being a "Hang-out Game" in the same way that a lot of sitcoms about people who just happen to be friends with one another (like Friends or How I Met Your Mother) are "Hang-out Sitcoms." Some people have complained (or worried, beforehand) that Rebirth is set in what is the least eventful stretch of the original FFVII. But in a strange way, I kind of feel like that's an asset. We get to hang out with this group of characters just being together in the world, their friendships developing, and seeing their opportunities to just be goofy and fun and, you know, get us to care about them.

It's not that Clive isn't likable as a protagonist. But even though he often travels with allies and friends over the course of FFXVI, there's never a real sense of a "party," because there isn't one. Gameplay-wise, we essentially never step outside of Clive's perspective, and we don't really get to see the world or its conflicts from a different point of view. And that, I think, also kind of shrinks down the rogue's gallery of the game into just a sequence of people to take down. The bad guys in XVI sort of bleed into one another, even if, upon close inspection, they do have contrary motivations (though I feel in particular that Barnabas wound up being kind of forgettable after a lot of build-up).

Naturally, VII's all building to the final confrontation with Sephiroth, but the lesser villains come into focus in different ways, not just because they have their own aesthetics and techniques, but also because different characters have different histories with them - Barret has a particular reason to take down Scarlett, for example, while Red XIII and Aerith would naturally care more about defeating Hojo.

And this is a matter of taste, of course (though this is all taste - I'm sure some people like the simpler action gameplay) but I really miss the silly bullshit. A character like Roche, for example, and the fantastic exchange of "Oh, that jackass? He's... a jackass." "We know, sir!" talking about him. And yet, even Roche has his own little arc and nuance - he's a crazy jackass, but he's also got this kind of chivalric sense of honor, and ultimately has this kind of tragic fate.

Anyway, even though it's a remake, I can imagine that a decade from now I'll be looking back nostalgically on this project and all the amazing things that were accomplished in it, but I seriously doubt that I'll still be giving much thought to XVI.

And that's a bit of a bummer, isn't it? I mean, getting a really good remake of a beloved game is something that gamers often want and very, very seldom get. No one could possibly accuse Square Enix of half-assing their re-creation of Final Fantasy VII. But much as I love that this has allowed me to get on a bandwagon that felt like it left me behind when I was eleven years old back in 1997, it feels like it would be better if it was the brand-new entry in the series that brought with it the expert craftsmanship and stunning gameplay.

JRPG Storytelling and Hiding Character Knowledge in TTRPGs

 Like many people born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, my first exposure to RPGs was not D&D or any other western-style TTRPGs, or, for that matter, even Western-style computer RPGs like Baldur's Gate.

No, for me, the very idea of an RPG was introduced to me through JRPGs. In the mid-90s, there was this incredible run of amazing JRPGs that came out of SquareSoft (I don't recall when they merged with Enix, which had its own perhaps lesser-known hit, the Illusion of Gaia). Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI (released in America as III,) Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, all came out one year after the other in '93, '94, '95, and '96, respectively, for the Super Nintendo. (FFVII came out in '97 for the PlayStation, so it's not like this roll stopped there). Now, ironically, the games of these four that I think are probably the more impactful and important projects are the ones I wouldn't play for several years.

Still, at least within my narrow band of social peers (my childhood best friend was a year older than me but in the same grade) there wasn't really the sort of "community continuity" that would introduce us to D&D, and in fact, despite growing up non-religiously in a very secular mixed-faith (or rather, mixed religious heritage) household, the specter of the Satanic Panic did actually linger a bit over that specific property.

I wouldn't actually get into D&D until the end of my 20s (as chronicled on this very blog). But I was kicking Lazy Shells and fighting Dark Liches back when I was in Middle School in the late 90s. And when I got a used PS2 my sophomore year of college, I actually tackled my first legitimate Final Fantasy game (X) and then picked up some PS1 ports that were playable thanks to backwards compatibility, focusing primarily on Chrono Trigger (which I never actually finished, but damn if it's not one of my favorite games of all time).

The structure and I'd say the appeal of JRPGs of this kind as compared with western RPGs are pretty different. Most JRPGs involve playing through a story that is mostly pre-written by the game's creators, with characters they've designed and created. While this can certainly happen as well in western RPGs, often the main appeal of these games is the freedom of choice, especially in creating a character of your own design, and then, depending on the series, you might have a huge array of options for how you want to play the game. In the Elder Scrolls series, for example, you can have a pretty significant and full game even if you ignore the main quest line, perhaps instead treating, say, the Dark Brotherhood quests as your main campaign.

There is a problem that you run into, though, with the freedom to create your own original character, which is that the game doesn't really get to tell much of a story with you. Necessarily, the edges are sanded down a bit - you can't really come up with much of a complex backstory for a character who, from the game's perspective, must ultimately be given the same options regardless of whether you're a shady rogue with a criminal past or a holy knight on a sacred quest or a wizard obsessed with plumbing the depths of reality to seek out some deeper truth.

Even in a game as brilliant as Baldur's Gate 3, which does so much to allow a player to forge a unique identity through their choices and actions, your "Tav" character will never get the full catharsis of seeing their individual story thrown in the spotlight the same way that the pre-written characters like Shadowheart and Astarion do.

It's necessary because ultimately, the creators of a computer game must create something that is more generalized and can work for multiple players.

This, of course, is a limitation we are free of as the game masters of TTRPGs.

However, there is a delicate balance to strike. See, often JRPG characters will learn something they did not know about their character. It's often quite shocking, throwing their whole identity into question. This is usually what happens with the "main" character, because in most cases, JRPGs have a central, main character. Often, these games begin with just that single character even being playable, easing you into the complexity required to make sense of its systems, but even as the party expands and you get more characters, this one will often be a mandatory member of the active party (perhaps with some story-dictated moments where they aren't) for a good chunk of the game, and are typically the character you're controlling outside of combat, and choosing dialogue options for.

But beyond this idea of a "main character" (and to be fair, FFVI's philosophy was that "every character can be the main character," and really makes it an ensemble) the notion of hidden, shocking knowledge is one that can be challenging to run in a TTRPG context.

But before we delve into this, let's talk about the characters in JRPGs.

We're going to be spoiling a whole bunch of games: for sure Final Fantasies VII, X, and XVI.

Spoilers ahead:

Hard Mode in the FFVII Remake Trilogy

 Having beaten Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I found, as I had with Remake, a desire to keep playing. There are some games where I finish the story and feel fully ready to move on, but usually when a game nails the "good feeling" of gameplay, it inspires me to find any opportunity to keep playing. For example, I'd have loved a New Game Plus (or even just the ability to have a second save file) for Control, so even after I'd finished the main game and both DLCs, I'd wander around the Oldest House and just look for Hiss to fight.

Remake and Rebirth are both games built to allow both a sense of closure with finishing the game and a sense that you can continue if you just want to play some more. Remake was, of course, a bit more linear, with brief interludes that included some side quests, but mostly just an ongoing narrative (and, like early Final Fantasy games, the plot dictated who was in your party at any given time).

Rebirth is a lot less linear, with tons of activities you can do in the world outside of the main story quest. Both games give you "chapter selection" when you finish the game - a kind of NG+ but one that allows you to jump around, perhaps to replay the parts of the game you enjoyed the most (or the parts where you want to get certain missed items - I remember in Remake missing Aerith's staff you need to steal off of the second boss in the Train Graveyard and making that my first pit stop after beating the game proper.)

But with all these side activities, especially those that are less about some new challenge and more about discovering parts of the world, they allow these things to carry over when you return to a chapter. Thus, your World Intel progress will remain completed, and you have an option to reset side quests (I'm not sure if this includes the protorelic intel) or simply leave them completed.

This does result, of course, in passing through the world a lot quicker. As soon as I exited the Mythril Mines, for example, I was basically ready to head into Junon and fight the big sea monster, and not long after that head up to the whole inauguration parade for Rufus.

Now, playing through this on the same difficulty is all well and good (there's also "Dynamic" difficulty, which is available from the start, and I assume scales monsters up to your level - which is probably wise if you're going to early-game areas with an endgame-leveled character unless the whole point is to utterly destroy everything in your path with ease).

But, as with the previous game, beating it once also unlocks Hard Mode. Hard Mode is truly hard. Not far into it, most of my characters hit the level cap of 70, which did grant more skill points, but the true incentive to do this is that each boss you take down grants a manuscript for one of your characters - my sense is that if you beat the whole thing, you'll have enough SP to unlock every skill in your Folios. Granted, at that point you might be wondering what there is left to challenge you.

Hard Mode, like in Remake, has two other major changes: the first is that you can't use items. Weirdly, you can still get items in Hard Mode, but they basically just go into your inventory and chill, I suppose until you decide to play in a different difficulty setting. The other is that resting at a bench or an inn will restore HP, but not MP. Finishing a chapter will restore MP, and there is a little bit of passive MP regeneration, along with skills and materia that can help with that, but you basically need to be clever about conserving MP (Aerith does have Soul Drain, which will likely get more use). There is one exception to the no-item rule, though, which is that you can use a Cushion on a Chocostop, and furthermore this will actually restore your MP as well. Still, any "dungeon"-like environment (including, for example, climbing Mt. Corel) will require you to really think about when to expend your precious MP. And without potions or ethers, you need to play very carefully.

However, in my experience at least, the non-boss monsters are mostly pretty trivial - they don't seem to scale up very much, and so between the free elemental damage skills and just the raw power of where your characters have gotten makes it pretty easy to get through these fights without having to spend MP, and often not even taking any damage (outside of combat, when you don't have to worry about building ATB charges, the base Cure seems like the most efficient healing-per-MP-expended). If you know for certain that a particular character won't be forced into your party, the HP/MP materia actually could work pretty well for a permanent back-line healer, though I haven't done this (and many of these more narrow "dungeon" environments split the party up anyway).

Anyway, if the non-boss enemies are pretty trivial in Hard Mode, boy howdy are the bosses not. These seem to be balanced not just around your being max level (maybe the first few aren't quite) but also requiring pretty excellent execution. Bosses that were thrilling but relatively easy to get through on the first attempt are quite difficult. I'm been able to one-shot a couple of them, but most have required at least a second attempt.

There are some systems I haven't entirely figured out - party level, for example, I think derives its separate XP from doing side quests, and that means that at some point I'll have to (if I want to cap this out and access the last of the skills in the Folios) actually finish the "Ultimate Party Animal" challenge at the Gold Saucer. Beyond that, there's also weapon XP, and that I genuinely don't understand and can't seem to find an in-game explanation.

Anyway, on Hard Mode I'm now on the modified Valkyrie at Mt. Corel, doing the Red/Cloud/Aerith half of the mountain before we go on to Yuffie/Barret/Tifa. I did one attempt, which was going ok until Red went down and I tried to use a synergy attack to stagger the boss, but happened to do so right when it was using a big attack, so the party got wiped. I don't think it'll take too many tries, but we'll see. (In Remake, Hell House took me many, many attempts on Hard Mode).

Tom Zane: Villain or Ally, Filmmaker or Poet, Creator or Creation?

 Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game is mysterious. We never see his face, only ever experiencing him as this person in a diving suit that is also, possibly, just a bright light beaming out of it. Still, ultimately what we learn of him feels like it more or less adds up: he was essentially the first person to go through what Alan does, seeing his romantic partner lost in the lake and then using Cauldron Lake's strange properties to alter reality and allow her to return. He's the predecessor to Alan who screwed up and didn't see the limitations on this power, and allowed his beloved to become a vessel for the Dark Presence.

Thomas Zane, the poet, has a pretty strong bit of evidence in support of his existence, which is Emile Hartman. Before Hartman got doubly infected by the Dark Presence and the Hiss and transformed into something showcasing a lot more body horror than anything else I've seen in Remedy games, the not so good doctor fit pretty neatly into the story, linking Alan's experience with the story of Thomas back from 1970, a 40-year gap bridged by this narcissist seeking to exploit both artists.

But all of that starts to get thrown into doubt starting in Control.

The same poem that Hartman seems to misinterpret and make the slogan of his unethical laboratory masquerading as a mental health center, Jesse quotes when speaking with a therapist. For a time, she seems to understand that Thomas Zane is a poet, but her therapist corrects her, finding that the only artist with that name she could find was a filmmaker from Finland.

Modern-day (or at least 2019's) Jesse believes that she was wrong, and that Zane really is a filmmaker. It's an odd thing: Alan Wake II establishes that some people are immune to the re-writing of reality performed in the Dark Place, as Saga and her grandfather and great-uncle see through the fiction that Logan drowned. One might imagine that a parautilitarian as powerful as Jesse might have a similar immunity, but then... perhaps not. Her powers might not be the right ones to allow for such an immunity.

There's a possible reading of Alan Wake's story that we can't really rely on any of it being "real" within the world of the story, where there is nothing but interpretation as to the fundamental facts of what happened. This anarchic reading is a valid one, but it's also one that I think leaves us little room to speculate within.

If we don't take that view, I think that this suggests to me that Thomas Zane really was a poet. The notion that "Tom the Poet" was actually a character in a film by filmmaker Zane (a distinction I usually make by referring to "Thomas" as the poet and "Tom" as the filmmaker, though the name of that movie confuses it a bit) does seem to push more in the direction that "Tom" is the real one, but given the nature of these games, I find it plausible that either Thomas "fictionalized" himself (as he is described in This House of Dreams as having written himself out of existence) by making the real him into this character from a movie, or that an external entity has laid claim to him by fictionalizing him.

That leads to the next question: is Tom Zane, then, a villain or an ally?

Tom and Alan have two face-to-face meetings, which take place within film strips that Alan discovers in the mostly-empty Room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (interestingly, while he also goes to Room 665 in these films, the layout is entirely different.) In the first, Tom is a wild and off-putting character, but a seeming ally: one who warns Alan not to let Scratch get his hands on the manuscript, and points him to the hotel as a potential source of inspiration. He dresses and acts more like a rock star from 1970 than a filmmaker (and I know there's a theory floating around that he might be the Loki from the Old God of Asgard) and seems paranoid when Jesse Faden appears on the television in the room.

It is noteworthy, of course, that his warning about Scratch altering the manuscript ultimately leads Alan to a self-destructive act. As we discover (it's not the most obvious plot point on a first play-through, or even a second) at the end of Initiation, Scratch isn't really there for any of those confrontations that Alan has in the writer's room. One finds a manuscript seemingly written by Scratch and begins making changes to salvage it (the one after, interestingly, the chapter that has us go around the Oceanview,) the next comes in after having gotten the impression that Scratch drove Alice to suicide and shoots the first one in the head, only to realize his mistake and pass out, getting summoned to the beach at the end of Return's first chapter, and then the last walks in on the carnage, seeing that first one and wondering what the hell has happened (this one actually being the Alan from Initiation's first draft, after the level in Caldera Street Station). The point is, Alan's actually turned against himself, thinking in each case that his other selves are actually Scratch (which... is sort of also true, but not in the sense that he thinks).

We get a preview of Alan getting more violent at the start of the chapter that ends with him shooting his other self in the head, because when Alan visits Zane's room again, he starts the film off aiming his gun at Zane's head. Zane acts innocent, trying to calm a confused Alan but also confessing that, yes, he did collaborate with Scratch because Alan had stopped writing. Weirdly, though, when Alan seems to be calming down, or at least redirecting his emotions from rage to confusion, Zane's face contorts into one of... well, villainy. A smug smile curls his lips and, through film edits, he trades places with Alan, seemingly about to shoot Alan in the head. But as they blink back and forth, Alan pulls the trigger and shoots Zane.

But once we're out of the film, we see the rest of it play - a bit of footage that extends past the final edit, where Zane appears to still be alive, his violent death only a moment of drama for his own film. He also does this beginning with the second half of one of Thomas Zane's poems: "Oh mercy. Thousands have gone missing beyond the labyrinth of me. When you're lost, you're lost in your own company."

So... what the fuck? (Alan literally says this, likely simultaneously with the player.)

It seems to me that Zane is trying to provoke Alan to shoot him. But much as Alan is safe in the writer's room (even when the writer's room becomes a setting for his story, because that kind of makes it a new writer's room) Zane seems to be able to step outside the fiction of his films and survive even when the character he's playing dies.

That, though, raises a very interesting question: is Tom Zane really just a character? And if so, who the hell is playing him?

Zane claims that Yöton Yö is a companion piece to Return. When we see the film, Zane plays Alan Wake in it, and the plot is more or less that a cult ritually sacrifices Alex Casey to die and take Alan's place in the Dark Place to allow for Alan to return.

This does, of course, kind of happen in the game. The Dark Presence is blown out of Alan and then enters Alex Casey, who... travels into the Dark Place or perhaps brings the Dark Place to downtown Bright Falls. Very briefly, Alan is technically out and free - though he's also in a world swarmed by Taken and with no hesitation jumps back in to save the day (or at least try to).

But it does strike me as interesting that, as far as I know, nowhere in Alan's writing does he say that for one person to escape the Dark Place, another has to be taken by it. Alan does say that a sacrifice needs to be made, which is why he chooses to stay in the Dark Place and make Alice's escape possible. But this is the choice of a hero, not the sacrifice of a victim.

Casey, in Nightless Night (I guess I should just use the English title to avoid having to make so many umlauts,) is for certain a victim. He doesn't choose to be sacrificed for someone else's benefit. He's just led in and trapped.

It's also, though, interesting that Zane casts himself as Alan in this story. Naturally, there's a meta weirdness here because the actor who plays Alan's body is the same as the one that plays Zane, and throughout Nightless Night, the convention seems to be that because it's a Finnish film, the Finnish mo-cap actor for a character also provides their own voice. Thus, if we were to see an authentic, non-Zane Alan in Nightless Night, it would still be embodied and voiced by Ilkka Villi anyway - severely blurring the line between Zane and Alan even further.

Thus, if I had to guess, I think Zane is probably plotting to essentially take Alan's place in escaping the Dark Place.

Which... when you think about it, is kind of what the Dark Presence wants to do, right?

Sure, maybe Zane is actually the real Scratch, the true imposter Alan that wishes to enter into the world and wreak havoc. But wait, we can go more unhinged.

It's nearly two in the morning as I write this, and I don't want to lose the thread here. The question of whether Zane created Alan or Alan created Zane is fertile ground for debate and discussion, but I wanted to present a different take:

Is Zane future Alan?

The change in voice is, of course, a little hard to account for here. But on a metaphorical level, I think there's something potentially potent: if we take the idea that Zane wants to exit the Dark Place, and can only do so by leaving Alan within it, could that actually be something more metaphorical? Our future selves are constantly replacing our past selves. Personally, I think the continuity of consciousness is the strongest evidence for something existing beyond the material world, but on a physical level, our bodies are constantly undergoing a cycle of destruction and creation. It's just happening on such a staggered scale that we never notice it - we have cells that die and cells that reproduce, and the factoid I always heard (though it's the sort of thing that could be bullshit) is that about every seven years, every cell in our body has been replaced. This raises some Ship of Theseus questions about personal identity (the soul essentially being a popular answer to that question that, as someone who is not religious, I nevertheless feel is a comforting one).

But if the Dark Presence is, in a literal sense, the Jungian shadow, and that arriving at the self requires a confrontation with and an integration of the shadow, it could be that Zane as a persona was created to be a kind of guide into the darkness - a demon whose very villainousness is required to put Alan on the path to reaching that place of self.

I'm not entirely sure we'll ever get a definitive answer here. Indeed, it's possible that Remedy will want Zane to be a part of the whole RCU beyond even Alan's story (Tom the Poet having been an element even as far back as Death Rally). But even if the guy's tailor-made to make us speak feverishly about what the hell he could mean, it's not like I won't enjoy doing so.