The Essentials #42: Chrono Trigger

Nearly a decade before financial difficulties led to its stunning merger with Enix, Square fulfilled many a genre enthusiast's dream by bringing together the creative minds behind Japan's two biggest role-playing game series, its own Final Fantasy and Enix's Dragon Quest, for a one-shot super game. 1995's Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was conceived and supervised jointly by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, and Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest. It featured the character designs of DQ's Akira Toriyama and the music of FF's Nobuo Uematsu. But the "dream team" did not end with those four. Kazuhiko Aoki, a battle designer for FFIII and FFIV, and later the scenario writer for FFIX, would take the producer credit. The assemblage of talent he then brought together reads like a veritable who's who of figures in JRPG development, and, for many of them, Chrono Trigger was in fact the title that truly launched their careers.

Director credits were shared among Takashi Tokita (lead designer and scenario writer for FFIV), Yoshinori Kitase (director, writer, and producer who would essentially take the reins of the Final Fantasy series with FFVII), and Akihiko Matsui (a battle designer for FFIV). Tokita and Kitase also contributed to the script, which was outlined initially by Yuji Horii. The bulk of the writing was handled by scenario writer Masato Kato, who would later contribute scenes to FFVII (he takes credit for the "Cloud in a wheelchair" episode) and Xenogears, among other Square titles. More significantly, Kato would go on to become the main man behind the Chrono series, writing and directing semi-sequels Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross, before leaving Square to become a freelance scenario writer. His friend and frequent collaborator, Yasunori Mitsuda, subsequently the second most recognized Japanese game music composer after Nobuo Uematsu, actually provided most of the music. Uematsu only came on board later in development to relieve Mitsuda's overwhelming workload by adding a few tracks. Even Noriko Matsueda (FFX-2) helped out with one jazzy piece. Also on the sound team, working on sound effects, was Yoshitaka Hirota, later the main composer for the Shadow Hearts series. Behind Akira Toriyama on the art team were graphic director Tetsuya Takahashi (creator of Xenogears and Xenosaga) and field graphic artists Tetsuya Nomura (Square's top character designer since FFVII, as well as the creator of the Kingdom Hearts series), Yusuke Naora (art director for FFVII, FFVIII, and FFX), and Yasuyuki Honne (director and art director on the Baten Kaitos games).

Deep list of Japanese names aside, the dream project delivered the perfect marriage of the artful narrative and aesthetic of Dragon Quest with the high concept appeal and playability of Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest (AKA Dragon Warrior) was never actually very popular in the West, and I personally only recently got into the series with DQVIII, so I missed out on the shifting perspective of DQIV and the multi-generational narrative of DQV. But playing through DQVIII did leave me with a finer appreciation for what Yuji Horii must have contributed to Chrono Trigger. More lighthearted and composed compared to the raw melodrama of the sprawling Final Fantasy epics, and considerably more coherent than subsequent Masato Kato scripts, everything in Chrono Trigger seemed so perfectly ordered and controlled. The tightly woven adventure experienced few lulls or lapses. Never would the player be left wondering why the characters were fighting some random monster in some random dungeon. With the exception of one glaring loose end that was almost assuredly deliberately left hanging by Kato, every twist seemed to fit sensibly in a plan that made for one of the most cleverly constructed time travel narratives of any medium, full of delightful paradoxes and closed circles.

Yet what made the story of Chrono Trigger so magical for me was not even the main plot of the heroes traveling across time on a selfless mission to unravel a chain of events that would result in the destruction of a far-off future. It was the stirring subplots, like Lucca traveling back in time to set right a tragedy in her own life. Or the robotic Robo taking on a mission that would last hundreds of years in solitary diligence for him, but mere seconds for his time-hopping human friends to bear the fruits of his labor. Yes, Robo and Lucca are probably my favorite video game characters of all time, but the game balanced a cast full of charming personalities, and the best part of the experience was getting to know them all.


One Dragon Quest tradition that I did not so much enjoy seeing carried over was the mute protagonist. Venturing far from proper "role-playing games," JRPGs are so heavily scripted and linear that I've never understood the argument in utilizing silent protagonists as a way to immerse the player. There is never anywhere near enough choice in these games to really allow players to identify themselves as the main character, so I would almost always say that a story would be better served to paint a protagonist that is independently interesting. The only semi-convincing point I've heard in defense of the device is that, while we may not insert ourselves as the protagonist, every player is free to project a personality of their pleasing on the mute character, rather than having to accept a hero only by the artist's strictly defined image. That's worked for me on occasion, though I think I may not be doing it right, because the personality that I seem to always project is that of a really quiet guy with no will of his own. Chrono Trigger certainly did not change my mind on the matter, and one of the things that most annoyed me was the perceived passivity of the unfortunately named Crono, in the face of other characters so bursting with charisma. But it did provide me one very special moment:

(HIGHLIGHT TO VIEW SPOILERS)

About halfway through the adventure, something amazing happens. With the party facing imminent annihilation at the hands of a world-destroying monster, Crono alone is able to stand and continue fighting. The player approaches the enemy, and Crono automatically assumes his battle stance. Then the unthinkable happens. Crono dies! Yet the player is somehow still in it, and the game goes on, driven by the other party members. Reflecting in the aftermath of that shock, I realized that, in that transformative moment severing the link between player and player character, the silent avatar had become his own person. For as he stood resolute against oblivion and died for his friends, it was not my doing, but his choice. And the only things more inspiring than his sacrifice would be the devotion of his friends and the lengths they would go to to bring him back.


It's also worth noting that, even after it became possible to swap characters freely in and out of the party, each party member still had something to say about every event. These were always simple observations--the characters could never have direct dialogue with one another--but they were actually distinct and context-sensitive lines, reflecting, not just their idiosyncratic speech patterns, but their different personalities.

While Horii may very well be one of the industry's superior storytellers, I've found that he makes some of the most stupidly unplayable JRPGs in the business. Whatever his stamp on the finished product, Chrono Trigger was undeniably and thankfully a Square game and not one of his sadistic Enix joints. One of the most accessible JRPGs released up to that point, it enjoyed a much more lenient difficulty curve than the grind-heavy Dragon Quest, or even Final Fantasy games of the time.

In a departure from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest norm, Chrono Trigger did away with random encounters. I'm rather of two minds on this issue, but if I had to pick a side, I'd say that I favor random encounters in moderation over the common alternatives. Chrono Trigger was less needlessly stressful than, say, Persona 3 or certain recent Tales games, where enemies actually chase you and can initiate surprise attacks, but there was still a degree of anxiety in dungeon exploration. Although you could often see enemies on the field, rarely was it possible for the party to avoid the obvious ambushes. Worse yet, these foes would respawn every time you left and returned to a room, which happened frequently in this back-and-forth time traveling adventure. The actual fighting was never very difficult, but it became dreadful nonetheless, knowing every time when you were about to be attacked. I imagine it would be like knowing the exact date of your death in advance; you might be better able to plan out your life, but the living would be made less enjoyable, because the knowledge would cast a pall over every pleasure.

Once initiated, combat was handled with a barely modified revision of Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system, originally designed by Hiroyuki Ito, who worked on Chrono Trigger as an event planner. One difference was that battles occurred directly on the field with no cut to a separate battle screen, and characters and enemies took positions roughly where they stood, introducing minor spacial considerations in the areas of effect of certain techniques. Party members' individual action menus were also now laid out separately, so that the player was not forced to assign commands exactly in order according to the characters' speed ratings. This was significant mainly in that the player could wait for multiple characters to ready up for orders at the same time, at which point the option for cooperative maneuvers would become available, allowing two or three party members to synchronize their signature moves. While cool to look at, I did not find them particularly useful, aside from a handful of early combos imbuing physical attacks with elemental attributes. Most were no more than the sums of the individual techniques that comprised them, with the additional downside being that, if one participating party member became incapacitated before a selected combo could be performed, all characters involved would end up missing that turn. It was usually wiser just to rely on characters' personal abilities.


Chrono Trigger's greatest innovation may have been the "New Game+" feature, allowing players to carry their endgame experience and equipment over into a breezy second playthrough. It was consequently one of the very few JRPGs that I played through more than once. Part of the incentive for replaying was that, in successive playthroughs, it was possible to warp directly to the final boss fight at any time during the adventure, and defeating it at different points would yield different endings. These were mostly short gag endings that saw the timeline becoming a comic mess because, in beating the game prematurely, the characters would fail to thoroughly cover the changes they wrought. They should not be mistaken for what comes to mind when game makers these days boast of offering multiple paths and endings. There was still only the one real ending with a few variations, but if the multiple endings were not a particularly meaningful innovation, they nevertheless provided some good fun.

Square Enix's shameless whoring out of the Final Fantasy name has turned segments of the gaming community against the company and franchise, to the extent that even the classics have lost a lot of their luster in the eyes of cynics. Chrono Trigger, however, despite a disappointing sequel and no shortage of ports, remains beloved by all. It still regularly contends for the titles of "greatest Square game," "greatest JRPG," "greatest SNES game," and even just "greatest video game of all time." I don't personally love it quite as much as the best Final Fantasy titles, mainly on account of its shallow combat and mute protagonist, but it is without a doubt one of the finest games ever made.


Additional Information

To coincide with the release of the long-awaited Chrono Cross, Square put out a 1999 port of Chrono Trigger for the Sony PlayStation. Released in North America in 2001 as one half of Final Fantasy Chronicles, it was the same game, only with lengthy load times and some brand new hand-drawn animated cut scenes, including one to set up the story of Chrono Cross.

Much as some of George Lucas's additions to the special editions of the original Star Wars trilogy may have done more harm than good, I am of the camp that firmly believes that these scenes ruin the game. Ironically, my personal complaint is that the animation injects Crono with a smirking personality that he never showed before as a voiceless 16-bit sprite, and it's one that conflicts with the image that I had formerly projected upon him. It basically upends my interpretations of his actions, and it makes all the more evident the trouble with the silent protagonist device.

With the Square Enix merger having brought Yuji Horii back to the house of Chrono, and with Masato Kato having returned to working regularly on Square Enix projects, there has been speculation that we might finally see some new movement in the series. So far, all we've gotten is another port of Chrono Trigger, this time for the Nintendo DS. The 2008 release includes the additions to the PS1 version, with none of that version's performance issues. There are also some new optional dungeons and modes that can easily be ignored. Of greatest interest to followers of the Chrono story are a new optional boss and an attached ending that inelegantly ties into the plot of Radical Dreamers, which itself was supposed to have been overwritten by Chrono Cross.

Road to Ruin

My eccentric neighbor had created a time machine. Unfortunately for him, he was a very old man, and he died before he could use it or share knowledge of it with anyone but me. Thus, the greatest power in the universe was left in my care. And I had every intention of abusing this power by traveling to the past, taking advantage of my knowledge of the future to get ahead of the game, with no regard for how many lives I would unmake in the process. After all, was it murder if the person never even made it to conception? (Probably it's something even worse...)

I had nothing so prosaic in mind as cheating the stock market. It was not money I was interested in. I had far greater ambitions. I was going to be a star, and I had the perfect plan. Traveling to many years before The Ramones were supposed to have formed, I would channel the revolutionary sound of their music to blow audiences away. By "channel," I mean steal, and by "sound," I mean their exact songs.

I started naturally with "I Wanna Be Sedated." Praised as beyond cutting-edge, it was an instant number one. I followed it up by putting together an album of all the other great Ramones hits. In less than a month, it went quadruple-platinum, and I had become the biggest celebrity in the world.

Then my scheme ran into a minor hurdle. My fans and backers still wanted more, but I had run out of Ramones songs that I knew. (In real life, "I Wanna Be Sedated" is the only Ramones song I know, and I don't even know more than its titular lyric.) What was I to do? Start composing my own songs? Never! I would have to dig deep to think of what else I could preemptively plagiarize. What other songs did I know that sounded similar to The Ramones?

...

...

...

Nope.

Nothing came to mind, so I went with Brandi Carlile's "The Story." Another hit, and the magazines applauded my ability to reinvent myself. Although I knew no more Brandi Carlile songs either, I now felt confident that I could keep my career going for several more albums. If these people seriously believed that the same man could write both "I Wanna Be Sedated" and "The Story," then they would accept anything I gave them, so long as it was good.

My next single was KT Tunstall's "Other Side of the World." Shockingly, I received my first bad reviews. I was outraged. These people were idiots. Not only were they wrongly criticizing me, but they were disrespecting KT Tunstall, whose work I evidently admired enough to unscrupulously steal. Perhaps I had finally gotten too far ahead of the time.

In an attempt to rebound from the negative reception to my latest track, my agent booked me for a fan Q&A event. A few questions in, a teenager stepped up to the mic and asked me how I was able to exactly duplicate his songs that he had not yet shared with anyone. The dream had become a nightmare. How had I never considered this scenario that now threatened to unravel all my plans?

The young Ramone sounded more genuinely curious than suspicious, and, seeing as how he had never shared his work with anyone, I doubted he had any evidence that would hold up in court. No, I alone knew and understood the truth. Everyone else would think he was just some crazed fan. But I couldn't take any risks.

With the press in attendance, I kindly suggested to the boy that he blow his own brains out. To my horror, he actually had snuck a gun in, which he then proceeded to use to shoot me in the chest.

Here's to twenty more!

It's apparently twenty years this month since Nintendo's original Game Boy debuted in North America. I am unable to find a more exact date for this anniversary, but just the year is enough to shock me. I would not have been six years old at the time. I was really too young to be playing video games anyway, but the trickle of industry news was also much slower, so it was entirely possible that a major hardware launch of a completely new gaming platform could escape my notice. The unveiling of Gunpei Yokoi's handheld did not register as a watershed moment in my life, but, in hindsight, my subsequent acquisition of it was a game-changer.

I believe I got mine for Christmas '89, or it may have been my birthday the year after. I do remember that I was all set to get a Mario plush as my present from my parents. Mario was perhaps an even bigger deal then than he is now; although I didn't play the games, I loved the character just the same as I loved Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. So when my mother asked me what I wanted, that was my answer, and it was all but decided weeks in advance.

Then, just days before we were to go shopping, my brother suggested that I get the Game Boy instead, pointing to an ad and describing it as a handheld junior version of the Nintendo. I pictured something like the Game & Watch (we had Balloon Fight and Bombsweeper, as well as an excellent VTech clone called Diamond Hunt) or those Tiger Electronics LCD handhelds. I didn't really understand, but I caved easily to my older sibling's influence. My mother was happy to get me whichever present I chose, even though, unbeknownst to me, the Game Boy cost several times what the plush went for.

When we did go shopping at Toys "R" Us, there were rows upon rows of the popular Mario plush. I was able to get a hands-on, and, as it turned out, it was not very soft or much fun to play with. This was also well before the character had a fully realized and consistent three-dimensional form, so, while I don't remember anything seeming amiss back then, I doubt my warmth for it would have lasted as long as it has for the Game Boy. On the other hand, if I had gotten it instead of the Game Boy, I might never have played a Mario game, and I might consequently have fallen out of love with the character anyway. Suffice it to say, as much as I thought I wanted the Mario, I have never regretted having gone with the Game Boy.


For the longest time, the only Game Boy games we had, besides the pack-in Tetris, were Super Mario Land, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, and Paperboy. Through most of the system's life cycle, I operated with the misguided belief that Game Boy developers only made unambitious child games not worthy of my enthusiasm. I don't know how I reconciled that attitude with the reality that I played each of the games in my Game Boy collection more than all my family's NES games combined.

Originally, my favorite by far was TMNT. I was a huge fan of the cartoon, and, back then, the turtles were truly multimedia heroes. With Konami handling the license, the video games were consistently excellent. I particularly appreciated that Fall of the Foot Clan was a very easy game. For a kid whose previous gaming experience consisted only of Combat for the Atari 2600, Super Mario Land required too much manual dexterity, and I didn't understand the narrative-free Tetris. I would come around to those games later, but TMNT included stage select as a default option, allowing me to skip to the last level without having to survive the buildup. Somehow the idea would still be considered innovative when Alone in the Dark did it in 2008.

I don't know why, but one of my most vivid memories of my childhood is from the day I got my Sega Game Gear. What I remember is that, the moment I got home, I sat down and started playing Super Mario Land on my Game Boy. I wasn't making a statement, but my brother cracked some joke about how I was still playing yesterday's machine. Actually, I was waiting for him to unpack and set up the Game Gear. I would be enjoying Columns and Sonic the Hedgehog shortly thereafter. But I would still end up going back to Super Mario Land far more often.

NonEssential #41: Skies of Arcadia Legends

It was the year 2006, when a co-worker of mine, having just purchased a Nintendo GameCube, began asking around the office for software recommendations.

"So what about role-playing games?" he asked. "Are there any good ones on the GameCube?" More specifically, he was looking for Japanese RPGs in the vein of Final Fantasy.

To that, one man answered with Namco's Tales of Symphonia. The suggestion met with my wholehearted approval, and sadly I could think of no other options for players looking for a good traditional JRPG on the GameCube. Baten Kaitos slipped my mind, but, not having played it, I could not have recommended it anyway. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was probably the only other game that came close to what Man #1 wanted, but again I was not sufficiently familiar with it. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was brought up as one to avoid, and, while I noted my fondness for it, I agreed that he was likely to be disappointed, especially since he would have no access to the multiplayer.

Man #1 may have been better-informed about the GameCube library than he'd originally let on, as he then led with "I heard there's a Skies of Arcadia for GameCube?"

He was referring to Sega's Skies of Arcadia Legends, a very slightly enhanced 2003 port of developer Overworks's critically lauded 2000 RPG, Skies of Arcadia (AKA Eternal Arcadia in Japan). It was my most hated RPG of all time.

"Oh, yeah!" Man #2 confirmed. "That's a good one."

A third man chimed in with his agreement: "Yeah, that one's really good."

I had listened as these people spoke affectionately of mediocre 3-D Sonic titles, or recommended the lame Sonic Team-developed Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but--and I swear it's nothing personal against Sega--Skies of Arcadia was where I drew the line. We were spread out about a room of only five people, one of whom spoke only limited English and would not contribute to nor even acknowledge the conversation. Outnumbered three-to-one though I was, I could not stand by quietly and suffer praise of Skies of Arcadia.

"You liked Skies of Arcadia?" I asked Man #3.

It was a struggle to contain my bitterness, but I tried to speak in a calm and controlled voice. Ironically, although I meant not to discredit myself by betraying too much emotion, the incongruous seriousness and labored slowness of my speech managed to chill the atmosphere. However hard I tried to mute it, there was a confrontational inflection to my delivery that was not lost on the addressee.

"Oh, uh, I never played it. I don't have a GameCube or Dreamcast," Man #3 sheepishly confessed, after having already recommended several titles for Man #1 to purchase. "But everybody who plays that game loves it."

A short pause ensued. The other two guys were fresh fish at the workplace, but Man #2, a veteran peer, perhaps intrigued by this rare glimmer of intensity from me, decided to pursue the topic further.

"You didn't like it, Henry?"

"No," I responded without hesitation. I suppose I did want this after all. "I thought the battle system was tedious, characters were shallow, the story was weak."

Another pause.

"Did you like it?" I asked Man #2 in return.

"Actually I never played it," he admitted. Nor, as it turned out, had any of these people played Tales of Symphonia, Crystal Chronicles, or indeed even half the titles they'd handed out as suggestions.

Another silence.

"I liked it on the Dreamcast," Man #1 finally declared. And this time I could hear him seething beneath his words.

"What did you like about it?" I demanded to know.

"I liked the story. And I liked the gameplay."

Fair enough, and perhaps that should have been the end of it. But no, for some reason, I could not let it lie.

Another silent interlude, and then I said, "It was the worst role-playing game I ever played."

At this, Man #1 was clearly offended. I had already guessed that Skies of Arcadia must have been his favorite video game of all time or something.

"Well, have you played a lot of role-playing games?" he asked skeptically.

This was the crucial juncture that I had perhaps been building to. The guy clearly had no idea to whom he was speaking. I had played and completed over fifty JRPGs in approximately a six-year span. Among those who knew me well, the number was almost an inside joke. Perhaps it was not the most absolutely monstrous list that the truly exhaustively hardcore importers might put up, but I had gathered enough from previous conversations to surmise that it was several times the number that this guy, who had naturally started with Legend of Dragoon, had even heard of.

In my imagined scenario, in which I proceeded to tear this guy apart for his impudence, I would have begun with "I dunno. What would you consider a lot?"

Then this novice, having no clue the hand I held, would have confidently answered with a terse "Ten." Because, of course, to him that would have been a large number. Right.

Then I would have shot back with "Try fifty, jackass!" At which point the room would have erupted in hooting and hollering. The fifth man would have sprung to life with an "Oh, snap!" Other teams within the building would have come flooding down the hall to contribute their ruckus. And even the boss man would have exploded out of his office door to high-five me.

But no, I didn't need any of that. In my heart, I knew that this guy did not have the tools to stand up to me on this point, and, as long as I knew, for me that was enough. I didn't need to embarrass him.

What I actually said was "I've played my share."

So I let this guy live, and nobody took it any further, until, still feeling bad about having ended the discussion on a bitter note, I conceded, "It had some good boss battles." And that was the last time anybody brought up Skies of Arcadia at work.

* * * * *

It's been three years since that incident. I've been able to play only a few more JRPGs since, so Skies of Arcadia Legends remains securely at the bottom of my list. Above, I already briefly described what I disliked about the game, but now that we're here, I'll go a little more in depth.

The gameplay was horrendous. The random encounter rate, already reduced from the Dreamcast original, was still outrageously high. Not only that, but these were undoubtedly the least exciting battles in any JRPG I'd come across.

The turn-based battle system, very similar to Xenogears or Chrono Cross, operated with a special meter shared among all four party members. Characters were defined by their repertoires of attacks and abilities that consumed varying amounts of points from this meter. The party started each battle with a few points, and players could either spend them immediately, or bide their time, filling the meter gradually over the course of the fight to open up stronger abilities.

The problem was that, after maybe the first two dungeons, nearly every random encounter could be won just by starting off fast with the strongest target-all-enemies attack ability available at the time. If one attack wasn't powerful enough to wipe them out, I still began every battle with enough points to pull off a second before they could respond. The frequency of the battling, combined with the mindlessness of the combat, made for one miserable experience. Like I said, as with most turn-based JRPGs, whether good or bad, the combat only became more than a grind in boss battles, where meter management actually mattered and Skies of Arcadia became halfway decent.

The same could never be said of the ship battles, which were strictly terrible. These were less frequent, but they took forever and were full of endless nothing. Battles consisted of long, repeating animations of two airships just circling one another, presumably jockeying for position, although they would never appear in the same frame together. After about a dozen interminable passes, vessels would finally act out the commands given them. The ensuing action possessed a Pokémon Stadium-level cohesion; first would be the shot of one ship firing its cannons, then the camera would cut to an opposing shot of the target taking damage. Then it would be back to the "epic" shots of these ships trying to outmaneuver one another. This was some sub-Advance Wars editing. I never played a turn-based game that so badly needed an option to turn off battle animations.


As for the crap story, I didn't hate it all the way through. I never go into a JRPG expecting it to be lame, or else I wouldn't even bother with the massive investment. Even if a story starts out slow or generic, I remain hopeful that it can turn things around before its 40-50 hours are up. So it was with Skies of Arcadia, and I remember being still fairly interested when an early twist left my protagonist stranded on a deserted island to fend for himself, evoking memories of Celes gathering fish in Final Fantasy VI.

I can't remember exactly at what point after that my optimism faded, but somewhere along the way, with about thirty hours still to go, it dawned on me that these characters were never going to grow or develop. Having already started as clichés, they had not changed at all after close to ten hours, and it had become evident that, just by their natures, they lacked the capacity for growth. Vyse was the free-living, eternal optimist who NEVER gave up. His best friend, Aika, was the warm yet comically abusive treasure hound. Fina, the shy but sweet maiden from another world, did go through a little more than the others, but she also started with less. These three were actually not without charm, and obviously a good story doesn't need to be full of angst and trauma, but, over the course of a JRPG-length journey, I would like to believe that the characters will have actually gone somewhere as individuals. 40-50 hours is too much to reasonably expect players to spend with static characters in a cliché-ridden story of noble pirate youths fighting for free skies against a power-hungry empire.

The only two subplots that I kind of enjoyed were both inexplicably intertwined with the most heinous side quest I'd ever experienced in a JRPG. Every dungeon included some hidden creature called a "Moonfish." They were out of the way and invisible, but if one was nearby, a beeping noise would let you know to begin scanning in first person, using special goggles to locate and capture them. As far as I knew initially, the only point to the Moonfish was that I could trade them to a particular NPC for rare items, but I wasn't overly concerned with that.

As for things I enjoyed, the first was the GameCube-exclusive series of tricky battles against the "Angel of Death," a mysterious female bounty hunter holding a grudge that would be slightly elaborated upon with each encounter. The other mildly interesting subplot was a doctor NPC's periodic tales clearing up the backstory of a major antagonist, whose motives and fall from grace would never elsewhere be addressed. These were about the only things I had to look forward to when I turned on Skies of Arcadia, so it worried me when I noticed that it had been a long time since either story had received a new episode. I had originally assumed that advancement in these subplots was tied to my progression in the main plot, and, in an indirect way, that was true. Looking up an online FAQ, I found that they were actually tied to how many Moonfish I'd collected, and based on where I was with these stories, relative to how many dungeons I had completed, it became apparent that I must have missed a few. But there was no way of knowing which Moonfish I had failed to catch, except to go back through EVERY abominable dungeon, and there was absolutely no way I was doing that! So that was that. Those accursed Moonfish had completely screwed me out of the only things I had been enjoying in Skies of Arcadia.


Better arguments in favor of Skies of Arcadia tend to concentrate on its sense of wonder and exploration. Eager players could sail the unmapped skies searching for "discoveries," which were sights and landmarks that the crew would document, afterward selling the information for cash rewards. I suppose I can respect liking Skies of Arcadia for that reason. That sort of gameplay is certainly not my cup of tea, especially since the ship steered like a tank, ramming into discoveries was made extra bothersome by the dodgy hit detection, and the high encounter rate dampened any drive to stray from the main plot. What I liked better was filling my home base with NPCs, as I recruited obnoxious idiots to fill positions on my crew. Yes, at its very best, the game was like a bad version of Suikoden.

Looking back, I would say Skies of Arcadia is notable only because it was one of the first JRPGs of its hardware generation, and far more technically ambitious than Grandia II. Many of the PS1's best titles had cheated by using pre-rendered backgrounds and cut scenes to provide graphics that exceeded what the hardware was actually capable of generating in real time. Skies of Arcadia took advantage of the next-gen power of the Sega Dreamcast to finally deliver a JRPG-sized world that could be explored as true 3-D space. Based on the finished product, however, I would say it was still too early to be going there. When I came to the Legends edition on GameCube, I thought the character models were okay, but the environments, not only looked crude next to those of Final Fantasy X, but had already aged very poorly even compared to those of the 32-bit Final Fantasy games. The jagged lines and muddy textures hardly seemed to justify my having to grapple with the camera. Maybe one could have appreciated it on a strictly technical level, but I didn't understand how anybody could honestly believe the game looked anywhere close to beautiful.

The limitations of the graphical engine became very apparent during a cut scene in which the protagonists had to escape the enemy by navigating their airship through a slowly closing fortress gate. Watching it, I was instantly reminded of the classic "breaking through South Gate" scene from Final Fantasy IX. Except that this was crudely modeled and not very exciting. Worst of all, the bulk of the sequence was actually one of those slow and boring as hell ship battles. (Courtesy of YouTube user "goodcowgames," here's the Skies of Arcadia version: before and after the awful fight.)


I may have, in the past, been critical of such games as Robotrek, SaGa Frontier 2, or Fire Emblem, and those negative remarks have tended to overshadow my actual assessments of those games as decent-to-good. But Skies of Arcadia was one game that I truly did despise. Goddamned Dreamcast fanboys. As far as I'm concerned, this was merely another case of owners of a failed platform trying to makes themselves feel special by boosting the status of a truly unremarkable game, whose quality they expected most people would be unable to verify for themselves. Even among Dreamcast RPGs, I felt Grandia II was a better game.

Given how much I loathed the experience, and how early on I recognized that I did, you may be puzzled at why I still spent about fifty hours seeing it through. I suppose it was my compulsive need to finish what I'd started. Or perhaps I felt I needed to complete it in order to credibly deride it. Or maybe, just maybe, my enmity toward the game had itself become the story, I the joke, and my rage the punchline. For that very reason, I am filled with dread every time I hear rumors that Sega might be planning a sequel. I know that a part of me might be tempted to play that sequel, just to recapture that intensity of feeling that is so rare in gaming, even if, in this case, the feeling would be running in the wrong direction.

Gears of War 2

The sequel plays essentially the same as the original, but it's a better and more varied experience. The first game was a pretty limited cover-based shooter with some occasional melee combat. Gears of War 2 mixes up the basic gameplay by including a few new enemy types, most notably some classes of larger enemies that do not rely on cover, instead advancing on the player character directly. Breaking up the standard shootouts are many sections of alternative play styles, including a variety of on-rails and vehicular segments, a Bowser's Castle-type stage full of lethal contraptions, and a few really crappy boss fights. Most memorable in co-op was a short mission that required each player to lift one end of a heavy trunk, reducing movement to a coordinated three-legged race. Comparable to the rappelling and car chase sequences of Metal Gear Solid, these bits may not be fully realized or altogether successful, but they keep the gameplay from becoming monotonous, and most are thankfully short enough to keep from wearing out their welcomes.

The core shooting action still provides the most fun, but it remains limited in scope. Despite being able to move and shoot at the same time, the Gears of War characters never feel as versatile as, for example, the heroes of recent Resident Evil titles. The clumsy melee attacks come into play only when smaller enemies are fool enough to charge at you. The majority of the time, you just exchange fire at long range from behind cover, and unless you have a sniper rifle for headshots, it doesn't really matter where on the body or even with what weapon you tag the enemy.

After having taken much criticism concerning the shallow plot of the first game, developer Epic Games made much of its recruitment of novelist Joshua Ortega to script the sequel. I'd be surprised if any players had actually heard of Ortega before this, and Epic was clearly patronizingly selling with his nebulous profession rather than his name or past works, but his addition definitely shows as an asset, as Gears of War 2 features a much stronger story than the last game. At least in parts. It has some dramatic moments, but it's spottily implemented and flimsily held together, and, once again, I rarely knew how or why the characters were in a given location. It left me pondering what an unusual office it must have been to serve as writer on a project that so blatantly did not begin with the script. Or rather, the design team must have had its own disjointed script of set pieces and environments already in mind, which Ortega then had to screw together and fit his plot around. To be fair, I hear many blockbuster movies are produced the same way. But why must that be the ideal that every triple-A video game aspires toward?

For all the complaints of Western critics about the passivity of the Metal Gear cut scenes, never have I found the disconnect between game and story so jarring as in Gears of War 2. There are the little things, like how these characters are able to go through traumatic experiences, only to emerge bloodthirsty as ever, as they mow down their enemies while gloatingly calling them "grubs" and "bitches." Perhaps these could be taken as signs that their psyches snapped long ago from the alien wars, but I know better than to think too deeply about that. The real issue with Gears of War 2 is that the narrative arc does not at all agree with the interactive progression. The story reaches its climax midway through the fourth chapter, but instead of arriving at appropriate resolution at the end of that act, the player must still fight through one more final full-length chapter. Epic seemed determined to save its biggest interactive set pieces for the finale, but, whatever the developer may have intended, the reality was that I had become more invested in the plot than in the gameplay, so that when the final chapter strayed from the engaging earlier threads to move on instead to a practically unrelated episode, I no longer cared how big the action got, because it could only be anticlimactic within the narrative structure.

Then there were those damn "active briefing" segments in both games, where, instead of cutting to a cinematic, characters would simply put away their guns and activate their earpieces to receive new orders. The transition is meant to appear seamless, and players are expected to continue proceeding forward even as their characters converse. Except that you can only walk at the slowest gear. Personally, I found this so much more frustrating than the interminable MGS4 cut scenes. I generally don't mind video games that can shift between active and passive modes. If I see a movie coming on, it triggers a switch in my brain telling me to relax and enjoy the show. It can be both a reward and a relief. I'm not so ADD that my fingers need always be pounding buttons. Gears of War thinks it knows better, however, and presents the player with a transparent illusion of interactivity, whereby you can tilt the stick to move your character around, but you'll quickly tire at feeling unable to do anything but inch along the path that the game leads you on. Because there's no obvious cut to cinematic, it's not a clean break from the action, and so my brain is still set for battle.

While, as a story it dragged on too long, the campaign was actually incredibly short. The game shrewdly omits any sort of clock, preventing me from determining exactly how short it was, but it could not have been ten hours. Without anything to unlock or upgrade, neither is there much incentive to revisit stages. And, however active the online community may be, the cover-based gameplay was clearly never designed for competitive multiplayer. The cooperative "Horde" mode offers perhaps a more balanced take on the Resident Evil "Mercenaries" concept, but it's disappointing that the different playable characters do not come with unique moves or animations. Honestly, I don't really see myself returning to the game now that I've beaten it.

Although I am glad I waited for it to drop in price before picking it up, I did still have fun with Gears of War 2. Whatever my complaints, it is undeniably a well-made and entertaining experience for most of its short duration. At its very best, it does feel like an interactive summer blockbuster, which, right in the introduction in the manual, director Cliff Bleszinski states was exactly his team's aim. Am I a fool to ask for more than that?

The King of Fighters XII

In my favoritism of Street Fighter, I may at times give the impression that I am less than fond of its would-be rival, SNK's King of Fighters. That's not true. I've played every release in the main series, and I even still play and beat the single-player of KoF '95 once a year just for its hilarious ending. While the earlier titles had many faults, 2003 and XI were legitimately well-made fighting games. Seeing SNK Playmore putting real effort into rejuvenating the series with The King of Fighters XII, I was more hyped than I'd ever been for a KoF game. Unfortunately, the "finished" product makes me sad in so many ways.

Let's start with the updated visuals, which were by far the game's most advertised asset. KoF XII runs at about double the resolution of the old Neo-Geo games. Unfortunately, while that was impressive back when Guilty Gear X did it in 2000, the recently released BlazBlue is about double that, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is sharper still. In other words, KoF XII's much hyped new graphics were obsolete long before the game ever came out. Why didn't anybody complain about this during all those enthusiastic previews, you ask? Well, the game truly looked amazing in screenshots and video at its native resolution. Blow them up on that HD set at home, however, and pixelation rears its ugly head. As a result, KoF looks once again less than cutting edge next to its more distinguished peers.

Now, if you've kept up with the KoF series through all its iterations, as I have, then you'll likely still be astounded at how much bigger and sharper these sprites are. But consider how SNK has operated in the past, and the disappointing prospect we then face is that these already outdated graphics may be reused and rehashed for the next several years.

The once annual KoF took a four-year hiatus because SNK Playmore knew it had finally gotten all the mileage it could out of the old sprites. For those four years, the developer was supposed to be working feverishly to give KoF a new lease on life by starting from scratch to painstakingly redraw all the art by hand. So why would they have spent all that work seemingly just to commit the series to obsolete sprites for the next several entries? Well, KoF XI came out in 2005. At the time, the highest res 2-D fighter was still Guilty Gear X. Perhaps SNK Playmore began work on KoF XII right then, setting GGX as the goal, and, by the time HD Remix and BlazBlue raised the bar again, it was too late to react.

The other theory is that KoF XII was held back by the same constraint that has resulted in so many compromised home versions of past 2-D fighters. Namely, current disc-based consoles may not have the RAM to load in the massive amounts of data, in this case constituted by the multitudinous animation frames of this size. You see, the increased resolution was only one side of the makeover. KoF XII also aimed for and here achieved Street Fighter III-caliber animation smoothness. Yes, now every character animates just as silkily as Kim (formerly Kim Kaphwan, now apparently just "Kim") has for the last three installments. For comparison, HD Remix is exactly as choppy as the 1994 game whose sprites it traced over, while BlazBlue is, like Guilty Gear, inconsistent and, even at its best, never close to being on the same level as Street Fighter III. Thus, while those other games may look better in stills, I would insist that no purely 2-D game impresses more in motion than KoF XII.

While the sub-HD sprites are disappointing, and the slick animation cannot wash that away, I might still have unenthusiastically handed KoF XII the title of "current best-looking hand-drawn 2-D video game," based on the unprecedented sum of its resolution and animation. Alas, it's still not that simple. For me, the actual design component may be what is most lacking.

I've remarked previously about KoF's curious preference for dandy men in glam runway outfits that have never seemed appropriate as combat apparel. But that's a large part of KoF's identity; its fans would demand nothing less. I'll also readily admit that I have no fashion sense, so I don't even know if these designs are ahead of or behind the times. What I expect fans will be less pleased about is how barely recognizable so many characters have become. The art has gone from the quasi-realistic look, which distinguished the early installments from the more stylized Capcom titles of the time, to something more exaggeratedly cartoonish, and a lot of characters have undergone drastic transformations. Mature has gone from seductress to freaky, one-eyed wench. Clark looks like he's on a triple dose of that Resident Evil 5 Chris Redfield juice. And Athena looks like a ten-year-old.

Part of the problem is that a lot of my favorite characters are plain missing, so I'm more critical of the select few who did make the cut. Because it took so much work this time to create each character's animations from scratch, KoF XII includes a mere 22 fighters. That would be plenty in almost any other game, but this is a team-based series that began in '94 with 24 characters and has, over ten sequels, grown to include more than 50. 22 slots isn't enough now to contain even just what might be considered all the core characters.

Of course, Kyo Kusanagi, Iori Yagami, Terry Bogard, and Ryo Sakazaki are all in. Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Robert Garcia, and Leona also make their triumphant returns here. But, for the second straight installment, Mai Shiranui, probably the most recognizable SNK character to Western players, is nowhere to be seen. In fact, this time, not a single member of the Women's Team made it in--no King, Yuri Sakazaki, Kasumi Todoh, Chizuru, Li Xiangfei, Hinako Shijou, or Blue Mary. Also absent are K' and any of his '99-2001 era cohorts. What do we get instead? Raiden? Chin Gentsai?! Really? Nor is this a calculated paring down and return to the classics, as seen by the inclusions of Elisabeth Branctorche (formerly Blanctorche) and the entire 2003 Hero Team (Ash Crimson, Duo Lon, Shen Woo).

KoF has always been a niche title that appeals, not even to the already hardcore audience of fighting game fans, but really only to SNK and KoF fans. For this series and this developer, the drive to design a mechanically sound competitive game has seemingly always been of secondary importance, while the emphasis on style is exactly what series loyalists appreciate. In addition to the losses of popular characters and recognizable designs, however, KoF XII is lacking surprisingly a lot of what won those fans in previous installments. There are no intro animations whatsoever for any of the characters. Even though it's still a team-based fighter, there are no more official teams, since there aren't enough characters to divide meaningfully.

There is no story. No, this is not a "dream match" like '98 or 2002; except for Mature, they didn't bring back any dead characters. The plot is just one more thing that SNK Playmore didn't have time for. There's not even a final boss. The single-player just has you fighting through five rounds of "time trials," as you aim to clear the arcade mode as quickly as possible. There are no survival or challenge modes, nor any unlockables, so the only thing for the lone player to do is go for the fastest time in arcade mode. My personal best of 3:13 with Leona put me at #48 out of 9999 on the online rankings as of last Sunday. I've probably dropped some spots since, and while I'm sure I could shave a few seconds off that time, there's nothing more to gain from it, now that I've already gotten my gold PSN trophy.

In the unlikely event that you can find worthwhile human competition, the core game does play well. Movement is tight, controls are responsive, and it feels overall as a top-of-the-line Street Fighter derivative should. The intriguing "Critical Counter" system is like custom combos, but its use is shrewdly restricted to keep it from becoming exploited like similar systems in other games.

Something that has always annoyed me about this series has been its willingness to suddenly and extensively overhaul characters' move sets--not just adding, but also removing--to the extent that returning fighters may as well not even be the same characters. This time around, Ash has lost the super-slow version of his sonic boom. Iori Yagami, since '95 the most stalwart fireball-uppercut character in KoF, now has neither fireball nor uppercut. Why? Well, Ash did do a number on him at the end of KoF XI. But XII doesn't pick up that story in any other way, so who the hell knows what the deal is. And while I have, in the past, accused KoF of including too many useless attacks that only exist to look cool, I really do miss Terry Bogard's "Power Dunk."

Lastly, I want to mention the audio. Like many recent fighters, KoF XII includes both Japanese and English voices. Oddly, on the English track, many characters, such as Athena, still speak with Japanese accents. Since Athena's moves have English names to begin with ("Psycho Swooord!"), I at first thought that maybe they decided not to bother rerecording that audio. But the clips are definitely different between the Japanese and English Athena. Mind you, I'm not even complaining. For someone accustomed to two decades of Japanese voices, the recent trend of providing new English voices in titles like The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact and Street Fighter IV has produced jarring results. KoF XII's English track, on the other hand, sounds quite natural. But what's the deal with that blonde reporter lady in the arcade mode cut scene, who speaks the English with an outrageous Japanese accent?

KoF XII obviously won't replace Street Fighter IV as the top fighter on the competitive circuit, nor does it offer the depth of BlazBlue to appeal to the hardcore scene. But the beginnings of a potentially excellent game are there. It's just a shame that, in the backs of our minds more than anything else, I suspect we're all hoping that SNK Playmore starts over again to give us the real HD graphics next time.

The Essentials #40: Final Fantasy Tactics

SPOILERS

If you were to ask me what my favorite Final Fantasy was, my answer would not be any of the numbered installments, but rather Square's strategy RPG Final Fantasy Tactics. Released for the Sony PlayStation in North America in 1998, Final Fantasy Tactics was written, designed, and directed by Yasumi Matsuno, creator of the Ogre Battle series. The idea was to adapt some of the gameplay and aesthetic elements of Final Fantasy to the tactical combat and mature storytelling of Matsuno's acclaimed Tactics Ogre. The result was certainly the best strategy RPG I ever played.

For its combat, which comprised about 90 percent of the experience, Final Fantasy Tactics married the turn-based gameplay and tiled battlefield of Tactics Ogre, itself modeled closely after Nintendo's Fire Emblem, with co-designer Hiroyuki Ito's Active Time Battle and job systems of the Final Fantasy series. There was no real-time clock, but neither did the game proceed in alternating rounds Fire Emblem-style between the player and the enemy. Instead, similar to the ATB system, turns were allotted based on a character's individual initiative, with faster units, regardless of their side, acting earlier and more frequently. In some ways, this might have reduced the strategic component; it was harder to coordinate multiple units, as the player's options were limited to the actions available to the immediate character. Instead, it asked that the player be always mindful of the turn order in a game where battles flowed more organically. Perhaps it was not so minutely calculated a chess match as Fire Emblem, but, like the Final Fantasy titles of the time, it was a more active take on its genre, and it tested a player's mettle by forcing them to exert their command of the field while adapting to emergent situations.


For Final Fantasy Tactics, Ito also expanded upon his job system from Final Fantasy V. In the most recognizably Final Fantasy element, Tactics included most of the traditional FF character classes, including the black mage, white mage, thief, monk, and dragoon/lancer, along with their trademark abilities, which carried over with impressively little compromise. Considerably more robust than the classes of most other tactical RPGs, these came with long lists of unique skills to be learned, and, as in FFV, characters could change jobs and mix and match to create devastating combinations. More advanced classes could be accessed once characters fulfilled the prerequisites in preceding classes. Thus, unlike many strategy RPGs, where units either have fixed skill sets, or transition in strictly linear fashion to the latest and most powerful classes available, Final Fantasy Tactics encouraged players to experiment with a variety of classes in order to build custom characters to suit their styles. If the initiative-based turn order seemed to limit one's options, the depth of the class system more than made up for it.

Rather than just having units take turns whacking one another according to the standard tactical RPG rock-paper-scissors formula of looping hierarchical effectiveness, character classes were extremely diverse and distinct, affording players a high degree of flexibility in how they approached each battle. Players could take advantage of the monk's counterattacking, the knight's ability to destroy a foe's equipment, and the full assortment of classic Final Fantasy spells, including summons. Admittedly, not every Final Fantasy technique translated perfectly. The classic "jump" attack, for example, was far less useful in a game where targets constantly moved in and out of range.

There were also special classes unique to the story characters who would join the party, and these arguably more powerful units could gradually take over the game as they became more numerous. This was most certainly the case with the holy swordsman Cidolfas Orlandu, who was so dominating that he could win most of the remaining story battles by himself.

But even "Thunder God" Cid's power would be eclipsed once the player managed to teach the calculator class's "Math Skill" to a learned mage. This skill set took the numbers that lay behind every RPG and placed them at the player's disposal. One could whip up formulas that could potentially target every unit on the field with one spell to slay, heal, or even resurrect everyone in a single stroke. No, it was not balanced, but, in my experience with fighting games, it is never the most balanced games that are the most rewarding. Some characters and moves must stand out in order for the player to appreciate "power" according to the game's mechanics. When design becomes too polished and all are rendered equal, identity is lost. As Algus would say, "It's about time you learned about 'difference'!"


It was no Grand Theft Auto, but the story was a minor controversy back in the day among JRPG-playing Catholics. Christianity is not commonly practiced in Japan, and, in fact, it was even formally persecuted into the 19th century. But there are few places that can entirely escape exposure to the world's most widespread religion, and, perhaps owing to this particular distance from the primary text, Japanese video game plots have liberally mined it as mythology not far removed from the Greek or Norse myths. I'm not sure what it is in that understanding that so frequently leads to JRPGs casting the church as manipulatively evil, but, sufficed to say, this was not entirely new territory in Final Fantasy Tactics. Tactics just pushed it further than ever before, barely disguising the Roman Catholic Church as the "Church of Glabados," the corrupt devil-worshipping house disseminating a sham faith.

Before the narrative ventured too deeply into any of that, however, the game's first chapter, "The Meager," told a gripping tale of class warfare between the haves and have-nots. More closely resembling Matsuno's previous works than any Final Fantasy, it was a far cry from the melodrama and metaphysics of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yoshinori Kitase. This was some true medievalism. These were humans and not monsters, and they were unrelentingly so. The conflict pitted, not only irreconcilable circumstances in opposition, but egos that could never coexist. The answer could never be as tidy as exterminating all enemies, and in the absence of swift resolutions, messy matters compounded with regrettable consequences. Unfortunate situations were met with increasingly desperate acts as that first chapter boiled inevitably to a literally explosive climax.


Jumping ahead years after, the next two chapters would not be quite as harrowing, but the story remained one of the most intensely sober in the realm of Japanese RPGs. Unfortunately, the narrative really lost its way in the fourth and final chapter, where the human villains were replaced by conspiring demons, which the party would almost indifferently eradicate one after another. Moreover, in Final Fantasy Tactics, characters could die permanently in battle or be discharged from the party. In order to accommodate these possibilities, initially significant cast members would withdraw completely from story relevance the moment they joined the party.

Joining Matsuno on the Final Fantasy Tactics team were his Ogre series compatriots, character designer Akihiko Yoshida, art director Hiroshi Minagawa, and composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. Monster and character class designs aside, the game was aesthetically far more evocative of previous Ogre games than of Final Fantasy.

The martial soundtrack was probably my favorite PS1 game score. Sakimoto would become one of the stars of the Japanese video game music scene, even becoming the first composer to succeed Nobuo Uematsu as primary composer of the Final Fantasy mother ship. In my opinion, however, he was at his best when working alongside Iwata on the earlier Matsuno titles. Interestingly, Sakimoto and Iwata did not really collaborate on specific tracks, but compared to the wild inconsistency of Final Fantasy X, Tactics possessed a far more unified sound, as its two composers managed to maintain a consistent theme and mood. Playing the game, it was hard to tell which tracks were composed by Sakimoto, and which by Iwata.


Final Fantasy Tactics was notorious for its translation, which gets my vote as the worst Japanese-to-English video game localization of all time, surpassing Zero Wing or any of that classic SNK-grish. Whereas Zero Wing was a fairly forgotten shoot 'em up that only much later gained notoriety when the Internet rediscovered the poorly translated intro included only in the European release of the Sega Master System version, Final Fantasy Tactics was actually a major title from arguably the biggest Japanese third-party of the time, with a dense story conveyed primarily through text. Yet, at its worst, the Final Fantasy Tactics translation was just as blatantly awful as Zero Wing's.

In actuality, it was obvious that there were different people responsible for translating different parts of Final Fantasy Tactics. The cut scene dialogue was generally clear and concise. Meanwhile, the B-team had evidently been assigned to translating menus, item descriptions, and other peripheral text. One key story battle opened by naming the win condition as "Defeat Dycedarg's elder brother!" when, in fact, Dycedarg was himself the eldest Beoulve brother, as well as the target. Errors cropped up frequently in descriptions for the "proposition" side quests. These were optional assignments that would be posted at town pubs. They were not playable, but you could send out units to earn experience and items on their own. The lengthy postings were prone to sloppy errors, including inconsistent gender and number (an "it" becoming a "them"), as well as erratic renderings of proper nouns ("Wojiris" and "Warjilis") within a single screen of text.

Worst of all, however, was the in-game tutorial by Professor Daravon. This was hands-down the most absurd tutorial mode ever included in a video game. Nothing this guy said even remotely made sense. It's quite possible that the translators for this mode had never themselves played this or any other game. It's also very likely that they had only a limited grasp of English. Not only would Daravon use completely different terminology than what was actually in the game, but at times he seemed to be using a different form of English altogether, hence the following pointers:

• "Move is your moving ability. You can move on a panel, the face value of the Move."
• "Bigger attacking power means bigger damage you can give."
• "'Learn' learns Ability."
• "This was the darkened Items won't appear."

Consequently, Daravon's lessons made for a mode that existed seemingly entirely just to dispense zany video game quotes.


For that first chapter, Final Fantasy Tactics was nearly a perfect game, excelling in both script and mechanics. If the narrative faltered near the end, the gameplay remained the strongest of any title bearing the Final Fantasy name. The Tactics Ogre-inspired grid-based combat brought the same engaging chess-like quality as the best strategy RPGs, but the Final Fantasy elements--the deep character classes and diverse skill sets--were no less integral to the game's success. More emergent and less cutthroat than, say, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, thanks to its high level of customization, remained an incomparably addicting experience long after Matsuno's story ran out of steam.


Additional Information

Following Final Fantasy Tactics, Matsuno also set his other Square-Enix projects--Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy XII--in his world of Ivalice, although he drew no overt connections across stories. That task would fall to those who took over after his split from Square-Enix. Among other titles, the resulting "Ivalice Alliance" campaign included a 2007 port of Final Fantasy Tactics for the PlayStation Portable.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions was an enhanced port that added in several cel-shaded cinematic sequences, a few guest characters from other Ivalice titles, and side missions that actually gave some new purpose to old party members. On the downside, the port suffered from audio and performance issues, which was puzzling, given that the PSP's built-in emulator was already quite capable of running the PS1 version of the game.

Although not handled by Alexander O. Smith, The War of the Lions featured a brand new translation that imitated the heavy-handed, pseudo-Elizabethan style of Smith's work on Vagrant Story and FFXII.

I'm rather of two minds about that. I had played through Vagrant Story hoping for something as good as Tactics, but, while I could appreciate things about it on a technical level, I personally never found the game nor its localization as charming as some fans had. By contrast, the hilariously bad text of the original Final Fantasy Tactics had, over time, become all charm. I feel it's something that must be preserved in all its badness. And, again, the original translation was actually fine where it most counted. When it was lucid, it was even quite potent. By comparison, the needless verbosity of the new translation often strips dialogue of power and clarity.

I suppose, however, if you're going to change anything, you had better have the conviction to go all the way. In that light, The War of the Lions could be taken as offering a fresh experience, rather than just attempting to play to veterans' nostalgia.