Jesus Christ. While I applaud this chap for coming clean on some of the pressure that games writers face to go with the flow, I can’t help but feel that he’s still a terrible turd.
As you may recall, I wasted valuable time and money on that game, at least in part because of the near-univeral critical acclaim. More fool me, eh? It seems they just wanted people to think they were cool.
I’ve lost a large amount of my free time recently to Final Fantasy IX. I tried recently to boil down its many qualities for a friend who had never played it and came up with:
– Excellent story and one which is actually a Fantasy story, rather than a Final Sci-fi story like many of the others.
– It gives you the chance, as I have, to complete the game by dropping a giant frog on the head of the final boss.
– As the last (final?) Final Fantasy on the PS it’s low-tech enough to dodge some of the problems of later games. All the dialogue is text rather than spoken, so you don’t get whiny Tidus or whiny Vaan mewling in your ear for hours at a time about their hermaphrodic problems. Also you can choose the names of all the characters, which is always fun.
– It has Vivi in it (or Paddy if you’re playing in my game) who may be the most adorable character ever in a video game. He falls over! He has a giant hat! He’s cute and filled with self-loathing.
Look at his little face!
While my friend had wandered off by the end of point 1 on the list, I was so compelled by the strength of my own arguments that I started playing it again. What I’d completely forgotten and what should have been point 5 on my list is the mini-games. I’ve welcomed in 2009 playing a worrying amount of Chocobo Hot and Cold – a game where you send a big yellow bird to peck around a garden and, depending on the level of enthusiasm in his response, work out where the treasure is buried. I used to play a similar game with my grandmother, where she would hide a thimble somewhere in the room and then I would dress up as a moogle and try to find it.
Mini-games always seem like a waste of time but I find something strangely compelling about them, especially when they help you level up or, in the case of Chocobo Hot and Cold, help you finish a hideously complex optional sub-plot about the in-game postal service. And it’s not just me who gets transfixed by sub games. Rockstar in particular seem to have some sort of perversion for them. Yeah, you could be screeching through the streets of Liberty City trying to shake off a four-star wanted rating, but wouldn’t you rather be playing a bowling sub-game? Or pool? Or darts? Similarly, I remember Bully as being a WarioWare-style mass of minigames where you’re alternately doing anagrams, punching people and playing a retro arcade game where you’re a hungry sumo wrestler.
Granted, they’re not all good. Some are annoying pointless wastes of time. But that’s not what the new year is about. Here’s to the decent mingames. A bit of spice, a tiny break, a little bit of instant gratification in games that otherwise take weeks to finish. Anyway, onwards – these Chocographs aren’t going to unearth themselves.
Captain’s Supplemental: On hols I picked up more of this delicious beverage. Enjoy!
Good boobs on this one.
