To Make a Mark in History

I know, I know. I haven't updated anything lately. But I have an excuse! Listen to me, now, I have an excuse!

(Hint: the video is my excuse!)

So, while my gaming hasn't been spectacular whatsoever, I have been making perler art. Yeah, so what there's a billion geeky craft blogs now? That's not what my blog is about. I'm just telling you that I've been making them. Well, if you ever went to my deviantART (I don't know why you would, since it's connected to this very page at the bottom), you'd see my later stuff, too.

What have I been playing? A little of this, little of that. A friend of my husband donated a fully functional NES to us, and I demanded some RPG for it so I could make use of it, too. The RPG chosen? Only the very first console style RPG in the history of gaming, Dragon Warrior! You know, that game is actually slow, the action is all text based, and you have to spend days grinding to do anything, but holy crap on a stick, I love this game.

Wait a Tantagel minute, though. I covered Dragon Warrior before, right? Yeah, the GBC version, and on a ROM no less. This is an actual cart - that keeps saves all these years later. Playing it with that square controller that will put bumps on your hands after a while, pressing that A button almost all the time, never having enough gold to buy all the equipment you find in the last town until you have to buy something three times as much to survive the grind to get the gold for the current equipment. You want that Magic Armor? Well, you're gonna earn it. In fact, you're gonna earn everything in this game, including a marriage you may or may not want.

This is where it all started, ladies and gentleman. This is where the entire subgenre of "JRPG" or "console style RPG" was born. That has quite a bit of power behind it, considering the industry giant that the RPG genre has become in today's gaming. In my attempt to study the History of the Evolution of the console style RPG, I'm compelled to play and beat this game in its original format on a TV set to channel 4 with a square controller. Not doing so is... well, it's just something my Gamer's Heart won't let me get away with. If I'm gonna make it a point to study these things, I have to bury myself in the history by playing what was made back then, since there's no way to travel to that time period and experience the rush of these games coming out as they were brand new. My husband tells me of the days when he believed that Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior were going to be cutting at each other's throat for dominance in our hearts, that it would be as epic as Star Trek vs Star Wars with the nerds, that each and every game would only try to up its competitor and we'd all relish in the awesomeness that was now available for play. I would love to journey to an alternate world where that is the case. It would be better than Square and Enix merging, putting Dragon Quest on the back burner, and dumping all of its money into a dying franchise. The two epic companies behind greatness like Chrono Trigger on one side, and Robotrek on the other. My personal opinion of this merge isn't exactly the best, since all Squeenix has managed to produce is things like Unlimited Saga, Kingdom Hearts 2, and The Bouncer. Every now and then, they manage to eek out a glimpse of hope, like Dragon Quest IX, but when you put the vast amount of crap on the scale against the games that Squeenix has managed to make that is actually worth playing... I think you see where I'm going with this.

Enough of my rant. Dragon Warrior was made before all of that. Before Final Fantasy even was conceived in Hironobu Sakaguchi's mind. It inspired a whole genre. A whole genre that has captured the hearts of millions around the world, be they casual or hardcore. Hard to believe that when Final Fantasy was in creation, they thought "we have to be better than Dragon Quest. we want more characters in a party, more weapons, more spells, more armor, more monsters, more dungeons", isn't it? While Sakaguchi wanted to tell a story, he did make a great game and people everywhere thought so, too. There have been numerous sequels and spinoffs of Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest hasn't the same amount of sequels, however, it's my opinion that there's a greater number of better Dragon Quest games and spinoffs that are great games, as opposed to what's got the Final Fantasy name slapped onto it just to boost sales from fan-twats.

I'm gonna be bold here for a minute, gamers, and tell you right now that if you claim to be an RPG fan, you need to do the same. I understand not all of us have NES consoles anymore, and we may have too modern of a TV to even play with one anyway. Then play it on the GBC or even on emulator, the way it was meant to be played. No save-states, no fast-forwarding. Experience the game the way it was meant to so that you, too, may experience a piece of gaming history.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill some Goldman enemies to get some gold for my magic armor. If I can survive that area of the continent, that is!

Thanks for reading!

Much love,

Suzuri

Suzuri's Thoughts: Gaming of Today

Gaming friends, I must apologize for holding out on you for so long. No, I haven't forgotten about angelslime.blogspot.com, after all, I only tell everyone I know repeatedly to come and check it out. Turns out that either no one gives a random two shits about my gaming adventures in games that are over a decade old, or I'm horrible at being a gaming columnist, or some other criteria I haven't noticed yet that seems to keep people from being actually engaged by what I write here. Not like I do it for anyone else, right? I thought it was just going to be for myself - but since I realized my readership was so low, I haven't wanted to show back up here at all lately. Not like I've made any discoveries in the world of gaming these last few months anyway. I've had things to do, like celebrating my daughter's second birthday.

Instead of reporting on the gaming I've done the last few months, I'll instead go into stuff that I'm looking forward to finally getting a chance to play. I'm broke (it happens when you have kids) and so I haven't had a new game since... since... my copy of HeartGold I got a few years ago. Wonderful, right? I'll admit that there's nothing on a current gen system that I want to bite my teeth into, save Tales of Vesperia (I know, I haven't played that one EITHER). That game's a few years old.

No, right now, I want to play very few games that are brand spanking new. Give me Dragon Quest IX, Pokemon Black, Golden Sun DS, or Tales of the Abyss' remake on the 3DS. On my "list to be played" that's about it. I want my JRPGs, and I freakin' want them now. No Call of Duty, no Resident Evil, just some straight up anime lookin' characters leveling up to beat bosses that eventually save the world. I'm stuck in my little gaming niche, and I like it in here. I've spent most of my life either slashing my sword in a Legend of Zelda title or level grinding to beat a boss in Final Fantasy so long that I don't mind. And while there's a heaping lot of it out there today, damn it, there's so little I want to invest my time in.

New games come out every damn day, and I still want to only play six games (I didn't mention that I actually want to try Final Fantasy Dissidia for some stupid reason, did I?) - some of which are a few years old all ready. What's happened to the state of gaming lately? The more I think about it, the more I want to go to Japan and curb stomp some developers. Even people who don't follow the same stuff I do (mainly Pokemon, Dragon Quest, and Tales of) complain about the lack of originality, creativity, and even COLOR in a lot of games. Who the hell takes colors away from gaming? Apparently, people who play FPS titles only like seeing worlds made of shitty brown, boring gray, and various hues of those two colors with a splash of red blood every now and then, unless you're German, then you'll see green. What happened? It was Mario who saved the industry from taking a nose dive into just being a fad instead of actually being a mainstay within the media, and my girls are still dazzled over how colorful the game is now. The shiny cold coins, the glowing Starman, the fireworks at the end of a level... things used to be so simple, and now, it seems like things have changed. Even for the genres I love.

Okay, I've written about my love affair with Final Fantasy that took place during my junior high years here on this blog before, and I'll be honest, I still like the series quite a bit. FFIX is my favorite of the numbered installments, Tactics is my favorite overall, and the Crystal Chronicles series always makes me come back and see what else they're up to. Well, now, this year they put out both Final Fantasy XIII and XIV. You'd think that I'd jump on that like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat, and if the games were anything like they were on the PSX days, yes, I would be. Even with FFVIII's numerous flaws. I accept them and move on with with my life. But FFXIII took the series in a whole new direction. What's this "if your one character dies in battle it's game over" bullshit? How come that dipshit Snow can't use a phoenix down on Lightning like I would have Tifa use on Cloud if he got KO'd, for example? Does no one see all of the changes made, as if it were being... dumbed down? No? FFXII made me believe that after the travesty that was FFX, the series could recover and we'd go back to lighting the crystals with no problems whatsoever. Something's missing both from gameplay and narrative of the new FF games and people keep buying them hand over fucking foot. Why? Well, the game's graphics are stunning to say the least. I won't deny that at all. But there is a problem with that.

Here's a little thing to think about. We consumers tell the media what we want when we buy things, and whatever sells is what will be mass produced. If we want more dumbed down, shiny graphic-y games, then we put money in the hands of developers and let them make more of it. If we want more colorless, bland, generic FPS titles, then we should just keep buying them. I don't like what I see, save a handful of titles, out of the entire industry, and I don't like to think I'm being picky - I like to think that I'm being honest with myself. If games I like stop being made, will I cease to be a gamer? Hardly, I have tons of games from over 10 years ago that will keep me happily entertained as I have been the last few years being broke and all. I'll just have to be retro-exclusive, though I don't believe that you can call a PSX title retro no matter how old it gets. Tell me that Star Ocean 2 is retro, and I'll tell you to go look at freakin' "Ultima Exodus: The Quest for the Avatar" on the NES for a retro RPG, okay?

I have so little income to work with that I have to know whether I'll like a game before I buy it, and I can't afford to plop down $40 to see if I'll like something new. When I spend, it has to be something that will give me tons of replayability, or a very long ass quest, or something to keep me engaged for months. I guess that's why each time a Pokemon game comes out, I'll slap down the money to get it. I'll play it for a year without getting tired of it, and now with bonuses like trading online or even voice chatting. I'm even more interested...

*sigh*

Thanks for reading,
Much love,
Suzuri