Our video game career has been one of slow disillusionment, unfortunately.  It peaked with Final Fantasy VII, what seems like an almost spiritual experience in retrospect, though I don’t dare go back and try it again for what my pessimistic mind might think of it now.

And then there was VIII.  A game so horrific (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlZlvfxk6xA&feature=related) that Mark and I almost completely lost the faith (Tactics acted as a sort of religious safety net).  Things went downhill from there.  And now when I see a new JRPG (and when you leave in J, the street is cobbled with them) I can’t help but shudder.  Used to be I’d get that spark inside when I thought of setting out on a new venture like Chrono Trigger or VI.  But no more.

Now we see younger generations throw themselves into the new wave of plastic hairstyles and challengeless boss fights with absolute glee.  Mark is there to set them straight.

A friend of mine who spends his time searching for semi-colons in a long column of mind-numbing programming code broke down video games for me quite succinctly.  He said games are made up of three obvious elements: graphics, story, and fun-factor.  The less obvious point he made was that a video game only needs two of those to be good (gamers will put up with bad graphics if the story is awesome and the game is sweet, etc. etc.) but only one to be successful.  Basically, gamers are suckers for the eye candy and this is the basis upon which games sell.  It turns out Squaresoft (pre-Squeenix) discovered that they could lump their entire budget into graphics and sell way more copies.  They found this after they only had enough money to make their first disc of Final Fantasy VII look good, and the first disc turned out to be the favorite among the masses.  Remember how Final Fantasy characters went from being these awkward triangular freaks of nature to smooth actually human looking 3-D figures?  That’s due to a higher budget.  But they had to cut the fat somewhere.  And this, I protest, is why Squall is entirely forgettable and will never show up as a secret hidden character in any game ever again.

But enough about that.

I’ve been riding my bike to the center of my island to explore more temples and burn off this “nikku” that attracts so much poking when I walk into my classes.  Today, I rode under a thundering cloud and had to find shelter in an ivy covered shack.   I watched the temple hillside grow glistening with rain as bat-sized onyx butterflies swooped through marble gravestones to wet their wings.

The beauty was almost ridiculous.

-Christian

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.