61 Frames Per Second : final fantasy III

Chrono Trigger's Box Art Still Makes My Head Buzz

Nadia Oxford — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:07:00 GMT

I've never been a big fan of Chrono Trigger's box art. I love the game to pieces. I love its story, its music and its character designs. “Akira Toriyama” will be the last words to burst from my mouth in a bubble of blood when Mouseketeer revolutionaries, seeking to empower western animation, unsuccessfully try to force me to renounce my love for the manga-ka.

But I just don't dig on Chrono Trigger's cover illustration. It certainly doesn't rank anywhere in Mega Man's Hall of Box Art Horrors, but it's too busy, there's an inflated sense of intensity, and it was a jarring change from the quiet RPG labels I was used to in the 16-bit era. The boxes for Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III on the SNES weren't as stylish as their Super Famicom counterparts, but they were recognisable. The “T” styled as a sword in the American Final FantTasy logo, though not especially creative, was iconic. Square RPGs outside of Final Fantasy still featured calm box art that carried a hint of mystery about the contents within. Secret of Mana, for instance.

Chrono Trigger's box art, on the other hand, is bold and loud. Though it's obviously a finished piece of work, it feels like a piece of concept art that was randomly selected to represent the entire game. I look at it and I'm helpless to stop my mind from wandering into Geekville.

I start thinking, “Why is Heckran on Death Peak? Why is Crono alive on Death Peak? Wait, maybe that's 12,000,000 BC? Those winter clothes are actually kind of badass, but we never see anything like them. Why would Frog even bother to look for a contact lens that's buried in two feet of snow?” (I know, I know, it's the Arc Impulse Triple Tech—for which Marle is incorrectly casting a Fire spell).

Thirteen years later, my thoughts still stumble all over one another crying “But--but--but--!”, when I see the cover for Chrono Trigger. It makes the inside of my head feel like a car crash.

Everyone on the box also looks uncharacteristically snarly. I wouldn't laugh off a threat from a giant thorn-lizard that will only succumb to magic spells (*%&$&#!!!!!), but poor gentle Crono comes off as a spiky-haired Rambo. It just ain't right.

Related Links:

The Weakest Link: Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross
The End of Time and the Beginning of Fan Drama
WTFriday: The Chrono Trigger Anime

Whatcha Playing: On the Road Again

John Constantine — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:15:00 GMT

Wherein travelling inevitably leads to thinking about Zelda, the nature of game linearity and unskippable passive sequences in games.

Five men in their late 20s are heading south on route 80 through New Jersey in a white Dodge Caravan. They listen to loud music and discuss plans for the weekend ahead of them. Before too long, they pass signs for a town called Hibernia. As they are a group raised on far, far too many videogames, the fanciful name of what is likely a small, simple town full of good, honest folk quickly transforms it into a land of adventure, intrigue and obnoxious obligation.

“Ho stranger! You have stopped for gasoline in Hibernia? I would love to give you some, but first you must travel beyond the woods and acquire a ruffled dragoon feather. I need them to make gasoline!”

“Hey! Hey! Have you tried pressing Z to look at signs? Press A to read signs! Hey!”

“You must equip a sword and a shield before you can leave the car. Who would leave the car without a sword and a shield?”

Yes, even something as an innocuous as a roadtrip leads to making fun of Zelda, and by proxy, every other videogame that makes you engage in a string of needless bullshit before letting you actually play. After we got the jokes out of our systems, we did start talking about how, when the itch arises, we all love going back and replaying past Zeldas, but have almost no desire to replay any of the 3D games any time soon. Everyone in the van has affection for Ocarina and Wind Waker – Opinions on Majora’s Mask vary. Personally, I find it to be a freaking chore to play, no matter how creative. Twilight Princess, we agreed, feels like actually doing chores when you play it. – but the prospect of wading through a never ending stream of unskippable conversations makes returning to these games unsavory. The constant handholding is bad enough, even without taking five minutes to listen to some owl made of triangles rant about a mountain, finally getting through the diatribe, and accidentally asking him to repeat himself.

The conversation was oddly prescient. I started playing the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV for the first time shortly after everyone settled into the drive. I enjoyed the Final Fantasy III remake two years back, and was ready to see what IV had to offer. After the ever-familiar Red Wings assault on Mysidia, Cecil’s sad departure from Baron, his introduction to Rydia and sad exile, I noticed that the shift from Final Fantasy III to IV was significant. Between 1990 and 1991, Hirnobu Sakaguchi made two RPGs, one that offered a great deal of exploratory freedom at the game’s outset and then another that led the player largely by the nose throughout its initial hours. Final Fantasy IV, in any of its incarnations, is nowhere near as coddling as Ocarina of Time, but it is representative of games, specifically adventure and role-playing games, becoming increasingly linear following the 8-bit era. What caused the shift? Why did adventure in games start to become as directed as it is in the mediums that inspired it?

Yesterday, on our return trip, we passed by Hibernia a second time and chuckled again. It occurred to me that the trip made a good model for adventure design. We couldn’t avoid passing Hibernia. It was inevitable that our route would bring us past it multiple times. But we didn’t know it ahead of time, we were left to find it on our own. Shouldn’t every adventure be that way?

Related links:

Whatcha Playing: Tale of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
Whatcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser
Whatcha Playing: de Blob
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Know Your Final Fantasy IV Trivia. It Could Save Your Life.
Gaming on a Train: Final Fantasy IV

Klonoa: Careful, Namco. You Tread On My Dreams.

John Constantine — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I’m not a purist. No, really. When it comes to classics being revisited, modernized, or remade, I don’t need every facet of the past perfectly preserved just the way I remember it in order to get a desperate nostalgic thrill. I delight in Mega Man 9 because it’s a great game whose presentation and technological limitations are carefully made design choices, not because it’s a new NES game. I’ll let you in on a secret: I actually like Mega Man 7 and 8. Yeah, that’s right. I think they’re good games. Not as good as their forebears, but all the same. When the new Bionic Commando was announced last year, even before Rearmed was revealed, I didn’t balk at Radd Spencer’s Adam-Duritz-makeover. I think the new look is cool, especially the way his dreads flow behind him like delicate willow branches as he soars through dystopian cityscapes and… oh! Excuse me. What I’m getting at is that not everything from yesterday is sacred. Some things, especially in games, should be changed. Final Fantasy III DS is a good thing. The NES original is just too slow now. Tomb Raider Anniversary preserves a revolutionary game’s best qualities while also making it, you know, playable. In with the new, out with the old may not be an all-encompassing maxim, but it’s more often than not good advice.

That said, Namco, if you go through with this, I will hurt you.

The Raw Meat Cowboy himself over at GoNintendo received a survey from Namco-Bandai today, the subject of which was their impending Wii remake of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. RMC has smartly inferred that Namco is testing the waters to see if Klonoa should be localized for North America. One of the questions in the survey asks which of these two character designs is preferable:

Yes, there on the right is Klonoa, already slightly altered to more closely resemble his 21st century self than the Klonoa of 1998. It’s great, he’s looking good. On the left, is some monstrosity, a Japanese Poochie, his raised ears giving off a deliberate whiff of the EXTREME. He has just enough buckles and straps to satisfy a Nomura. The implication is that Namco thinks this bastard would be more suited to North America’s indelicate palette.

Now, there are going to be some vague spoilers here, so beware. Even beyond the fantastic platforming, level design, and soundtrack, what makes Door to Phantomile so special is that it subverts expectation. Klonoa himself, and his introduction in the game, portray complete innocence, a cutesy cartoon anthropomorphic at play in a pleasant fantasy world. But the game quickly becomes melancholic, and by game’s end, the pleasant Disney aesthetic is pulled away, violently, to reveal that the story is, in fact, a tragedy. The game is about a loss of innocence, and the character’s design is essential to that theme. This redesign places the character more firmly in a recognizable, and marketable, anime tradition, where existential angst is an expected component. Remaking Klonoa in this image completely betrays the point of Shuichi Sakurazaki’s story.

Don’t do this, Namco.

(Link: GoNintendo)

Related links:

Where is Shuichi Sakurazaki, Creator of Ninja Gaiden?
Klonoa's Truimphant(?) Return
Christmas in Nintendoland: The Tokyo Conference
The Tale of the Identical Box Art
Lowering the Standard: Why Nintendo’s Hardcore vs. Casual Commitments Aren’t the Problem
Abominations of Technology: Pre-Rendered Graphics