Well, this was truly a saga for the ages. The ages of thirteen to thirteen and a half. Anyone older than that should demand something better.

Also, making a "trilogy" out of a plot and characters you can completely sum up on a 3x5 card doesn't automatically elevate you to the level of Star Wars. Knock it the fuck off already.

 

 

While Ocarina of Time is overall a good game, I've always felt it was quite overrated, and it's hard for me to explain why in just a few short sentences. Mostly because there were just a lot of small, specific, nitpicky things that snowball together over the whole run of the game, and in some ways, a lot of small flaws can be worse than just one or two big ones. So let's run through it step-by-step so I can point these out as we go.

Our game opens in the Kokiri woods, where we're introduced to the Great Deku Tree, the guardian of the woods. He tells a fairy named Navi to go and find Link, who is the only Kokiri boy without a fairy companion.

Spoony: And before long, you'll wish things had stayed that way!

On our way there, we're stopped by Mido, the de-facto leader of the Kokiri, who demands that we have a sword and a shield before we go to see the Deku Tree. Seconds into the game and we're already on a fetch quest. The sword is easy enough, hidden away in a small alcove with giant Temple of Doom boulders that mysteriously roll around under their own power, but the shield is considerably more annoying, requiring you to meticulously collect forty rupees to buy one from the shop. So you waste a good ten minutes chopping down grass and collecting green rupees one-by-one before you even get to really start the game. Not a very good design decision, methinks, especially since all the prior games either gave you your starting equipment right away or it was just a short hike to retrieve it.

After we've finally collected our equipment and convinced Mido to let us through, we reach the Deku Tree, who explains that he's been put under a curse, and that Link is the only one who can save him. Alright. So we enter the Deku Tree and prepare to face the monsters that poison it from within.

It's here that we encounter a pervading theme in the game - the horribly drab color palette. With few exceptions, the game is colored almost entirely in shades of gray, dark green and brown. It also doesn't help that our main enemies for this section are Gohmas (spiders) and Skulltulas (skull-shaped spiders), and that all of the familiar enemies in the game have also undergone drastic redesigns to be more "dark" and hard-edged.

Spoony: Darker art direction + blocky low-res N64 graphics = not a good combination. And no, I'm not just picking on this game - N64 graphics in general have just not aged very well. Maybe that's why Nintendo's in a scramble to remake all of their top-selling N64 games of late?

Another minor-but-frequent annoyance is the context-sensitive A button, which has about twenty different functions based on what you're currently doing, be it doing a jump attack, sidestepping, backflipping, grabbing a block to push it, climbing atop the very same block (by pushing forward into it before pressing A), and more. You adapt to it after a while, but it's still annoying doing the wrong thing because you pressed the button an instant too early or moved the joystick slightly too far in the wrong direction. Having to constantly recenter the camera via the Z trigger is also quite irritating. Thankfully most of the later 3D Zelda games were far better designed in both of these departments.

Also, any time you target come to a new puzzle, Navi has to interrupt the game and explain it to you in a cutscene that cannot be skipped. This continues through the entire game, by the way, and you can't skip these scenes. EVER. Not to mention that she has to pester you for everything else too - targeting an enemy and even just dawdling slightly too long also have her shrieking at you.

Spoony: Why do fantasy stories always have fairy sidekicks for the main character? They're always borderline useless and always SO. DAMN. ANNOYING. Not to mention that having her flat-out explain every enemy and boss' weak point to you takes a large puzzle element out of the game.

Before long, you'll also notice another annoying trend - that the game likes to stop and cut to whatever door you just opened (or closed) by whatever switch you've just activated. It's not that bad in shorter dungeons, but in ones that require you to constantly trigger switches and events to get around (hi Water Temple!) it gets annoying pretty fast.

Ah yes, and one more nitpicky point - when you get a key, you get a message saying that "you found a key, now you can unlock a single locked door!". Pretty obvious, really - keys in video game context are almost invariably used to open doors that bar your path. But guess what? Every time you pick up a key, you get reminded of exactly what they do, just in case you forgot! Hooray!

Anyway, after a series of puzzles of the usual Zelda fare - lighting torches, pushing blocks and defeating enemies in a specific order - we acquire our requisite dungeon item (the Slingshot) and finally come to the boss, a giant Gohma! We're also introduced to the new boss intros, complete with cheesy sub-titles. I guess Miyamoto really liked Wild ARMs?

At any rate, this is a rather easy fight - you just have to destroy its eggs before it can hatch more mini-Gohmas to annoy you, then blind it with a Deku Nut and stab it in the eye a few times while it's stunned. You can also slap it with a Deku Stick for heavy damage, and do a jump attack with one for even more damage - the latter of these two can end the fight in only a few seconds.

Spoony: Previous Zelda games had fire rods, Pegasus boots, jumping feathers, and magic invisibility capes. Ocarina of Time gives us... really big sticks that break after one hit.

Anyhow, we exit the Deku Tree triumphant, and learn that despite our efforts, the damage has already been done and he's beyond saving. We also get a long bit of exposition about the three goddesses who created Hyrule - Din, Farore and Nayru and the artifact they left behind (the Triforce). We also get introduced to a thief named Ganondorf who looks to take the Triforce for himself, and placed the Deku Tree under a curse for refusing to give up his part of the key. He gives you said key fragment (the Kokiri Emerald) and tells you to go and find Zelda so you can stop his evil plan.

We return to the Kokiri Village, where we're apparently blamed for the death of the Kokiri tree by Mido and forced into exile. As we make our exit we encounter Saria, who gives us the Fairy Ocarina, which grants magical power to songs played on it. You also have to literally "play" the songs by stopping the game to equip the item and stopping the game a second time to key in a sequence of buttons!

Spoony: And you'd best get used to this mechanic, because before the game is out we're going to use it so many times that it'll make you physically ill!

We now head out to the overworld map for the first time, but before we can even take a few steps, we encounter another familiar face.

Spoony: Oh good, it's our old buddy from Link's Awakening, the talking owl that never shuts the hell up. We already have enough non-stop chatterers for one game, thank you.

Spoony taps the button to scroll text faster, accidentally picking "Yes" when the owl asks if he wants to hear all that again. Damn it. Oh well, at least we can fast forward through it this time and - fuck, hit yes again. Rggfff, AGAIN. And again! ARGH!

Spoony: Well, one way or another, you're going to slowly and carefully read every word he says, whether you care to or not.

After he finally shuts up, we gather that we're supposed to head to Hyrule Town next, so that is where we go. However, it doesn't take long for you to realize that something else is off here. Two things, actually. First, Hyrule field is bo-o-oring. It's basically just a big, empty wasteland with almost nothing to see or do in it. There's hardly even any of Hyrule's famous rupee and heart-generating grass for you to kill a little time with. What it does have are Peahats - really, REALLY big versions that will cut you to shreds if you come anywhere close - so you'll want to avoid them at all costs. More annoyingly, at night the overworld just generates endless armies of wimpy skeletons to attack you, and Hyrule Castle gets completely closed off. So if you screw around just a bit too long on the map, you're going to have to wait several minutes for the sun to come back up, and you'll be fighting off these annoying little bastards the entire time. Have fun!

At any rate, we now have to sneak into the castle and meet Princess Zelda, resulting in one of my biggest pet peeves in games, the shoehorned stealth section! YOu have to stay out of the guards' line of sight while you make your way to the courtyard, and if you get caught, you get tossed out on your ass and have to try again from the beginning. Even better yet, they add Rupees in really dangerous spots just to trick you into staying out of the safe zones so you get caught even more often!

Spoony: When you have a whole game based around stealth (IE Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Thief) it usually works out okay, but as a hastily-implemented minigame... not so much. They're just exercises in tedious trial-and-error more than anything else.

Once we've finally made our way through all of that nonsense, we encounter Princess Zelda, who foresaw our arrival in a dream (cinematic convenience!). Apparently she already knows that the shady guy currently swearing allegiance to her father one room over is up to no good, and the two of you hatch a scheme to acquire the key to the Temple of Time first and get your hands on the Triforce before he does. Fair enough. You also get the first of several songs for your Ocarina.

About here, we're goaded into going to visit Saria by Navi, so back to the Kokiri forest we must go despite being exiled from there only an hour ago. Not that anyone really tries to stop you from entering or is at all reluctant to talk to you. We learn that Saria is in the Lost Woods, and set out to find her.

Here, we come to another annoying trial-and-error puzzle - the Lost Woods is essentially a maze of rooms with four exits. Taking the right exit lets you advance a little further into the maze, taking the wrong one kicks you out out of the maze and sends you out of the Lost Woods entirely, forcing you to start from the beginning. So you're basically just doing a one-in-three guessing game at every single branch.

Spoony: Actually, I did a bit of research after writing this and learned that there's a trick to it - if you go a very short way down the tunnel and the music starts to fade out, you're going the wrong way. Back out and try another one and eventually you'll make your way through.

So what did we come back all this way for? Another Ocarina song, of course! It won't actually be useful until much later in the game, but it was vitally important that we get it right this minute. Delightful.

Now we move on to Kakariko village, but before we can move on to Death Mountain (where the next key fragment is) we're stopped by a guard, who won't let us pass until we buy a better shield. Well, we could do that, but why spend the money when we can just partake of some graverobbing and get one for free?

We're also made aware of one of the game's biggest sidequests here, that being the House of Skulltula, whose owners were cursed and turned into Skulltulas, and will only revert to their original forms if we find Gold Skulltula tokens. There are something like 100 of them in the game, and for every ten you find, you'll get an item. Except that they cease to be worthwhile after the first fifty (which gives you a heart piece), so I really must question the point.

Spoony: Tedious item-collecting, a hallmark of any great adventure game!

And before you call me out for not minding the Secret Seashells in Link's Awakening, let me state that
a) There were much fewer of those to find
b) You didn't have to find all of them to get the big prize and
c) They were mostly hidden in fairly obvious places, rather than forcing you to search every square inch of every wall and dungeon, in both the past and the future, both during the day and at night, to find them.

At any rate, now we move on to Death Mountain, where we encounter the Gorons (a race of creatures who can't decide whether they want to be cute or just plain disturbing) and acquire the "Goron Bracelet", which lets us pick up and toss bomb flowers. This will quickly become useless, however, since the item we acquire in the next dungeon is the bomb bag, which lets us use bombs anywhere we want instead of just within throwing distance of a bomb stem.

Our next boss is a gigantic Dodongo, and if you've ever played the first game, you already know how this goes - toss bombs in his mouth. Sure, there's an extra step here involving jabbing him with a sword (or Deku Sticks) after the fact, but it's still the same deal. After you defeat him, you earn the Goron Ruby (the second part of the key).

With your newfound bombs, you may also encounter the Great Fairy of Power, or as I call her, "Madame Nightmare Fuel". Seriously, between that shrieky laugh, her blocky character model and some dodgy texturing, she's absolutely terrifying. Oh, and there are five more of them in the game too. Shudder. I'd skip them entirely except for the fact that they give up some really useful magic.

Our next destination is Zora's domain, accessible via a hidden door at the end of a river. Suprisingly, their design is completely different from the earlier Zelda games - rather than monsterish creatures that vaguely resemble the [url=http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Chapman,%20Ben/Annex/NRFPT/Annex%20-%20Chapman,%20Ben%20(Creature%20From%20the%20Black%20Lagoon)_NRFPT_20.jpg]Creature from the Black Lagoon[/url], they're now largely humanoid and stark white in color. Also, none of them try to fight you. What inspired this brave new retcon, I cannot say.

Things also take a turn for the silly as you're forced to compete in a rupee-diving minigame until you win and get the Silver Scale, and once you have that, you have to dive into a hole at the bottom of Zora's domain, which transports you to Lake Hylia - clear across the game world - where you find a letter written by Ruto, the princess of the Zoras, explaining that she's gone to help Jabu-Jabu. So now we have to go all the way back there, show the letter to the king, and go back to encounter Jabu-Jabu, who won't help you until you feed him a fish. So you backtrack again to get a fish (blah) and he thanks you by inhaling the fish - and you - whole. Thanks, bud!

Spoony: Because it's just not a dark fantasy game until you're crawling around in some giant monster's guts!

This dungeon is also relatively straightforward, requiring you to find Ruto and use her as a mobile block to press down some switches, and find the Boomerang to kill three giant tentacles dangling from the ceiling. Our boss this time around is a giant aenemone thing that uses electrified jellyfish as a barrier. Again, while being amazingly annoying (largely due to electrocuting Link and his subsequent shrieking in pain every time he gets hit), he's not that hard - you just have to sever its tentacles via the Boomerang so it drops the electric jellyfish, and then attack its core with jump attacks to kill it.

After Ruto tries to jump your bones (yes, seriously), you get away with the Zora Sapphire. Well, now armed with all three gems, we can make our way to the temple of time and get the Triforce, so that's where we head next.

However, it seems Ganondorf has made his move already, slaying the king (I assume - it's never stated exactly why Zelda and Impa chose to flee the castle at this point) and now pursues them on horseback. Link tries to stop him, but Ganondorf, being an immensely powerful warlock, just blasts him in the chest with a fireball and continues unabated. Luckily for us, on her way out Zelda tossed us the final key to the Temple of Time, the eponymous Ocarina of Time, so we dive into the moat to retrieve it.

With the path now clear, we enter the Temple of Time, use the four keys to unlock the door, and find ourselves set before the Master Sword, the key to the realm of the gods where the Triforce awaits. So we pull out the sword and a bright light engulfs us.

We awake in the future, where Link mysteriously now has pierced ears and tights (?), and are greeted by Rauru, the Sage of Time. He states that because Link was not yet of age to wield the Master Sword, he fell into a sleep for seven years, which allowed Ganondorf to enter the Sacred Realm himself and steal the Triforce away, becoming godlike in power, decimating all of Hyrule's cities (with the strange exception of Kakariko Village) and generally turning it into a monster-infested hellhole.

Spoony: So there's an age requirement to use the Master Sword? That is the DUMBEST plot twist. Not to mention it's pretty disheartening that Link and Zelda themselves are responsible for creating the monster that will terrorize Hyrule for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to come, and that later games in the series would have Kid Link wielding the Master Sword without any trouble at all.

Not to mention that this also opens another large plot hole: Was having Link collect the keys and open the door for him actually Ganondorf's plan all along? It must have been, considering he's also directly responsible for the troubles plaguing Jabu-Jabu, the Gorons, and the Great Deku Tree. But how the hell would he know who Link even is, let alone how the Master Sword would react to his presence? We learn later that Link was a child orphaned by the Hylian war and that he was raised by the Deku tree as a Kokiri, a race that's largely unknown to the outside world. And I really doubt he realized that Link was carrying the Kokiri Emerald and intended to go after the other two keys based on an extremely brief glimpse at Hyrule Castle a few days prior.

Anyway, before I ramble on forever about this plot gaffe, let's move on. Rauru explains that all is not lost - when one with an impure heart comes in contact with the Triforce, he simply gains the fragment he desired most while the other two go to their predestined owners (an awfully convenient deus ex machina if ever I saw one). Ganondorf, desiring power, gained the fragment of Power, Zelda got the Wisdom piece, and Link got the Courage piece. As it stands, Ganondorf is nearly unstoppable, but with the aid of the other five Sages he's sealed away you may just have a chance at beating him. And so we have our next goal.

Link is then transported back to the Temple of Time where he encounters Shiek, a character whose company hype and subsequent popularity will forever baffle because he NEVER. DOES. ANYTHING.

Spoony: Seriously, they built him up as some awesome warrior, especially if you saw the promotional posters that had him alongside Link fighting a horde of monsters. But the game totally fails to deliver anything nearly as cool as this; instead, he just shows up occasionally, speaks in riddles, gives you a song you need to get through the next dungeon, and then disappears again. False advertising!

He does his shtick for the first of many times, and we're given our first goal - head for the Kokiri Woods and the Forest Temple to free the sage there. Before we can do that, though, we have to make a stop at Kakariko's graveyard to get the Hookshot, which we'll need to even get into the next dungeon. Fair enough.

Spoony: We also discover that Ganondorf's conquest has made the overworld field even MORE barren and empty. You're not even under constant attack by skeletons in the night hours anymore, which you'd think would be a trait of the dark future rather than the relatively bright present. In fact, there's hardly a damn thing to do here at all until you get Epona, and all that nets you is another tedious item-collecing sidequest. Hooray!

Upon arriving in the Kokiri woods, we learn that the Kokiri have all stayed the same age since, unlike Hylians, the Kokiri never grow up. Hm.

Spoony: A hero in green, his fairy sidekick, and now a group of "lost" children who never grow up. What's with all the sudden Peter Pan parallels in the Zelda mythos, anyway?

Through some trials involving a giant maze full of Moblins (much larger than their counterparts in earlier games), and one especially huge one who sends shockwaves through the ground at you whilst you try to close in and hit it (knocking you all the way back to the starting point if one clips you in the slightest), we finally reach the forest temple. Sheik gives us another song which will immediately teleport us back here (why not just give us that at the outset and spare us a lot of trouble? blah) and vanishes again.

With that, we finally enter the Forest Temple. It's a fairly straightforward Zelda dungeon, though I remember it vividly for one big reason: the music is horribly, HORRIBLY annoying. And it never shuts up until you get to the boss. The Mute button is your only friend here.

(Okay, the MC Escher tunnel that turns a whole section of the dungeon on its side was pretty creative too).

Ah, and one more I just remembered: This is the first dungeon we encounter with Floor Masters. You know, the hand monsters that grab you and dump you at the dungeon entrance if you dawdle in one spot too long? They're here just to drag this dungeon and its awful music out even longer! Augh!

Phantom Ganon is our boss this time, who mirrors the battles with Agahnim from the previes game, tossing spheres of electricity at you which you must knock back at him with your sword. However, there's a slight twist this time - he can bounce said projectiles back himself, resulting in a pretty funny game of Pong where the loser gets electrocuted.

Once he's down, you free the Sage of the Forest (who by coincidence is Saria) and the Great Deku Sprout is born, expositing a bit about Link's mother and the Hylian War.

After that we return to the Temple of Time, where Sheik informs us that to reunite the sages we will have to go "over mountains, under water, and through time". Guess where our next three dungeons are! Oh, and you can also apparently go back in time by putting the Master Sword back on its pedestal. Alright.

Our next stop is the Goron city, where all of the Gorons (save one) have been taken away to be eaten by the dragon Ganondorf's installed in the fire temple. However, you're able to procure a fireproof suit, enabling you to withstand the intense heat of the volcano and enter the temple.

Not long after we enter we encounter Darunia, who attempts to free the other Gorons but gets captured almost immediately, so the task falls to us. Alright. After freeing a few Gorons and fighting a mini-boss or two, we eventually recover the Megaton Hammer, which is necessary to solve a few puzzles but not very practical as an offensive weapon. Still, it's fun to smash stuff with it.

Our next boss is Volvagia, the already-mentioned Goron-eating dragon who likes to pop out of small holes in the platform you're on and fly around dousing the whole room in flame. But with a combination of shooting him down with arrows or cracking him over the head with the Megaton Hammer and a flurry of repeated sword swongs, he goes down rather quickly.

With that done, the Goron are saved and the Fire Sage (Darunia) is freed. On to the next one: Zora's Domain!

Which is now completely frozen over and all of its inhabitants encased in ice. Our goal here is simply to enter the 'Ice Cavern' and acquire the treasure within via a few puzzles and a fight against a mini-boss (who is just a texture swap of the Wolfos we've already encountered in Kokiri Woods). This earns you the Iron Boots, which allow you to sink beneath the water.

To stop yourself from drowning after about a minute, though, we'll need another item, which thankfully the Zora King will provide you if you thaw out the weird red ice surrounding him. So how do you do that? Bottle some blue fire and dump it on him! ...Yeah, I'm not sure how that works either. But at any rate, you get the Zora Tunic, which allows you to stay underwater indefinitely.

Now we head to the Water Temple at Lake Hylia. Ah, the Water Temple. How I hate thee. Let me count the ways.

1) It's extremely confusing to navigate, requiring you to raise and lower the water level, and you constantly have to pause the game and equip and unequip the Iron Boots via the menu to do it. This is why they were a C-button item in the sequels, folks. Oh, and you have to play Zelda's Lullaby over and over again constantly to raise and lower the water level, too. Yeah, don't just let me pull a switch or something.
2) You can wander it for several MORE hours before you eventually realize that you made a mistake and used a key in the wrong spot, thereby locking yourself out of a room you need to reach in order to proceed, and have to start the entire game again completely from scratch. Urgh.
3) There are tons of points where you think you need to use the Hookshot to proceed, but you can't reach. So how do you get to them? Simple - you wander around confused and lost until you find the dungeon treasure - the LONGshot, which extends its range! Doh.
4) The mini-boss in this dungeon is Shadow Link, and he hasn't gotten any easier from the days of Zelda II. He's still extremely cheap and will instantly counter your stab attacks by jumping atop your blade and whacking you in the head. And no, the "duck in a corner and stab repeatedly" trick doesn't work here. I eventually just got frustrated and kept spamming Din's Fire until he fell down and died. Yeah, it's kinda cheaty, but what the hell.

(Again, I did a bit of research as I was writing this, and found that the Biggoron's Sword and the Megaton Hammer are both much more effective here. While he can effortlessly block and evade your attacks if you have the Master Sword equipped, Nintendo apparently didn't factor those two weapons into this battle, and both of them will consistently pierce his defenses and hit him.)

The next boss is a giant amoeba, who is actually rather easy to beat - just grab the core out of its center with the Longshot and whack it with your sword, repeating until it dies whilst dodging its attempts to sweep you off the platform and into the water (where it will probably get several cheap hits on you). Killing it frees the next sage, Ruto (I'm sensing a theme here), and we reappear outside, where Sheik gives us a clue about how to obtain the Fire Arrows. By the not-at-all bizarre method of standing on a pedestal above the temple and shooting an arrow into the sun.

The next dungeon awaits in the graveyard of Kakariko, the Shadow Temple. However, before we can get very far in, we first have to go back in time and acquire an artifact from the graveyard of the past called the Lens of Truth, which lets us see through all the various fake walls and puzzles within. Fair enough. We also acquire the Hover Shoes within, which allow you to float over small gaps but make you slide around like you're on ice at all times.

Spoony: So if you really, really, REALLY love ice levels, now you can turn every dungeon into one!

The boss this time around is "Bongo Bongo", a giant disembodied head and pair of hands that drums the surface you're standing on throughout the fight.

Spoony: So we've had giant spiders, dinosaurs, dragons, giant electric anemones, demonic shadows of the big bad, and now there's a disembodied demon head and hands playing a giant bongo. Um... one of these things is not like the others?

He's also arguably the most annoying boss, as you can't even see him without the Lens of Truth activated, and you also need to fight him with the Hover Shoes equipped (so you don't bounce everywhere) and have to make precise shots with the bow to even get a chance to damage him.

Once Bongo Bongo is defeated, we free the Sage of Shadows (Impa) and we're told that there's just one sage left to go, in the lands of the Gerudo. But wait, we haven't met anybody from Gerudo territory yet, who could it be?

We'll have to wait to find out, as we now have to rescue seveal of the Kakariko carpenters' sons from imprisonment. This leads to another stealth section, this one arguably even worse than the previous one because the fortress has multiple layers and is fairly tough to navigate since every area looks very similar. Every time you get caught, you get thrown back in the same cell, so you first have to get reoriented and then start your search all over again. However, it helps matters slightly that you can disable the Gerudo guards with your bow.

Spoony: Jesus, that's a little extreme. We've just been killing monsters up to this point, now we're murdering Gerudos left and right just so they don't blow our cover. This really is a much darker turn for the Zelda franchise!

After freeing the last Carpenter, we learn that the Gerudo's second in command - Nabooru - is at the Spirit Temple, and we get a "Membership card", which prevents the Gerudo from attacking and imprisoning us on sight. Hell, they even let us take part in an archery minigame for a chance at another Heart Piece. I'm kind of surprised they're not running me through for shooting dozens of them in the face with broadhead arrows, but I know not the specifics of Gerudo culture so I'll just accept this turn of events.

But before we can venture into the desert to reach the Spirit Temple, we have to undergo two more trials. First we must cross a river of sand, and next we must see the "spirit guide" to lead us to what we seek. Well, they never said we couldn't cheat, so these are quite simple - the first can be done with the Hover Boots and the Longshot, and the second requires following a ghost through a series of flag markers using the Lens of Truth. Just be sure you do the latter during the day, because it's nearly impossible to see what you're doing during the night hours.

Once that's over and done with, we reach the Spirit Temple, which is pretty much empty save for two signs that basically tell us that we have to go back in time before we can go any further as Adult Link.

Spoony: In other words... this was all padding! Yay!

At the very least, Sheik gives us another song, so we don't have to go parading through that whole annoying stealth section a second time. Returning to the past, we encounter Nabooru, the second-in-command of the Gerudo, who plans to ender the temple and obtain the Silver Gauntlets in order to throw a wrench in Ganondorf's plans. However, the gate is sealed with the only entrance being a small gap that she can't fit through, so we're left to do her dirty work.

At the end of this mini-dungeon we encounter an Iron Knuckle, a foe we haven't seen since Zelda 2. They're even more annoying here, being difficult to damage while dealing a whopping four hearts of damage to you with each hit they land. If you have the Nayru's Love spell, this is definitely the time to use it.

One the behemoth falls, you'll gain the Silver Gauntlets, which allow you to push, lift and throw much heavier blocks. However, Nabooru is captured by two witches apparently loyal to Ganondorf, leading us to wonder how the Gerudo in the future still assume she's alive and has simply gone to the temple instead of being, you know, dead after seven years of absence.

Spoony: I think we just created one of these:



Returning to the future, we make our way into the Spirit Temple with the help of the Silver Bracelet, acquire the treasure within (the mirror shield) and confront our next boss, the two witches collectively known as "Twinrova". One casts fire magic, the other uses ice, and each is weak against the other's element. So naturally, we must use the Mirror Shield to reflect the beams they fire toward their appropriate target!

Now that Nabooru is freed, she exposits that the Gerudo are entirely female, save for one male born every 100 years who is destined to become their king. In this case, it was Ganondorf, who she rebelled against for his evil ways.

Spoony: That raises a lot of questions about how the Gerudo race even continues to exist, but I won't get into that here.

With the six Sages reunited, we now have to meet their leader at the Temple of Time, who it turns out is... Sheik?

No, not really. His hand glows (revealing a Triforce fragment) and he drops his disguise to reveal that - Gasp... Shiek is really Princess Zelda!

Spoony: Ah, so that's why he never did anything throughout the game.

Zelda hands over the Light Arrows, which are the strongest weapon of their type and the key to defeating Gannondorf. However, this comes with a price - Ganondorf was apparently listening in, traps Zelda in a crystal, and whisks her away to his castle. Why doesn't he just capture Link the same way? Never explained!

(You could argue that the medallions the other Sages gave him protect him somehow, I guess, but it's still silly that there is never a single word of explanation offered).

Anyhow, now we can finally enter his fortress as the six Sages create a bridge of light, allowing us to cross his Lava Pit of Doom (TM) and enter. There's one last treasure to find in here - the Golden Gauntlets - which are necessary to move a couple of huge blocks out of the way. If you're clever, you can also back out of the dungeon and use it to move the huge block just outside of the castle to reach the last Fairy Fountain, which gives you an enchantment that reduces all damage you take by half. Quite useful, but just a bit too late in the game!

Spoony: That actually would have been really handy for dealing with all those Iron Knuckles in the last dungeon. Ah well, there's a couple left in here we can use it on.

In vaguely Mega Man fashion, Ganondorf's castle contains miniature versions of all the dungeons we've conquered before. Once we've re-conquered all of them, we reach the top of the tower where he plays the organ whilst Zelda remains trapped in a crystal. On our approach, he collapses the entire room beneath us save for a platform in the center (where he stays) and a narrow ledge around the outside (where we stay).

Whenever he's not punching the floor and creating shockwaves to knock you down, this fight closely mimics the Phantom Ganon battle in that he'll heave balls of energy at you, which you have to tennis-racquet back and forth until eventually he gets hit and stunned. Then you peg him with a light arrow to knock him down, then you jump the gap and whack him a few times with your sword. Rinse and repeat until he goes down (which takes quite a while).

Once you've dealt the finishing blow, Ganondorf coughs up blood and dies (recolored in the later versions to green), bringing down his castle with his last bit of strength. Now we just have to clear out a few more rooms and escape, and then it's over, right?

Wrong! Ganondorf rises from the rubble, using the Triforce of Power to finally take on his more recognizable, monsterish form, Ganon, although he looks much different in this incarnation, with devil horns, goat feet and a pair of large swords instead of his recognizable trident.

Spoony: I always felt there was something off about this battle, but I could never quite put my finger on it. Now I think I know what it is - in the previous games, he would always utilize tricks and sorcery, teleporting around, tossing firebats at you, going invisible, that sort of thing. Using his magical powers to deceive and trick you. Here he's basically just a brutish monster, which is much less threatening considering we've seen Link defeat tons of monsters much larger and stronger than him by this point.

Anyway, he knocks the Master Sword from your hands and raises a flame barrier to prevent you from retrieving it.

Spoony: Man, I don't care. I got the Biggoron's Sword, which does twice as much damage! Eat shit, Ganon!

His weak point now is the end of his tail, so you have to evade his attacks, hit his face with a Light arrow to stun him, and then run around and whack his tail a couple times. After a few hits he'll fall down, dropping the fire barrier and allowing you to retrieve the Master Sword. Round two is pretty much the same, although he's slightly faster now. No biggie, just equip the Master Sword and continue the same strategy. After felling him a second time, Zelda will hold him in place and let you deal the finishing blow.

Now that he's defeated (temporarily, at least), Zelda sends Link back in time to a point before he entered the Temple of Time and inadvertantly allowed Ganondorf access to the Triforce, so that he could warn the past Zelda and prevent the whole dark future from taking place. Hooray, a deus ex machina!

Spoony: And possibly another one of these, since Ganon swears that he'll return as long as he has the power of the Triforce:



This was another thing that bothered me for a time - namely, the fact that pretty much nothing described in the events of Link to the Past being carried over in the prequel. The absence of the "band of thieves" aiding Ganondorf in his efforts to obtain the Triforce, the fact that we never see a war betwen the Hylians and Ganon's demonic forces (it seems to happen completely offscreen in the skipped seven years) and the "Seven Wise Men" who sealed the Dark World away now being turned into the Six Sages who are imprisoned by Ganon, not his prisonees. But then several other titles came out in the franchise and it became clear that the whole series' timeline was a convoluted mess, with every subsequent title only being interested in reinventing the whole mythology from scratch rather than having one contiguous plotline. Yeah, there are allusions to a "Hero of Time" in Wind Waker, and the Seven Sages are mentioned in Twilight Princess' backstory, so there are thin connections, but there ultimately seems to be little regard for a running, concrete continuity in the Zelda franchise (despite Nintendo's claims to the contrary, which they adamantly refuse to back up with hard evidence). I suppose that's part of the appeal of its fans, though - there's a ton of theories floating around including split timelines and endless debates about which games are the most "recent" and which are its earliest prequels. Personally, I'm with the AVGN on this one - just enjoy each game on its own merits, and don't sweat trying to fit it all together into one big, epic tale of the land of Hyrule.

As for Ocarina, like I said, it is a good game, but it does contain a lot of small, nitpicky gameplay and story elements that I didn't really like. Still, I know I'm not alone on some of them (evidenced by numerous fan complaints about the Water Temple, and the improved camera system and various "menu-equippable" items being turned into button items in later games). So yeah, another game that, while impressive for its time, I don't find myself revisiting much these days.

 

 

I don't think that even the people who played this as their first video game in 1997 and still swear 14 years later that it's the BEST GAME EVAR*(@%@!%&*%@(#&%#()&#@! can deny that there is much to be made fun of in it. So away we go!

Final Fantasy VII. What can you say? It was a groundbreaking game for its time, proving that the CD format could do things for graphical effects and cinematic style that simply couldn't be reproduced on the limited storage capacity of a cartridge. However, it also kicked off the drastic change of every single aspect of the franchise - visual style, setting, music, characterizations, gameplay - and almost all of it changed for the worse. So yeah, kind of a mixed bag.

But you're not here to read this tired rant yet again. Nor are you here to listen to me argue that Final Fantasy VI was actually where the franchise's writing and gameplay began to take a dive and that VII was actually a step back up in quality before the downward spiral began in earnest. No, you're here to watch me poke fun at the plot and various dumb nuances of the game design. So let's get into it - this is Final Fantasy VII.

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Our game opens with an FMV of a starfield that fades to green sparks that fades to some girl (Aeris) that fades to the decaying slums of Midgar that pans out to show a gigantic city with a tower in the center. It's a decent enough establishing shot, I suppose, giving us a view of a few of the game's running themes and giving us a sense of the graphical technology the platform is capable of. Then we abruptly cut to a train pulling into a station and stopping as a scuffle occurs between a few of its riders and soldiers posted at the station. It's here we encounter our first mild letdown, in that the character models appear to be comprised of about eight polygons apiece, and they're all in a super-deformed style.

Spoony: I guess they weren't ready to let those 16-bit sprites go just yet. But really, I never saw the point of having them be relatively undetailed outside of battle, then in-battle switching to much more realistic and detailed models. Pick one style or the other, not both! Then again, I guess I shouldn't fault this game's attempt to break consistency in some fashion when this is a franchise that apparently prides itself on never, ever changing its formulaic storylines and character archetypes, no matter how flat and dated they may be.

At any rate, we establish a few characters - Cloud, the spiky-haired guy with a sword bigger than he is. Barrett, the first (and until XIII, the only) black guy in a Final Fantasy game, Jessie, and the eponymous Vicks Biggs and Wedge. We learn that they're carrying out an attack on an energy reactor, having to fight their way through countless security forces to get there.

Which leads to our second mild disappointment - an absence of challenge. Every enemy you encounter falls in a single hit and fails to ever do more than single-digit damage to you. Sadly, it never really gets much tougher than this for the rest of the game aside from a decently challenging boss here and there. Come on guys, give us some challenge!

At any rate, after a boss battle against a scorpion robot in which Barrett gives some rather shoddily translated advice (Mild Disappointment #3), Cloud sets a bomb for twenty minutes and the group is forced to flee. They escape just in the nick of time as the reactor blows, causing countless civilian casualties, leaving dozens of soldiers' families widowed or orphaned, and depriving hundreds (possibly thousands) more innocent people of electricity and other basic amenities. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!

They evade the authorities with surprising ease and return to Seventh Heaven, a bar in the slums run by Tifa, Cloud's childhood friend. We also get some exposition about how Cloud became a first class SOLDIER working for Shinra before defecting to join Barret's terrorist group AVALANCHE.

We're also introduced to the new Materia system. Instead of each character having their own distinct jobs or ability sets, now all abilities stem from items you equip on your weapons and armor. This started off another trend I disliked about the later Final Fantasy games, that being that the characters no longer have any distinguishing abilities in combat outside of their limit breaks - their skills and stats are all completely interchangeable. You may as well just pick the team with the best limits (Hint: Cloud, Barret and Cid) and ignore the rest.

The game attempts to balance out Materia by having certain stats decrease when they're equipped - generally lowering the character's maximum HP - but these differences are so minimal that it never affects gameplay in any significant way. Even less so considering that later on you can simply buy HP Plus Materia, which more than makes up for any penalties you incur from equipping a ton of magic Materia.

Spoony: Incidentally, beginning the trend of nullifying strategy by abolishing classes and giving characters no real advantages or setbacks outside of their Limit Breaks is our (Mild Disappointment #4). Though like I hinted at earlier, I'd actually argue that that sort of thing began with VI rather than VII, where the characters' only defining characteristics were their skillsets (most of which were rendered useless by the mid-point of the game anyway). But I digress.

After a night's rest in the bar's hidden cellar, the group sets off for another mission.

However, Shinra is much better prepared this time and lays an ambush, resulting in a battle with a giant robot that explodes when defeated, destroying a large chunk of the walkway and sending Cloud plummeting to his doom.

Nope, just kidding. He fell half a mile completely unaided and crashed through someone's rooftop, but he's perfectly okay. He's found by Aeris, a a girl who tends to a church full of flowers that mysteriously grow in the barren landscape of Midgar. But because Final Fantasy games can't sit still for more than 30 seconds, some Shinra soldiers burst in and attack!

Spoony: Why did they send armed soldiers after a guy that fell half a mile off a destroyed bridge? Were they expecting him to not only survive, but be no worse off for any of it? Well, he is a genetically engineered super-soldier, I suppose...

At any rate, they escape the guards and proceed into the Sector 7 slums, where we learn that Tifa is forcibly recruited into the harem of the local kingpin named Don Corneo (how long was Cloud out, anyway? Hours? Days? Weeks?). This results in an extremely silly event where Cloud has to cross-dress in order to infiltrate the mansion.

After that bit of padding, we learn that Shinra is apparently so desperate to crush AVALANCHE - a group comprised of seven or eight people - that they're apparently planning to collapse an entire section of the slums and kill thousands of innocent people just to get rid of them.

Spoony: That's another thing that really bothers me about this series - there's absolutely no moral ambiguity. The heroes may occasionally do dumb things that get people hurt or killed, but the villains always up the ante by being fifty times worse in the next scene. It's a damned lazy way to justify your protagonists' actions, no matter how idiotic and destructive they may be. Compare that to say, Myria from the Breath of Fire series - sure, she was vengeful, manipulative and instigated genocide on several occasions, but she ultimately felt she was doing the right thing, protecting humanity and serving as its shepherd by destroying the "evils" of technology and the Dragon clans. The Shinra company, on the other hand, has all the subtlety and motive of your average James Bond villain, but with none of the charisma or lovable zaniness.

Well, despite our heroes' efforts, they succeed, bringing down the plate and killing off Biggs, Wedge and Jessie. Luckily, our heroes manage to escape by grabbing a cable and swinging hundreds of yards on it through the front door moments before the whole thing comes down on their heads. Plot convenience be thy name!

Well, this bit of foolishness proves to be just the break our heroes need, as they can now climb up a tangled mess of metal, cables and debris to reach the top of the plate and infiltrate the central Shinra building. You're given a choice of two paths - either go in the back way and climb up a sixty floor stairwell floor by floor, or just take the cowboy approach and barge in through the front door, killing everything in your path.

Either way, you reach the 61st floor, where you'd think security would be at its tightest, as we're now getting into the place where the company's top executives reside and they're running their horrible gene-splicing experiments, but nope - it's clear sailing from here on out. Well, we get to solve a few puzzles, but that doesn't really count as "resistance" on their part.

At the top, we encounter the headless body of "Jenova" as well as Professor Hojo, the company's requisite mad scientist type. We also meet the subject of one of his experiments, Red XIII, who is also our next party member. Despite looking quite cool, he doesn't contribute a lot to the overall story. Oh well.

Spoony: This is jumping ahead a bit, but it's another detail that always bothered me. If the "numbers" are meant to be attempts at recreating the "ultimate soldier" Sephiroth, then why the hell is he conducting these experiments on a WOLF?! He's not even the same species as Sephiroth!

Also: WHY THE FUCK IS HE TRYING TO MATE RED XIII AND AERIS JESUS CHRIST FUCK(*&####$FFDSDDFSFV

Anyhow, we somehow get captured despite the fact that all of their best war machines and soldiers couldn't even make a scratch on us moments earlier. But luckily for us, some maniac with a big sword infiltrates the building, messily slaughtering every single guard in his path. Not only that, he opened our cell doors for us and didn't bother to try to kill us while he was at it. Um... thanks?

We make our way to the top floor unimpeded, where we find the president dead with a sword in his back, but his killer is nowhere to be seen. But by the power of plot convenience, his son appears via helicopter at just that moment to carry on in his stead, unloading such comedic lines as "It's time for a new reign - of fear!"

Spoony: I haven't seen a villain this richly nuanced since I watched "Highlander II: The Quickening". Hell, he's even disquietingly similar to that film's villain - an overacting, cartoonish stereotype who keeps the world under militaristic oppression for his own personal gain. Plus, holy fuck, his name is RUFUS SHINRA. Am I really supposed to take this guy seriously? Because I don't even know who Faceless Swordkilling Psychopath is yet, but he's already proven himself to be a far more threatening villain!

At any rate, the heat begins to close in, so Cloud stays behind to confront Rufus while the rest of the party flees down the tower, another giant war machine in pursuit. Amazingly, Rufus is able to hold his own where several hundred of his elite soldiers failed, fighting Cloud to a standstill. (And no, they never really explain how he can do this.) The party then piles into a truck to escape, with Cloud pursuing on a motorcycle and fending off attacking Shinra soldiers, dovetailing into our first mini-game.

Spoony: Actually, this is a very cool sequence, and probably exemplifies better than any other the "action movie" motif they were attempting with this game. If only they could have shown more restraint with the over-the-top action and visual effects in later games, this may have actually made for a pretty good trend! As is, they're mostly just overdone and glittery to the point of absurdity, like they're trying to distract you from the dumb stories rather than immerse you in the world they're creating.

After yet another battle sequence with a gigantic robot guard, we finally manage to break out of the dreary slums of Shinra and can explore the countryside a bit. We make our way to the town of Kalm, where we engage in a lengthy expositional flashback to Cloud's days in SOLDIER. And before you ask, yes, this is easily the best sequence in the game, exemplifying better than any other what a writing talent they had in Masato Kato. The same writer who also worked on Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, the NInja Gaiden trilogy for NES, and... Chrono Cross. Well, nobody's perfect, I guess.

Anyhow, this scene shows Cloud and his SOLDIER unit going to Nibelheim to check on the Mako reactor there, and they were accompanied by Sephiroth, Shinra's most powerful SOLDIER with near-godlike abilities, which are demonstrated when he wipes out all resistance in only one or two hits. We also recruit Tifa (we had to shoehorn her in somehow, I guess), get a brief lesson on the origins of Materia and Mako energy, and finally make our way to the reactor, where we learn of Shinra's monster-creating experiments via the extracted Mako energy and Jenova's cells.

Seph goes apeshit over this, being told all his life that he was the son of Jenova, and shuts himself in the Shinra mansion for days reading about their illicit experiments. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that Jenova is the rightful heir to the planet, that Shinra (and by extension, all humans) are evildoers who enslaved her for sinister means, and sets out to recover her body, torching Nibelheim in the process.

Spoony: Sephiroth is my favorite villain in the entire franchise, bar none. He had an actual back story, a motive, some actual history with the main characters of the game, and was genuinely a well defined and interesting character who you sympathized with as he took his plummet into genocidal madness (because, as has been said many times, good villains do not think of themselves as villains!). He also felt genuinely threatening - you witnessed his almost god-like powers in the flashback scene, and had the horror of seeing them turned on your home village with that awesomely chilling theme song. It was also nice to see that they didn't turn him into the typical "get beaten, run away to power up a bit, then come back 4 hours later" boss that removes any feeling of him being a legitimate threat - they showed some tact and left the climactic battle for the end, where both of you fought at your full strength. I may have a lot of complaints about the game's design and writing, but to me, the dynamic between Cloud, Tifa and Sephiroth was what held it all together and made it into something truly memorable. Which is more than I can say for most of the games in the franchise and their stories in particular. Too bad they had to ruin it all with that stupid movie...

But I digress.

Sephiroth continues his rampage, cutting through everyone in his path (including Tifa) as he makes his way back to the reactor and liberates Jenova's body. Cloud charges in to confront him and the flashback abruptly ends before we see the results of the showdown.

Back in the present, we move across a swamp occupied by the Midgar Zolom and encounter the Turks, who all but admit seconds into their first appearance that they're the game's requisite recurring bosses who are there just to get on your nerves and pad the game out with more fights. Wow, I've only known them for a few seconds and I hate them already.

We make our way through the cave and find ourselves on a long path to Junon, another occupied Shinra territory. If you're lucky enough on the way there, you might just encounter the inexplicably popular Yuffie, who fights you and steals money from you if you don't give the right answers in the following cutscene. Actually, just feel free to skip her - she contributes pretty much nothing to the overall plotline and her limit breaks are garbage.

Spoony: Why do they even allow Yuffie to come along, anyway? She has no real reason to do so, and in fact she attacks you alongside monsters and steals money from you even after you defeat her. Sounds like a trustworthy character to me!

At any rate, we infiltrate Junon through a series of increasingly silly minigames and make our way aboard a ship. Sephiroth appears once again, laying waste to everyone aboard (with the conspicuous exception of our party, Rufus and his right-hand man, all people who pose the biggest threat to his plans) and we're forced to fight a spawn of Jenova. It's a laughably easy fight for a spawn of an alien monster that once threatened the entire planet, but at least it has some catchy music.

After that, we move on to Costa del Sol, where we encounter Hojo on the beach. But nothing much really comes of it, so I have to question why they even wrote it in.

After that pointless scene, we depart town and come to the mountains of Nibelheim, fight our way through, and end up in the town of Nibelheim, which is mysteriously not destroyed (but is inhabited by creepy, lethargic dudes with numbered tattoos and black robes). In the basement of Shinra Mansion we encounter Sephiroth, who has a few cryptic words to say about some manner of "Gathering" and tosses a pretty powerful Materia at you as he flies out the door like Superman. Okay...

If you follow a short sidequest in this area, you can also find another party member in Vincent, a character garbed out in a red trenchcoat who carries a rifle. He's another pretty boring character with little relevance to the overall story, but he's worth using just because his limit breaks are so ridiculous. Hell, one has him turn into a slam-dunking Frankenstein monster!

Next up is the Gold Saucer, where we meet a robotic cat-moogle thing named Cait Sith. Shortly thereafter, we're told that a guy with a gun-arm went rampaging through the park shooting everyone he met, and we're left to assume it's Barret - however, before we can find out for sure, we're apprehended and tossed into the prison below the park. Yeah, there's a prison below the world's premier amusement park. That's also silly; imagine if they built Alcatraz below Disneyworld Florida...

Here we discover that this was not the work of Barret, but it was in fact his friend Dyne, who had a similar operation where hereplaced his shot-off arm with a rifle. He's also gone quite batshit insane, as we've already seen. Cue fight scene, followed by a convenient way to earn a full pardon for the crimes we were accused of by winning the Chocobo Races.

Spoony: I would have expected something more along the lines of "the Running Man" with the monolithic evil megacorporation Shinra running the show, but hey, this works too.

We then move on once more to Rocket Town, where we meet the eponymous Cid, who is being menaced by Rufus and his goons into giving up his airplane. However, because he's an awesome, trash-talking, cigarette-chomping air pirate, he tells them to fuck right off, in almost those words.

Spoony: I don't care what anyone says, Cid is always the best character in Final Fantasy games. ...Well, except for 8.

One of Rufus' goons is a fat doofus called "Palmer" who continuously demands lard in his tea, fights the party with an ice-shooting gun, and then promptly gets run over by a truck. Yeah. Square villains are almost always too goofy to take seriously, but this guy goes above and beyond and becomes sillier than most 60's batman villains.

Spoony: So Square fanboys - who allegedly identify themselves as such for the company's "dark and mature" storytelling - bash on me for enjoying Disgaea, a series that openly flaunts its silliness. Yet every time Square shoehorns in hammy characters like this guy, homicidal Cindy Brady with a killer yarn ball, and Jar Jar Binks the bartender (all to the detriment of the overall game), they just look the other way. Ah, hypocrisy...

The party attempts to escape on Cid's plane, but it takes a hit and crash lands into the ocean, forcing them to convert it into an ad-hoc boat to get around. Our next plane of attack is to make our way south to the temple of the Ancients, wherein we try to acquire the Black Materia so that Sephiroth can't use it for his mad scheme, which is apparently to blow a big hole in the planet with Meteor and then absorb the Mako energy that gathers to repair the damage, making himself into a god. Yeah, it's silly as hell, but at least it makes more sense than Kefka solving a Resident Evil statue-shoving puzzle and becoming the devil incarnate.

The Temple of the Ancients is, as you might expect, a large series of puzzles and confusing pathways, mostly because it's built to resemble an MC Escher painting and pulls a lot of annoying tricks with perspective to make it look like you can go down certain paths (but you can't) and that one obscured by a foreground object is the way you actually need to go.

After finally reaching the central chamber, we figure out that the Black Materia is booby trapped - solving the final safeguard and removing the Materia causes the whole temple to collapse inward, crushing anyone who happens to be inside it. Cait Sith, being robotic, volunteers to stay behind and solve the puzzle so that nobody has to die. Sure enough, the temple collapses and the party collects the Black Materia, with his replacement appearing in a matter of seconds. Convenient!

But our victory is short-lived, as Sephiroth pops up moments later, using his influence over Cloud's Jenova cells (I guess?) to wrest the Black Materia from his grasp. Wonderful!

Spoony: There's another thing I never really liked about JRPGs - you always, ALWAYS end up playing right into the villain's hands and allowing him to accomplish his grand scheme, no matter how hard you try not to. It always seems like if you just left the big Macguffin where it was instead of trying to take it away to "prevent the bad guy from getting it", he'd be up shit creek! Like a handful of teenagers with no money and resources are really a better safeguard than an magical temple designed to kill anyone who enters it in search of the forbidden treasure. Besides, who was he going to send in there to fight off all of the monsters and retrieve the materia? His shaky, useless tattooed clones? I don't think so.

Anyway, we now learn that Sephiroth has gone north, with Aeris in pursuit. So we follow them up there to an abandoned city of the Ancients (after another bout of padding mini-gaming, of course), and find Aeris attempting to summon Holy to wipe out Meteor. But it's not to be, as Sephiroth swoops down from the ceiling and kills her with a sword through the belly as our party fights another fragment of Jenova. Cue the tragic music and funeral scene that pulled so many heartstrings despite Aeris having almost no character depth or emotional attachment from anyone in the game!

Spoony: I never really got the attachment people felt for Aeris, to be perfectly honest - all in all, she's pretty forgettable as a character. Hell, Even Cloud doesn't seem to care all that much despite much of the first disc implying that they were to be an item. She's barely even mentioned throughout the entire rest of the game, and what little mention there is is never initiated by either Cloud OR Tifa. The game's manual alleged that Final Fantasy VII contains a "love triangle" between Cloud, Tifa and Aeris, but there really isn't much evidence to support that in the actual game. Hell, Cloud has more of a character connection with Yuffie, since in one side-quest you go out of your way to save her even though she consistently betrays and steals from you!

Disc 2 opens with us continuing the pursuit to the Northern Crater, where Sephiroth currently awaits. Through the magic of several filler quests and a snowboarding mini-game, we make our way there in record time, confronting another Jenova spawn which happens to be carrying the Black Materia. Why Sephiroth would entrust the pivotal object in his plans to some shitty monster that Cloud and his friends have already felled several of is a mystery that will forever battle me, but hey, at least we got it back.

Cloud (quite wisely) thinks that Sephiroth may pull the same stunt again and entrusts the Materia to one of his party members before moving on to the center of the Crater. But it proves to be all for naught, as Sephiroth appears in the guise of Tifa and tricks your appointed guardian into handing it over anyway. Which is silly, but again, it's another facet of the character I actually kind of like - he's truly devious, deceptive and underhanded instead of just some cackling buffoon with superpowers.

He and Hojo also take the opportunity to torment Cloud, stating that his memories are false, that he was not present at the events we saw in a flashback earlier (proven with a photograph showing someone we don't recognize in his place) and that he was a failed clone of Sephiroth, not even given a number (implying that his memories of Nibelheim are fake).

Now that Sephiroth has the Materia again, this also causes all hell to break loose, unleashing the five Weapons (the "guardians" who defend the planet in its hour of utmost danger) and forcing the party to flee.

We then cut to Junon, where we've been captured by the Shinra, are convicted of unleashing the catastrophe in a mock trial, and sentenced to death to appease the masses. But luckily for us, one of the Weapons attacks, giving the party time to escape in the confusion while Shinra mounts their counteroffensive. We make our way to the Highwind - that big airship we saw on our first journey here - and escape.

We also find out rather abruptly that Cloud is still alive, albeit left catatonic from exposure to undiluted Mako, and that he somehow made his way from the north pole of the planet all the way to an island near the south pole. Which is, like many things in this game, quite silly and doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But there's no time to ponder that mystery, as we now learn that Shinra is attempting to destroy the Meteor by using the four Huge Materias they've created. But I guess we simply can't let them have their way, even if their goal is to try and save the planet, as our next objective is to recover the four Huge Materias via a series of minigames and events. And yes, it does smell suspiciously like padding!

Spoony: Final Fantasy games are a lot like Steven Seagal movies - nobody is allowed to upstage the hero for any reason, not ever!

After recovering two of them, we return to Mideel to check up on Cloud, only to find that Ultima Weapon has arrived to cause some havoc. They fight him off, but not before he causes an earthquake that causes the whole village to crumble apart, sending Tifa and Cloud plummeting into the Mako stream once again.

This proves to be a rather metaphysical experience for both of them, as they end up within Cloud's mind, attempting to patch up the holes in his memories. It turns out Cloud was not actually a First-class SOLDIER - merely a recruit - that the spiky-haired swordsman from the flashback was really Zack (who you probably don't remember since the only sign of him before this was an EXTREMELY brief mention in one of the earlier towns of Disc 1), that Cloud WAS in fact present at the events of the past (he was the masked soldier who tried to prevent Tifa from entering the reactor), and finally, that his confrontation with Sephiroth ended with him and Sephiroth stabbing one another, with the latter being tossed into the Mako stream. He's also not a "clone" in the literal sense - he was injected with Mako and Jenova cells in a failed experiment to recreate Sephiroth like all of the other "Numbers" that had gathered in Nibelheim; he was just never actually given a number himself.

Spoony: So he invented this false persona and lied to himself and others - to the point where even HE couldn't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore - just so he wouldn't have to face his childhood friend. That's... kind of touching, in a really pitiful sort of way. It also makes his entire dynamic with Aeris mostly pointless, since we now know that his character is defined entirely around Tifa.

Also, quick question: Cloud seems to be the only member of this experiment who came out relatively okay (aside from Red XIII, maybe - it's never really stated how far into the process he was), so why was CLOUD rejected as a failure while all the ones who were given numbers were lethargic and useless?

Plot hole aside, it's another pretty interesting scene and serves to set this game apart from its predecessors and successors by giving a legitimate and interesting arc for the main character. But now that we have Cloud back, so it's time to continue our mission of collecting the two remaining Huge Materia - one from a submarine base in Junon, and the other loaded aboard Cid's rocket in Rocket Town, which is set on a collision course with the Meteor. Both result in some pretty cool scenes (including a bit of character building for Cid) and a mini-game or two.

But now that we've recovered the last two Huge Materia, we find that Shinra is mounting an attack against the North Crater using Junon's massive laser cannon. However, Diamond Weapon emerges from the sea and attacks, firing a beam that engulfs Rufus' office in flame and kills everyone within. Or at least it did, until that stupid movie came in and retconned it to Rufus getting away with only a broken arm. Did I mention Advent Children sucks?

Anyhow, we confront Diamond Weapon and actually do quite well against him, until the ray gun fires and completely decimates the beast. Apparently someone's still around operating it, so we make a daring parachute insertion into Midgar to go and take them out.

We encounter the Turks for one last time (though you're thankfully given the option of just telling them to fuck off so you can skip a pointless battle), Shinra unleashes their new giant robot toy Proud Clod, which takes a lot of damage to bring down but isn't particularly hard, and we climb up a long series of stairs to confront Hojo. But first, more exposition!

It turns out that HE is Sephiroth's real father, and that Seph's real mother was Lucretia, a woman on the Jenova project who I think goes unmentioned until this point. And because he's a total nutjob, he wants Sephiroth to usher in a new world and therefore fights you himself! He actually puts up a pretty good fight, mutating into several monstrous forms due to being given an overdose of Mako and Jenova cells (one of which is more than a little reminiscent of John Carpenter's "The Thing"), but with a little creative use of Materia he can be beaten without too much trouble.

Now that Shinra's been eliminated and the path to Sephiroth is clear, it's finally time to move on to Disc 3. There's really not any plot left at this point outside of the final dungeon, so this is just your chance to backtrack and clear up any sidequests you hadn't already finished - collecting Materia and weapons, finishing minigames, fighting Ruby and Emerald weapons for some fun prizes, and so on.

Once prepared, we head down into North Crater, where we confront Sephiroth, who as, as with all other things Jenova-infused, turned himself into a gigantic monstrosity that you have to split into multiple parties to fight. Actually, you don't, really - allegedly there's a mechanic at work here where you'd need to swap between both parties to disable his defenses or something, but I found this never comes into play - I just attacked him with one party and took him out without much trouble.

Cue the awesome orchestral score as we move on to his second form, Safer Sephiroth (what?). Here, Sephiroth casts the most comically over-the-top spell in the game, and arguably even the whole franchise, Supernova. It causes an asteroid to crash through and destroy several planets before colliding with the sun, causing it to erupt into a supernova that engulfs Mercury, Venus, and even within a hair's breadth of the Earth, causing colossal damage to everyone in the party. The whole animation takes well over a minute to play out, and it's all so wonderfully absurd that it's worth drawing out the battle just to see it happen at least once.

Spoony: Jeez-us. Forget Meteor coming down and wiping out all life on the planet - I'm amazed the Earth is still around at all after that fucking catastrophe!

Unfortunately for him, it also deals enough damage to fill up everyone's Limit gauge pretty much instantly, allowing you to unload on him with Omnislash, Highwind and Catastrophe for absurd amounts of damage and bring the battle to a quick end.

But the fight's not over just yet - now we have Cloud confront him one-on-one in some sort of metaphysical plane. This is sure to be an epic final showdown, right? Well... no. You just hit him with one Omnislash and he dies. So much for that.

Spoony: I kid, but I actually like this idea. It gives Cloud some closure to his long-standing hatred of Sephiroth, doing so without even one single line of dialog. The music and tone of the scene in itself is enough to make it a pretty poignant image when Cloud strikes him down in a flurry of violent slashes and puts an end to him once and for all. Shame then, that the movie... okay, enough about the movie.

But wait, the story's not done just yet. Even though we've stopped Sephiroth, Meteor still comes down and unleashes chaos and destruction upon the earth. Oh wait, it's fine - defeating Sephiroth has apparently allowed the spirits of the Ancients within the Mako stream (Aeris included) to be freed from his control, allowing them to cast Holy and repel it. Hooray!

Cut ahead to five hundred years in the future, where we see Red XIII and two wolf cubs (huh? I thought he was the last of his race!) at the foot of a cliff overlooking the destroyed Midgar, now overgrown with plants. Um... deep?

---

Spoony: So that's Final Fantasy VII, the game that made Square a runaway success overnight and put the Sony Playstation on the forefront of the gaming consciousness. However, while there are elements of it I do genuinely like, they're kind of few and far between. The whole dynamic between Cloud, Tifa and Sephiroth was really interesting and quite well written, but that just amounts to a handful of scenes peppered between bouts of the usual, archetypal Final Fantasy silliness. Unexplained boss monsters! Cartoony physics and unexplained happenings! Lots of silly (albeit relatively fun for the most part) minigames! Impractical designs for practically everything! It makes it pretty difficult to take the good parts seriously when the rest of it is cartoonish and dopey, and honestly, that's probably my biggest problem with the franchise - it can't decide whether it wants to be somber and serious or irreverent and jokey, so it tries to jackhammer both in and just ends up feeling like a bit of a mess.

Of course, it doesn't help that the game hasn't aged particularly well, if only because it became far too popular far too quickly - it seems like almost every game, anime, manga, comic book, movie, etc. of the next decade had lifted ideas from it (and many still are), and frankly, there are only so many spiky-haired antiheroes with giant swords, dark backstories and bizarre psychoses who fight against thinly veiled Biblical allegories that I can take. Plus, as I've already mentioned countless times, its success has caused Square's creativity to cease and their style to stagnate, giving in to endless fan demand to see the exact same characters and scenarios in every game they release*. The only thing that seems to improve are the visuals, and watching bullet time and shiny aurora effects is only amusing for so long when the gameplay beneath is so damned shallow. Seriously, name me one Final Fantasy game created in the last twenty years where you can't win 99% of all battles by spamming normal attacks and limit breaks. You can't!

*For those who think I'm exaggerating on this point, I have two words for you: Kingdom Hearts. An entire FRANCHISE built around nothing but characters and storylines recycled from other franchises.

So while FFVII was a standout game for its time, and even a few of its copycats were pretty good (see the first two Shadow Hearts games), there's definitely something to be said for popularity and originality being double-edged swords - sure, you'll make a game that everyone will remember for years to come, but you'll also get eighty bazillion copycats desperately trying to rip it off, which can cause the whole thing to become trite and cliched and quickly ruin any appeal it once held. The other moral here is, of course, to always keep in mind what made your franchise a fan favorite to begin with, rather than abandoning it all as soon as you get your first million-seller royalty check.

Oh, and if you're currently in the middle of typing up a five-plus page rant about how I missed some minute plot detail in a game I haven't played through in over ten years, that its plot elements and characters being carbon copied time and time again was the best thing to ever happen to the creative medium, or that I have no right to level criticism toward Final Fantasy VII until I've sat through and extensively researched every single iteration of the entire media franchise it's spawned*, remember to keep it to yourself because I don't care. Thanks in advance!

---

* This is such a red herring argument anyway. I can't be fair about my criticism of a game because I haven't played all of its sequels and prequels? Really? So I can't point out its gameplay faults until I've played several other completely different games and sat through two animated features? I can't critique the forgettable characters, story holes and cliched plot points without playing games they barely feature in, assuming they even show up at all?

I hate to make a broad sweeping statement again, but most of the people who make this argument to me just seem to have an axe to grind about... well, nothing in particular, really.

"Dude you cant make fun of FFVII until you've seen all of it you're being unfair"

"Okay. Say, I recommended the Ultima series to you..."

"THAT SERIES SUCKS THE GRAPHICS ARE AWFUL I QUIT AFTER 20 MINUTES"

"How about Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door? That game's pretty good."

"My buddy says its a bad ripoff of Super Mario RPG so I didn't even bother"

"Notwithstanding how idiotic that statement is (given that Super Mario RPG was a collaborative effort between Nintendo and Square, and Nintendo is therefore just as entitled to utilize its scenario and gameplay mechanics as Square is), you're passing final judgment on two entire franchises you've either barely played or never played, yet when I critique a single same I've played start to finish three times, I'm the one being "unfair.""

"YES AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED"

Yeesh.

 

 

Often cited as "the reason so many people scrambled out and bought a brand new Playstation 3 for twenty times what it was worth on eBay". So, was that $12,060 purchase worth it? Let's find out!

So our game begins with... actually, I'm not sure what the hell they're trying to prove here. Our game begins by giving you four or five "TV channels" to flip through, none of which have any apparent tie-in to the game's storyline aside from a few tongue-in-cheek references. It's not like these are short videos, either - each one goes on for a good four minutes before the game properly begins!

Spoony: Wow, you really put this bleeding-edge Blu-Ray technology to good use, guys. Open up your brand new game on an expensive new game console with twenty gigabytes of uncompressed video that has no relevance to anything! You've really convinced me to move up from the mere eight gigabyte discs your competitors' game consoles have with this!

Our introductory cinematic sets up several key points - Snake's rapid aging (a result of Werner Syndrome coded into his DNA), Olga's daughter (I thought Olga's child was a boy? Bleh) Sunny was freed by Raiden (off-camera - it's an important plot point but we had to include Raiden as little as humanly possible due to fan backlash toward his character, you see) and now lives aboard Otacon's aircraft as a computer genius with no social skills. Finally, there's the fact that weapons, vehicles and other implements of war are now entirely coded with Nanomachine-driven ID locks, and that "War Has Changed" as a result. Silly Snake, don't you know that war never changes?

The action finally begins in the middle east, having to sneak through the middle of a war between some armed goons and private military companies hired to fight them off. Snake's here to find Liquid Ocelot, who has somehow worked under the radar to become the head of the biggest PMC in the entire world. I guess nobody heard that he was working alongside two terrorist masterminds only a few years back. Yeah, yeah, he was really working for the Patriots, whatever. We know from the previous games that almost nobody knows who the Patriots are, and the Shadow Moses and Big Shell incidents are well documented acts of terrorism against the United States. So how did he manage this, exactly?

Spoony: The first of several glaring plot holes, incidentally.

Along the way, we also learn that Snake has a high-tech "octocamo" that can blend into anything he presses up against for a second (much more convenient than having to pause the game and swap uniforms constantly, at least), Otacon has built a tiny portable Metal Gear scout 'bot (shades of Snatcher) and that all the "ID locks"can only be broken by some goofball named Drebin who has a pet smoking, drinking monkey. Yes, I"m serious. Oh, and also, Snake is suddenly using CQC, something he showed absolutely no knowledge of in the first two games but Naked Snake showed heavy use of in Metal Gear Solid 3 and Portable Ops. More retconning at work!

At one point along the way, we encounter Meryl and her unit, and an extremely long gunfight scene ensues with dozens of soldiers who can apparently leap twenty feet in the air and stick to walls. One of them is a painfully annoying doofus named Johnny who doesn't really do much aside from contribute a lot of unfunny poop humor, which you'll get tired of pretty quickly. Thankfully, they tone that down to a dull roar after this scene - I don't think I could stand twelve straight hours of Jar Jar antics from this guy.

Anyway, we finally come up to Liquid Ocelot's camp, and despite having plenty of chances to just take the fucker out with a clean shot, Snake doesn't do so, instead waiting until he unleashes the power of Plot Convenience to render all the soldiers nearby - Snake and Meryl's unit included - completely ineffective.

Spoony: Ah, nanomachines, the ultimate lazy plot device. Does your story require that you keep a person's identity secret? Nanomachines. Need to instantly subdue or kill anyone? Nanomachines. Make someone immortal? Nanomachines. Disable or enable any weapon or vehicle in the world at a single person's whim? Yep, nanomachines! And yes, this plot device will be so heavily relied on throughout the game that it will become laughably trite very, very quickly.

Anyhow, we get rescued by the annoying doofus from earlier (how embarassing) and now we're apparently off to South America to rescue Naomi Hunter. Oh, and the Patriots are all just AI systems rather than a group of people now. Which you could probably already guess if you played MGS2.

We also come to one of my big piss-offs with the game, learning that Raiden now leads a one-man war against the Patriots after the memories of his past as a child soldier arose again. As a result of this, he started drinking, had severe relationship turbulence and Rose miscarried their child. So much for MGS2's optimistic ending where Raiden overcomes his demons and puts his past behind him to lead a new life, eh? Oh, and Rose is now shacking up with Colonel Campbell because... we just needed to turn this into a bad Jerry Springer plot somehow, I guess.

Spoony: But guess what? This whole subplot is completely meaningless because Rose lied to Raiden about the miscarriage and she and Campbell are only "together" as a cover story to protect Rose and her son from the Patriots! Because yeah, it's not like they're above kidnapping and coercing people into doing their bidding under threat of murder (up to and including young children). It's also not like the Patriots - who I remind you have had a hand in events reaching back to the beginning of the entire series - don't have a close eye on two major players in the lives of Snake and Raiden for exactly this purpose. Oh, and do you remember that scene where the Patriots threatened to kill both Rose and Sunny if Raiden should die or fail to follow orders? Apparently Kojima doesn't, because MGS4 never follows up on that plot point!

After sneaking through a lot more skirmishes between the local militia and an armed resistance, we encounter Naomi, who gives us a Plot Convenience nanomachine suppressor and explains that the FOXDIE within Snake's body is slowly mutating and will turn into an airborne outbreak in a few months, and that the only way to prevent this is to die before that time.

Spoony: Because it's just not enough that Liquid Ocelot is trying to wrest control of the Patriots' system away from them to effectively conquer the entire planet - we had to add MORE gravity to the story! Never mind that just like the whole Rose/Raiden drama, this plot element is also rendered completely moot by the time we even learn of it.

Anyway, a bunch more soldiers burst in with extremely convenient timing, abducting Naomi and leaving a group of wall-climbing ninja soldiers to kill Snake. But in Metal Gear fashion, their elite commando senses are no match for a guy who knows to hide under a table and pick them off one by one with a tranq gun as they go to investigate their fallen comrades. Silliness.

It's here, about three hours in, that we finally encounter our first boss battle in the form of Laughing Octopus. It's actually a pretty interesting fight in that she uses her OctoCamo to hide in the environment, blending in with the walls, ceilings and even a painting at one point. Later she even starts getting creative, disguising herself as Naomi and even Metal Gear Mk. II to try and catch you off-guard. I'm not sure how she knows who Otacon is, let alone how to mimic his voice so perfectly, but it's still quite creative.

After that's over, we have to track Naomi through a forested area by following a trail of clues (the whole thing reeking terribly of padding), rescue Naomi from Vamp (who's still invincible, big surprise) and then embark on a long shootout with a bunch of Gekkos and soldiers turned into zombies via Plot Convenience.. err, "Nanomachines". Then we get to embark on another stealth section where we evade a ton of Gekkos.

This section is actually really incredibly annoying because they cut off every single path you can take, and as soon as you destroy one (which takes 3-4 rockets or several clips of ammo to the 'eye' on top), another one immediately drops down in its place. That is, until you discover that they have an incredibly dumb weakness for being robotic - they can be tranquilized! Yeah. Just shoot them in the knees with 3 or 4 tranquilizers and they'll fall down and act lethargic, giving you plenty of time to run past them. Just don't try to run past them without doing that, or they'll sweep-kick and kill you instantly.

As Snake and Naomi escape, they're once again attacked by a swarm of Gekkos, as well as Vamp. But lucky for us, Raiden comes back, dispatching the whole lot of Gekkos and leaving Vamp severely injured in an overly long fight scene that climaxes with him doing a breakdance spin while whipping two Gekkos around by their little cable-claws - one on each leg. It singlehandedly turns what should be a badass fight scene into unintentional comedy.

After that display of extreme silliness and shark-jumping, we move on to eastern Europe, where another PMC is keeping peace in the streets and you have to follow a Resistance member back to their home base to meet up with Big Mama, who has the remains of Big Boss that Liquid Ocelot is hunting for. The gameplay style here is vaguely reminiscent of Assassin's Creed, in that you have to trail the guy without letting him know he's being followed, whilst simultaneously evading enemy soldiers and preventing the guy you're trailing from being detained by PMC soldiers. It's about as exciting as it was in that other game, too. By which I mean "not at all." It also doesn't help that this section drags on. And on. And on. For a good forty minutes. And getting spotted at any point just drags it out even longer.

After that dose of filler, we meet up with Big Mama, and a huge dump of exposition begins!

Spoony: I'll just give you the short version here. Remember Zero and Para-Medic, Naked Snake's support team who we learned pretty much fuck-all about in MGS3? They're our main villains now! Also: Big Mama is EVA, who also happens to be Snake's mother, DARPA chief Donald Anderson from the first MGS game was really SIGINT (strange that they look and sound absolutely nothing alike), and Ocelot had actually intended to kill him during that game's torture scene to keep his identity as a double agent under wraps. Small fucking world, I guess.

Due to more convenient writing, Big Mama's location - formerly secret for months - is now blown, and we have to make our grand escape with Big Boss' remains before they find us. Why didn't they just DESTROY the remains to prevent Liquid Ocelot from using them in his grand plan? Oh, right - because then we wouldn't have a plot.

We also get some clunky exposition about how Big Mama's "children" are all raised on violent first person shooter games and that "war is just a game to them". So a Metal Gear game that's designed to more closely resemble a third-person shooter than any other in the series is speaking out against violent video games (and shooters in particular) as "brainwashing". Yeah. This message is doubly hypocritical considering that all the major players in the entire franchise - both good and evil - use armed warfare, assassination and mind control as means to an end. So just in case you didn't already dislike the game for being padded out like crazy, now it's preachy and pretentious too!

Spoony: Oh get off the soapbox, Kojima. The quickest way to kill my enthusiasm for any game is to have it preach at me, especially when its a VIOLENT, M-RATED GAME decrying simulated violence.

I have to admit I was dreading another bike chase scene, because Metal Gear Solid 3's "intense, climactic action scene" was easily one of the most drawn out, boring, and tedious parts of any video game I've ever played - you had UNLIMITED ammunition and regenerated health so quickly that you could get shot dozens of times to no ill effect, and between the frequent cutscenes, the boss battle in the middle and about fifteen screens of first-person shooting adding up to well over an hour of game time, it went from mildly amusing to unbearably torturous very, very quickly.

Thankfully, MGS4's bike scene is much better. It's a lot shorter for one thing, and with the sheer amount of explosions, flying shrapnel, enemies and mayhem, it's quite a spectacle to watch, even if it is still rather easy.

After all that madness is done and we come to a violent crashing stop, we encounter our next boss, Raging Raven. And again, this is a fine boss battle. The boss comes crashing through the building you're in, punching holes in the walls in a crazed attempt to weed you out, and you have to utilize stealth, cover and quick shooting to get some hits in when she's vulnerable. It does get a little drawn out because she takes so little damage from your bullets, but it's still quite fun.

After that, we learn that despite our efforts, Liquid Ocelot has captured Big Boss' remains, and with them he is able to gain control over the SOP system and disable every weapon in the world, save for those possessed by his loyal soldiers and the handful of "jailbroken" ones that Drebin has helped you launder. Once again, there's a huge gap of opportunity for Snake to simply SHOOT HIM as he floats in the middle of the harbor, going on and on about how he now controls the world through the "Guns of the Patriots" while mugging for the camera for twenty straight minutes (spending a good chunk of that simulating gunfire by pointing his fingers and shouting "BANG" followed by watching whatever he points at actually explode - I am not fucking kidding in the slightest), but Snake doesn't even attempt to fire a single shot in Ocelot's direction. What the fuck!

Spoony: Yes, the once crafty, manipulative and threatening Revolver Ocelot is now reduced to being an unfunny clone of Ernest P. Worrell. Who's brilliant idea was this? Watching a (formerly) awesome villain act this way is so painfully stupid that I think it's about time we start a counter for shark-jumping moments. So counting the extremely silly Raiden battle earlier, Kojima's sermon about simulated violence in a video game that revels in violence and human misery, and now this scene, we're up to three.

Also, I finally get the relevance of the title. Guns of the Patriots. GOP. Har har. What brilliant satire does Kojima have in store for us next? Is Rising's plot just going to be a cartoonish exaggeration of the Occupy movement?

He's pretty much won at this point, having rendered every militia in the world except his own useless, but Liquid Ocelot isn't done yet, no sir. Now he wants to go back to Shadow Moses to steal Metal Gear REX's railgun so he can wipe out the Patriots' core AI and prevent them from impeding his plans as well. So with that bit of convenient plotting, we roll out to MGS1's location, attempting to stop Ocelot's plans that whilst engaging in a fair bit of nostalgia.

Spoony: Oh, and GW is back too, completely restored and none the worse for wear despite it quite clearly being wiped out by Emma's virus in Metal Gear Solid 2. Way to render that game's central plot totally meaningless, guys! And for what, just so you can further belittle Raiden and Emma's character arcs in order to make Snake the "one and only true hero"? Way to pander to your fanbase.

Halfway through the trek to REX's bunker, we encounter yet another boss - Crying Wolf. Once again, this is a well-designed boss battle, forcing you to contend with the harsh weather and utilize stealth to evade Wolf's senses, as well as a constantly-respawning patrol of FROG soldiers. Like the fight with "The End", it's pretty much a long waiting game, but it's well-designed enough that you don't mind having to constantly watch your back as you wait for her to slip up and give you a shot at her weak point.

After that and a couple of rooms with a swarm of annoying sphere robots that constantly respawn, we finally come to REX. But surprise, Vamp and Naomi await us here too! Another boss fight ensues.

Like Wesker in Resident Evil 5, this is pretty much just a gimmick battle - no matter how much you shoot him, he'll just shrug it off and refill his health moments later. After a not-so-subtle clue from him, you'll figure out that it's Plot Convenience nanomachines that keep reviving him, so you'll need to shoot him in the head, then grab him as he gets back up and inject him with the suppressor to finally kill him. Well, not quite - Raiden bursts in and delivers the finishing blow whilst you fight off an army of Gekkos with Crying Wolf's railgun (which she borrowed from Fortune, apparently - funny, I thought it was a highly dangerous experimental weapon that only Fortune could wield due to her "supernatural luck"). This is probably the most spectacular battle of the whole game - just a pity you won't be able to pay attention to Raiden's side of the fight, since you'll be too busy fighting off Gekkos to watch the other half of the screen.

Spoony: So, his nanomachines made him super strong, able to predict people's movements by giving him super senses, and able to regenerate from wounds, even ones that would be instantly fatal. Fine, I'll buy that. But what I don't buy is him being able to run up walls, walk on water and swim in a highly-oxygenated fluid that any normal human would instantly sink and drown in. Unless they converted his entire body mass to helium, that simply does not work!

After all that's said and done, Naomi explains that she's created a virus to destroy the Patriots' network, and also that she's secretly dying of terminal cancer, which we never saw evidence nor even heard mention of before this scene. She injects herself with a suppressor and drops dead in a hamfisted tragic moment.

Spoony: Hooray, yet another shoehorned tragic heroine death! How many times are we going to spend that nickel in this series, anyway? First it was Meryl in MGS1's bad ending, then it was Emma in MGS2, then The Boss in MGS3, then Elisa in Portable Ops, then Big Mama, and now Naomi!

After that, we discover that we're too late and that the railgun has already been taken. However, Otacon manages to get Metal Gear REX back up and running with only a bit of tweaking.

Spoony: So I shot it with about 500 Stinger rockets and it's been sitting here in a bunker at temperatures as low as 90 degrees below zero for nine years (ensuring that it's most likely completely frozen solid and, at any rate, its fuel is well past its shelf-life), but oh, it's perfectly fine - we just need to hotwire it a bit to get it running again. Convenience, be thy name!

After a spectacularly decadent escape sequence where we drive REX up a long ramp, trashing everything in our path with a barrage of missiles and machine gun fire, we come face to face with Liquid, who is now driving a Metal Gear RAY. Another boss battle ensues!

You'd think this would be a hard battle, especially since RAY was specifically designed as a means to eliminate REX and similar designs of Metal Gears, but actually, it's quite easy. Just plaster him with machine gun fire, and swap over to the missiles or the laser to stop his really big attacks. Aside from that, just keep moving, and have a chuckle at how everything on this island is destroyable save for the comms tower in the middle of the battlefield.

Once we've trashed Ray, the game decides to copy the ending of the first game again by having Liquid Ocelot fall from the cockpit and apparently drop dead from FOXDIE. Only not! He gets right back up, laughs, and runs for his battleship.

Spoony: What... the... fuck was that?! Was that supposed to be a joke? Why would Snake even be FOOLED by that?! I know he has a new strain of FOXDIE in him thanks to Drebin, but he doesn't know who it's supposed to affect! And even if it was meant to kill Ocelot (which it is), why did it not affect him at all when when they met (and fought) in the previous chapter?!

In another thoroughly idiotic moment, Snake, rather than just arming REX's weapon systems and pasting him with a missile or a few thousand rounds of machine gun fire (or at the very least using the higher vantage point to draw a bead on his target with a handheld weapon), drops twenty feet to the ground, severely injuring himself and allowing Liquid to gain an even bigger lead. But to his credit (I guess), he does at least take a shot this time as Liquid makes his getaway. Yeah. This moment of incredible stupidity on Snake's part deserves another one of these.

(Shark-jumping counter: 4)

We also find that his battleship - Outer Haven - has a pastiche of Mount Rushmore with Big Boss, Solid, Liquid and Solidus' faces instead of the presidents. No, I'm not making that up. It's really there. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I had to go to Youtube and check the Metal Gear wiki afterward just to make sure I hadn't gone fucking insane.

Spoony: Oh god, that is beyond corny. Was Kojima really taking this seriously, or has the series just degenerated into a self-parody at this point?
(Shark-jumping counter: 5)

Outer Haven begins to tear up the pier Snake is on in an attempt to crush him to death, but Raiden appears once again to save Snake's bacon, doing so in the most idiotic way possible - rather than just picking him up and hauling ass out of there (which should be effortless for him as we've already witnessed him leaping from rooftop to rooftop and whipping a three-ton robot around on either leg), he tries to WRESTLE THE FUCKING GIGANTIC BATTLESHIP AWAY WITH HIS BARE HANDS.

Spoony: Really? REALLY? Now you're making Raiden a complete idiot too? What the hell, Kojima! You repeatedly defended Raiden's inclusion in Metal Gear Solid 2 -even going so far as to declare him your favorite character - and now you've minimized his contribution to the overarching story by cutting his scenes, belittling his accomplishments in MGS2, and now turning him into a complete idiot. But then, Snake doesn't really fare much better in this game, so I'm just left totally confused as to what you're trying to accomplish with this series anymore. Aside from raking in boatloads of cash, I mean.
(Shark-jumping counter: 6)
(That's the THIRD one in this cutscene alone! Scale it back a little, guy!)

Thankfully Mei Ling comes in to save Snake and Raiden from their own stupidity, commandeering the only non-disabled battleship in the Navy fleet to drive Liquid off. You know, in the previous games, Snake was usually the one bailing people out of tight spaces, and now he's the one who's always getting rescued. Usually by the unpopular minor characters at that. Not a very good turn for one of video gaming's iconic action heroes to take!

Spoony: Say what you want about Raiden's character in Metal Gear Solid 2, haters - at least he wasn't playing second fiddle to the supporting cast throughout the entire game!

With that, we finally enter the game's last act, wherein Snake, Meryl and Johnny attempt to infiltrate Outer Haven to upload Naomi's virus and wipe out the Patriots' central AI. This chapter is actually quite short in terms of gameplay, with only a few stealth corridors and the rest being played out in cutscenes. But as long as it helps us avoid more flagrant and obvious padding, I won't complain.

The first of two boss battles is Screaming Mantis, who is apparently Psycho Mantis resurrected in the guise of another mentally destroyed girl. Again, this is pretty much just a gimmick battle - you'll constantly be under attack by resurrected Plot Convenience nanomachine-driven soldiers and you'll have to knock Meryl out once in a while to prevent Mantis from killing her, but that's all secondary. You just have to knock the voodoo dolls out of Mantis' hands, then grab one of them and manipulate her into stabbing herself multiple times. Notably, this is the only time when you actually have to use the motion sensor built into the PS3's controller - I guess Sony insisted that they work that in somewhere, even if it is an extremely minor sequence in a single fight near the end of the game. But hey, at least it's better than the clunky, unintuitive grenade-throwing mechanic in Uncharted. And while we're on the subject, fuck that game too.

Spoony: Nanomachines - they can do anything, even make people float several inches off the ground with no external support! Man, this is dumb. I mean, there's suspension of disbelief and then there's insulting my intelligence; microscopic machines in your blood CANNOT MAKE YOU DEFY GRAVITY OR VIOLATE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. I don't care how far technology advances in the next 100 years, that just ain't happening. I have wonderful news, though - the game is almost over.

After that, a very long series of cutscenes plays. In a scene that draws out a single joke for far too long, Meryl and Johnny hold off a huge swarm of FROGs whilst Johnny proposes to her (what?), Raiden bursts into save Snake from a group of FROGS - doing so despite being so badly injured that both of his arms are rendered useless and he has to hold his sword in his mouth - and Snake continues his journey down a hall of deathtraps to the central core.

Spoony: It's official - Metal Gear Solid 4 should have just been about Raiden instead. He's been far more badass than Snake throughout the entire game. Hell, even when he's being blazingly stupid, he at least does it with some style!

As he finally reaches the end and uploads the virus, Meryl, Johnny and Raiden - all in dire straits - are immediately saved as the world is immediately ripped free from the control of the Patriots' Plot Convenience nanomachines. Snake is brought out in bad shape and barely conscious to a hero's welcome, but somewhere in the midst of all this, Liquid Ocelot manages to drag him off TO THE VERY TOP OF THE SHIP for their final battle.

Spoony: Okay, I was having a hard enough time believing he could drag an unconscious Snake up to the top of REX. Now we're on the top of a twenty story tall TOWER on the middle of a crowded battleship and NOBODY saw him carry Snake up there and tried to stop him?

Up here, Ocelot explains that he had fully intended this chain of events from the beginning, that he was NOT actually mentally overtaken by Liquid Snake (it was all a ruse on his part), that he is loyal to Big Boss - not the Patriots - and that he'd secretly planned from square one that Snake would upload Naomi's virus and wipe out the Patriots' AI, causing the war economy to collapse and the world to plunge into uncontrolled chaos, thereby creating the "world for soldiers" that Big Boss had always envisioned.

Spoony: Oh my god. So all of this - ALL OF THIS - was a setup by Ocelot from the very start? You're telling me that hunting down Big Boss' body to gain control of GW, getting the railgun off of REX, training Sunny to some kind of computer prodigy, kidnapping Naomi, and disabling EVERY WEAPON IN THE WORLD so he could attack and destroy the Patriots' core AI to gain complete control to GW - ALL of this was staged in the hopes that Snake would upload a virus created by Naomi and tempered by Sunny to destroy the Patriots' AI at its core? And just to make it more convincing, he sent his entire elite battalion to fight Snake at every step of the way? What would he have done if Snake - who is physically 70 or 80 years old at this point - were to be overwhelmed and killed by one of these mechanically augmented psychotics? "Whoops, I just botched up my big plan! Now I'll have to rule the world as the oppressive dictatorship I always despised! Silly me! Ha ha ha!" Kee-RIST, this is the dumbest plot twist I've ever seen outside of a JRPG.

(And it's also Shark Jumping moment #7!)

But despite Snake playing right into his hands and really having nothing left to fight for anymore since they've both achieved their goals, we have a final climactic fistfight. Why? Because the director demanded a climactic action scene, of course!

As if that paper-thin reasoning wasn't enough, we also have to watch them fight over the Plot Convenience Suppressor just to even give them the strength to continue their pointless little tussle, ruining what little chance there was of anyone being able to take this seriously.

At any rate, we now lapse into a one-on-one battle with extremely stiff controls, wherein we have to employ clever use of ducking, dodging and dash attacks to land hits on Ocelot while evading his attacks. After he takes enough damage, the music changes to a MGS2 theme and he starts getting sloppy, using an easily avoided dashing punch that leaves him wide open.

Spoony: He also resumes that infernal mugging. As if it weren't already impossible to take his character seriously ever again after he spent all of Metal Gear Solid 3 acting like a hammy dipshit.

Speaking of which, after dodging that and retaliating with combos a few more times... Snake Eater from MGS3 begins playing!

Spoony: That song alone deserves another point on our counter. It was bad enough hearing that corny mess over and over again constantly in the previous game, now I have to listen to it here too? Press the mute button, please.
(Shark jumping counter: 8)

Now Ocelot stats using grapple moves, which you can shake out of rather easily and follow up with a punch combo for some pretty heavy damage. After a few bouts of that, we're finally on to the climax, which is... kind of lame, honestly. All you really have to do is mash R1 a lot and Snake will keep hitting him with huge Mortal Kombat uppercuts and haymakers that take a huge chunk of his health off. Just keep that up and he'll never even get a shot at counterattacking.

Anyway, after that extremely dopey combat scene, Ocelot finally succumbs to the FOXDIE virus and dies, starting up the ending cutscenes which last well over an hour. Welp, let's get started.

Meryl and Johnny get married. Yay, fan service for two characters nobody ever cared about.
Raiden is no longer a cyborg, and gets reunited with Rose who reveals that he has a son. Okay.
We learn that Drebin was working for the Patriots all along to assist Snake in stopping Liquid Ocelot. I guess they just didn't expect Snake to go ahead and destroy THEM as well, which is pretty silly since he's a founding member of Philanthropy - whose entire goal is to destroy Metal Gear and by extension the Patriots' offensive platform!
We also cut to the graveyard from the beginning of the game, where Snake is about to off himself to prevent FOXDIE from becoming a global pandemic. However, he's stopped by... Big Boss? Yes, it turns out he's still alive. That charred corpse Big Mama had was really Solidus all along.

Spoony: Oh COME ON. You DON'T FUCKING DO THAT. You do NOT bring back a character whose death is the CENTRAL FOCUS of THREE GAMES just for a sappy ending scene, especially when you're just going to kill him off again right away! What the FUCK!

(Shark-jumping counter: 9)

Not to mention that bringing Big Boss back in this way creates a massive plot hole: If those really were Solidus' remains back in Act 3, why did Liquid Ocelot go through all the trouble of tracking down Big Mama and sending a small army after her resistance cell to retrieve them? He knew they weren't actually Big Boss' remains! And even if he didn't know that, it still wouldn't make sense since he accesses the SOP system and shuts off all weapons in the world immediately after he obtains them. Making it worse is the fact that this comes directly after a scene where we had established that Big Boss' DNA and Biometric data - and ONLY Big Boss' - would work for that purpose!

I've seen claims that this is because Solidus is a "perfect clone" of Big Boss, but I call bullshit - Big Boss shows no evidence of the rapid aging that his sons did (keep in mind he's literally about 70 at this point in time, and Solidus was younger than Snake in MGS2 despite looking much older), so his DNA differs from Solidus', if only slightly. Which goes against established logic again, as it's said that an EXACT match is required to access the SOP system. So there.

Anyhow, Boss explains that he's just here to tie up the last of the loose ends by wiping out the sole survivor of the Patriots (Zero), and that Snake's been injected with a new strain of FOXDIE, which was intended to kill off Big Mama, Liquid Ocelot and Big Boss himself. Conveniently, this new strain of FOXDIE has also destroyed the old one within Snake's body. So through an extremely contrived plot twist, Snake can now live out the last months of his life in peace rather than having to die to save humanity. Hooray!

Spoony: This had to be a last-minute rewrite just to give the game a happier ending. I mean hell, even the official trailers for the game showed Snake blowing his own head off. It was sad, sure, but at least it made a point to explain that he was looking at the big picture and doing what was ultimately right to ensure humanity's future, even if it wasn't made clear exactly how. You don't set something like that up and then not deliver, guy. Damn.

That said, Big Boss succumbs to the new FOXDIE and dies. Thankfully, it's considerate enough to let him give a twenty-five minute speech about how the Patriots needed to be brought "back to Zero" and then "back to nothing" to avoid poisoning the minds of future generations, whereas in the previous games FOXDIE worked almost instantly. So much for consistency.

Spoony: So what makes him think there won't be "neo-Patriots" along the lines of the Neo-Nazis? Does he think nobody is ever going to document what happened in this international event, or that there will be no survivors who carry on the beliefs of the Patriots to future generations? Or is he suggesting that all of them should be killed as well? If so, then what a great message this game carries! "Violent video games are evil and brainwashing, but if someone holds radical beliefs, MURDER THEM!"

Why FOXDIE only gave Big Boss (and everyone else it infected throughout the series' run, for that matter) a handful of minutes before death while giving Liquid Ocelot several days is another enormous plot hole, but whatever, it's finally over. Roll credits. Another twenty minutes of them.

---

Spoony: So yeah, that's the big finale to Metal Gear Solid, and as you can probably guess, I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a dark, ugly, mean-spirited game whose tone is constantly undermined by increasingly moronic story elements, glaring plot holes and the main villain constantly mugging like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. I think its biggest failing is just that it tries to do way too much and ultimately collapses under its own weight. It's a pretty predictable storyline at its core that tries to set up a lot of plot twists to keep us guessing, but so few of them really work. "Naomi betrayed you, but not really! You played right into Liquid Ocelot's hands, even though it ultimately makes no difference to any of the proceedings! Big Boss' death - the DRIVING FACTOR behind two of the previous games - was all just a lie, even though we're just going to kill him off again right away! Yeah!" Honestly, I still stand by my claim that it's better to have a simpler story that's well written rather than one that's convoluted and ridiculous just for the sake of being convoluted and ridiculous.

Not to say the game was not without its strong points. The gameplay mechanics were a major leap over MGS3's, largely eschewing the tedious micromanagement and playing up the slower, more deliberate approach to stealth gameplay. The boss battles were tense and exciting, and it was at least nice to see all of the characters come back for the finale, even if most of them weren't really given anything to say or do. I guess I just expected a lot more from the "big finale" to the richly-nuanced Metal Gear universe than what we got here, especially when you take into account that the game was delayed time and again so that it could take "full advantage" of the shiny new Blu-Ray format (more on that in a bit). It doesn't really speak well of your writing when you feel the need to explain away every super power every character has, but major things like Ocelot bending the rules of JD's DNA and Biometric regonition system go completely unmentioned.

In the end, MGS4 is a mixed bag. The gameplay (what little there is between the extremely long and frequent cutscenes) improves upon the ideas its predecessor set up, but the story leaves a lot to be desired. The writing relies too heavily on "nanomachines" as a plot device (they can do anything the plot demands to the point where they may as well just be called "magic")*, its "morals" are heavy handed and pretentious, all of the "plot twists" just feel tacked on in a feeble attempt to add substance where there really is none, the humor is REALLY forced and only subtracts from the story, and a lot of huge leaps are taken just to tie up all the loose ends before the credits roll. But the worst offender is the padding - when half of the game's running time feels like dull, idle banter and pointless busywork added in just so you can fill up all the space on a Blu-Ray disc, you really need to rethink the philosophy behind your game's design. That much-touted fifty gigabytes of space doesn't count for crap if you can't amount it to anything substantive**, guys.

*I'll be extremely generous here and just count that dead horse of a plot device as one big, nonspecific shark-jumping moment, bringing the final count to 10.

**Actually, before I end it, let's take a look at just what all of that disc space went towards. Was it the gameplay? Not really - it's just the same basic Metal Gear game with a couple of new gimmicks attached. Adding more of that wonderful codec banter? Nope, there's much less of it here than there was in MGS1 and 2, and even 3. Hell, I think even the Game Boy game had more than MGS4 does. The scope of the narrative and scale of the game world? Nope. As stated, the dull filler far outweighs the handful of inspired moments the game has. Hell, the first chapter alone takes almost an hour and a half to set up two plot points about Drebin and the SOP system (three if you count Doofus' immunity to it); the rest is almost completely inconsequential.

So what did they use all that extra space for? Well, from what I've read, a very large chunk of it simply went toward adding uncompressed audio samples, video files, and textures. As someone with a bit of experience in this department, I can tell you that uncompressed files are much, MUCH larger than compressed ones - hell, my average 90 minute Youtube video gets compressed from well over 100 gigabytes down to 2, and there's virtually no noticable loss in quality from it. So yeah, almost all of that disc space went toward making the game look and sound slightly better if you have a 70 inch plasma screen HDTV and a top-of-the-line Dolby 5.1 surround system. Maybe. [iThat[/i] was certainly worth alienating ALL of the Xbox fanbase and delaying the game time and again for, now wasn't it?

Bottom line: If you're going to make use of that expensive new media format on that powerful new game console nobody can afford, you'd better damn well push hard to make your product take full advantage of its features, instead of just padding out the free space with junk levels and uncompressed media.

 

 

Is it just as pointless, childish and one-note as everything else EA's had a hand in lately? Let's find out!

As we begin, we're given the choice of three character classes. If you've played any RPG ever, I'll bet you can already guess what they are. That's right, we went with the boring old mainstays of Fighter, Rogue and Mage, and didn't even bother to mix it up a bit by thinking of clever new names for them. So right off the bat, we see that the developers' imaginations are stuck in 1981 and stubbornly refuse to go past that point, ever.

Spoony: Even Etrian Odyssey - a game series fully intended to be a throwback to the old dungeon-crawler RPGs of the early-80s - had more creative class archetypes than this. Like the Gladiator (lightly armored but very powerful fighters), the Hexer (status casters), the Buccaneer (teamwork-based class that does powerful "followup" attacks in response to the actions of their allies), the Wildling (beastmasters)... need I go on?

At any rate, I pick the Mage class, because let's face it, that's always the best class to play. Your teammates will be struggling for their lives against some crappy monster, and all you have to do to turn things around is use one or two well-timed spells to render it feeble and helpless, or just nuke it with a fireball the size of a city block. Then you get declared awesome and you get first pick of all the loot as recognition for your efforts. Well, that's how it goes down in any game other than this one, but we'll get to that shortly.

As we pick and customize our character (defaults for everything because it's a demo and none of it's going to carry over to the full version anyway), he decides to strike a dramatic pose and twirl his staff menacingly. This fails to impress because, being a mage, he is bound by video game law and can never, ever touch a weapon that can do any actual damage.

Hum de dum, introductory cinematic that can't focus on any character for more than three seconds. Skipping the rest because I fear the constant cuts and flashing images might trigger an epileptic seizure. Good to see they're putting my two gigabytes of hard drive space to such productive use, though, what with one uncompressed, noninteractive full-motion video after another. This stuff might have been impressive on the PS1, an era when high-quality FMV in games was relatively new, but in an era when in-engine graphics can generally match anything prerendered cutscenes are capable of with far less strain on memory and disk space... yeah, not nearly as much.

Speaking of which, the graphics in Dragon Age 2 are ass-ugly. Like, early Playstation 2 quality. Low-res textures, jagged polygons abound, so little facial movement in characters that they almost look like hand puppets, and a color palette that's predominantly brown and gray does not make this a game that appeals to the eye. Even the first game looked better!

It's here that we come across our first big disappointment in that our mage is not the archetypal "guy who turns a dire situation around by defying the laws of nature" character. Instead, Dragon Age's definition of "mage" simply reads "See : Ranged Attacker, Page 8". Or perhaps "The Last Airbender", since he tosses minute fireballs and icicles by performing Tai-Chi with his staff, none of which do any significant amount of damage. Even your spellbar doesn't change this much - you have the ability to throw ice at an enemy to slow them down for roughly half a second, which might - MIGHT - save one of your fighters from taking one or two points of damage off of their reserve of roughly 130 apiece.

And no, playing as a fighter or thief isn't any more fun, since they take about a billion swings to take down one single enemy too. Nevermind that in the preceding cinematic we saw monsters get cleaved in half at the midsection with a single blow, complete with endlessly cheesy Mortal Kombat blood fountains. Apparently EA's still trapped in the mindset of the mid 90s, when stuff like that was "cool" and "edgy", and they've dragged Bioware down with them.

Spoony: Also the first of many glaring signs that this game is not designed and marketed toward a more mature demographic as it so desperately claims to be. But I'll get into that as we go.

After a very drawn out and boring battle, a dragon flies down from the cliffside and bathes everyone in flame. Well, it wasn't a very good demo, but at least it was shor- wait, what is this?

Oh, now we cut to a fat guy and some chick talking. We have no idea who either of them are, but apparently the fat guy is narring the story to the other woman. Okay. She accuses him of making things up (like she even knows) and now he says he's going to tell her what REALLY happened. Shades of "Hero" starring Jet Li, only with with none of the fun that description might imply.

Cut back to our party, where we learn that they're attempting to navigiate our main character's sister and mother to safety against the invading skeleton hordes. Alright. After another very boring battle where we dispatch a dozen more skeletons with airbending and swordfighting, I get a note that the Codex has been updated.

Yeah, you remember this thing. Tri-Ace started it with Star Ocean 3, and now EA and Bioware have run with it as a cheap way of leaving all the plot out of the game itself just to hammer in another combat scene every forty seconds. That, and it lets them get away with hiring voice actors for a game at a greatly reduced cost - they don't have to actually explain any of the backstory, major characters or key plot points, a little notebook does it for them! All they have to do is belch out two or three scenes of dull small talk, collect their paycheck, and be on their way. Yeah, fuck that; I'm not going to bring the whole game to a complete stop to read this damn thing.

Spoony: Storytelling 101, guys: If you want me to pay attention to your story and your game's "rich universe", PUT IT IN THE ACTUAL GAME. Having to interrupt the action every twenty minutes and read a small novel of text just to figure out exactly what they were talking about in those last couple cutscenes is fucking asinine. Hell, imagine if 85% of Metal Gear's plot and character development was trimmed out and moved into a little external notebook just so they could pad out the game with dozens of rooms that serve no real purpose outside of giving you more busywork to complete. Wouldn't really be much fun, now would it?

The worst part about this whole Codex fiasco is that it's caught on and even Squaresoft is doing it now with Final Fantasy XIII, so we can look forward to every RPG for the next ten years having its plot relegated to a few Cliff's Notes in the online manual to make way for endless battle scenes against the same three monsters. Good work dumbing down yet another entire game genre, you hacks.

Venturing a bit further down the one and only beaten path, we meet an elf guy with a big sword (whom I affectionately named "Legolas") and some schmuck named "Wesley" (whom I disparagingly named "Wesley Crusher"). We stop to talk to them, learning along the way that Legolas is a mage-hunter. It's never brought up in the dialog itself, but it happens to be one of my character's dialog choices, so I'm going with it. Hey, you take what you can get with the Codex system in place.

Spoony: Penalty flag. Establish important character traits IN THE DIALOG, not in a menu choice.

As we stop and yammer on, we suddenly get ambushed by about twenty more skeletons. Yeah, not very wise to shoot the breeze whilst you're surrounded by undead hordes, you numbskulls. In the midst of the fighting, Wesley Crusher gets mortally wounded. Legolas' only response to this is repeating "the Order dictates" several times.

Spoony: WHAT ORDER? DICTATES WHAT? SPEAK IN COMPLETE SENTENCES!

After a scene that tries its hardest to be emotional, but fails since we knew this guy for about two minutes and never even exchanged a single paragraph of dialog, Wesley Crusher dies. Farewell Wesley Crusher, we (literally) hardly knew ye.

Then, as we waste more time talking about the poor chump's death, fifty more skeletons appear and attack! This time they're also accompanied by "Bolters", which is probably the stupidest possible way of saying that they use crossbows. Honestly guys, what was wrong with "Archer" or "Marksman"? "Bolter" just sounds really stupid.

Spoony: I know I was ripping on you for being unoriginal with the class choices, but come on, bolters? Did that even sound good as you were writing it? I can't imagine it did.

At some point we're presented with a branching path. I thought this may have offered us an opportunity to take a harder or easier path, thereby providing us with an optional extra challenge, a touch of free choice (gasp!) and maybe even some replay value, but nope. My hopes are immediately dashed as I find that each and every dead end that doesn't take us further along in the story just leads to a treasure chest. Our developers apparently copied notes from Final Fantasies ten and thirteen. Really, guys? Of all the games you could have copied notes from to improve Dragon Age 2 over its predecessor, you decided to crib from the two worst Final Fantasy games to date?

Spoony: If you thought Mass Effect's railroaded gameplay was severely detrimental to the overall experience, guess what? Dragon Age 2's overall design is even more linear and padded beyond belief just to make it even more unbearable! Have fun!

It's also around this point that we're made aware of the ability to program your party's AI - like in Final Fantasy XII, you specify a trigger condition, and once that condition is met, that party member will automatically cast a spell, attack an enemy, and so forth. However, any strategic aspect this may have applied to the game is immediately squashed as you quickly figure out that the game automatically programs in new AI routines for you every time your characters level up and gain new skills, so there's really no point in even giving you the option. Even better yet, you inexplicably cannot tell your party members to use a potion when they're low on health. For that you have to pause the game, manually select that character, click the potion button, and win an invisible dice roll that determines whether or not he'll actually listen to your command or just ignore you completely and get mowed down. They also seem quite fond of ignoring your other commands, be it ones programmed in via the menu or ones you manually order them to do. Seriously, there's about a 50% chance they'll just do whatever the hell they want even after you give them a direct order to do something else.

Spoony: Yeah. Say what you want about Final Fantasy XII, haters: that game just handed Dragon Age 2 its own ass in the design department. At least when you gave a direct order in that game, your character would actually carry it out. Every single time.

Anyway, this group of monsters proves to be little threat (big surprise). We also quickly figure out that our heroes' health fully regenerates after each and every battle, meaning that this game's difficulty is about on par with playing Kingdom Hearts 2 on the Easy setting. Or perhaps Fable 3, a game people have reportedly completed without ever dying and while using as little as two health potions throughout its entire twelve-hour run. God, I hate fucking Fable. It's the only RPG franchise even more vacuous, banal and marketed to nine year olds than this one.

Wait, nevermind.

Getting back on track, we stop and talk yet again (uggghhhh) and get ambushed yet again (uuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh). However, the enemies have now started playing dirty - like in Goldeneye, as long as you're not actively pointing the camera at an area, enemies can spawn in from that area. And since the camera is always forced into a super close-up view situated immediately behind your character so that you have to pause the game every three seconds and re-situate it just to see what the hell is going on, that gives them plenty of wiggle room. However, this hardly makes the game any more challenging because the enemy AI is still complete garbage - they make absolutely no attempt to come at you with any sort of strategy or formation, they just pick a character, run up to them and swing away until either they or their chosen target dies.

Spoony: Even Doom had monsters more formidable than this. They weren't much smarter, sure, but at least in large groups they could cover for each others' weaknesses and pose a genuine threat to you. There was also a lot more variation to the combat in Doom, whereas in Dragon Age 2 every fight feels exactly the goddamn same.

After killing about a hundred more skeletons, I attempt to move on, only to find that my characters' mother and sister have frozen in place and stopped moving. Attempting to talk to them to jostle them out of it proves fruitless, and I can't take manual control or change their AI programming because they're not technically party members. Shoddy, glitchy programming at its finest, EA. But I guess it wouldn't be one of your games without tons of corner-cutting due to a rushed development schedule.

Well, if they don't care about their own lives, I don't either. I move on without them, only to have them teleport right behind me in the cutscene. But surprise, an ogre attacks and punks dear sister out with a boulder in a rather hilarious moment.

I guess this serves as our demo's "boss fight", because the ogre is the only enemy to pose any kind of threat thus far. He actually does fairly decent damage, and my ice-stun spell doesn't seem to work on him either. In fact, he actually manges to wipe out my party due to their stubborn refusal to use potions when low on health, but since this game is easy as dirt, we're given the option to continue the fight from the beginning with no ill effects. I guess all those diligent quicksaves I made were entirely pointless, then.

Spoony: Do you remember how in Baldur's Gate - you know, the game Dragon Age is supposedly a spiritual successor to? - you were quicksaving constantly because any battle could go catastrophically wrong or you could trigger a trap that would wipe out your main character instantly and end the game? Yeah, Dragon Age will have none of that on its watch. No challenge, no feeling of satisfaction when a change of tactics allowed you to overcome that group of monsters that gave you so much trouble, no reward for being careful and diligent instead of just charging headlong into everything in your path, NOTHING. They might as well just start the game at the "you win" screen and cut the seventy or so hours of pointless filler.

Anyway, the fight goes much smoother the second time around, for the most part. My allies still actively refuse to use a potion about 50% of the time when I tell them to do, so we lost one guy. But regardless, the remaining two of us manage to take down the ogre, and since we won, everyone is immediately revived at full health. Whoop de do.

Cue yet another scene that fails to invoke emotion because, once again, we established basically nothing about this character and she was in our party for less than ten minutes. The expressionless character models and dull, unemotive voice acting certainly doesn't do it any favors either. My character (quite wisely) states that we should save our mourning for later and get the fuck out of dodge before another horde of skeletons appears - it's not like they attack us every time we stop to talk or anything!

Oh, and as soon as we finished talking, Mom teleported back to the bottom of the cliff despite being right alongside us only seconds before. Hooray for terrible programming.

Anyway, guess what happens next.

Go on, guess.

No, really, do it.


.
.
.
.

Ready for this?

ANOTHER HORDE OF 200 SKELETONS APPEARS AND WE'RE FORCED TO FIGHT!

But lucky for us, the Deus ex Machina dragon is here to save the day, swooping down, bathing the cliff in flame and killing all of them. Then the dragon turns into... someone else we've never seen before! Yes, we're in for the longest, talkiest scene yet that still manages to not explain anything we don't already know. And yet again, the wooden acting and the fact that DeMD is trying her hardest to sound like a Disney villain does not make this any more compelling.

DeM Dragon: Yackity yackity blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak.

Out of boredom at the dry dialog, replete with monotone voicework and the actors' incredibly fake accents vanishing and reappearing from sentence to sentence, I decide to (gasp!) roleplay a bit. Yeah, I know the game isn't built for any actual storytelling outside of thinly-veiled excuses to throw a dozen more monsters in your path every eight seconds, but I came here looking for a Role Playing game, and I'm going to at least pretend that there's one on offer.

After a few quicksaves and reloads reveal that none of my choices have any effect whatsoever (not even garnering an alternate line of dialog from other characters a good 70% of the time), I eventually give up and decide to play a bipolar character by picking random choices every time I get one. So one sentence I'm angry and hostile, the next I'm making bad wisecracks, and the next I'm a stoic hero type. Not that any of it will have any lasting effect on the proceedings - this is a Bioware game, after all. The story events, with maybe one or two minor variations, will always play out the exact same way regardless of your choices. Hell, you can even be a baby-stabbing asshole the whole game and still get the "good guy" ending at the last minute if you make the right choice at the final dialog! Compare that to Fallout, Deus Ex or even Tactics Ogre, where every choice you make has palpable consequences and will radically affect the way you play through the game and what ending you ultimately receive. It's an especially grave sin when you consider that all of those games came out in the late nineties while Dragon Age 2 came out more than a decade later. But I suppose no amount of technological improvement can improve lazy game design and hackneyed writing.

DeM Dragon: Yackity yackity blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak LOOKOUTASKELETON.
*CHOP*
Legolas: Oh no, I've got skeleton blood on me. Now I'm fated to turn into one of them like in Axe Cop.

Now we have the hokey scene from every zombie movie ever where they have to kill one of the cast before he becomes a zombie. Also worth noting is that this is the third forced emotional death scene in almost as many minutes! Was this game written by a human or just a machine that randomly assembles trite cliches into a plotline? Whatever, I don't care. Cue the hokey music as we stab him in the gut (which, unlike every other scene so far, is conspicuously absent of exaggerated Mortal Kombat blood splatter). We then promptly move on to the next scene - those same two unnamed people talking. Again. Since the game doesn't seem interested in naming them or explaining them at all, I've dubbed them "Fat Guy" and "Megaboobs Pimplechin".

Spoony: *Sigh* This demo is just one big fucking Moebius loop - as soon as you think it's done, it just starts all over again! Hey EA, If I wanted a game where all you do is fight endless waves of braindead enemies while contending with some of the most unresponsive controls ever programmed and yet never feel any sense of accomplishment for it, I'd play Dynasty Warriors. At least Koei is up front with the fact that their latest game is a thoughtlessly phoned-in cash cow rather than hyping it up as a "worthy successor" to one of the greatest PC RPGs of all time.

Cue another uncompressed FMV with stolen artwork as we emerge in a completely different area, fighting a completely different set of enemies, with a completely different set of party members, and zero explanation is given as to what led us to this point. There's no point in explaining anyway, because all that's really changed are a few textures - the enemies are the same mindless drones that swarm in and quickly get mowed down (they're just wearing suits and called "Thieves" now), and instead of fighting in a generic barren hillside, we're fighting on a cobblestone road. Within minutes, the whole town square is bathed in blood and my team is none the worse for wear.

Spoony: So... where are the guards? isn't it their JOB to break up these sort of skirmishes in their town? Why are Fat Guy and Megaboobs in my party now? Who are we fighting? Why are we fighting them? You couldn't spare a few lines of narration or about three seconds of that cutscene to fill us in even a little? Or do I have to go digging through the Codex to get filled in on the basic tenets of the fucking plot again?

I suppose I shouldn't ask intelligent questions of this game, since EA's development team has repeatedly proven that their staff consists solely of 13-year-old caffeine-addicted metalheads whose only measure of a game's quality is how many people and monsters get messily splattered within (and the more plot narrative, gameplay and realism sacrificed just to show more guts flying, the better). Not to mention that their marketing department insists that all of their games are designed and marketed toward two very specific people:



Our next stop is some generic temple where we meet... some guy we don't know (our hammiest voiceover job yet, incidentally) who holds a grudge against Megaboobs. Why, you might ask? I don't know, but - holy shit - I actually have the option of asking him what's going on!

Spoony: Plot exposition IN THE GAME ITSELF? Amazing!

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no context to put anything he says in due to the plot being truncated for the demo and further truncated by the hated Codex, so I'm not much wiser for having asked. But it's the thought that counts. Immediate shift back to juvenile mode as Megaboobs rather abruptly tosses a knife into some poor woman's throat, resulting in an exaggerated bloody splatter.

Spoony: Yeah, guys, milk that "M" rating for all its worth. Lord knows it's the only thing your games have going for them, and only then if you're eleven years old and pause the game right before all the violent scenes just to squick your parents out when they enter the room.

Cue yet another boring combat scene. This one would be just as unremarkable as the rest, save for the fact that my character abruptly drops dead for no real reason in the interim. At least, that's what I thought at first. After dispatching the boss, my characters immediately dashed behind my fallen corpse and I discovered the culprit - about seven other bad guys spawned in behind us, got wedged in the doorway like the Three Stooges due to crappy pathfinding AI, and shot my backside full of arrows.

We're not done with the bad AI yet though, oh no. One goon finally breaks free of the group, dashes straight past my fighter, and doesn't even attempt to stop said fighter while he follows behind him and hits him repeatedly in the backside with a gigantic Highlander sword. This would all be hilarious if I didn't know that millions of people were going to plunk down good money for this amateur-level shit in a month and a half.

My hero is magically revived after the battle once more as Megaboobs states she wants to go after some magical Macguffin next, and that she'll be waiting for me to booty call her at the local inn. Gee, I wonder if they just shoehorned that line in so they could validate all of the claims they were making a game with "mature content"? It's certainly not because the characters have shown any particular attachment to one another, or that the game has shown any sign of things like tact, subtlety, and intellect - you know, things that generally imply maturity.

Spoony: But I suppose it's not as bad as "The Witcher", a game where every character jams at least six instances of the word "fuck" into every sentence they speak, makes constant references to sodomy, rape and genital mutilation, and which gives you collectible trading cards every time you put another notch on your character's belt. Yes, I'm serious. And this is supposed to be an "adult-oriented" RPG. Sorry guys, it really undermines the adult focus when everyone in your game curses like a twelve-year-old desperately trying to sound "tough" and one of its primary goals is collecting porn of fictional characters. "Adult" games don't pander to thirteen year olds like that. Stupid, worthless, childish garbage.

Cue closing cinematic, which is just another collage of disjointed scenes that make no sense out of context.

Spoony: Ugh. In terms of gameplay, this is only slightly more bearable than the first game, and that's only because the combat here doesn't drag nearly as much. On every other front, it somehow actually became worse - its overall design and story have nothing substantive to offer (and in fact, take a great many pains to actively insult the player's intelligence). It's a rushed-out, dumbed-down copy of a dumbed-down copy of one of the greatest PC RPGs ever made, and Bioware's staff should be ashamed that they've even allowed their brand to degrade to this point. I honestly doubt they even care, though - who needs to actually expend precious time and effort on their game when they're backed by the EA cartel? You can churn out any piece of crap you want and still enjoy millions of sales and glowing reviews in every gaming publication in existence. Ah, the joys of aggressive advertising. And outright theft.

(Oh, and lecturing people on what constitutes "Mature behavior" while you consistently churn out childish shit like this? Yeah, that's a laugh, EA.)

So if you like dry and poorly acted dialog, painfully generic and predictable storylines, characters with all the depth of a skillet, a development team that desperately tries to shove its game's "M" rating down your throat every ten seconds with gratuitous violence and banal childish content, hours upon hours of tedious combat that requires no planning or strategy whatsoever, AND you're up for a big gamble on whether EA's shitty Download Manager will give you a bad product key or lock you out of your account forever for no reason at all, then Dragon Age 2 is right up your alley! Anyone else should demand something better. Immediately.

But on a final note, our demo concludes with this gem of a line:

"Think like a general, fight like a Spartan"

i don't even need to comment on how laughable that statement is.

 

 

MASS EFFECT 2 IN A NUTSHELL (SHITTLE EDITION): COMMANDER SHEPARD'S SHIP COMES UNDER FIRE FROM A NEVER BEFORE ENCOUNTERED AND BADLY EXPLAINED GROUP OF ENEMIES AND HE GETS REVIVED BY DEUS EX MACHINA INC (ERR, "CERBERUS") WHERE MARTIN SHEEN SENDS HIM ON MORE INANE, REPETITIVE GUNFIGHT MISSIONS AGAINST A GROUP OF CORNY GOLLUM-VOICED LIZARDMEN AND SPOONY IMMEDIATELY GETS BORED AND UNINSTALLS THE GAME.


Spoony: Yeah. Why shoot for the top tier when you can settle for mediocrity in order to cut down development time and widen your profit margin? You've already built up street cred with Baldur's Gate and KOTOR, now you can just sit back, churn out a generic space-themed shooter with light RPG elements, pepper it with dull characters and a generic uninspired plot (80% of which is copy-pasted from development notes into the online manual at the last minute rather than worked into the game itself) and then ship it off to the Satan of publishers, EA. They'll buy up a few million dollars in ad space and positive press and before long you'll see five hundred times the return on your investment and one glowing review after another proclaiming that "THIS IS ANOTHER GAME FOR THE AGES FROM THE COMPANY THAT BROUGHT US KOTOR AND BG2 THEY ARE YOUR JESUS WORSHIP THEM". Then you can just sell 20-minute sidequests as DLC every three months for the next three or four years to make even MORE of a profit with no real effort spent! Yay!

 

 

I don't know why I thought this game might be decent; this series has been completely and irredeemably terrible since it began. But nevertheless, I played Abyss at a friend's house, and boy do I wish I hadn't.

The game can't even start off by doing something right, as the opening cinematic is left completely untranslated - no dubbing or even subtitling is employed. So unless you speak Japanese, enjoy being dropped right into the game with absolutely no clue of what's supposed to be going on!

Cut to our hero, who, even though he hasn't spoken a single line yet, already manages to piss me off eight ways from Sunday:



Yes, that's right. He's sporting a bright red mullet, patched baggy pants, a white trenchcoat that exposes his midriff, a gigantic metal belt buckle and a tube top. It's the anime version of trailer trash. That would be bad enough on its own, but they also have to turn him into the whiniest, most unlikable fucking cunt in all of video games. Yes, even worse than Tidus.

On top of all of this, the game also starts off in the absolute worst of all RPG cliches - rather than simply taking you to a cutscene where we can establish a plot and some characters, you get to fucking wander around the same building, talking to everyone over and over, for fifteen minutes before the game finally relents and lets you move on.

Spoony: Wow, I'm not even a half hour into the game and already I want to take the disc out of the drive and smash it with a tack hammer. You have to suck pretty fucking hard for that to happen.

Between his constant whining over stupid bullshit ("He thinks he can say anything because he's the king. It makes me mad!"), the horrendous voice acting and being forced to spend twenty hours clicking on countless throwaway NPCs over and over again in what can only be described as "pointless, tedious busywork", I lapse into a blind rage long enough to completely forget what happens next. When I come down from it, we're now out in the wilderness and being treated to the game's horrible combat system - all the action takes place on three planes, and you and your enemies can swap between them freely to evade incoming attacks. But like every Tales game, you don't really have to bother with any of that - just get in close to your enemy and mash the attack button until they die. You'll continuously juggle them into a 500-hit combo and give them absolutely no chance to fight back.

Spoony: It's like Guardian Heroes, only with no multiplayer option, challenge, or fun whatsoever!

Now we come to our first town where... our hero doesn't know what a fucking shop is. No, I'm not kidding. He knows that killing monsters drops gold (sorry, "Gald") and evidently knows it has enough value to warrant picking it up and taking it with him, but he doesn't know what it's actually used for.

Spoony: It's not enough that they're sticking me with this whiny redneck asshole in a game with a bad combat system and they're probably going to trap me in a "walk around and talk to everyone" scenario in every single town we come to, now they have to insult my intelligence by telling me, step by step, how a fucking shop works. That's it. I'm done. I can't take anymore. System power off, get me out of here.

Embarassed for the both of us, I contemplate simply destroying the CD right then and there, but reconsider; it may be the worst game I've ever played, but it's technically not my property, and lord knows I don't want to pay to replace the disc and reward Namco with my money in any way, shape or form. So I take a more tactful route and simply hide it in a place he'll never think to look for it - the PSP shelf. As far as I know, it's still there, hiding behind dusty copies of Lumines, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Patapon that got played for a half an hour each and never touched again. Actually, I don't think he's even bothered to look for it, since he's never brought it up. I think I did us both a favor.

Spoony: I usually try to give games a fair chance - I make a point to play for an hour or two (if not more) before I give my verdict - but Tales of the Abyss is just so fucking unbearable that I could barely last 45 minutes. But from what I've seen, I can already tell I'm not missing much. Just to be sure, I looked online too; A quick check on Wikipedia's plot entry only confirms that the rest of the game's plot is a carnival of endless painful stupidity, and a quick scan on Youtube just reveals that the characters heap on a metric fuckton of that cutesy anime kawaii desu bullshit that I absolutely loathe. How does anyone over the age of eight put up with this shit? Seriously.

To paraphrase the great Old Man Murray:

"By the way, I believe Namco makes a case for why it is okay, and even cool, to pirate games. So remember kids, why buy a Tales game when you can just pirate it? Save that hard earned money for someone who deserves it (any other company in the gaming world)."

 

 

Let's nutshell this fuckfest!

Chapter 1: Great Jaggi

Okay, starting up I have my choice of control schemes. I went with Classic Controller A, because B's "Right Stick = Attack" setup sounded a bit too reminiscent of Rise to Honor, a titanic piece of shit on the Playstation 2. A bit of quick experimentation revealed that the Wii Remote + Nunchuck combination wasn't any good either. (Tilt left and press A for weak attack, Right and A for strong attack, tilt upward + A for a forward thrust, then realize that the A button actually does nothing and that every combat boils down to swinging the remote around wildly until you come down with a terrible case of carpal tunnel syndrome!)

I'm given only two choices for quests: "Great Jaggi Hunt", rated at 1 star, and "Ouropeco Hunt", rated at three. I decide for the former at first so I can hopefully get used to the controls and start off on an easy quest to get into the swing of things. I choose the guy with the giant bowgun as a weapon, because honestly, that gun barrel looks to be twice the size of the damn thing's head; one clean shot should leave it decapitated and me a few hundred bucks richer.

Tracking the monster is a pretty easy process; you're given a minimap, and a glowing red dot on it shows you the monster's position. So all I have to do is make a minute-long trek over there. Easy shit. Not to skip ahead here, but this is the only thing they managed to get right.

After reaching the monster, I take a moment to puzzle out how to use my weapon. Okay, so Y uses a potion (whoops, wasted one... oh well, I have nine left), B makes me roll, A doesn't seem to do anything... ah, it's X to equip weapon. Okay. Now what button shoots... Y? Wasn't that the potion button a minute ago? Whatever. Shoot the thing.

Well, that did nothing but piss it off; now it's charged right at me, knocked me on my ass, and fled to another area. So I pursue, shoot it a few more times, and get the exact same result. After repeating this one more time, the thing decides its had enough of me, sends all of its smaller minions after me and they frantically tear me a new asshole while I desperately try to retreat and use a potion, then learn the hard way that your weapon runs out of ammo after only six shots and you have to reload by pressing A. Oh, and you can't do your dodge-roll while you have your weapon out either, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of even having the damn thing. Isn't the general idea of a dodge command to allow the player to quickly evade attacks? Kind of hard when you have to stop, take two seconds to sheathe your weapon, and THEN press the button before it will have the desired effect.

So I cancel the quest, having remembered that guns are almost always useless in JRPGs, and decide to try again with something that hopefully packs a bit more punch. Like... that really big axe. That sounds good. So I find the monster (again), whack it a few times with the upward stab attack (via Y Button) and quickly get mobbed by his smaller minions again. After taking a few hits, I also discover that the A button can do a sweep attack that hits multiple enemies, which allows me to quickly wipe out the little fuckers. Hey, this is going pretty well.

Or at least it is until I hit him a few more times to absolutely no visible effect; he barely bleeds, he doesn't get knocked back, he doesn't shout in pain, NOTHING. In fact, he's still more than able to slap me around with his tail AND call in more backup to chew on me even as I bash him repeatedly in the spine and head with my axe. At this point I'm starting to get low on health, so I sweep his minions out of the way and retreat a safe distance to use a potion.

The problem with THIS is that every time I try, the fucker just runs up, bitchslaps me with his tail and takes off more health than I recover, because not only do I have to put away my weapon (a two second process) and stop dead in my tracks to use a potion (ditto), I THEN have to continue staying completely vulnerable to attack while my character slowly tosses the empty bottle aside, raises his arms into the air and cheers himself on. It becomes clear at this point that my hunter is Wimp Lo, deliberately trained wrong as a joke. Or perhaps Dan Hibiki.

So after getting hauled back to the village on a cart that looks like something out of the Flintstones, I decide to see if I can buy any better potions or heavier weapons. Nope. In fact, I can't talk to anyone. Oh, but pressing Minus brings up an item menu, where I discover that I have some Mega Potions. But how do I equip them? The menu only gives me the option to drop them or move them around the list.

Oh, maybe that "L" button under the icon is a clue. Yep, it brings up a window with some items. Now how do I cycle? It's not the D-pad, the left stick or even the right stick... oh, it's A and Y. Rather nonintuitive, but whatever, I've got some Mega Potions equipped; maybe these will work better. Let's find that fucker again.

On the way there, I discover that hitting the Plus key (Pause in most games) does a slow upward slash attack. Is this my power move? It sure looks like it. Guess I'll find out when I get there.

Okay, there's the bastard. And sure enough, my Plus attack is the only one to inflict some visible damage to the guy - he actually flies back and winces for a moment! So I do it again. Nothing; he just keeps attacking. And again. And again! Apparently it was a one-shot deal. Kind of shitty. But hey, at least I can recover more health than I lose now, even if I do get hit again during the unnecessarily drawn out process of using a potion. After a countless number of sword whacks, the bastard finally shows visible signs of pain and injury - and promptly runs away... through a solid wall. So not only does he have plenty of time to escape and (probably) recover health, but hitting him as he does so is useless because he's too fast to catch up to and he doesn't get stunned.

So I look at the included poster for hints, and I find out the axe can apparently also turn into a powerful sword. I'm not sure what the point of that is since you can just choose a sword as one of your starting weapons, but hey, I may as well give it a shot. After fumbling around with the buttons for a bit, I find the transform button, which makes me move really slowly. Well, I have played a lot of Team Fortress 2, so maybe this is a good sign; the rough equivalent to the Heavy revving up his weapon in preparation of unleashing an unstoppable hail of death.

So after (very slowly) making my way to the Jaggi's latest hiding place, I unleash the fury of my sword with a few Plus attacks, which, once again, results in no stun and hardly any sign of injury. But I'm running low on potions and the game's just informed me that I have less than five minutes left to complete my task, so I guess it's do-or-die time. After a while my sword runs out of ammo (uh... what?) and turns back into an axe, but by that point it's too late and the bastard finally decides he's had enough and falls over in defeat. After a few more sweep attacks clean up his minions, the mission gets declared a success and I collect my reward of... a plug for a game I've already had to preorder to get this demo disc. Yay.

Chapter 2: Ouropeco

Now I decide that it's time to take on our second quest, Ouropeco, who looks like some kind of retarded giant duck. I elected to pick the great sword this time; turning our big axe into a big sword seemed to have pretty good results last time around, so why not just start with a big sword, right? The description also tells me something about an unstoppable combination attack; again, sounds pretty good. Stunning the boss monster is nearly impossible, so I may as well pick a weapon that lets me dish out a lot of damage and prevents me from being knocked back while doing it.

So after a short trek to find the bastard, I run up to him... only to watch him fly up out of my reach and flee to another area. So I follow him again - same thing. And again. Same thing! Do I ever get to FIGHT this guy, or what?

Well, after wasting about five minutes of my allotted 20 minute quest time, he finally lands, allowing me to run up and hit him a few times. Or not, as he hocks a gigantic loogie on me, knocking me down before I can even get close. But I do eventually close the gap and stab him in the knees. As with my last fight, this does little outside of pissing him off, and he summons more of the mini-Jaggis the last boss sent after me. I was expecting mini-Ouropecos, but I guess the demo's too low-budget to afford those. Not a huge deal; let's just roll with it.

So after a few waves of those little bastards get dispatched, I continue to run up and whack away at him; again, he doesn't get stunned or slowed in the slightest, but one small nudge from him is enough to send me flipping back ten feet while my health meter turns purple and my character begins to spark like a damaged robot, and he continues to call in more and more monsters just to be a gigantic pain in the ass. So I decide to unleash the aforementioned special move, which I eventually puzzle out being tied to the R button. Yeah, R. Not Plus, as it was with the axe-sword. It's like they just mapped commands to random buttons, paying no heed to the fact that they did something completely different when you were using a different weapon, had your weapon sheathed, or are redundant to things already mapped (the D-pad AND right stick both control the camera, rather than one of them, say, scrolling inventory items). It's really sloppy game design, to say the least.

Sure enough, the R button seems to be the sword's one-shot knockback attack, which I can continue to spam to unleash a lengthy and (allegedly) powerful combo. But the "unstoppable" effect certainly doesn't work as advertised, as he managed to slap me out of it mid-combo and send me back to the village on a Flintstones stretcher once again.

What's with that thing anyway? If you can make bowguns and transforming weapons, shouldn't you at least have stretchers made of wood instead of stone and dinosaur bones? Whatever. I equip my Mega Potions and jump back into the fray.

Oh god, he's back to this run-down-the-clock routine again. So after dicking around to the point where I now have well under ten minutes to kill him and he has yet to even show any sign of weakening, he finally decides to stand and fight again. But after only a few hits, I get informed that for no real reason my weapon's effectiveness has been decreased; sure enough, the little Jaggis aren't even dying in one hit anymore. So what am I supposed to do?

After getting Flintstoned back to the village (again), I check my inventory and find a whetstone. Okay, I guess I need to sharpen my sword back up after I use it too much. Why that wasn't the case with the axe-sword is a mystery I'll never understand, but at this point I really don't care anymore. I just want to get this fucking demo over with.

...Alright, I'm good to go again. Back to the fight.

Oh the way there, I checked my inventory again and also found that I had some bombs. Thinking that maybe those could help (or at least STUN the thing momentarily where a giant sword repeatedly piercing its neck couldn't), I equipped them. Once I reach the monster again, I ready a bomb, toss it and... it does nothing. Absolutely nothing. Wow, thanks game. Why not just give me a handful of pebbles to throw too?

The third flurry of slashes-to-the-throat seems to have been the last straw, because NOW he's sunk to the ultimate low - calling in Great Jaggi again! I shit you not. The guy I just killed after more than fifteen minutes of hard work is, with no explanation, back from the grave and helping the guy I'm already having trouble even doing any noticeable damage to. Needless to say, they quickly rape me, the game arbitrarily decides to enforce a three-knockdown rule, terminates the quest, and sends me back to the same splash screen I was "rewarded" with for completing the last quest. Then I'm brought back to the select screen and asked if I want to try again. Fuck. That.

Spoony: This game blows. All of the control options are clumsy and unintuitive, combat has no discernible strategy outside of brute-force repetition, even the weakest monsters take way too long to kill, and I honestly can't imagine it being fun even with a group of people helping you out. Maybe I'm just missing something, or maybe you can get weapon upgrades and items that make these quests easier in the full version; I don't know. But the objective of a demo is to convince me that the full version of the game is worth my money, and this one has failed in that task. Hard. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get a refund on my preorder.

Do not buy Monster Hunter Tri.

 

 

So, here's some writing about Final Fantasy 13, inspired by Spoony's Games in a Nutshell reviews. This is the latest game in the Final Fantasy series, and so far, I'm not really impressed with anything but the graphics. Off we go!

You start off seeing a train travelling through a few places. It's carrying a bunch of prisoners in cloaks, being watched by a bunch of soldiers. Two prisoners seem to be up to something.

Lightning: I'm the main character. I look like Ashe and a female Cloud Strife. I'm also an ex-soldier and use a sword gunblade, though plain old guns would be a far better choice.
Sazh: I'm another main character. I carry a baby chocobo in my afro, and I use two pistols. I'm here to help you, I guess?
Lightning: Quiet. I have to do some eye candy fighting.

Lightning proceeds to kick the crap out of the soldiers while defying gravity and physics, which frees the prisoners. You get some eye candy FMV of what looks like a city, fighter jets (dragons?) shooting the train, and Lightning looking around. She blasts a fighter jet dragon with a rocket launcher that happened to be found by Sazh. The train is then attacked by a giant, flying scorpion robot.

Sazh: What the hell are we supposed to do here?!
Lightning: We attack it by going through a bunch of tutorials, of course.
Sazh: Can't we skip the tutorials?
Lightning: Yeah, but it'll result in frustration.

Azul Rojo: I feel sorry for any poor bastard who tries to play this without an instruction manual or tutorials. This battle system is a bit painful, and you can't flee from enemies.

Lightning and Sazh kick the robot's ass. It falls into a gaping pit which spans the bottom of the city, for some reason.

Sazh: Yay! We win! So, I'm going to follow you. Oh, and I can talk to the baby chocobo in my hair.
Lightning: Don't really care. Oh, by the way, here's another tutorial. This one's about the camera.

Azul Rojo: A tutorial. For using the camera, which is controlled with the right analog stick. Oddly, it and character movement handle like crap. Skipping this "tutorial."

After several more battles and gravity-defying jumps, Lightning and Sazh reach a bridge, only to see it blown to smithereens. Lightning attempts to fly away, but Sazh pulls her down, which results in him getting beat up a bit.

Sazh: Hey! I said I'm following you, so stop hitting me and let me go with you! I can't possibly get out of here by myself!
Lightning: What the hell? You broke my magic flying machine gizmo. Dick.
Sazh: Hey, we can just use that elevator bridge over there.
Lightning: So why didn't you use it in the first place?

The two of them get onto the bridge, then run into more soldiers and Boba Fett an officer.

Officer: SURRENDER SO THINGS DON'T GET UGLY.
Sazh: What's that mean?
Lightning: He wants to kill us. Duh.
Officer: DIEDIEDIEDIE! *charges at Lightning*
Lightning: Guess what?
Sazh: Another tutorial?
Lightning: That's right.

Enemies get their asses kicked, of course.

Sazh: So, what's your deal, anyway?
Lightning: I'm going after the fal'Cie. Happy you followed me?
Sazh: I didn't have a choice.

Azul Rojo: So, if you don't know who the fal'Cie are, that's okay. There's no mention of them until this point, unless you looked at the instruction manual, read the datalog, or loaded a save game. The datalog is an encyclopedia overloaded with information on enemies, game setting, and plot. Didn't Star Ocean 3 do this already? Also, while you're loading a saved game, the screen displays bits about the plot that weren't mentioned during the game. Honestly, Square-Enix. What happened to explaining things in an interesting way during the story? Why do I have to load my save file or go through an encyclopedia to learn these things? Bah. On with the game.

Scene changes to a bunch of people fighting soldiers, and some guy babbling about certain people in Cocoon being relocated to Pulse, the world below Cocoon. He mentions that their sacrifice will keep Cocoon safe and peaceful, and keep others from being exposed to the dangers in the lower world. The guy continues babbling, but then someone kicks in a nearby radio, ending the speech.

Yuj: Screw that. Guy's full of shit, obviously.
Snow: Yeah, now calm down. By the way, I'm another main character. I have no relation to Seifer in Kingdom Hearts II, even though I look like a much older version of him. I punch things. Yuj, you get to stay here and help these civilians because you're an NPC.
Yuj: Okay!

Snow goes to meet up with some more of his allies. They complain for a bit until Snow shows up and gives them a pep talk. Wakka and Lulu look-alikes Gadot and Lebreau join him to fight off some enemies, then help some civilians about to be exiled.

Snow: So, is everyone okay?
Civilians: Guess so.
Snow: Good. We'll clear a path for y-
Civilians: No! We want to fight, too!
Snow: Oh, okay. Cool! Grab a weapon!
Lady: Hey, I've got my kid Hope with me. I'm gonna help you fight, too. Moms are tough.
Snow: Oh, that's cool. Here, have a gun. Okay, one weapon left. Who wants it?
Hope: No way! I'm totally scared, being a young kid/main character and all.
Vanille: Hey, I'm an obligatory cute girl with a happy attitude! I'm also on the young side. I'll take the gun!
Snow: Uh...really?
Vanille: Bang! Hee hee!
Snow: Okay, then! You look after these people. The rest of us will go kick ass!

Snow and his allies continue forward, and meet up with the civilians who pushed ahead. Snow and his party fight off a huge robot dog, and then a huge warship comes to attack. Most of the civilians are slaughtered.

Snow: Well, shit!
Gadot: Yeah, we're screwed now.
Snow: No, wait! There's a rocket launcher conveniently lying in the warship's path!

Snow jumps for the rocket launcher, but fails to pick it up. He's about to get shot, but Hope's mom got the rocket launcher and shot the warship. An explosion then rips up the bridge, knocking her flying, and sending several people falling to their deaths. Snow manages to catch Hope's mom; however, they're both stuck dangling from a piece of metal sticking out of the bridge.

Snow: Crap, now I'm hanging off a ledge, and I don't know if I can hold on to you, too.
Hope's Mom: I'm gonna die, anyway. Keep my kid safe, and bring him home, okay?

Hope's mom falls into the pit, along with more people. Snow loses his grip on the bridge, and also falls. Hope and Vanille watch from a distance as this happens.

Hope: What just happened?!
Vanille: ... *smacks Hope*
Hope: Ow!
Vanille: Come on. We have to go.

Azul Rojo: So, we have more falling into pits to split up the party, and a ton of tragic death to help with character development. Snow just relived a certain moment in FF7. Way to go, Square-Enix. My faith in this game is quickly failing.

The game goes back to Lightning and Sazh, who are on some sort of airship, discussing the big attack they just saw.

Sazh: That was a massacre.
Lightning: Of course.
Sazh: What?
Lightning: The sanctum conjured up a Purge to eliminate a threat. Why carry a danger all the way to Pulse? Get rid of it here.
Sazh: Did you know this was gonna happen?
Lightning: No. The Purge was PSICOM Troops, not the Guardian Corps.
Sazh: Whatever. Soldiers are soldiers. Pulse fal'Cie and their l'Cie are enemies of the state.

Their conversation continues until they're attacked by a flying bot. Ass-kicking ensues. When the bot is defeated, a siren goes off in the distance. An announcement blasts over loud speakers, telling the deportees to surrender immediately. A big
ass machine comes down from the very top of the city. The scene changes, and you see Snow climbing on some rubble. He's looking for someone named Serah. Lightning and Sazh are watching the big ass machine.

Sazh: Just what you were looking for.
Lightning: Yeah. Right in there.
Sazh: The Pulse fal'Cie. Huh.

Over to Vanille, Hope, and some other civilians who are also looking at the machine. Vanille throws off the exile robe she was wearing, then giggles and smiles at Hope. She then picks up a gun and hands it to Hope.

Vanille: Here!
Hope: Uh...
Vanille: *hugs Hope* It's too much, isn't it? Face it later! Ciao!
Hope: Huh? Uh, hey! Wait!

Hope and Vanille run off. Scene goes back to the big ass machine for a moment, then back to Lightning and Sazh.

Sazh: How're the Pulse fal'Cie different from the Sanctum's? I'll keep wondering about that.
Baby Chocobo: Kweh!
Lightning: Jump time!
Sazh: What?
Lightning: Eye candy and physics warping stuff, of course.

Lightning jumps, then snaps her fingers to activate her flying magic thing. Instead of flying, though, she somehow uses the magic to break her fall.

Sazh: Damn. Well, I guess we can do that too, even though we don't posses the sparkly magic thing.
Baby Chocobo: Kweh!

Sazh tries to hang off the platform, but slips. His fall is broken by a platform of electricity that Lightning left behind.

Azul Rojo: Wasn't that magic flying thing broken just 10 minutes ago? And how the fuck does lightning magic break a fall and help you fly? This would've made more sense if the lady used wind magic. But, Square-Enix hasn't liked to make sense lately.

Back to Snow, who's helping Gardot get up by slapping him in the face. Dead people are everywhere on the platform.

Gadot: What about the others?
Snow: *sigh*
Gadot: They're not dead, right?
Snow: Of course not.
Gadot: Dude, get a grip. What's wrong?
Snow: Trying to remember who I'm supposed to look after. That woman who died said to "get him home."

Suddenly, a huge piece of the big ass machine breaks off. Snow tosses Gadot a gun, and Gadot promptly aims it at him.

Snow: What the hell?
Gadot: What are you afraid of? You're the hero. Your bride-to-be is over there. Shouldn't you go pick her up?
Snow: Oh, right! Hey, those ships over there will be our ride.

Azul Rojo: Still no idea what that big ass machine is, so I'm just going to keep calling it that. I probably could find out by looking at the datalog, but fuck that. I'm going to play this like any other RPG: I'm only going to look at the datalog for enemy data and gameplay tips. I'll not be looking at plot-related info, because I shouldn't have to in the first place. On a side note, I played FF12 for a bit today. I can now confirm FF13's character and camera controls are delayed and slippery. And no, it's not the controller. It's fully charged, and isn't even a year old.

Snow and Gadot plow reach the ships, then cruise around and catch up with their other allies. Hope and Vanille soon show up, and Snow notices Hope.

Vanille: Didn't you have something to tell him?
Hope: Yeah.
Vanille: Let's go, then! Go go go!
Hope: I'm going to be all scared and everything.
Vanille: Okay, I'll call him over!

Snow flies off before Vanille can get his attention. Gadot left a ship behind, and Vanille and Hope take a look at it.

Vanille: Hey, do you know how to fly this?
Hope: I guess so. Most kids can do this sort of thing in these situations, anyway.
Vanille: Oh yeah! Well, in you go! Now let's go that big machine.
Hope: If we go in there, that thing could make us l'Cie.
Gadot: Hey, what are you two doing?!
Hope: Well, time to go!

Hope and Vanille take off before Gadot can do anything. They head right for the big ass machine. They soon crash, and the ship is ruined.

Vanille: I guess it's just us here.
Hope: Well, even soldiers know not to go near the fal'Cie. If you become a Pulse l'Cie, you're finished.
Vanille: Well, I'm just going to be happy some more, and act like I don't care!

Vanille finds a staff/whip thing, and starts dancing around with it, which attracts the attention of a robot guard dog. The two of them proceed to kick the bot's ass. They soon find Snow's ship, and start talking again.

Hope: You know we're going to be in deep trouble if anyone finds us, right?
Vanille: La la la, happy happy!
Hope: Do you even know what could happen? Do you care? Pulse is hell on earth!
Vanille: Yeah, yeah! fal'Cie are bad. Hanging around them curses you, and then no one wants to be near you. Then you become an l'Cie, and have to go to Pulse. See? I actually know and care! We'll be fine, though!

The two of them soon hear Snow looking for Serah. The scene switches to Snow, who is busy searching another room.

Azul Rojo: So, two kids bust into a place that most people wouldn't dare go near. One of them is having a great time, and doesn't seem to care that things could go really, really bad. The way the game's going so far, you KNOW things are going to end badly. Current amount of faith I have in this game: 80% and falling.

Snow gets to a room-changing platform. Lightning and Sazh are busy elsewhere, trying to open a glowing, red door.

Lightning: This is all my fault.
Sazh: Uh, what?
Lightning: Cover your ears.
Sazh: Gonna blast the door open? Okay! *ducks and plugs ears*
Lightning: No. I'm going to say I'm sorry and beg it to open. *door opens*
Sazh: Eh? Woah, what'd you do?
Lightning: Shut up and have a tutorial.

Meanwhile, Snow is busy in another room, also fighting enemies. He eventually gets on an elevator that takes him lower into the building. Vanille and Hope hear him yelling on the elevator, but still have no clue where he is.

Hope: What a dick. He's calling himself a "hero."
Vanille: He's coming this way. Don't you still need to talk to him?
Hope: I don't know what to say.
Vanille: Well, then how about we just run away?
Hope: We can't, because that would end the story. Hey, why does your accent keep coming and going?
Vanille: Don't know. Let's keep going.

They soon come across a batch of weird-looking monsters with a glowy, red eye thing on their chests.

Hope: What are these things?!
Vanille: Cie'th. This is what happens to l'Cie who don't finish tasks given to them by fal'Cie.
Hope: Well, we're screwed since they're surrounding us.
Snow: ARRRRRRGH!

Enemy ass kicking ensues.

Snow: How did you get here? You should leave. Actually, go hide somewhere and keep quiet. I'll come get you when I find Serah.
Vanille: Who's Serah?
Snow: My future wife. She's a Pulse l'Cie. She's with the fal'Cie, so I'm going to find her.
Hope: Why the hell are you helping a l'Cie?! Don't you know they're the enemy?! How can you save them and not...not...that's insane!
Snow: Well, I've gotta do something. I'll be back.
Vanille: Should we wait for him?
Hope: Screw him! Why's this happening to me?! Mom and I were visiting a city in Cocoon, and then people found a fal'Cie! Then we got thrown on that train, and because of Snow, mom's.... If you haven't noticed, I'm the new whiney kid.
Snow: Oh, wait. I probably shouldn't leave kids alone. Let's go!
Vanille: Come on, Hope. Let's go with him. Oh, and you should talk to him.

Back to Sazh and Lightning.

Sazh: Did you come here for a fight?
Lightning: My sister, and she's a Pulse l'Cie. The fal'Cie has her captive somewhere, so I'm going to find her.
Sazh: What'd she have to do? Not "blow up Cocoon," right?
Lightning: I didn't ask.

A door opens, and Cie'th are on the other side.

Sazh: Oh, just so you know, any l'Cie that don't complete their tasks turn into those things. And you can't turn a l'Cie back into a human. So, even if your sister does complete her focus, she's screwed.
Lightning: Oh, so you're saying anyone who becomes a l'Cie should be wiped off of Cocoon? People like you started this Purge junk. You racist.

Azul Rojo: So, I run past a bunch of Cie'th, and end up running into 2 big fuckers at the end of a hall. My ass gets kicked, and I'm not even 4 hours into the game. You might be thinking I'm too low-levelled, but here's the thing: enemies do NOT award EXP or Gil. You do get fully healed at the end of each fight, but no way of levelling up at this point in the game. Got through the two bastards on a 2nd try, at least. So, yeah...rooms full of enemies serve no purpose, other than they MIGHT drop items for you. Great, Square-Enix. My faith in this game has fallen even more.

Lightning and Sazh eventually find Serah, who's laying unconscious on the floor.

Lightning: Okay, let's go!
Sazh: That girl's a l'Cie. She's got a brand on her arm. *goes for a pistol*
Lightning: No shit! What'd I tell you just 5 minutes ago?
Sazh: Well, she's an enemy now. And if she fails her Focus, you know what'll happen.
Lightning: So, killing her is a mercy, then?
Serah: Oh, hey. I'm awake now.
Snow: Serah! Let's get out of here!
Lightning: Hey, piss off, buddy. I'm taking her home.
Snow: Calm down, sis.
Lightning: Don't call me that. This is all your fault, you know!
Serah: You can save and protect us all. Save Cocoon.
Lightning: THAT'S your Focus?
Snow: We'll do whatever we can, okay?

Serah transforms into a crystal.

Vanille: Huh? Why's that happening?
Hope: She fulfilled her Focus, so she turns into a crystal and gains eternal life.
Snow: Sweet dreams, Serah.
Lightning: She's dead, you idiot!
Snow: No, she's not. Remember that legend? Crystallized people gain eternal life! And we're supposed to get married, so she's not dead!
Lightning: *punches Snow* SHE'S DEAD. LIVE WITH IT, DICKHEAD.

The entire room starts to shake. Outside, several fighter dragon jets are moving the big ass machine, and plan to destroy it. The army starts firing all their weapons at it, causing it to start crumbling. Back inside, the room is starting to crumble. The shaking eventually stops, and a door behind the group opens. Everyone soon goes through the door. They wind up in a room with a giant machine, which is the fal'Cie.

Snow: Serah finished her mission, so let her go!
fal'Cie: . . .
Snow: I'll be your l'Cie!
Lightning: Oh, fuck this. It doesn't care!

Lightning tries to slash the machine, but her gunblade does nothing to it. The fal'Cie's true form is soon revealed: a huge robot with crystal parts. Lightning, Snow, and Sazh attack it.

Azul Rojo: Gee, another game over! If the party leader dies, that's it. Your allies don't use potions, so you have to have Lightning use them. And due to the enemy smashing you nigh constantly with attacks that hit for 40 to 80 damage each time, you're going to be popping a lot of potions. It doesn't help that Lightning is a strong attacker, and you have to use her as a healer. Who the fuck designed this battle system, and why are people saying it's so much fun? Yet more over-hyped bullcrap.

When the fal'Cie is defeated, Lightning, Sazh, and Snow find themselves floating around a dark room. The fal'Cie has grown even larger. It binds everyone with energy chains, then brands them as l'Cie. The fal'Cie explodes, causing the big ass machine to fall into the water and crystallize it. Eye candy FMVs of a party and Snow proposing to Serah follow. Snow wakes up from his dream, and finds that he and the others are on Lake Bresha, which is now crystal.

Sazh: How the hell did we end up here?
Lightning: I don't know.
Vanille: How are we alive?
Snow: Serah saved us!
Lightning: Shut up! It's your fault she's dead!
Sazh: Oh shit! Enemies!

Snow blocks an attack aimed at Lightning, and kicks the enemy's ass with a burst of energy.

Snow: The hell?
Hope: You used magic! l'Cie power! Well, shit! We're all l'Cie now!
Lightning: Right. Oh, it's tutorial time.

Azul Rojo: Congrats, Square. I think this it the biggest number of tutorials you've crammed into the first 4 hours of a game! So, my characters can change "roles" now, even mid-battle. Not so fun changing things mid-battle, since the action doesn't pause while you're deciding what you want.

Snow: So, we really are l'Cie.
Sazh: Guess so.
Vanille: Yeah, me too. Have a close up of my thigh!
Hope: Why me? You guys suck! Leave me alone! It's all Snow and Serah's fault!
Snow: Shut up, kid! Er, sorry.
Vanille: It's okay! Everything will be fine! La la la, happy happy!
Lightning: So, how do we complete a Focus if we don't know what it is?
Vanille: I think I saw it.
Lightning: What?
Sazh: That's how a Focus works. Fal'Cie just give you a glimpse about what to do. Er...That's what legends say, anyway.
Lightning: Hey, whiney. What'd you see?
Hope: Uh...I saw a towering-
Sazh: Wait, did we all have the same dream?
Lightning & Snow: Ragnarok.
Sazh: Yep. Same dream.
Hope: That was our Focus? How do we figure that out?
Vanille: That's the hard part. Fal'Cie only give us a hint. We have to figure out what to do with it.
Sazh: So, we're technically enemies of Cocoon. So, are we supposed to--
Snow: We have to protect Cocoon.
Vanille: Why's that?
Snow: Serah told us. Let's work together! Oh, I'm gonna go find Serah!
Vanille: Wait for meeee!
Lightning: Hey, tutorial time again.

Azul Rojo: Wow! I can level up now! About fucking time. Wait a minute. HP +20 slot? Strength +4 slot? Oh, fucking damn it. The Sphere Grid? Really? Well, it uses points this time. But you can't just dump points into slots. You actually use them up while moving from slot to slot. This is a pain in the ass to use. And each character has to develop battle roles separately! Wow, Square-Enix. You went with the License Point system and normal levelling for FFXII, which worked nicely and was easy to learn. Now, you've brought back the Sphere Grid, but mashed it together with the LP system and a limited job system? Fucking hell. *RAGE QUIT*

What? You want to know more? Go on YouTube and watch a playthrough. Or go rent it.

 

 

Yeah, I'm doing another game I actually like; the first RPG I ever played and completed, in fact. Because Phantasy Star II deserves some company in the Nutshell section that isn't ass on toast.

King of Alefgard: Descendant of Erdrick, thou art the only one that can defeat the Dragonlord. Now go forth!
Hero: I'd love to, but I'm kind of trapped in this room by a magic door. Come to think of it, so are you. How did I even get in here?
King of Alefgard: Take my treasure chests so that thou can escape and buy some equipment!
Hero: I'm on a big quest to save the world from an evil fiend and you couldn't spare more than a torch and some chump change? Well, I guess if this game was easy, it wouldn't be any fun.

This early on, the hero is a gigantic wimp, and has to take a break every 3 or 4 fights to rest off all the damage he's taking, which the game charges you for each time (of course). But once you gain the Heal spell and figure out that talking to the magician guy in the castle restores your MP to full at no cost, the inns become pretty pointless.

This stage of the game is pretty much just a gigantic grinding session to earn levels and buy better gear, because almost every area you need to complete is blocked off by magic doors, and you don't find any more keys until you're strong enough to survive a trip through a tunnel to the southern island, and then make the perilous trek to another town where you can finally buy the damn things. There's a side-quest or two to sort out on the way there to keep it from becoming too monotonous, at least.

On the return trek...

Hero: Hey, I've got these keys now. I wonder what that door in the tunnel on the way here has behind it.
Dragon: ROAAAAARRRRRR
Hero: Ohhhh SHIT!

The hero is reduced to charcoal, but the King is kind enough to bring him back from the afterlife to continue his quest. But only after extorting half of his gold from him.

King: Didn't you know? That 120 gold wasn't a gift, but a loan! And I make all of my loans at 13,000% interest!
Hero: You're... kind of a douche, dude.
King: But a rich douche!

It's at this point that you venture into the locked doors in the king's castle and realize that there's a key shop right behind his throne room.

Hero: Why could he not just loan me another key so I could save myself a lot of time and effort? What a cheapskate!

Actually, it's a pretty elegant, if shoehorned, way to get you prepared for what lies WITHIN said dungeons - the enemies would stomp you flat if you tried going in before level 10 or so. So you venture deep into Garinham's dungeon and find a Silver Harp, which - get this - summons enemies whenever you play it!

Hero: What was the point of that? I've already got enough random bad guys trying to kill me!
Nintendo Power: Don't you pay attention to the villagers? Some guy on the other end of the island wants it!
Hero: You mean that unlike 98% of all RPGs ever made, the villagers actually have vital, important things to say? Amazing! Why didn't this carry over into 80% of all later RPGs, exactly?

So you talk to the guy and swap him the Silver Harp for the Staff of Rain, which you vaguely remember being one of the key items you need to get to the Dragonlord's keep. Nifty.

Anyway, you venture south for a while longer (after some more level grinding) and come to Hauksness, a ruined town full of really powerful and supremely annoying monsters. Rooting around doesn't reveal much until you venture into the burned out ruins of a shop, with a tree behind it where a knight with a really big axe attacks you.

Hero: Jeez. This guy hits like a damn truck, and the Sleep spell, on the off chance it works, only knocks him out for turn or two. Must be some good shit back here.

Sure enough, you find the Armor of Erdrick, the best of its kind in the game. Not only does it make you immune to poison swamps and magic barriers, but it also lets you regenerate your HP. Sweet!

That done, you try to venture even further south to Cantlin to load up on more awesome gear, which is an unnecessarily long path north, then west, then south, then east across a giant swamp, then north again through a maze of mountains. It would be a really short trip if you had a boat or an airship, but unfortunately that hadn't become an RPG mainstay yet in 1986. Just before you enter Cantlin however, your path is barred by a Golem, who hits like a bullet train and takes no damage from spells!

King: Oh, hello again. I brought you back from the dead and stole half the money you were going to spend on equipment to hopefully kill the Dragonlord with and save my kingdom!
Hero: Dick.

So, anyway, you do a little research and find out you're supposed to use the Fairy Flute you found in Kol to knock the guy out, then beat him up while he's asleep.

Hero: Why couldn't I just use the Sleep spe-- nevermind. I guess they had to work a puzzle in somehow.

Killing a bunch of Goldmen to make up for what the king pilfered, you buy a shiny Silver Shield and a Flame Sword for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 bucks a pop. Now that pretty much every enemy in the game is helpless before your might, you venture back to the tunnel to teach that dragon a lesson.

Gwaelin: Oh, hello. I'm the king's daughter that he mentioned in passing when you first began your quest!
Hero: Well, that's convenient. Should we go back to the castle?
Gwaelin: Yes, but you must carry me the entire way!
Hero: Wha... why?
Gwaelin: Because I am unnecessarily lazy!

You do just that (although it is slightly amusing to lug her around for the next few hours of the game just for the hell of it), and your reward is... Gwaelin's love. Both in a literal sense and in a surreal metaphysical sense, as you get an item in your inventory called "Gwaelin's Love". Using it results in her giving you your current coordinates, but only after you sit through a lengthy dialog about how much she loves you that never changes and cannot be skipped. But you just have to put up with it because you need this information to solve one of the game's biggest puzzles.

So anyway, you get back to the quest of trying to find the three key items to get to the Dragonlord's castle, learning that one is in a small shrine south of Rimuldar guarded by a wizard guy.

Wizard: Thou claim to be the descendant of Erdrick. Hast thou any proof?
Hero: What, seriously? I have his ARMOR. That's not enough?
Nintendo Power: You need the Amulet of Erdrick!
Hero: Well, where the hell do I find that?!
Nintendo Power: 70 South by 40 East.
Hero: Oh boy.

We already know that Gwaelin's Love is the key to solving this puzzle, since it gives your coordinates relative to Castle Alefgard and all. However, I still got stuck on this puzzle because I kept trying to get to 40 WEST, which is three spaces into the ocean off the western coast. I searched everywhere for a boat, looked for a way to get past the wizard for the item he had, hoping that would somehow allow me to get to it, scoured back issues of Nintendo Power, and checked every villager in every town three times over thinking I'd missed something. I agonized over this for close to two weeks until I finally realized I read the directions wrong! (Hey, I was seven years old at the time, cut me a break.)

Anyway, rooting through that gigantic swamp you had to pass through on the way to Cantlin eventually yields the amulet. Hooray!

Wizard: Thou claim to be the descendant of Erdrick. Hast thou any proof?
Hero: Here's the amulet. That enough proof for you, chief?
Wizard: Well, I was going to give you this neat item, but you need the Stones of Sunlight first.
Hero: Well, where the hell do I find those?

Wondering if that random villager with the same line of dialog might have the other item, he returns to Rimuldar.

Villager: Thou claim to be the descendant of Erdrick. Hast thou any proof?
Hero: Yeah, right here. See? Medallion of Erdrick!
Villager: Thou claim to be the descendant of Erdrick. Hast thou any proof?
Hero: I just showed you my medallion, dickface. Acknowledge me as Erdrick's descendant!
Villager: Thou claim to be the descendant of Erdrick. Hast thou any proof?
Hero: Oh, fuck you.

Retracing his steps, he talks to random villagers and learns that the stones are hidden in Castle Alefgard. However, turning the place upside-down for half an hour earns you... nothing.

Hero: Where are the damn things? This place is two screens wide by two screens tall, it can't possibly be that well hidden!

After painstakingly searching the place tile by tile, you find that they're hidden in a secret room along the RIGHT EDGE of the castle, just south of the key shop, behind that door you need a magic key for. You need to walk south from the shop along the edge of the moat, being careful not to walk too far to the right and exit to the world map, because if you do that you have to start all over again.

Hero: Why couldn't I just see and approach this room from the outside? I mean, I know it's a puzzle and all, but this just seems a little contrived even by mid-80s standards.

So anyway, after all that effort, you finally have the two items the wizard guy wanted.

Wizard: I say something cryptic and the screen FLICKERS DRAMATICALLY! Oh, and have this Rainbow Drop.
Hero: O...kay. The guy who wanted the Silver Harp just kind of vanished into the ether after we made the trade, but that works too.

Equipped with the Rainbow Drop, we can now bridge the path to the Dragonlord's keep. And when I say "bridge", it's very literal; after a psychedelic light show, it creates a bridge for you.

Hero: See, this is another example of why the king should just build a boat. I could sail the whole two tiles across the river south of Alefgard and get right to his castle and skip all this magical item fetch quest mumbo-jumbo!

Anyway, you root around in this oddly abandoned castle and find a hidden staircase behind the throne, leading into the biggest dungeon in the game. It's also full of dragons, knights, wizards, and basically every super tough generic villain imaginable. It's also got a few misleading paths in it, which is actually kind of a rarity in this game.

Ironically, one of these leads you to Erdrick's Sword, the bane of all evil!

Hero: Why the hell would the villain have the ONE WEAPON that can defeat him in his castle? Why would he not just, you know, destroy it or toss it into the ocean or something? Hell, at least Ganon hid the silver arrows away in an obscure hidden room deep in his fortress so you'd have to go well out of your way and spend a significant amount of time finding them!

The other throw-off path leads to a neverending hallway, which I tried to go down for about twenty minutes before catching on. Again, I blame it on being seven years old.

So after backtracking and finding another route to follow, you come to the bottom of the Dragonlord's dungeon, which unlike every floor before it is fully lit and free of random enemies. You can loot his storeroom too if you want, but it's not really worth it at this stage of the game since all he has in there is a torch, a handful of gold and a cursed belt.

Dragonlord: Join me, young Skywalker, and we will rule the world together!
Hero: And what would I possibly stand to gain by abandoning this quest I've spent weeks trying to complete and following an empty promise from the lord of darkness?
Dragonlord: Your experience meter drops to 0, I emit an evil laugh and the game locks up, implying that I killed you!
Hero: ...And I get to hit Reset and do the entire dungeon again. That's weak sauce, dude.
Dragonlord: This is a 1986 game; villains didn't start thinking ahead and getting truly devious and persuasive until the mid-90's.
Hero: Good point.

They duke it out, which is pretty anticlimactic since the Dragonlord dies in three hits.

Hero: Well, that was... pretty easy.
Dragonlord: SURPRISE! I have another form!

The dragonlord becomes - what else - a dragon, and is much tougher this time around since he can dish out a lot of damage and none of your spells work on him. Still, if you've got the best equipment available and a decent supply of MP for healing spells, you can outlast him without too much difficulty.

Dragonlord: I am vanquished!

You get Erdrick's ball of light back, which vanquishes all random enemies in the game forevermore, and allows you to wander around to every town in the game and get congratulated by everyone. Actually, just one town will do the trick, since they all repeat the same two lines.

So you go back to Alefgard, where the king offers you his eternal gratitude and his daughter's hand in marriage. She won't take "No" for an answer no matter how many times you try to choose it, so our hero is forced to wed Gwaelin and, once again, carry her off into the sunset. The end, roll credits.

Spoony: You know, as RPGs went on, I expected to be able to explore more of the possibilities the story could take. Like here, where the game gives you a yes or no choice, but the story won't continue until you pick "Yes"; I always just thought that was a system limitation locking you to one path. I was hoping in future games that in a similar situation you could pick "No" just to see what would happen. Like, say, the King putting a hit out on you for abandoning his daughter to the dragons! A pity that idea seems to only have caught on with American RPGs on the PC, and to a lesser extent the Suikoden and Shin Megami Tensei series. I mean, why do they even give you a choice of two or three dialog options in newer games when they both do the same thing in the end anyway? Just to tease you?

At any rate, I like the game of Dragon Warrior; it was certainly a milestone in the console RPG genre, and although it definitely shows its age nowadays due to the bare-bones story and heavy emphasis on gold gathering and level grinding, I'd still much rather play this than say... Star Ocean 4, Last Remnant or Infinite Undiscovery.