Seeing Xenosaga through to the end of the third game taught me that I don’t have to finish everything. Seriously. I drop tv shows, films, books, and videogames all the time since then.
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I like Xenogears, but I don’t think any of the shit you slog through ever pays off
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are you kidding this is adorable
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weirdly I do feel like this kind of writing has become a lot more tonally salvageable in recent years than when encountering it in a 2000s action RPG. not sure if we’ve just finally caught up with japan’s level of ironic lecherousness or what
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It’s less frequently paired with anime-style absurdly leering male gaze “fanservice.” Once in a while you get e.g. Xenoblade 2 doing it uncritically but at least the camera isn’t as bad as the costume design anymore.
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it makes me embarrassed to be alive
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good point. we all love a hapless pervert character, but we don’t want the game to indulge us for being perverts (it’s ok if it insults us for being perverts)
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Times are changing, we’re going to indulge all the perverts now, tune into my gamer stream tomorrow night and get in touch with your Eugene and/or Rusty
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at this point i have to resignedly accept that i will just never again have enough interest or dedicated focus to play through another one of these games - whatever deteriorating memories i still retain of the blitzball system will just have to last me through the rest of my life
it’s funny since i do still like dragon quest, a game series predicated on the idea that anybody playing it either is or wants to be emotionally comatose, for some reason that’s more appealling to me now than the sweep and slightly mangled melodrama of these games
i still believe the “final fantasy experience” can be artificially simulated in some form, maybe by reading through a game script in a dazed state while listening to the OST and trying your best to recall pieces of the strategy guide and promo art you’d encounter from having a single games magazine at age 10 and just reading it compulsively like a religious text. maybe also throw in some smelling salts, idol worship, snake handling… carefully selected interviews with people who played these games as children and their efforts to summarize just what they entailed, followed by a meditative daydream state and some automatic writing… final fantasy tulpa… i still believe i can summon it some day… that day you’ll never find my body again
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15 is reasonably close to just outwardly expressing this belief fwiw
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i think one reason i’m still sort of fond of FFX is that its conception of the franchise as one ongoing Rite Of Spring teenage death ritual was a bit more on the nose than i expected at the time
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Twitch FFX speedruns (10 hours long, mostly unskippable cutscenes interspersed by extremely brief traversal and boss fights) are good background watching material to put on the TV while you’re mopping the floor or something. You can enjoy a random snippet of the game and turn it off whenever you’ve had enough. Then it’s the player’s problem to stoically play through the whole thing not yours
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Now that you mention it, I’m reminded of how these Canonized Games end up being translated over and over and over and over, and how some of these translators would sometimes have pages where they listed portions of the script line-by-line in a three column format (one for the original Japanese, one for the official translation, and another for their translation), so they can extol the virtues of their new pet translation (I know Clyde Mandelin does stuff sorta like this now, but I’m mostly thinking of some Chrono Trigger fans who did this ages ago). Very common to see some mildly interesting analysis, but all a lot of missing the forest for the trees.
While I realize doing comparisons like that are probably quite common amongst translators of all types, I feel that this particular kind of obsession of poring over the same canonized texts over and over like this is a very close reflection to what you see in the Biblical studies community when people want to extol the virtues of their new pet translation or compare the synoptic gospels or some other nonsense. Very bizarre to see this kind of obsessive fervor translated to a secular context.
What I’m saying is that I want things to come full circle and have Ted Woosley to translate the Bible from its original Japanese under a strict, unrealistic deadline.
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It is kind of interesting to obsess over npc dialogue details when Final Fantasy is mostly impressionistic. Character, scenarios, vibes, aesthetics tend to be the remembered experience while inconsistencies, mechanical shortcomings, and plot points are picked to the bone.
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Although there’s nothing like the key single words in the Bible that determine huge stakes like whether there should be a Pope, translation decisions do still accumulate to alter the impression, particularly in earlier, more abstract games.
Wizardry is most fondly remembered in Japan partly due to its terse, impenetrable translation that erased comedic elements like the “Vorpal Blade”. Conversely, Kefka is FF’s most memorable villain in the English-speaking world due to his bitingly funny personality.
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The original videogame determines the action figures and how the hands move them around, and the translator determines what the child says
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i had a lot of fun reading gamefaq scripts for longform jrpgs on the sly at my day job a few years back and the things that jumped out the most were all the strange patches of empty space where some big incongruous plot thing is announced (such as tidus’s famous soccer celeb dad being variously alive, dead, a famous hero, an evil whale, or some combination thereof) and then the characters just say “…!” and then it immediately goes back into garbled jrpg script of npcs saying “ah, i can’t believe i lost my REDSWORD in the CAVERN” again until it’s time for the next plot convo sequence. it really highlights the way these things can feel like wandering across a plain of grey industrial carpet where things like theme and plot are only really experienced as unexplained bulges, distortions and pile-ups in the fabric
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Final Fantasy TWV
This is very important investigative journalism thank you