The Surreal Experience of Playing Final Fantasy VII For the First Time Now

 Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997, the year I turned 11. It was Squaresoft's (not sure if they had merged with Enix yet) first foray into 3D graphics. For those of you too young to remember, the transition from the 16-bit era of the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis to the next generation, which brought the N64, the Sega Saturn, and the first PlayStation (the Xbox would come later as a contemporary of the Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, and I guess technically the Sega Dreamcast) was enormous.

Flat, two-dimensional sprites were the norm in the 16-bit (and earlier) era, with only a few games (like Starfox) playing in true 3D. There were, of course, games like Donkey Kong Country, which used 3D modeling to create its characters and environment, but then essentially used those assets as the basis for 2D sprites.

But this 32-bit era (I've never quite been able to figure out if the N64 was actually 64-bit or if that was marketing - by the time the "128-bit" era came about we stopped using bits to name console generations) was the first in which the use of 3D graphics really came to the fore. It's honestly the beginning of the era we're still in, graphically, but over the past 28 years the technology has evolved incredibly, which is how you get the dynamic lighting, extremely detailed worlds and characters you find today.

So, VII, being at the dawn age of that graphical era, is kind of "where we started." Square I think has always been ambitious with its graphics, and as a longtime Nintendo loyalist (though obviously I've now had three of the five extant Playstation consoles) it was always frustrating that they basically abandoned Nintendo - FFVII was originally being developed for the N64, but Square didn't think they could fit their game on the N64's cartridges, and wanted Nintendo to move to discs as a medium (also, kids, there was a time when CD-ROMs were the pinnacle of high-density portable data-storage!), something Nintendo did actually do the following generation, but by that time FFVII's "killer app" status on the original Playstation cemented a partnership that lasts to this day.

VII does something of a hybrid approach between Donkey Kong Country and true 3D - the environments are pre-rendered still images, which forces the camera to remain at a fixed perspective. The exception here is the battle scenes, which are fully rendered, along with the overworld map, both of which allow for the camera angle to sweep around.

Long ago, when I was a sophomore in college in either 2005 or 2006, I played my first Final Fantasy, FFX, and you can see that the overall concept was pretty similar for how battle would work - for certain special moves, the camera cuts in to a close-up of the monster or character doing their thing, creating a more dynamic visual experience than the classic fixed battle screens of previous titles.

Now, let's talk about the surrealness.

Final Fantasy VII Remake took what was a substantial but ultimately pretty quick chunk of the original game and expanded it into a modern days-long game experience. In Remake, for example, the Sector Seven Slums are something of a hub that you return to a couple times, getting side-quests an other side-areas. In the original, you only go to the Seventh Heaven bar once - between the attacks on the two Mako reactors.

Areas like this, and the Sector Five Slums where Aerith lives, are significantly smaller and not actually as similar in overall look and design as I'd assumed they would be. While Remake does make it clear that the buildings are largely constructed from scrap metal, they're still functionally rather sturdy-looking structures, whereas in the original conception it seems that there are a fair number of "buildings" that are little more than heaps of metal.

Likewise, certain sequences and areas in Remake were originally just single map screens - the collapsed freeway, for example, is just a single map where you'll have three or four encounters (mostly, it seems, with Hell Houses) and the Train Graveyard is likewise a quick and small section with no real "plot" to it other than it being a place to pass through.

There are fewer bosses, as well - there's no Jenova fight in the Shinra HQ, and the rough equivalent of the "Arsenal" fight is more like a pair of consecutive minibosses.

Plot-wise, there's clearly more time for subtlety and characterization in Remake, so characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie aren't really given much in the way of dimensionality.

I think it's interesting to see here how the game was, in some ways, still essentially trying to depict a world and tell its story in a manner similar to the 16-bit era. At one point, Barret smacks Biggs for some reason and sends him flying at the screen - a move that feels very much at home in a 16-bit game (like a point in V when Bartz and Krile smack each other at the gates of Tycoon Castle) but playing with new capabilities (the fact that he comes at the screen).

Given that my primary experience with this story and these characters has been a fully modern game with more modern sensibilities (though still a crazy batshit fever dream) it's kind of fascinating to be reminded that this game is only three years removed from FFVI, and to see how similar it was.

One thing I do find kind of interesting is how the game seems poised to have its characters play more similarly to one another than those in VI did. Obviously, in the Remake trilogy, the "live" gameplay is distinct between Barret's Overcharges, Tifa's various martial arts moves, and Cloud's Operator/Punisher modes, but beyond that they also have all their unique skills. Here, it seems that every character is basically just a basic attack and any materia they have access to, the only unique thing being their Limit Breaks, which do feel like a more regular part of gameplay than they do in the Remakes.

Anyway, as of today (after I started writing this post) I've played through the Nibelheim flashback scene in Kalm. So far the beats of the game are pretty similar, though I think it's interesting that you never see Sephiroth in Midgar - the first glimpse we get of him in the game is on the truck to Nibelheim, when he seems like a pretty chill dude.

Rebirth, I think, gives bigger hints that Cloud's story is skewed, and that the unnamed Shinra trooper is actually him. I'm curious to see the full explanation, because I remember my best friend, who had played the game when it was new, having a rather extreme explanation of what Cloud technically was, but I think that was his youthful misunderstanding.

VII Up

 We're officially past the Pixel Remasters, and as such, an hour into the original Final Fantasy VII has required an adjustment from the homogenized UI that the recent recreations of the first six games in the series provided.

Despite the N64/PS1 era being pretty foundational for me as a gamer (I got my first console, an SNES, in 5th grade, and my second, an N64, in 6th, so the two consoles more or less overlapped for me) I will say that I feel less of a nostalgic connection to those earliest of 3D graphics. So, playing through the fixed-camera environments of Midgar so far has felt mixed. I've seen these places recreated 23 years later with Final Fantasy VII Remake, and they look damned good in that 2020 release.

I suppose there's a bit of a nostalgic connection I feel to the grimy industrial pre-rendered (but still unimpressive by standards that are now like 15 years old) 3D environments with much simpler polygonal characters going through them. It's funny because I think that grimy, grungey look was A: likely so popular at the time because it was easier to render light scattering off of shiny metal in the early days of computer graphics and B: also liable to make me kind of depressed as a kid, but now, paradoxically, as something that was popular at a time of innocence and safety (for those younger millennials and Gen Zers, the 1990s was a time that, at least for a straight white kid in an affluent suburb, was decidedly less anxiety-ridden).

Anyway, being familiar with the story, but getting a somewhat simpler version of it compared to the fleshed-out version seen in Remake, is kind of interesting. I think Remake really drew out, for example, the second reactor mission (which ends with the Airbuster and Cloud joining up with Aerith) with an entire chapter prior to that mission in which you visit Jesse's family to steal her father's keycard. Here, it looks like we're going straight there.

I'm curious to see how long it will take for me to get out of Midgar - I don't remember what my total playtime on Remake was before I beat the game, but Rebirth I think I beat a little past the 100-hour mark.

It's also interesting to see that Materia doesn't work precisely like it does in the Remake games - there seem to be more passive bonuses - and penalties - involved, like "Restore" materia, which grants Cure, etc., also reduces your Strength and Max HP while increasing your Magic and Max MP.

Anyway, I think I'll have to get through a fair amount of the game before I get any truly new story content, but it's interesting to see how the various beats of the Remake originated.

VI Down...

 So, I made a mistake.

In my last-minute clean-up of Final Fantasy VI before going to the final dungeon, I revisited Darill's Tomb and, with a bunch of monsters I profoundly out-leveled, turned off encounters.

Thus, only after finishing the game did it occur to me that Kefka's Tower might not be unique in not having any non-boss enemies, but that I had simply forgotten to turn encounters back on.

Thus, while I feel that, difficulty-wise I don't think I would have been too affected, as I'm pretty diligent about healing up and restoring MP between fights, I did rob myself of the true experience of that dungeon.

Still, while I might go take my "you've beaten the game" save file and muck around in the dungeon if I can to just experience those fights, I did get the climactic ones. There are several bosses to be fought in Kefka's Tower, which are of course not skippable, including the final two legendary dragons needed to gain the Crusader Magicite, along with a couple other less plot-relevant bosses and then the three members of the Warring Triad followed by the big fight with Kefka himself.

For years now I've been familiar with this final fight, if not precisely all of the mechanics involved. Honestly, having Terra spam Ultima over and over did most of the work for me. Indeed, it felt like there wasn't much of a "trick" to it - just heal the party up and pump out damage. The only character I lost from my original lineup was Sabin, mainly because I beat the second or third phase of the fight before I had a chance to revive him (story-wise he survives, and I think Locke came in to take his place - actually both Locke and Cyan were down, I think, at the end of the fight). Terra, even without the Soul of Thamassa to grant her dual-casting, was the star of the show, doing I'm pretty sure the most damage and getting the killing blow on the mad clown god.

For those unfamiliar, and who don't care about spoiler for this 30-year-old game, the final fight with Kefka takes place over four phases, each of which have their own unique battle music.

It's not entirely clear to me if you're really fighting Kefka the whole time, or some elaborate animated sculpture (the targets are all Statue of the Gods A, B, C, etc.) The first phase has a big hulking demonic figure with two arms that can be separately targeted (though again, I mainly spammed Ultima, which hits all enemies). I believe the inspiration for these phases was Dante's Divine Comedy, so this first one is Inferno.

Next, the second phase, which has probably the most unhinged music (the title of the full suite is "Dancing Mad," but I don't know if this part of it has its own title). Here you have I think four statues of what look like tormented souls (one of which actually looks a bit like Terra). Similar to the Neo-Exdeath fight, downing a target doesn't remove it from the sprite, so it can be a little hard to tell what progress you've made, but I do think each of these will do a little revenge blast when they die that hits very hard.

The third phase is really interesting - there's a maternal goddess figure (very Virgin Mary-like) over a reclining image of Kefka (very Pieta-style imagery) and the music becomes some kind of heavenly, serene organ music. I kind of love the concept behind this, because it shows Kefka's blasphemous claim to godhood, with all the imagery here seemingly benevolent (and certainly coded that way if you're Christian). But the melody of the organ is actually a variation on part of Kefka's theme, which we've previously heard more as a sinister, minor-key musical element.

Finally, when this phase is finished, you encounter Kefka himself, and all the quasi-classical elements of the music shift into a driving prog-rock blast. Kefka has a scary ability that will set all the party members to 1 HP, though a swift Curaga on the party will let most if not all of them survive whatever comes next.

Following Kefka's defeat, there's a sort of faux-credits sequence where we get little vignettes of the various party members escaping the Tower of Kefka as it collapses. Most of these are played pretty light, and giving us one last fun moment with the characters we've grown fond of.

However, there is one moment that feels like it's played for laughs, where Gogo and Celes have to punch in some commands while synchronized, which Gogo is obviously well-suited toward, and then Gogo falls in a pit and... I guess they die?

Played more tragically, Shadow decides to stay in the vast heaps of rubble, chasing Interceptor off (the dog, I assume is fine). I think I missed one of his backstory dreams (which you can get just by sleeping at inns with him in the active party - and with the mercy of the RNG gods) but I'm given to understand that there's no sidequest that will prevent this end for him - presumably dying in the tower's collapse. Furthermore, I've read online that Shadow/Clyde is actually Relm's father, but beyond Interceptor's affinity for the girl, I didn't see any clear hint at that, but it would make his death all the more tragic (I mean, that Relm doesn't even find out?)

The other source of tension in all of this is that, with the Warring Triad and Kefka dead, magic in the world is going away, including all of the Magicite (man, and I just got Crusader!) This also means the Espers, and with Terra as a half-esper, no one knows what is going to happen to her.

Well, good news: though she loses her Trance form while guiding the Falcon out of the canyons of detritus, they do catch her and she merely becomes fully human. In a bit of fun 16-bit animation, one of the last images we get is of Terra untying her ponytail and letting her glorious green hair blow in the wind, while the Falcon tours the world, seeing people rebuilding and recovering from the ruin Kefka wrought upon the land.

Naturally, I feel dumb and like I cheated myself for having accidentally missed the non-boss encounters from the final dungeon (I was meeting family in the evening, so it's likely I wouldn't have finished the game this afternoon if I hadn't made this mistake) but I still think I can reasonably say that I've experienced Final Fantasy VI.

I think that, given that I knew I would be biased toward it thanks to my greater familiarity with it (as opposed to just about all the preceding games - I think I knew "there's that one where you start off as a dark knight and then become a paladin") I've been trying to sort of temper my overall impression of the game, but let's just stop beating around the bush: this is the best of the pre-3D Final Fantasy games by a pretty wide margin. I really liked IV and V, don't get me wrong. But there's just so much more originality and creativity on display here.

Now, this does mean the end of my big Final Fantasy gaming project (at least once I fight some trash mobs in the Tower of Kefka) but I'm inclined to keep this rolling. I'll probably be getting Final Fantasy VII's latest port to play the original version of that game. The VII Remake games have genuinely been among my favorite video games (I've played a lot of games, so I don't know if I can confidently put them in my top 10 or even 20, but top 50 feels safe). Given my best friend's deep, lifelong (well, he was 9 when it came out) love of FFVI, I feel almost worried that I'll dare like VII better, but I think the general consensus is that the two of them occupy places 1 and 2 on the ranking (and it's up to you to decide which goes where).

I think there are more posts to be written about the lasting influence of Final Fantasy VI on not just the series, but also game storytelling in general. But I'm tired, so we'll call it here.

Second or Third-Hand Info from the Game Informer Article About What I'm Just Going to Start Calling the 5.5E Core Books

 So, I'm cheap and try to avoid subscribing to too many things (I probably should subscribe to Dropout at this point, but oh well) so I don't have the text of the recent Game Informer article, which I believe is behind a paywall, but which gives a preview to the upcoming D&D core rulebooks.

Generally I've been referring to these as the 2024 Core Rulebooks, but as we learned a few months ago, the Monster Manual won't be coming out until next year. Still, between Flee, Mortals!, recent monster books like Bigby's, the quite expansive Monsters of the Multiverse, and other sources, I think I can manage to wait. The Player's Handbook is obviously the most exciting thing, and that one comes first.

But there's goodies in all of the books.

All three books will be massive tomes - each weighing in at 384 pages (I'm certain this was no coincidence - we saw that with the Spelljammer set all three books in that were 64 pages, even if at least one of them really deserved to be about four or five times as long. 384 I think is plenty even for such foundational books - I believe this is longer than any of the 2014 releases).

But now let's talk about the highlights from each book:

    Player's Handbook:

A lot of the changes to classes and species (the new name for Race - a somewhat clinical but certainly precise term that I think wisely sheds the baggage of "race" as a term) I've already gone over here in this blog, but we do get some confirmations: the Goliath and Orc are both being added to the core list of choices, along with the Aasimar, which was not named in the playtest. Early on, they were experimenting with animal-headed humanoids called Ardlings to be the Upper Planar equivalents of the Lower-Planar Tieflings (riffing on established Celestials like Guardinals and Hound Archons) but the Aasimar were clearly just sitting there as the more obvious counterpart. I believe the plan is still to remove Half-Orcs and Half-Elves, instead allowing characters with mixed heritage to simply choose one species to represent them mechanically (and thus no longer privileging human/elf and human/orc hybrids). In other words, Half-Elves and Half-Orcs can still be part of your game worlds and options for your players, but you can also have, say, a half-dwarf/half-Halfling or a Tiefling/Goliath or an Orc/Gnome - you just pick which species' traits you closer embody (though I did create a character backstory for an Aasimar with a Tiefling wife whose children are just ordinary humans).

Each of the 12 core classes (sorry Artificers) will be present, each getting one big full-page piece of art to depict the class broadly, and then each class gets four subclasses (and upgrade for all but the Cleric and Wizard) that each have their own illustration, meaning 60 pieces of art for all the classes and subclasses. I don't know if we have the finalized list of subclasses, but there are some brand-new ones like the World Tree Barbarian, College of Dance Bard, and Circle of the Sea Druid.

Setting-wise, the PHB is going to be agnostic, intending not to favor one setting (such as the Forgotten Realms) over another, but will still have references to established settings like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Planescape, and perhaps others.

The book no longer begins with character creation (though I think that will be toward the front) and instead has an extensive chapter of sample play and basic rules explanations. There will be a rules glossary that includes clear explanations of things like cover, jumping, and other things that one often finds hard to find in the 2014 PHB. One thing of note for those poor neglected artificers is that there will be a section here on crafting, with specific nods to making potions and spell scrolls, as well as specific uses for tools.

Evidently art is a big part of the book, as additionally every weapon type is going to get its own depiction (probably useful to show how a Halberd is different from a Glaive) and the Weapon Mastery will also be making it in there (which didn't seem to be at risk, but still good to confirm it - also, it finally makes a clear distinction between Glaives and Halberds mechanically!). There will also apparently be a lot of art depicting spells being cast, including a lot of the characters who created such spells, like Tasha casting her Hideous Laughter.

    Dungeon Master's Guide

The DMG is always the core book that has to work to justify itself - frankly I think that it was useful when I first started running the game, but the new one is intended to have much clearer uses, including, shockingly, a chapter about literally what you need to do to run this game.

Here, while the book will give guidance on creating settings and does not push you to embrace a particular established setting, they provide Greyhawk as the template upon which to build a campaign setting (the argument being that it's a world that's a little less fleshed out than, say, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, and thus easier for DMs to create their own stuff for it).

The DMG will also include a "Lore Glossary" like the PHB's Rules Glossary, giving you information about various notable proper nouns from D&D lore.

The Bastions system appears in the new DMG as an optional set of rules governing the player characters' home bases, which is intended to give players a bit of their own world-building opportunities and something to care about back home.

I haven't seen any mention of it, but personally I hope we get an updated and revised Dungeon Master's Workshop chapter, because I've had great success in implementing its monster-creation rules in building my own creatures that don't totally fit with published ones (for some reason my latest obsession has been with malevolent ambulatory vending machines as a low-level enemy in some surreal modern-set campaign).

I'm eager to see how it's written and set up, because it would be cool if it were the book a DM has behind their screen that serves as a useful reference for more than just magic items.

    Monster Manual:

Well, the big thing is just more stat blocks. But what I find encouraging is their approach to monster families.

They mentioned that they're aware of how certain monsters that only have one or two associated stat blocks (Vampires, for example - which we'll get to in a moment) can sometimes feel hard to use because there's a good chance your players are too low-level to deal with them and could just get squashed, or they're high-enough level that they can't really pose a threat. So, they're taking some of these iconic monsters and expanding their families. Vampires were used as an example: for low-level players, they have some kind of nascent vampire, kind of a humanoid still in the process of becoming one, who could serve as an appropriate challenge for players who aren't ready to deal with the real thing. But then, for high-level players who could wipe the floor with the standard Vampire in the 2014 MM, there are things called I believe Nightbringers, who are like super-vampires and far scarier.

It does look like big, high-CR monsters are definitely something they're looking at here - among those mentioned are Archhags, elemental juggernauts, construct colossi, and something called the Blob of Annihilation, which is a Gelatinous Cube big enough to eat a whole town.

It also looks like various types of NPCs - pirates, wizards, bandits, etc., - are getting more fleshed-out families, which as I understand it means that you'll be able to use them in bigger level ranges. The game does start to run short of humanoid adversaries at high CRs, so this sounds very welcome.

    General Thoughts:

I think WotC earned a lot of ill will at the start of last year with the whole OGL crisis, and paradoxically, the massive success of 5th Edition starting in 2014 has, I think, made a lot of people resistant to a revision of the game. But having gone through all the playtests and surveys, and seeing their approach to the game, I think most people who get their hands on the new books are going to probably be happier with the way the game plays and feels than they are now - which is saying something.

Now, what I'm curious to see is the degree to which the books support creativity. The core rulebooks of 5th Edition led me to the creation of what is probably the most extensively fleshed-out fantasy world I've ever conceived. It's perhaps not as original as my Otherworld setting, but knowing that I could have players delving into the deep history and strata of archaeology and magical agendas pushed me to come up with some ideas I think are really cool.

The great thing about D&D and tabletop RPGs in general, in my opinion, is the degree to which players can create and invent things. Indeed, I've been toying with this idea of creating a campaign on an "Endless Horizon" world, where players don't just come up with their own character's backstory, but an entire land and country that they've come from, all in a world that remains mysterious and unexplored from the players' characters' perspective. But even running in an established (albeit primarily established in a different game) setting like Ravnica, the degree to which I've created my own history and lore for that world has been an absolute joy (the players spent about five or six sessions in Agryem, Ravnica's land of the dead that was, for a time, just another neighborhood in the city-world, and I had a ton of fun turning it into a surreal shadow-realm utterly unsuited for living people to be there).

Something I worry about in terms of the direction that the game has gone has been a push toward doing things "their way," and stuff like the Planescape set feeling like it was mostly there to provide material for the packaged adventure (while it was far more substantial than the Spelljammer set, I really wish they would go back to the style of campaign setting book we got with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which felt much more focused on inspiring DMs to come up with their own stories and ideas).

So again, I think it would be utterly tragic if there were not a revised version of the guidance on creating monsters and other such things. I'm happy to see Pistols and Muskets included in the PHB (for someone who abhors guns in real life, I really like having them in my fantasy games - blame Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I guess) but I hope we'll also see modern and futuristic weapons again in the new DMG, as we did in the 2014 one.

We are still a ways off from the releases here, but I am hyped to get my hands on them (and while I hope I can do this in a way that cuts in my local game store, these might be a physical/digital bundle because there's no way I don't want to have access to at least the PHB on D&D Beyond).

Not Much Left to Do in FFVI

 The World of Ruin - the second half of Final Fantasy VI - is very open. After you spend the first game in a relatively linear fashion, getting introduced to the characters and the various points of interest, the World of Ruin, once you meet up with Setzer and complete his backstory dungeon, the first order of business becomes reuniting all of your old playable characters (by the time you find Setzer, you'll have started as Celes and only been able to get the two Figaro brothers back, leaving even central characters like Locke and Terra as technically optional).

While getting Mog as a permanent party member in the World of Balance half is slightly unintuitive and easily missed (you have to go back to Narshe) there are just two characters you can only recruit in the World of Ruin, Umaro the Yeti and Gogo the Mimic, both of whom are pretty light on backstory (Gogo is practically a blank slate, and is found in a very weird dungeon).

Anyway, re-recruiting all of the party members takes up what I think is the bigger chunk of the World of Ruin, but there are a couple other challenges, like climbing the Cultist Tower (a special dungeon in which only spellcasting is allowed - even forbidding Strago's Lores - but which holds a pretty fantastic prize in the form of the Soul of Thamassa, which gives any character who equips it Dualcast for any of their spells, which pair well with the Golden Hairpin, which halves the cost of any spells).

There's also Deathgaze, a moving world boss who will flee from battle and require you to hunt them down repeatedly (luckily they don't recover HP between fights) and who drops the Bahamut Magicite, which teaches Flare, which is ok but perhaps unimpressive compared to Ultima, but also gives a 50% boost to the HP you gain upon leveling up, which is pretty amazing (paired with the Ultima Weapon found in the first half of the game, which gives a larger attack bonus based on your max HP, this becomes very cool).

There are also eight legendary dragons, most of which you'll come across in dungeons when looking for other stuff (I think the first I fought was the Wind Dragon in Mt. Zozo when tracking down Cyan). I have 6/8, and I believe the last two are in the final dungeon.

Some of the endgame activity here is actually just story-related. I found Gau's father (you have to go to the hut with Sabin and Gau both in the party) and there's a somewhat heartbreaking reveal that Gau's crazy father left his "demon child" in the Veldt (I think the implication is probably that Gau's mother died in childbirth, and the father went crazy and blamed him for it), which is particularly jarring as prior to their presentation to the father, the whole party gets together to gussy up Gau with fancy clothes (you get to see him in various outfits as the party argues about fashion).

In this 16-bit era, there are limitations on just how deep the characterization can go. I haven't played the original VII, but I'm given to understand that the Remake trilogy has done a lot to flesh out both the party and the NPCs, and that makes me all the more eager to see VI get a similar treatment.

Once again, VI feels really different than the preceding Final Fantasy games. While I really liked IV and V, VI feels much more original, and more ambitious in its storytelling. Obviously, these games have grown all the more operatic... and lengthy, as time has gone on. While I think I might have one or more things to do (I haven't done much in the arena, and while I think most of the characters who need to learn certain spells have it, I'll never turn down giving everyone things like Curaga, Reraise, and Arise) I think I'm probably ready to head into Kefka's tower and take the mad clown-god down.

I'm at about 40 hours into the game, which feels respectable, especially for a thirty-year-old game.

Still, not only am I getting that "near the end of the story" melancholy for VI itself, this will also mark the finale of my delve into the Pixel Remasters. There's a good chance I'll be playing the port of the original FFVII as well, but it does feel now like a months-long project/experience is winding down.

Approximately, I'd Guess, 70-75% of the Way Through FFVI

 I'm now not only in the World of Ruin, but I've also got all but one of the playable characters I had gotten in the World of Balance (the holdout being Mog - and I haven't gotten Umaro or Gogo yet).

It's hard to look at Final Fantasy VI objectively the way I think I've been able to for the previous five games, in part because it's a game that I do remember from even before I had an SNES, and on top of that, it's my best friend's favorite video game of all time, so I guess in a kind of empathetic transference I feel a lot of his nostalgia for it.

I've written before about the ways in which the game feels like another step in the evolution of the series, particularly in how it divests itself of a lot of the medieval fantasy tropes that had been present in the first five games (though, unlike VII, it still retains a bit of that, given that a lot of the towns could easily fit in one of the previous games without much change).

But I think I have a few more observations - some neutral, some positive, some actually kind of negative, about the game.

First, let's talk about its bleakness: even before Kefka blows up the world, the world of VI is pretty dark. Not only do you have a conquering empire crushing everyone under their boot-feel and mind-controlling Terra to act as one of their super-soldiers, but you've even got stuff outside the Empire like Jidoor exiling all of its poor people to the anarchic slum of Zozo (I'm not expecting a lot of sophisticated politics in a 30-year-old SNES game, but I think if they fleshed out this segment in a remake we might get a little better sense of how Zozo got so scuzzy, because as it stands there's a likely unintentional implication that poor people will naturally devolve into violent thugs without an authority to keep them in line).

Of course, the World of Ruin, and particularly Celes' time on the Solitary Isle with Cid, is particularly dark (I didn't get the darkest version of it, because I caught enough Delicious Fish to keep him alive).

Earlier FF games do deal in some dark moments - IV has you begin your adventure as an agent of the evil empire, II sees entire towns wiped off the map by the evil empire, and V, while mostly a bit more upbeat, has a late-game moment in which several towns get sucked into the void, but the ending seems to make it clear that this is all reversed by defeating Exdeath (I'll also throw in there that the reveal of Castle Exdeath's true form is a pretty horrific shocker - the entire series has trained us to understand that the big bad's lair will be all blue crystals, and that's what the castle looks like until the illusion is dispelled and it's shown to be one giant mass of flesh. I guess given that the big bad is ultimately an evil tree, perhaps he thought that turnabout was fair play - if we were going to make our homes out of wood, he'd make his out of meat. Of course, Castle Exdeath is far from the final dungeon, and the actual final dungeon is a little more "cosmic crystal" like the other games).

Next, let's talk about structure:

I have a confession: I've been using a walkthrough. The reason here is just a fear of missing out on things. If it hadn't been drilled into me by my aforementioned best friend, I'd have likely left the Floating Continent before the timer ran out and thus lost Shadow as a party member permanently.

There is definitely a line of breadcrumbs in the World of Ruin that leads you to regaining most of the party members (I didn't even realize re-recruiting Sabin was technically optional).

But there's definitely less of an A to B to C structure in the back half of the game than the World of Balance part. To an extent, this is just the natural consequence of a structure that limits your movements - the very first game basically forced you to play most of it in order because you just couldn't get anywhere else, but then when you get the Airship, the world opens up in a big way.

At the moment, the objective is certainly to get all the party members, but I'm also curious to see how obvious the breadcrumbs are to get, for example, the other Magicites (I've been coasting on the second level -a rank spells for a long time, and I feel like I've got to get the -ga rank ones pretty soon, right?)

I will say that I think there's a double-edged sword to having a really open design. I know that a lot of people love the fact that, for example, the characters' journeys in Baldur's Gate III can go in so many different directions. But I guess I'm someone who really wants to have that golden ending, and isn't really down for replaying a whole game to try to do things differently.

Something I love about a game like, say, Alan Wake II, is that you get the full story if you beat the game (well, you get the full story if you beat the New Game Plus). I honestly think that the reason I fell off of BG3 upon arriving at the eponymous city is that I just became overwhelmed with the need to make sure every character's arc turned out the way I wanted it to - what had begun early on as a casual, "let's see where this goes" way of playing it devolved into "ok, wait, what exactly do I need to do to make sure that Shadowheart chooses not to kill the Nightsong? Say nothing? Really? That actually makes sense but I would not have thought of it."

FFVI doesn't have quite the granularity of different story paths to it that BG3 does, but I can definitely say that I looked up how to ensure that Cid doesn't die at the start of the World of Ruin.

Switching gears: let's talk Magicite.

I... I actually have to be honest here. I don't know if it's my favorite system.

See, on the surface it's great that you can get everyone to learn all the spells.

But I think it starts to homogenize characters that, prior to getting magicite, were very distinct. I'll still use Edgar's Tools and Sabin's Blitzes, but I'm starting to hit a point where basically any fight will have me mostly just casting spells on all four of my active characters. And while Terra is still doing way more with them (I have her double-equipping Earrings and I've had her using Magicite that boosts her Magic stat on level-up) it makes things like Cyan's Bushido feel underwhelming.

I also don't love that you're basically penalized if you level up when not using a stat-boosting Magicite.

I think if I were to redesign the system, I'd probably have the Magicite give a percentage bonus to that stat while it's equipped, and then perhaps grant the spells it offers while equipped, but not teach them permanently. Maybe Terra and possibly Celes would be exceptions here, where they get to actually learn those spells permanently.

Again, games have gotten more sophisticated over time, and this was certainly a big, experimental leap (and likely taking inspiration from V's Jobs system).

I think in a revamped version of the game, you could also evolve the characters' unique abilities to grow and develop in fun ways over the course of the game. Sabin and Cyan learning new techniques is very cool (and is basically like the way that the VII Remake series has had characters learn their unique weapon abilities).

Anyway, Magic is also easy to use a lot of because once a character has Osmose, they basically will never run out of MP. Mind you, I don't hate that, but it does de-emphasize physical attacks.

VI is shaping up, even with its flaws, to be very likely my favorite in the first six of the series, and I say that knowing that I genuinely liked both IV and V (I appreciated I-III, but they all felt sort of proof-of-concept-like, with III being the first game that felt like it was approaching true ambition, but which got blown away by IV's confident arrival in the 16-bit era). There's a decent chance we'll be getting whatever the latest port of the original FFVII, so when I finish this one I might have to check that one out (and will compare it to the preceding six games and to its decades-later remake series - which have genuinely been some of my favorite games ever).

How to Do a Final Fantasy VI Remake

 I'm roughly halfway through (I think) Final Fantasy VI, currently (unchanged since my last post) cleaning up various things before I go to the Floating Continent and... well, see the game change significantly for the back half. (Spoilers for a 30-year old game?)

I do think I need to temper some of my reactions to the game given that this is the first one really filtered by nostalgia, but I also know that the general consensus surrounding VI at least in the U.S. is that it's the best (even if VII is also deeply beloved). And folks at Square Enix have talked about how they dream of making a similar from-the-ground-up remake of VI the way that they've done with VII.

The biggest challenge, they say, though, is the cast. After games like IV where Cecil is very clearly the main character, and V where the cast does share the spotlight fairly well, but there's only five total party members (and only four at any given time,) VI's guiding philosophy was that all the characters were the main character. Granted, I might give privileged positions to Terra, Locke, Celes, and maybe Edgar and Sabin, but the goal was to ensure that everyone had something of an arc.

Now, I know that the second half of the game is where a lot of these personal stories get resolved, so I'm still in a bit of a set-up phase, but I am getting a sense of the game's overall shape.

Speaking with my best friend, whose favorite video game of all time is VI (though he's never beaten it! He's working his way through V's Pixel Remaster for now - we've been doing this in parallel) he suggested that if we had an expanded remake like VII has gotten, he would put the end of the first game at the big battle at the Narshe mines.

This does feel like a natural spot - while the game starts in Narshe, you have the separate legs of the journey trying to get Narshe to join the Returners, Locke meeting Celes in an occupied South Figaro, and Sabin coming to understand the depths of Kefka's depravity before he, Shadow, and Cyan take their trip aboard the Phantom Train, and then later meet Gau on the Veldt.

The funny thing, though, is that as a place to cut, you actually wind up ending the game before the mechanic of Magicite even enters the picture. That could actually be great - you could basically not have to worry about it when designing the first game, and instead focusing in on the characters' individual powers.

I'd guess, then, that the second game (assuming this would be a trilogy like VII) would likely begin with the search for Terra, eventually getting your first Magicite in Zozo, Celes' starring turn in the opera, and then the trip to the Magitek facility in Vector, the opening to the world of the Espers, meeting Strago and Relm, and finally the Floating Continent. That might be a lot, but it's actually kind of similar to VII's remakes where you cover a lot more ground in the second game.

It's actually sort of funny to me that VI is generally agreed to sit alongside VII as the best of Final Fantasy's entries (I've heard a lot of people putting the MMO Final Fantasy XIV alongside them, but I can only really do one MMO and also I think it's PC only and not on Macs anyway) but unlike VII, which has had tons of prequel games and a sequel movie, as far as I know they've never returned to the world of FFVI, other than various remasters of the original game.

I've been a massive fan of VII's Remake trilogy so far, and frankly wish that future Final Fantasy games would use its combat system much as many of the pre-X games more or less re-used IV's Active Time Battle system. Seeing the world of VI fleshed out and detailed as the VII remakes have done with that game, and seeing those characters rendered in modern, realistic graphics with more space for performances and voice-acting... really it would be freaking awesome.

Given that this is the last of the Pixel Remasters, I'm trying to stop and smell the roses as best I can. I feel like I'm clearing a massive backlog of classic games while also walking through a kind of museum of game design.

On the Cusp of a World of Ruin

 I think I'm about halfway through Final Fantasy VI, which would suggest the game is actually shorter than V. Given the degree of familiarity I had with earlier parts of the game, I believe in my original attempt at this about 18 years ago, I got stuck at the boss of the Magitek Research Facility, which is funny because this time around it posed essentially zero challenge.

Indeed, one of the slight disappointments here is that some of the most iconic fights have been over too fast. My fight with the Ghost Train ended in only about two rounds (I did manage to get a Meteor Strike, which is what the Pixel Remaster calls Suplex, I assume as a more faithful translation of its Japanese name, off on the train, fulfilling the meme) and similarly my second bout (of which I'm now through three) with Ultros at the opera house was tragically short, I think this one only going three rounds.

I'm now in a clean-up phase, exploring on the Blackjack to try to get everything I can out of the World of Balance. But the floating continent is now floating, and that means that we're near VI's big midpoint shift. I only hope that the World of Ruin is as substantial.

To be sure, I imagine I'm getting through this content quickly in part because I'm so familiar with it.

Another goal of my check-in with the midpoint of the game is to let some of the lower-level characters catch up. Poor Gau is still in the teens, while folks like Terra and Strago are 25. Speaking of Strago, I'm also trying to amass things like his Blue Magic (I've only learned a single spell he doesn't start with, and it's... Self-Destruct) and Gau's Rages (of which I have many, but I guess there are some really powerful ones to pick up). I also picked up Mog, and got him a bunch of environment-based dances.

Well, I guess if it's over too quickly there is a port of VII you can get on a PS5...

Final Fantasy VI: Espers, Operas, and Another Leap Forward for the Series

 So, while I had never played very far into it, Final Fantasy VI was the first game in the series I was really aware of (though the dark-clad knight in some cardboard cutout that I recall vaguely from early childhood might have been Cecil from IV, then known as II) and so I'm a little biased toward it as "the" classic Final Fantasy game.

But, to be fair, by reputation and by what I'm now experiencing playing the game, it is earning that.

I've now worked out a deal with future party-member Setzer to use his airship to travel to the southern continent and confront the Empire and rescue some Espers from a Magitek factory.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Square seemed to pull out all the stops when conceptualizing VI. I should note that, graphically, the Pixel Remaster has made some changes and embellishments on what released for the SNES (and I'll talk about the Opera in a moment) but in terms of art direction, there are some huge departures from the previous games. Yes, there have always been elements in these games of high technology, most notably the sci-fi environments encountered in IV. But while there are still some castles to be found in VI, they have ventilations shafts in their towers.

Zozo, in particular, feels hugely different.

At one point in the game - after a lengthy journey where the characters get split up (one branch of which includes the segment on the Phantom Train) and then reunite for one of the game's "multiple parties" segments (which, as a WoW player, I think of as "raids") a few characters need to go looking for Terra, and this takes you to the wealthy town of Jidoor, which has a classic medieval Final Fantasy town vibe, but where the lower class citizens were all banished, and were forced to go create a new town up in the mountains called Zozo. And it is there that we discover Terra was last seen.

Zozo, unlike any other town I've seen in an earlier Final Fantasy game, feels modern (well, modern for the mid-90s). While, being a video game settlement, it's tiny, the town has the vibe of a dense urban slum, with tightly-packed apartment buildings. Zozo doesn't really function as a town the way that most towns in these games do, as you'll be attacked anywhere in there and the "stores" don't actually have anyone who will sell you anything.

The dense town of urban decay - which literally has bodies lying out on the street - has a vibe that I think was popular in my childhood, an era when the cyberpunk genre was really big (a genre that, all apologies to modern cyberpunk authors, I think is almost redundant given how we're already in a society dominated by the internet where megacorporations dictate how we live). It's honestly something that I think as a kid I would have found kind of off-putting and depressing, but thirty years later kind of hits a note of nostalgia. Zozo is scuzzy to the extreme.

But it's also here that one of VI's major progression systems is introduced. Terra is being tended by Ramuh, one of the Espers that, being basically human in form, can pass as human and live in secret. Ramuh escaped from one of the empire's Magitek laboratories, and is hoping to enlist the Returners in liberating his fellows. Ramuh's three companions, Siren, Cait Sith, and Kirin, didn't make it, but transformed into Magicite upon their deaths. Ramuh allows the same to happen to him, and thus we get our first Magicites.

Each character can have one Magicite equipped at a time, and as you battle things, the Magicite will (permanently) teach you spells - for example, Ramuh gives you, if I recall correctly, Thunder, Thundara, and Poison. Additionally, some Magicite will also affects your stats when you level up - I believe of the first four you get, one has your Stamina go up an extra point with each level, another increases the HP gains you receive by 10%, and another increases your Magic attribute by 1 when you level up. Finally, each of these Espers can be summoned once per battle by the person who has them equipped.

At the moment my strategy has been to try to swap them out so that everyone learns as many spells as possible - especially Cure (taught by Kirin). But I think in the long run it'll also be important to have Espers equipped that will give certain character the attributes they most need. Celes and Terra, as the two native spellcasters, will probably be characters I focus a lot of Magic stats on.

Right now the Figaro brothers are profoundly powerful with their unique abilities. I got the Chainsaw on Edgar (which I must confess I got some online help with) and between that and Sabin's Meteor Strike (which in the SNES version was just called Suplex) I can dish out a ton of damage in single-target scenarios. And in fact, both have powerful AoEs as well. I wonder if these will remain as powerful moving forward.

Indeed, very few characters, it seems, have much reason to just use the standard "attack" command. Celes does when she's not casting spells (I haven't encountered a ton of spellcasting enemies, so her Runic command doesn't get a lot of use). Locke was doing this until I got a relic that changed his "Steal" to "Mug," and while given that he wasn't putting out much damage compared to the Figaros anyway, having him focus on combat larceny has been a pretty standard practice.

Following Zozo, and needing an airship to get to Vector, the imperial capital, another of VI's iconic sequences (and there do seem to be a lot of those) takes place - in which Celes takes the place of an opera singer whom she looks like as bait for a scoundrel gambler who happens to have an airship and intends to kidnap the singer.

Now, the fact that this kidnapper is a future party member is... a bit intriguing, as he's a full-on villain here.

But this opera sequence is where I think the Pixel Remaster went really hard. I do have vague memories of this in its original SNES form, and while it was a real spectacle, in the Pixel Remaster they do a couple things I genuinely didn't expect.

The first is that they play with camera angles. All of these games have had the top-down (or slightly-tilted top-down, maybe more tilted in VI) perspective, but we get shots of the stage from various angles, with the sprites redesigned to show off... well, angles that we don't usually see them from. It's not constant, but it's a sort of shocking vision as we're reminded that, oh yes, we're actually in 2024 right now (at least as I'm writing this) and video games have definitely figured out how to show off a 3D environment.

The other is that the singing in the opera has full voice acting. As in, it's really sung, with, like, lyrics being sung by voice actors in English.

Now, the SNES did have very occasional voice acting - think about the opening of Super Metroid "The Last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace." But that was seriously exceptional, and I don't think it was really until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation that voice acting in video games became the rule rather than the exception. So yeah, this really knocked my socks off.

Playing through all these iconic moments, though - Suplexing the ghost train, having the second Ultros fight on the opera stage - the one thing is a little surprising is how easy things have been. Both of those fights only lasted like two or three rounds, and while with Ultros I probably did do a little grinding (trying to learn various spells and such) with the Phantom Train I really didn't at all (ok, I spent long enough in the Veldt to have Gau do his thing one time, but that hardly seems excessive).

Not all the fights have been easy - I took on the second bout with Kefka (which comes after defending Banon from several waves of imperial soldiers - though there's a recovery bucket you can return to between fights) with Locke, Gau, and Edgar, I believe, and well after I'd set Gau to one of his Rages, Locke and Edgar were both knocked out by a single attack, meaning I had to just sit there and cheer Gau on to finish the fight (he did prevail, but with a fairly small number of hit points left) but I wonder overall how much of a challenge the game will wind up being. My general rule (and this is probably the subject for a whole post) is that I like a game that is difficult enough to get me to engage in its game systems - you don't want something where you can just hit the basic attack over and over and succeed - but not so difficult that it feels impossible (yes, I know that I play FromSoft games, and for some reason they feel like an exception to that second rule, probably because of some sort of "tough but fair" philosophy).

Anyway, I'm still playing through stuff that feels relatively familiar to me. But I'm running out of big moments that I already know pretty well.

Final Fantasy VI Kicks Off With Unprecedented Creativity

 It's a small detail, but Final Fantasy VI might be the first in the series in which the first or second monster I fight is not a goblin.

From the beginning, the Final Fantasy games always flirted with some divergences from the medieval fantasy genre. Fantasy, of course, does not need to adhere to the historical limitations on technology (and in fact, there are often some "rules" to medieval fantasy that aren't actually historical, like I think guns pre-dated full plate armor in our reality). We had the sort of technological city in the sky in the first game, and certainly by IV we had what were clearly high-tech elements, such as the futuristic Tower of Babel and Lunar Whale.

But VI feels like the first game that truly sets aside the D&D inspirations of the series and sets out to do its own thing. Yes, there is still a big castle you go to early in the game, but it's actually a big mechanical fortress that can bury itself in the desert.

I haven't gotten my hands on any Magicite yet, so at this stage in the game the characters are limited to what they inherently can do, but what that is is pretty fun. Terra is the only spellcaster at this point, but Edgar has an array of tools that are quite effective in combat (though I'm given to understand he'll need upgrades over time). I think in my previous runs at this game, I didn't appreciate the Noiseblaster and Bio Blaster, defaulting to his Auto-Crossbow, which does the most direct damage. I'm not sure if it's ever ideal to just take the "Attack" action on him - perhaps if he gets a weapon that's better than any of his tools - but I'm fine with that.

My most recent addition to the crew (I'm a little over an hour into the game) is Sabin, Edgar's martial artist brother, and boy has the Pixel Remaster made him easier to play - his unique ability is Blitz, which gives him various attacks that seem inspired by fighting games. Using them requires you to input a specific button combination, and you'd have to memorize them after reading the combinations in the pause menu. Now, in the Pixel Remaster, you select the Blitz you want and then get a prompt in-combat that tells you which buttons to hit, which I am extremely grateful for.

Anyway, I also find it interesting how Kefka is introduced - he's a lieutenant of the evil Emperor Gestahl, and going by the tropes of this sort of game, you'd really expect him to be some tough but ultimately subordinate boss, like the Turks in VII, or I guess the elemental lords in IV.

Another note is how the town of Narshe, which is where the game starts, really feels like it has a more distinct personality than a lot of the towns in previous games - you really get a sense of the extremes of temperature, between the snowy cold outside and the heat of all the steam-powered machinery.

Also, the way the world map works is different - the angle is sort of tilted and the camera is much more zoomed in. This does make it feel a little more like you're exploring a big world, but it will take some getting used to (and especially the change to a "behind the character" rotating camera angle when using a Chocobo, and I assume later the airships, which actually reminds me of Secret of Mana when you get Flammie the Dragon to ride on - a game where I think you only ever see the overworld when flying above it, outside of non-controlled transport like the big cannons).

Environments in this also feel like they're a little more three-dimensional - a departure in the art design that shows an evolution toward the modern 3D environments we're now used to.

V Down, I to Go

 Well, that's the penultimate entry in my Pixel Remaster run of the early Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy V is a great game - I honestly don't know where I'd rank it compared to IV, which I consider good praise. Mechanically, the game is certainly more complex than IV, but the Jobs system in V takes the ideas introduced in III and really makes them work a lot better - though that is not to say that there isn't room for improvement.

Ultimately, when I got to the final dungeon (which, at least in its first half, is actually a really cool trip, taking you through what at least was the 16-bit equivalent of a surreal journey through locations both familiar and semi-familiar) I had most of my characters going as "Freelancers," gaining all the passive benefits of their various classes. This wasn't quite as crucial on Bartz and Lenna, whom I had using, respectively, Black and Time Magic and White and Blue Magic (as cool as Dualcast was, I really couldn't go in without someone that could cast Curaga, Arise, and Esuna). Faris and Krile had mastered several classes (I did actually get the latter's Mystic Knight mastered in the final dungeon) and so Faris was my biggest damage-dealer, using Spellblade and Rapid Fire while dual-wielding I think the Brave Blade and either Excalibur or Ragnarok. Krile I had Spellblade on but rather than having her Rapid Fire she took care of Summoning magic - and honestly, Golem's Earthen Wall and Odin's Zantetsuken both played important roles in the final fight.

Exdeath as a villain is actually a kind of cool inverse of your typical Final Fantasy bad guy. In a lot of cases, you have some ambitious and arrogant human (or human-adjacent fantasy person) who has been transformed into a hideous abomination through some magical corrupt. Exdeath, though he appears through most of the game as an armor-clad knight (not unlike Golbez in IV, whom we discover near the end isn't really the bad guy), turns out to be not even remotely human, and is instead a great tree that was used as a kind of dumping ground for evil magic and essences, which then amalgamated as this singular entity.

Thus, the final boss has two phases - the first one has you face off against Exdeath, no longer bound in armor and appearing as a monstrous, branchless, twisted tree-trunk with a nasty face. Even then, though, you can see that the wood (twisted to have multiple mouths) is just barely covering up the demonic presence inside. When that is beaten (which took me shockingly little time - I might have been a little overleveled, but not by a ton) the wooden facade is stripped away, and we get what I think might be first really true Final Fantasy body-horror amalgamation final boss, where a bunch of demonic entities are kind of melted into one another, trying to pull all reality into the void (a void out of which it is reaching - a cool and scary visual).

In fact, the boss has four targetable points to attack, some of which are weak to certain effects - like one can be Petrified and another can be insta-killed by Odin.

I've noticed that, since my mother died seven years ago, I've been more sensitive than before about any kind of emotional element in pretty much any medium. So even with old 16-bit sprites, I'll confess that Krile mourning her grandfather (and the rest of the party mourning their friend) kind of got to me. Galuf and his Dawn Warrior companions are a kind of cool element in the game - you can imagine some unmade prequel that was the story of their defeating Exdeath the first time. (We don't need that prequel, or... you know, most prequels.)

I think some folks at Squaresoft regretted not releasing this one in America, and I think it probably would have been well-received.

The game is also way longer than previous ones - IV was certainly a step up in narrative, but still a relatively tight story. I put 30 or maybe more hours into V, which feels like a decent time for a modern game (I bet I spent less time in Alan Wake II, at least on my first play through it). Part of that time was definitely grinding (I spent a long time trying to steal Murasame off a Rukh, and there were moments where I turned the Pixel Remaster's ABP boost all the way up and fought enemies to master various Jobs - my rule was that I only used the boost when I was grinding anyway, though I broke that rule with the Magic Pots in the Phoenix Tower) but I also think there's just more content and story to get through. I was intrigued by the game's two worlds - I love that when you arrive in Galuf's world, there are different enemies and the environments all look a little different. I kind of love that feeling of "new world means a whole new set of fantasy elements to discover" and then I was fairly shocked when those two worlds merged into one (I never beat that freaking turtle in the Gil Cave, which vanishes after the worlds merge). Seeing the maps fit together was really cool as well - the notion that this merged world was actually the original one, and that the two other worlds were so similar yet different because they had been separated. It's genuinely a cool fantasy concept. I might have liked a phase of the game where you could travel between the two before they merged, but it's already a long one.

Anyway, with this under my belt, I'm eager to move on to VI, which is my best friend's favorite game of all time and one that I believe goes farther off the beaten path of traditional medieval fantasy. Mechanically, I get the sense that it kind of gives you the solid character-mechanics of IV but with some customizability in the form of Magicite that was maybe a kind of evolution of the Jobs system.

Given that I beat V at around 11:30 tonight (last night?) I decided not to embark on VI until tomrrow.

My Pitch for Running Curse of Strahd

 It's been a while since Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft came out, and given that I am someone who seems to only run long, epic campaigns that take years (we're now 4 years and two months into my Ravnica campaign) I haven't had an opportunity to put the book's setting into practice.

I've actually been thinking about the possibility of, once this campaign is over, or perhaps when the Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign I'm in ends (we're only two sessions in and haven't entered the Feywild yet, so not any time soon) how I might consider trying my hand at actually running a published adventure, and if there's one that has really stuck with me it's got to be Curse of Strahd (the DM for our WbtW campaign has also always wanted to play in that one, so it would feel like a good opportunity).

Still, given that one of my players (my best friend) has read that one already (he ran the one I was playing in a few years ago that got pretty far - we had hit level 8 and were in the Amber Temple) and, well, my own desire to create my own stories, I had some thoughts.

As any reader of this blog can attest, I'm kind of obsessed with Alan Wake and Control. The former, especially with its sequel (while I think I might like Control better, I think Alan Wake II is the best Remedy game I've played, which is admittedly from a sample size of three) being more in the horror genre, feels like a touchstone for me.

I'm also someone who has read a fair amount of Stephen King - a key inspiration for Alan Wake, along with David Lynch (whose work I'm also reasonably familiar with) - and I think there's a point of inspiration here to consider:

Curse of Strahd is likely one of the most-played 5th Edition adventures (that and Lost Mines of Phandelver, I'd guess). I mean, I had read it before I played in it (and did a decent job, I think, of not meta-gaming too much, acting on the knowledge my character had rather than what I had as a player).

While the specific events of Curse of Strahd are, I think, meant to represent a singular period in Barovia, the nature of the Domains of Dread is that Strahd will always return so that he can be eternally tormented, and nothing truly changes.

In other words, it's kind of a loop.

And in that loop, there's some familiarity - people might have played this adventure before, might have a general sense of its shape and its arc.

So (and boy, if you're one of my players and read this blog, stop doing so now) overall, there would be a few things I'd tweak.

For one thing, we'd probably divorce the campaign entirely from anything Forgotten Realms-related. We'd also likely make use of elements of Van Richten's, like allowing Gothic Lineages, possibly Dark Gifts. That's all well and good. We'd of course include all the updates and new character options to come out since Curse of Strahd did way back when it did. And, you know, probably incorporate some of the better cultural sensitivity that came with Revamped.

But that's all window dressing.

I think we would start off small. Maybe we have the players find a Mist Talisman in Barovia or Vallaki that leads to another Domain. Perhaps we'd introduce a new NPC or two who aren't in the book.

Indeed, I think I'd try to get players to come up with more elaborate backstories than what a pre-fab adventure usually calls for, and incorporate hooks and quests that relate to those - the kind of thing that I think a good DM should try to do even when running a published adventure.

And then, when the party finally makes their first visit to Castle Ravenloft...

Blow it the fuck up.

That's right, climbing the perilous path to the great manor overlooking the cursed town of Barovia, the party rounds a bend, and the great castle of Strahd von Zarovich erupts in a massive fireball, stone fragments of its towers and parapets raining down.

What the hell just happened? The characters and the players should both be asking that question.

And from there on, all bets are off - all the assumptions that the players might have had about how things are likely to go in this adventure are called into question. Was Strahd caught in the blast? Is he dead? Can that happen?

And who is this friendly archmage Firan Zal'honen who has invited us to delve deeper into the mystery?

While I tend to write stories with a lot of horror elements, I've always been drawn more to the sense of confusion and disorientation that horror often trades in more than the pit-of-the-stomach dread and visceral disgust at gore and violence. Though I know Stephen King didn't like its departures from the novel's ideas, Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining is my go-to favorite horror film, because of the way that it makes you feel like you're getting details wrong - I think it puts us very effectively in the shoes of Danny Torrance, being a young enough kid that you're not sure if the weirdness around you is actually out of the ordinary or if it's just the way that the world is and you just haven't yet learned about that aspect of it yet.

Alan Wake (both games, but especially the second) very much trade in this idea of a questionable reality, and I think there's a grand potential in the Ravenloft setting if you really hammer home the idea that this is not the prime material plane, where things need to have some underlying logic that adheres to how we generally expect things to work (even if, simply by virtue of existing in the fantasy genre, any D&D game can have elements that break those rules).

Obviously also an element in Alan Wake II, I find the motif of doppelgangers to be a really fascinating potential element in a horror story. Psychological horror and Gothic Horror often find monsters within the main characters' psyche - the threat of a doppelganger carries a lot of potential sources of fear: you could find a double of yourself trying to take over your life and lay claim to the aspects of your identity. You could fear being held responsible for the actions performed by your double. You could fear that what you believe to be you is actually a lie, and that you are the double, who could reconcile the dissonance of your existence by committing a heinous act of murder and stealing their identity. You might fear that a villainous double is no double at all, but another facet of your own personality.

I don't know that this concept would be central to my alternative Curse of Strahd game, but in the distant likelihood that any of my friends find this blog, I'm going to throw this behind a spoiler cut.

A Full Day of FFV

 I think my total play time of Final Fantasy I was like twelve hours. The subsequent games in the series have generally taken longer, but naturally the big leap into the Super Nintendo era with Final Fantasy IV seemed like it would be the most noticeable transition.

And yet, I think (and I don't have the specific play time I had in IV) that V has had me playing much longer.

Now, I think a big culprit here is the Job system. There's been some grinding, yes (though technically today's session was trying to steal the Murasame off of a Rukh near Crescent, after getting it once and then dying and realizing my quicksave was from before that fight). Anyway, different jobs take different amounts of time to Master. The Red Mage, for example, requires a full 999 ABP points (actually I think the P already stands for points) to get its highest level, which will take a long time when most fights give you just 1 (even if you use the Pixel Remaster's Boost feature... which I will confess to doing, though only if I'm specifically grinding gil or ABP - I've never turned it on for XP - it'll still take a long time) while Jobs like the Berserker and Dancer have, I think, only two levels (or three, if you count starting at zero).

Anyway, today my play time tipped over into 25 hours, which I think puts this at a similar play-time as Alan Wake II, a game I've spilled many a bottle of digital ink over.

And even if we take into account the grinding, I do think that V has surprised me in how much plot happens. I do genuinely think I'm in the endgame now, as I'm now going around collecting tablets that will unlock the 12 ultimate legendary weapons (it seems that there are four dungeons that each have a tablet, and each will let you take your choice of three of the weapons from their vault, so I think you do get all of them - I got Excalibur, Masamune, and the Magus Staff, of which I only am using one just because of the current Jobs I'm leveling).

Monsters are also giving up more ABP - while farming Murasame (which needs to be Stolen from a Rukh, most of which just have Hi-Potions - thankfully I had a dagger that sometimes casts Mug instead of attacking, so I could have multiple people attempting steal even with only one Thief in the party at the time).

I've actually gotten the full run-down on how Jobs, Mastery, and the Freelancer job work now, which basically suggests that at a certain point, if you're happy with the jobs a character has mastered, it's best to go Freelancer. Here's how it works:

Leveling up a Job unlocks different active and passive abilities. Active abilities always need to be equipped (each Job has a single mandatory active ability - or passive in the Berserker's case) but so long as you are, say, a Monk, you'll get all the passive bonuses you've unlocked for being a Monk, like Counter or Barehanded, etc. If you swap that character to be, say, a Black Mage, you only have your one ability slot to choose one of the active or passive abilities you've unlocked from any Job, so you could, for example, pick up Counter or Barehanded, but not both.

When you hit the maximum level for a Job (which, again, varies from Job to Job,) however, which means you've "Mastered" it, you get - I believe, a permanent boost to one of your stats if it's better than what you've gotten from other Jobs (for example, I think the Summoner has the highest Magic stat boost). But on top of that - again, if I understand correctly - you will also get all of the passive abilities from that Job when you take the Freelancer job (also the Mime, though that's the one job I don't have yet).

In other words, it seems that the best possible scenario would be to master all the Jobs on every character. Practically speaking, though, you'll want to find the Jobs with passives that are good, and by "endgame" (whatever that is,) your Freelancer is going to be powerful in myriad ways.

So, for example, the build I'm using on Faris is to eventually get the Mystic Knight's Spellblade ability and the Ranger's Rapid Fire as my active abilities, and then make use of the Ninja's dual-wielding capabilities, and on top of that the Knight's "equip swords" feature, so she can dual-wield powerful swords and enchant them, and then use Rapid Fire, which I believe does twice as many attacks (so four when dual-wielding) for somewhat less damage.

But there are other things to get as well - the Thief's final passive you get when you master them is "Artful Dodger," which increases the rate at which your ATB meter charges - basically always helpful. And while it might not be an enormous bonus, I suspect that the Summoner's higher Magic stat will improve the Spellblade abilities. Monks eventually get a 30% HP bonus.

Is this all necessary? Perhaps not. There's a complexity to the optimization here that can also be brute-forced by grinding out all of these Jobs.

The other thing that's kind of silly about it is that the longer you spend leveling Jobs with passives you don't terribly need (the Berserker, for example, I think only gives the Berserk and Equip Axes passives - I assume this includes hammers as well, another weapon type that seems to be exclusive to them) the longer you delay actually getting to enjoy all the benefits of these bonuses.

I will say, too, that there's going to be some FOMO regardless of how you build. Between White Magic, Black Magic, Blue Magic, Time Magic, Summoning, and the Red Mage's powerful Dualcast ability, you're going to be hard-pressed to build a party in which you get to use all of those different types of magic. The Chemist is kind of cool conceptually but I just can't imagine I'm going to have space to actually give any of their features to a character in my final build.

Indeed, what I expect is that I'll have something like this:

Bartz will probably wind up as a Black Mage/Time Mage who maybe gets to wear good armor and wield a good weapon.

Lenna is probably going to be my main healer, but whether she can do that with just a Red Mage's Dualcast (not having access to high-level heals could be scary, but is two Curas in a turn enough to make up for not having Curaga?) remains to be seen - I'd really like to be able to use Blue Magic as well (and in fairness, I do have a powerful group heal and also a good group defensive buff in there).

Krile is the character I have the least sense of how she's actually going to wind up, but I think it's going to be some kind of tanky melee build.

And Faris, as I said before, is going to be a dual-wielding Spellblade, which should absolutely wreck house with Rapid Fire.

Looking forward to Final Fantasy VI, I'm curious to see how the Magicite system compares with this - naturally the characters in that have a more specific Job (Sabin's fighting-game-like button prompts make me nervous, as I've never been good at those) but I'm given to understand the Magicite (which allows for Summons) also teaches characters magic gradually over time. That then makes me wonder a bit about, like, whether Locke could be a good healer despite being a Thief. I mean, in fairness, in VIIRebirth I think Cloud is actually my most effective healer.

Anyway, I do think that because V has this system that you can pour almost an indefinite amount of time into, it's delaying my completion of the game. IV, with its fairly rigid character progression, did have the benefit of keeping you moving forward.

Are Final Fantasy's Jobs Inherently Grindy?

 I actually don't have a great sense of how far into Final Fantasy V I am. I'd guess around halfway, largely because I've hit a pretty serious "midpoint shift" moment.

A midpoint shift is a moment in a movie where the dynamics of the story undergo a big change around the halfway point. The clearest example I ever saw was Jaws, in which the small-town politics and establishment of the dangers that this shark poses to the community give way to three men out on a boat trying to hunt the thing down.

Anyway, in FFV, the moment that I suspect represents that midpoint is when the party travels to another world - seemingly a literal other planet. It's actually pretty cool - the aesthetic of "Galuf's World" (in contrast with "Bartz' World") is markedly different. The mountains are a different shape, the combat backgrounds are different even in similar environments, there are all new monsters to fight, and the array of "fantasy races" are different. Having encountered a werewolf back on Bartz' world, we now discover that they're a group of people allied with Galuf's kingdom, and are quite friendly.

Now, I also figure that we're going to find a way to return, but that could be very near the end of the game - a kind of last hurrah for the setting(s) of the game with perhaps some last-minute sidequests.

But I'm here to talk about the Job system.

I think just about every aspect of the Job system in V is an improvement over the one in III. Job levels have a much clearer benefit, with a new job ability unlocked at each of these points. And you also have an incentive to level different jobs on a single character, being able to mix and match features, such as getting the fast-hitting Ninja, who dual-wields weapons, and giving them the Mystic Knight's Spellblade ability, which adds a magical effect to each of their hits (I can tell you, casting Drain on a weapon can be nasty - though not recommended if you're fighting undead).

Granted, there are aspects of this I don't yet have a great sense of - the one character I have who has "mastered" a job (Lenna has hit the maximum level of Blue Mage, which is only 4, I think) I've now shifted to leveling other jobs. For some reason she needs a full 999 ABP (the alternate XP for Job levels, which you rarely get more than two of in an encounter) to get her next level of Red Mage.

The Blue Mage's whole deal is that they can learn abilities used by monsters. And I've got a reasonable little portfolio of Blue Magic. But while Blue Magic is the automatic class feature when you are currently a Blue Mage, the "Learn" feature that actually allows you to gain those abilities is not. And I haven't been able to figure out if equipping a class gives you all the passive features that the class has, or only the ones you have equipped (I'd think the former, given that when I have a Thief in the party, I move across the screen very quickly, but I don't know for certain).

So there's already a bit of a challenge here in figuring out how to set up your character. But on top of that, there are a lot of Jobs. Currently, I have (if I can remember them all) Freelancers, Knights, Monks, White Mages, Black Mages, Blue Mages, Time Mages, Thieves, Rangers, Bards, Beastmasters, Berserkers, Mystic Knights, Ninjas, Samurai, Chemists, Dancers, Dragoons, and Red Mages.

In other words, that's a lot. Even if you're still keeping certain characters to certain types of Jobs - like early on I had Galuf as a Monk, then got some levels in Knight and Mystic Knight, but then after he departed the party briefly, he came back as a White Mage, and so he's a bit all over the place. Indeed, I think only with Lenna have I really focused her on only a few jobs - she's been mostly Blue Mage, Red Mage, and a bit of White Mage and Summoner.

The customizability is fun, but if we're meant to experiment and play around with different things, there's a fair amount of catching up to do. Job levels tend to require more ABP to level up higher levels (and weirdly it's not consistent, so it's a lot easier to get a 4th level Mystic Knight than a 4th level Red Mage) but given that, aside from bosses, even this far into the game I'm not getting more than 2 ABP per encounter most of the time, it's not exactly easy to catch up.

The Pixel Remasters have options to increase the rate at which you gain XP, Gil, and in this game, ABP. I tend to shy away from these because I want the game to feel balanced, but I've made a rule for myself that if I feel the need to grind, I can adjust those temporarily. I haven't boosted XP, but in order to be able to buy equipment for my characters and get these Job levels up, I consider it worth it.

I believe that Jobs as a system are part of Final Fantasy XIV, though likely work differently. But they don't seem to have returned in any of the single-player games (though I think that one of the characters in IX is a classic Black Mage with the face hidden in shadow).

There's a lot about this system that I like, but after the really smooth progression in FFIV, where I think apart from some extra-hard optional dungeons I never felt that my characters weren't keeping up with the challenges presented by the plot, here I feel - actually that I'm powerful enough, but that the grind of leveling up Jobs is getting in the way of making me feel like I can really experiment with the system.

Again, these are complaints for a game that's over 30 years old, so I realize I'm kind of shouting into the wind here. I do like this game, and really feel like the SNES era of the series has been a giant leap forward. Naturally, this whole run through of these games is leading up to my fully-committed tackling of FFVI, which my best friend considers his favorite game of all time, and which is often cited as the best of the Final Fantasy series (though VII is of course in strong contention).

Also I might return to FFVIIRebirth at some point and see if I can get through the Gi dungeon on Hard Mode - I tried it earlier and arrived at the boss with almost no MP left, which seemed to make it impossible.