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Number twelve:
Squaresoft was bold enough to, back before 2003 could even begin, dub 2003 "The Year of Final Fantasy." That Square so quickly jumped in to give this year a title spoiled the chance for anyone else to title it. So it was that Final Fantasy, whether you want it to or not, colored this year brightly and boldly. Kind of.
This Year of Final Fantasy was kicked off with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Gameboy Advance in February -- released on the same day as the Gameboy Advance SP, conveniently for Japanese people with ridiculous amounts of money to throw away. The year was closed up with a November announcement that Final Fantasy XII actually is being worked on, and then a month of absolutely nothing interesting.
It's perhaps the case that when Squaresoft called 2003 the Year of Final Fantasy, they were only talking about Japan. If this is so, then the forthcoming extrapolations are going to look either stupid or clever.
In America, Final Fantasy XI was released in October. This was kind of a big deal. The stateside release of Final Fantasy Origins for PlayStation in April was a considerably smaller deal, one that my good friend Doug Jones and I partook of with mild relish. I'd recalled how my best pal Carl and I had frightfully enjoyed racing through the original Final Fantasy during weekends in our elementary school times. I recalled how fun that was. So Doug and I planned to undertake a similar experience, in his home, with his girlfriend present, and after eating some good Mexican food. It was a "spirit of the moment" sort of thing.
Two hours into the game, we were confused as all hell. Had childhood lied to us? Had we grown less stupid? Were we too full of refried beans and cheese to understand the "classic" nature of the game before us, or did the original Final Fantasy just really, really suck ass?
It was less than three hours in that we decided to begin using my digital camera to film commentated videos of the game. It was nine hours later, in my house, with my electric guitar, as we looked over the footage, that we decided we were geniuses. Kind of.
The Birth of Project FFDog is definitely a highlight of 2003 for me -- and for a lot of the world. A total of six installments were filmed in Indianapolis, starring myself, Doug and Julie Jones, and sometimes special guest Drew Cosner. Now that I've moved back to Tokyo, we ride as Team FFDog Tokyo, starring myself, a certain Chuck Franklin, and my roommate Kasugi Kimoto. Sometimes, we have a girl around -- a girl whose name shall not be revealed until the first FFDog Project Tokyo goes live -- and she usually says ridiculous stuff right alongside us, so we feel at home. In a month, at long last, Drew Cosner will return to Tokyo to rock with us, and by then we should be getting around to the international edition of Final Fantasy X-2. It's a good project.
A lot of people reading this right now might be shaking their fists in hatred of me and everything I do, saying that I've got a big head about how damned cool Project FFDog is, and I don't blame them. They're not the ones who wake up every day to find at least ten emails telling me how "Fucking Awesome" the video documentaries and the reviews are.
So let me take it down or up a notch, and tell you that what's perhaps more important than Project FFDog itself is the event that inspired its becoming -- that is, my sudden and violent realization that the original Final Fantasy, a childhood favorite game, had in reality disgustingly sucked. It was only because Square had put the game on a pedestal of enhanced graphics and symphonic sound (really, that polished brassy music playing over an eight-bit paper-rock-scissors battle engine does something of an exposé of its own) that I was able to see through to the thin layer of actual quality within the game. So it was that I started Project FFDog, an effort to review all Final Fantasy games from a modern, unbiased standpoint, so as to arrive at a conclusion that will benefit the whole of game-playing humankind.
The Project has so far revealed that Final Fantasies I and II suck majorly, IV rocks your mother's house, and that VI was made by people "who were convinced (and correctly!) that the game they were making was god-damned incredible."
One thing we find, continually, is that it's easier to make interesting video if the games we're playing happen to not be enjoyable at all. We used to never question why this is. I don't question it now, because I think I've grown to understand. Final Fantasy I was the perfect and only way to start what got started in this Project, because it was a remake of a game that was, in the first place, a successful exercise in only adequate game-making.
The important point here is that few games of the past are actually worth remaking. If games truly are on the cusp of becoming a fully respectable medium, then as a medium on this "cusp," it's reasonable to say that almost nothing before the event that's going to transpire which fully establishes games as "arrived" is worth even a tenth of a shit. Final Fantasy is one of those things.
Now, this isn't negative sentiment. In fact, it's very positive. The PlayStation remake of Final Fantasy inspired me to look into something with deep concern. It inspired me to think, and to take risks and come to bold conclusions in so doing. I have determined, then, that old games are building blocks. Final Fantasy X can be said to reuse elements of Final Fantasy (turn-based battles consisting of a group of heroes versus a group of monsters) in a strip-mine sense. Final Fantasy X, for example, has looked at its heritage, snatched up what it needed, and then refined it into something more agreeable. This is progress -- it is revision, not imitation, that makes the most difference.
Yet these rampant remakes persist. These days, we're seeing games like Pac-Man and Frogger (and holy shit do those Sega 3D Ages Golden Axe and Gain Ground remakes suck) remade at alarming rates, and to me it points to something of a weakness in the way of thinking of the current generation of game producers. That Shigeru Miyamoto attests his favorite videogame of all time is Pac-Man points to a glaring problem. If games are really stagnating as some say, then it's the phantom menace behind Miyamoto's E3 declaration that is to blame. For one thing, does Miyamoto really still admire Pac-Man above all games? How often, when he's at home, does he play Pac-Man? Does he even, really, play it at all? Miyamoto's halfhearted declaration reminds me of a film school student claiming that his favorite movie is "The Battleship Potemkin." Sure, that's a good movie, and an important one, heavily influential on all past films, Russian or not, that dealt with naval battles and/or things exploding. Also, it's twenty-six minutes long, and silent. It's a building block; an atom, not a molecule; a brick, not a building; we need to see a remake of it about as badly as we need a 3D remake of Pong.
. . . Okay, so it's too late for that one.
This remaking trend at some point inspired me to look at games, and come up with a list of ones I think I'd like to see, at some point in the near future, remade. Final Fantasy IV would be excellent, if slightly edited for continuity. Xenogears, a competent inevitability, is another one that could benefit from some updating and editing. River City Ransom is graciously being remade for Gameboy Advance as I write this. The game at the top of my in-April-composed list was Metal Gear Solid, soon thereafter deliciously announced as in the process of being remade. I doubt that means anyone is listening to me. Even if Hideo Kojima is a professed fan of Project: FFDog.
. . . Okay, well, he will be, soon.
[next: number eleven: please turn off your cellular phones]
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