Finally fantastic

Above: Fortunately, Lightning is not introduced by removing a motorcycle helmet to reveal -- gasp -- she's a woman!

Still clearing out some of the backlog, my review of Final Fantasy XIII is up now at thephoenix.com. This one seems to be polarizing fans, but as I argue in the review, every new Final Fantasy game seems to polarize fans. Popular opinion only coalesces much later. At least, that's the way it feels to me. Is it true? I don't know. This review ran like a month after the game came out. I had to think of an angle.

Argh, still being flip. I like this game quite a bit. The criticism about it taking 25 hours to get good feels off-base to me, as I allude to in the review. I think it's great fun before it allegedly opens up, and didn't have any problem with the way the game was laid out. Besides, if you're going to suffer through 25 hours of something because you've heard it gets better after that, you may want to re-evaluate your priorities.

There's still the argument about what, at heart, Final Fantasy is. Lots of people argue that it's always been about exploration, but the exploration has never been what's attracted me to the series. In fact, I had a hard time getting into the games for a long time because of the open-ended style of play. Only when I used walkthroughs to get through parts 1, 6, and 7 did I start to appreciate what Final Fantasy does well. For me, that's the combat.

That's why I was taken with this one -- it's nothing but combat. I mean sure, it's more complicated than that, but everything is rolled out so slowly and confidently that I didn't realize just how complicated it all was until I tried to write it down. Try to sum up paradigms, stagger, the crystarium, and inventory upgrades in 600 words. Maybe you can do it, but it won't be much fun to read. That's why I said the hell with it and started making fun of fanboys.

On the other hand, maybe it's just auto-pilot at this point. I just went back to read my review of Final Fantasy XII and it says almost all the same things. Good night, everybody!

Friday afternoon tidbits

The blogs go awfully quiet during the Game Developers Conference, although Twitter has been hopping. Sounds like a great time, and I'm sorry I missed it. I'll just have to look forward to PAX. Only two weeks to go!

-I'm a few hours into Final Fantasy XIII, and still trying to get a feel for it. When I've heard it compared to Final Fantasy X, and it's intended as an insult, I've thought, "Sign me up!" That said it is almost stifling in its linearity so far, which I didn't think about FFX. Even so, I think Jeremy Parish is right on the money when he wonders why it's such a bad thing that FFXIII abandons some long-held RPG tenets. "There are no towns" not seem to me to be an incisive criticism.

-Another great post from Sparky Clarkson this week, this time about the notion of "camp" in games, vis a vis recent titles like Deadly Premonition and Heavy Rain. I've wondered before whether games can succeed as camp, and like the commenter on the post, my feeling is it's hard because the gameplay still needs to be decent for you to appreciate the campier aspects of the story. I thought No More Heroes succeeded as camp, while its sequel didn't, and it was mostly for those reasons.

I also can't believe people have me honestly considering buying Deadly Premonition. It looks truly terrible. But everyone loves it!

-Neat article in the Boston Globe this week about the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab, whose members are doing some interesting and forward-thinking work, though apparently they're doing it for the Nintendo 64.

-The Huffington Post put together a slideshow of "the most controversial video games ever," which is not terribly illuminating but does show that today's controversial games are a little bit further along than those in the past. The difference between Postal and MW2's "No Russian" scene is the latter was at least trying to say something. Also, the article makes it seem like Six Days in Fallujah has been released.

-Yep, you need to watch this video:

Friday afternoon tidbits

I've had a two-week layoff from reviewing games, and in that time I have played... nothing. Didn't pick up an old favorite, or finish off something that had been lingering. Haven't even turned on a console. Weird. But I've still been reading lots of blogs!

-There were a couple of good editorials at Game|Life this week. Earnest Cavalli said good riddance to Duke Nukem, calling him a relic with no place in 2009. It's true that Duke is an anachronism today, but it's possible that a solidly executed Duke Nukem Forever would have made that seem like a good thing. After all, who doesn't get sucked into watching Commando on AMC every time it's on? Even though the character might still have his place, it's probably for the best that we close the book on Duke Nukem, forever. This game would have had too much baggage, regardless of how it turned out.

(As an aside: Remember when Daikatana was an oft-delayed, much-maligned punchline? It's still got nothing on DNF, right?)

-Also at Game|Life, Chris Kohler decried the looming possibility of an English-only audio track for Final Fantasy XIII. Although I think it would be nice for players to have the option of Japanese audio, I disagree with his premise. Movies and games are not a fair comparison when discussing the merits of dubbing and subtitles. The reason for this is simple: all video games are dubbed.

Sure, I'd rather watch a live-action movie in the original language, with the voices belonging to the actors onscreen. It's jarring when the movement of someone's lips don't match the words coming out of their mouth. And, quite often, inferior actors are used for the voiceover. In a film, the dialogue, the actor's voice, and his movements are equal parts of the performance. You can't reconstitute it from its many parts and make it work. I doubt anyone would argue that.

But in the majority of animated films and video games, the voice actor in the studio is providing only one element of the performance, whether he's the "original" performer or not. He's not doing motion-capture in most cases, nor is the movement of the characters' mouths so precise that you can tell when the lip-synching fails. There is no inherent drawback to dubbing animated characters. The process for giving them voice is exactly the same. (It may be the case that the Japanese voice actors are better than their American counterparts, but that's confusing the issue. The solution to that problem would be to hire better American actors.)

Kohler's larger point about not scrubbing the "cultural odor" from the Japanese-made game is one that I sympathize with a little more, but that's not the reality of the market. If Square Enix wants to sell millions of copies of Final Fantasy XIII to Western audiences, they have no choice. Maybe it's a shame, but you may as well complain about the sun always coming up in the East.

-Michael Abbott makes a great point about what video games are really sending the wrong messages to kids. Certain culture warriors get hung up on depictions of violence, sex, and profanity in games, but one thing they never seem to do is consider the context. Often, violent games make an effort not to reward indiscriminate bloodshed. Even the notorious Grand Theft Auto series sends the cops after you when you break the law. Believe me, I'm not giving a pass to GTA or anybody else, but at least they implement some kind of recognizable morality system in their games (usually too simplistic a one, in fact).

Marketing games specifically to kids that emphasize rabid consumerism, materialism, and social climbing -- that's just as bad. Now, I don't think playing a first-person shooter will make a kid shoot up his school, and I don't think playing Style Up for Prom will make a kid max out her parents' credit cards. But I've called for everyone, from publishers to players, to take the messages of their games more seriously, and what's bad about the games Michael mentions is how innocuous they seem to be. Lots of parents look at Grand Theft Auto and say, "Not appropriate for my kid." What parent would say the same about these?

-Finally, Gary Hodges bids farewell to Joystick Division, and, apparently, to freelance game reviews. Can't say I blame him. It's very hard to do this for the love of the game, especially when there's so much about the game that makes it hard to love. In his reviews for Village Voice Media, and his posts on JD, Gary's always shown thoughtfulness, integrity, and a real ability to get to the core of a game in just a few words. We'll miss him.

Friday afternoon tidbits

I can't remember the last time I've been to a show, but that all changes tonight when the Electric Six comes to town. I have no idea what to expect from those lunatics. Frankly, I'm a little frightened.

-Jeremy Parish has been writing a great series for 1up's RPG blog about Final Fantasy XIII. Everybody who just regurgitates press releases and screenshots ought to look at this series for how to make talking about an upcoming game interesting. Parish brings a lot of knowledge and insight to bear. It's all good, but unfortunately he hasn't tagged the series in a way that would let me link to every part at once. So here, check out part 10, "Sword Beats Gun."

-Important news: You can get Fairway Solitaire for free. Wait, let me amend that. You must get Fairway Solitaire for free. I've written about this game many times before before, and I still play it. It's that good. (h/t Dubious Quality)

-At Offworld, Tom Armitage posted an insightful piece about The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. His main point, which I agree with, is that the game's success is due to its convincing portrayal of its setting and characters as physical entities. Prowling the halls of Butcher Bay as Riddick feels authentic, especially when it comes time to take somebody on in hand-to-hand content. There's heft and weight to Riddick, his surroundings feel sturdy, and the forcefulness of his attacks is surprising.

One more thing I'd note: last year, I was impressed by the physicality of the characters in Far Cry 2, Dead Space, and Mirror's Edge. Riddick beat them to the punch by four years.

-This is awesome. A YouTube user named Underworld23 has posted a ton of classic RPG music, sorted by category: town themes, overworld themes, battle themes, and a lot more. Yes, I spent far too much time listening to these last night.

-I've never read anything more blatantly whorish than Harry Knowles' explanation for why he wouldn't review X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The problem isn't so much that he wasn't planning to write a review. That's his choice. But just read that first paragraph: he recommends that his readers skip the movie, because none of his editors were invited to a press screening! Astonishing.

Further still, Harry says:

I'm more eager to spend my money on a film I do support, which is why I have bought tickets for my third watching of STAR TREK next week, and if I were you - I'd save up to see it twice, rather than have a bad experience this weekend.

Star Trek -- that's the movie that Harry watched at a surprise screening, where he hung out with the film's screenwriters and producer. The one where Leonard Nimoy showed up and his very presence made Harry cry. Look, AICN is a fan site, and it's never really pretended to be anything else. But since we've been talking this week about a lack of scruples in the games press, it's nice to see, at least, that we're not the only ones who deal with it.