Some Other Castle

First of all, apologies for missing my update last week; due to personal reasons, I didn’t quite get around to writing a new column. Fear not, though, because the project lives on! And yes, I am still mired in the depths of Final Fantasy II. My party, in fact, became quite literally mired in the depths, as they spent a great deal of time wandering around in the internal organs of a giant sea creature. I wish I could say that’s the only time in the past two weeks that I’ve encountered the digestive tract of a mythological being in a JRPG format, but it isn’t even that! (How many times does one get to write that sentence in a lifetime? I’m guessing it isn’t many, and that I’ve probably already used my life’s allocation.)

Now that I’ve triumphantly overcome the difficulty spike that has, in the past, prevented me from getting anywhere near finishing FFII, I feel that I’m able to step back a bit, put aside my self-imposed leveling paranoia, and take a slightly more objective look at whether or not this is a game worth playing—a “good” game. Continue reading →

Once again, the siren song of Ni No Kuni has meant that my story progress through Final Fantasy II has been a bit more limited this week than it might otherwise have been. Instead of talking about the plot, then, I’d like to discuss a mechanic that the Final Fantasy series makes fairly frequent use of, and that originated in II: “guest” party members.

For the purposes of this column, when I talk about guest members, what I mean is a character who doesn’t stick with you for the entire game, but instead joins up for only a smaller segment before dying, revealing him/herself as an agent of the “other side,” running off on some other very important errand, or otherwise leaving your merry band. In looking around for some specific examples, I discovered this page, which is….exhaustive, if you’re interested, but I’ll mostly be focusing on the Final Fantasy-related examples (even though it’s extremely tempting to mention Shinjiro from Persona 3, I will, of course, refrain from straying off-topic….of course). Continue reading →

This week, a realization struck me quite literally in the middle of the night (I’ve been having off-and-on insomnia issues) that caused me to think long and hard about the reasons I continue having trouble with the early Final Fantasy titles (specifically this one—II—at which I’m still dedicatedly hacking away).

To bring this into context, let me describe the incident which led up to my epiphany. I mentioned last week that I was now officially further along in FFII than I had ever been before, and that as a result, I was heading into brand-new content that I hadn’t seen before. My first major foray into this content was a dungeon which, as the guide I’ve been following informed me, wasn’t mandatory at this particular part of the adventure; it should have been well within reach ability-wise, and could help with leveling characters, gaining new equipment, and otherwise preparing me a bit better for the trials that lay ahead, but story-wise, it wasn’t a place that I needed to go to until much later. I thought it might be a good test to see if my party was able to hang with the crowd in this slightly higher-level area, so I set off in my newly obtained ship, consulted my maps, and found the tiny island in the middle of nowhere where the dungeon was located. Continue reading →

I mentioned last week that Final Fantasy II was the stumbling block which caused me to quit my last attempt at a Final Fantasy series playthrough. What I don’t believe I’ve mentioned, however, is that it’s actually the only game in the series (barring, of course, the MMO titles) that I’ve never finished. As of now, that’s still the case; I did put quite a bit more time into it this week than I did last, but as far as I can tell, I’m still nowhere near the end. However, I did manage to break through the barrier that stumped me before, meaning that I’m now in the only real new Final Fantasy content I’m likely to see in this entire project.

I should be excited about this, and I am…sort of. Mostly, though, I’m still a bit paranoid, which has made me question whether these types of games are really “meant” for me anymore. Or, I suppose, if they’re meant for anyone. Continue reading →