[HEADING=1]TOP GAME[/HEADING]
Hello, and welcome to our special challenge! Taken from the idea of the thread about games you can't help but defend, and Top Gear's The Worst Car in the History of the World, I decided that now was a good time to renew my One Rant To Rule Them All, the one involving me, my laptop, and a certain Squaresoft game. I find it informative, perspective-making, and a good benchmark on what makes a game bad. It was a terrible mistake to ever buy this game, yet I'm alot more careful because of it, so it's really a public service that I'm doing. Though, if I'm honest, I've also found it to be terribly fun. You might have owned a car or a computer and said "That's a real piece of shit. Let me tell you the ways.", and then you and your friends have a laugh. It's kind of like talking about bad movies and the like. I've done that with Final Fantasy 8, as you know
But then, I realized that I'm not the only one. You're never the only one. That's why I present, for the first time ever...
[HEADING=3]The Top Game Reverse Challenge of Worst Game You Own that is Best for Ranting About![/HEADING]
The rules are very simple. We're not here to talk about games that have simply old, but were bad out of the box from the time they were made and have aged badly to boot. We're talking Vintage Wrongness...where the design, the writing, and everything else has gone south. It can be modern or old, but it has to be a game that you are extremely familiar with, and not simply have a normal opinion about because you just never liked it. I don't like Halo games, but then I never played Halo games and they're not TRULY bad as far as I know, though if anybody has an in-depth explanation about what might've been wrong about it, go right ahead. I'm not stopping you.
This is a discussion/challenge of basically riff-worthy games. Enjoy yourselves!
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FF8 Rant Revamp...
Right, so! After the success of Final Fantasy 7, Squaresoft's first Playstation blockbuster, they began to work on their next one... It was designed to take full advantage of the graphics engine of the time and it did look nice on the adverts. It looked very nice, enticing even. My older brother had bought a Playstation to play it, I bought it, my sister STILL has a copy...but it went wrong. It all went so terribly wrong. My brother barely got to the first boss battle, I've no idea how far my sister got (though I know she still plays FF7), and I...? I played through it. Worse than that, I did it twice. First time, normally, and then the second time (years later) just cheating like hell. It looks very nice, and the music is very well done, but on the inside...madness. By this time, I've seen Spoony's review. It's quite good. He drinks from the same well of bitterness that I do. Let's get down to it, shall we?
So, you wake up one morning to realize you're basically a high school student with a gun attached to a blade that doesn't do something cool like fire swords at enemies. This, right off, is a disappointment. You're a youth inside of a school designed to hunt down and kill monsters, soldiers, and people of a high affinity and control of magic who cause wanton disaster...and yet you are NOT cool. THEN, you realize that rather than being cool or being a rebel, you're kind of woeful, emo, distant, and a jerk. (For comparisons, the main character of Persona 3 was considered distant and none-too-social, but he's obviously more expressive and he can improve.) There's more to the problem of Squall than emo behavior. He is a block of wood. Since, in Japan, "..." means an awkward pause to fill in where you are basically staring and saying nothing, this means that our boy doesn't even react to shit. He'd be a better character if they had written in "WTF?" instead of "...". This is lampshaded by savvy comedians like the ever-popular Uncle Yo. Other times when he IS talking, he is various levels of TOO emotive and not enough. Dem Guardian Forces (More on this later.) aren't just eating away at his memories. They're making him completely unstable...like the rest of the cast.
The rest of the cast? Ah yes...
Zell is everything Squall is not...in a bad way. Overreactive, embarassingly energetic, talks too much, and has no brains or restraint. When you couple this with the fact that he has the strength to injure a train, you get the idea that he's some kind of walking disaster area.
Quistis is apparently a tutor who is a failure at her job (because this school sucks) and that even as an operative she is equally meh. Essentially, her claim to fame is having shot out a giant robot spider and then being kind of pointless, even though she has a fanbase in-game.
Selphie is a MASSIVE ditz who acts as such without being entertaining. (For comparisons, Tao Kaka of Blazblue can be considered completely hilarious, due to her proper randomosity and cartoonish antics.) She is best-known for attempting to beat up a missle launch console.
Rinoa is supposedly the leader of a rebellion against Galbadia...with no common sense. She's the daughter of a general, which should have given her some incite into how tactics and planning works, but no, let's just ask the Sorceress nicely to put on the X-Men mutant power eliminator. Sure.
Late to the party was Irvine, the walking stereotype who is gutless and useless. Also, the game made owning an actual gun for combat extremely irritating. Irvine is best-known for conveniently leaving out the fact that everybody else he knows in the cast has AMNESIA.
Seifer is also an idiot, for different reasons. Let's see... Big blowhard carrying the same useless weapon as Squall, can't follow simple instructions, failed the class, got into a situation where he was suppose to be executed, became a bad guy, and somehow DIDN'T reap any real consequences as a result of his dickery. Karma Houdini doesn't even BEGIN to explain this, for him OR his wannabe ganger and robot-acting-human posse.
Edea, meanwhile, is the decoy antagonist who was being apparently puppeted by a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere in the future (More on this later.) and had all the opportunity in the world to mindfuck the cast by explaining the amnesia gag (that she actually raised everybody as kids or, in fact, had a working relationship with their Headmaster), but completely wasted it. Also, negative points for hiring Seifer, obviously.
Strangely, I had little complaint about the cast from the past...apart from them being total goofballs...of course that Laguna was freaking out over being mentally poked by forces outside his control. If the game had been about them, about a trio of haphazard war veterans trying to get by in life and deal with some of the plot of the game (which I'll also be getting to), the character end of this would've been more entertaining. Since part of the game's current events deal with stuff that Laguna set into motion, Squall's situation feels like it's catching up to the actual story. How much more fun would it have been to take part in Laguna's ride to presidency? Most of the time in these games, the heroes remain pretty damn humble. They don't become president or royalty or someone important unless they were always that important. Ah, but now we're getting onto the next bit...
The rest of the cast? Ah yes...
Zell is everything Squall is not...in a bad way. Overreactive, embarassingly energetic, talks too much, and has no brains or restraint. When you couple this with the fact that he has the strength to injure a train, you get the idea that he's some kind of walking disaster area.
Quistis is apparently a tutor who is a failure at her job (because this school sucks) and that even as an operative she is equally meh. Essentially, her claim to fame is having shot out a giant robot spider and then being kind of pointless, even though she has a fanbase in-game.
Selphie is a MASSIVE ditz who acts as such without being entertaining. (For comparisons, Tao Kaka of Blazblue can be considered completely hilarious, due to her proper randomosity and cartoonish antics.) She is best-known for attempting to beat up a missle launch console.
Rinoa is supposedly the leader of a rebellion against Galbadia...with no common sense. She's the daughter of a general, which should have given her some incite into how tactics and planning works, but no, let's just ask the Sorceress nicely to put on the X-Men mutant power eliminator. Sure.
Late to the party was Irvine, the walking stereotype who is gutless and useless. Also, the game made owning an actual gun for combat extremely irritating. Irvine is best-known for conveniently leaving out the fact that everybody else he knows in the cast has AMNESIA.
Seifer is also an idiot, for different reasons. Let's see... Big blowhard carrying the same useless weapon as Squall, can't follow simple instructions, failed the class, got into a situation where he was suppose to be executed, became a bad guy, and somehow DIDN'T reap any real consequences as a result of his dickery. Karma Houdini doesn't even BEGIN to explain this, for him OR his wannabe ganger and robot-acting-human posse.
Edea, meanwhile, is the decoy antagonist who was being apparently puppeted by a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere in the future (More on this later.) and had all the opportunity in the world to mindfuck the cast by explaining the amnesia gag (that she actually raised everybody as kids or, in fact, had a working relationship with their Headmaster), but completely wasted it. Also, negative points for hiring Seifer, obviously.
Strangely, I had little complaint about the cast from the past...apart from them being total goofballs...of course that Laguna was freaking out over being mentally poked by forces outside his control. If the game had been about them, about a trio of haphazard war veterans trying to get by in life and deal with some of the plot of the game (which I'll also be getting to), the character end of this would've been more entertaining. Since part of the game's current events deal with stuff that Laguna set into motion, Squall's situation feels like it's catching up to the actual story. How much more fun would it have been to take part in Laguna's ride to presidency? Most of the time in these games, the heroes remain pretty damn humble. They don't become president or royalty or someone important unless they were always that important. Ah, but now we're getting onto the next bit...
(I want to point out, up front, that the Squall Is Dead theory is funny and interesting, but it doesn't actually make the game any better.) Now then, the story goes that our hitherto-unseen villain of the future, the Sorceress who pretty much controls the world in the future, has this problem where she's prophesized to be destroyed by the organization effectively bred to kill practicioners of magic such as herself, SeeD. So, she goes and reaches back in time with her temporal-reachy-backy device to poke into the minds of receptive individuals to go and bring forth the compression of time which - presumably - stops history and therefore the flow of events that would lead to her demise.
Uhhh, problem. Lots of them.
First, take about every single argument against changing your own history and then set it aside on a table. They're there and we know they're there, but we don't need to explain them anymore adequately than Doctor Who or Back to the Future has. Time travel and history-changing be hazardous in many ways, the details of which we need not to go into EXCEPT for the more-specific problem. In no way did this lord of an advanced future with all her magic and technology even deem to consider that her time-jaunt to tweak people around was actually causing her demise, and that doing nothing would have assured victory. Because...messing with time travel allowed people to experiment on the effects and figure out the problem, and that somehow the great-and-powerful sorceress living many years AFTER the effects of everything couldn't see this coming!
It boggles the mind. This is after ignoring the problem of paradoxes and how you might be affected by changes in your own timestream if you're still in it, because obviously a wizardess did it and negated THOSE problems. The issue is that everything against Ultimecia that she was worried about was started BY her and that the best way to assure her dominion FOREVER was to be completely unexpected by not allowing anyone to have foreknowledge of her existence! Nobody existed in her time period that could do anything to her! This is about as bad as finding out first that Seifer was going to be put to death (YES!), and then finding him later, completely unharmed...which is bullshit. He committed a capital offense, abducting a President with intents to MURDER him. In fact, he kept screwing everything up and received NO consequences, and he wasn't even brainwashed or controlled by anyone. He was just a dick with a poorly-designed weapon.
I really didn't think much of the 'nearly every character came from the same orphanage' bit either. The idea that everybody conveniently forgot stuff because the Guardian Forces took part of your brain to live in? That was forced and covered up pretty badly. What? You mean there's NO evidence from childhood to present day for ANYONE that these people actually knew each other? Even amnesiacs find evidence of who they are and what they forgot, even if their current self can't find a connection to it. And nobody in the WORLD knows anything about Edea or anything surrounding her at all? Well, apparently Cid knew, but his answer appeared to be sending his brain-damaged teenagers with attitude into battle. Not maybe warning the entire country of Galbadia that MAYBE her intentions are not pure! But then, it seems like nobody objected to the President getting killed on-stage, so maybe they're all just Too Dumb To Live.
Except Biggs and Wedge, who survived for once.
Uhhh, problem. Lots of them.
First, take about every single argument against changing your own history and then set it aside on a table. They're there and we know they're there, but we don't need to explain them anymore adequately than Doctor Who or Back to the Future has. Time travel and history-changing be hazardous in many ways, the details of which we need not to go into EXCEPT for the more-specific problem. In no way did this lord of an advanced future with all her magic and technology even deem to consider that her time-jaunt to tweak people around was actually causing her demise, and that doing nothing would have assured victory. Because...messing with time travel allowed people to experiment on the effects and figure out the problem, and that somehow the great-and-powerful sorceress living many years AFTER the effects of everything couldn't see this coming!
It boggles the mind. This is after ignoring the problem of paradoxes and how you might be affected by changes in your own timestream if you're still in it, because obviously a wizardess did it and negated THOSE problems. The issue is that everything against Ultimecia that she was worried about was started BY her and that the best way to assure her dominion FOREVER was to be completely unexpected by not allowing anyone to have foreknowledge of her existence! Nobody existed in her time period that could do anything to her! This is about as bad as finding out first that Seifer was going to be put to death (YES!), and then finding him later, completely unharmed...which is bullshit. He committed a capital offense, abducting a President with intents to MURDER him. In fact, he kept screwing everything up and received NO consequences, and he wasn't even brainwashed or controlled by anyone. He was just a dick with a poorly-designed weapon.
I really didn't think much of the 'nearly every character came from the same orphanage' bit either. The idea that everybody conveniently forgot stuff because the Guardian Forces took part of your brain to live in? That was forced and covered up pretty badly. What? You mean there's NO evidence from childhood to present day for ANYONE that these people actually knew each other? Even amnesiacs find evidence of who they are and what they forgot, even if their current self can't find a connection to it. And nobody in the WORLD knows anything about Edea or anything surrounding her at all? Well, apparently Cid knew, but his answer appeared to be sending his brain-damaged teenagers with attitude into battle. Not maybe warning the entire country of Galbadia that MAYBE her intentions are not pure! But then, it seems like nobody objected to the President getting killed on-stage, so maybe they're all just Too Dumb To Live.
Except Biggs and Wedge, who survived for once.
Any of it. All of it. Drawing magic seemed like a cool idea at first, but it became tedious and irritating, especially drawing GFs who you couldn't use even in the battles you pulled them from! Binding them to stats? Ugh. Losing strength in something because you casted a spell? Ugh. Junctioning GFs, magic, commands, etc.? Ugh. Unskippable tutorials for ANY of this? Groan! ALL Junctioned GFs, commands, magic, and so on that were carefully setup previously now suddenly UNDONE during the course of the game for ANY REASON? RARGLE BARGLE! This is forced and tedious and I hate it! I hate time limits too, but that's a side-complaint next to messing up my stuff!
Items! Items, items, and more items...plus cards. What a pain in the ass. Everything to do with the collecting and refining and the crafting and the doing ANYTHING with items except for finding them or buying them and using them is tedious and irritating. Need items to make your crappy weapons less crappy, including ammo for the one character using a gun. And cards? Fuck cards. I won't even bother to go into it. Just watch Spoony. He went far more into it than I care to, because (and this is the weird part) I found myself enjoying FF9's card game. Possibly because it wasn't attached to all the crap of the game in the same manner as this was.
Weapons! I hate gunblades. The only gunblades that have the right to exist are ones like Lightning's that change about so that they actually look like they function properly as both. We have guns with blades ON them in real life. They're not used quite like this. Galbadian soldiers carry guns AND blades separately! What's wrong with that? Oh, and let's talk about Limit Breaks. First, there is a stigma that we, the Zero Punctuation watchers, hate and it's called Quicktime Events, which in this case is "Press X to not suck at Limit Breaks". Appalling. Limit Breaks emerged out in Final Fantasy 6 as a secret surprise desperation move that happened automatically if you had low HP. You didn't have to do anything for them. For FF7, they were developed into a decent system that worked. Once again relying on the low HP and having to make a minigame out of it is painful. Also, some of them don't even work.
And speaking of painful, how's that leveling going? Oh wait, there's practically no point in leveling at all, because everything ramps up with you. Not as in you fight progressively stronger monsters like climbing stairs. You and they are basically running in place, and the only way to gain an edge is all the junctioning BS and item refinement and messing about. Not gameplay, not strategy, not basically training your characters into becoming super-soldiers like everyone else does in RPG land. It's all alchemy and pokemon. You NEVER get any better than the beasties from the FIRST enemy areas, or anywhere else. This includes bosses! And WHY are there giant dinosaurs inside of an academy?! I hate that there is not only something that nuts there, but that even if I DO kill it in the early game...its death is basically meaningless. I can't skyrocket over the next pathetic enemies because I'm maybe the ultimate dinosaur hunter. That's wrong on so many levels.
Items! Items, items, and more items...plus cards. What a pain in the ass. Everything to do with the collecting and refining and the crafting and the doing ANYTHING with items except for finding them or buying them and using them is tedious and irritating. Need items to make your crappy weapons less crappy, including ammo for the one character using a gun. And cards? Fuck cards. I won't even bother to go into it. Just watch Spoony. He went far more into it than I care to, because (and this is the weird part) I found myself enjoying FF9's card game. Possibly because it wasn't attached to all the crap of the game in the same manner as this was.
Weapons! I hate gunblades. The only gunblades that have the right to exist are ones like Lightning's that change about so that they actually look like they function properly as both. We have guns with blades ON them in real life. They're not used quite like this. Galbadian soldiers carry guns AND blades separately! What's wrong with that? Oh, and let's talk about Limit Breaks. First, there is a stigma that we, the Zero Punctuation watchers, hate and it's called Quicktime Events, which in this case is "Press X to not suck at Limit Breaks". Appalling. Limit Breaks emerged out in Final Fantasy 6 as a secret surprise desperation move that happened automatically if you had low HP. You didn't have to do anything for them. For FF7, they were developed into a decent system that worked. Once again relying on the low HP and having to make a minigame out of it is painful. Also, some of them don't even work.
And speaking of painful, how's that leveling going? Oh wait, there's practically no point in leveling at all, because everything ramps up with you. Not as in you fight progressively stronger monsters like climbing stairs. You and they are basically running in place, and the only way to gain an edge is all the junctioning BS and item refinement and messing about. Not gameplay, not strategy, not basically training your characters into becoming super-soldiers like everyone else does in RPG land. It's all alchemy and pokemon. You NEVER get any better than the beasties from the FIRST enemy areas, or anywhere else. This includes bosses! And WHY are there giant dinosaurs inside of an academy?! I hate that there is not only something that nuts there, but that even if I DO kill it in the early game...its death is basically meaningless. I can't skyrocket over the next pathetic enemies because I'm maybe the ultimate dinosaur hunter. That's wrong on so many levels.
So...I've already established that this badly-accented woman caused her own problems. That is, this entire horrible chain of events and brain-damaged youth soldiers coming to kill her was caused entirely by her own actions and resources. We all know the game's a time loop, and time loops aren't even outside of Final Fantasy's pervue, since...the FIRST game pulled that off with Chaos. I really hate Ultimecia, though. Even her name is bad. (The main badguy of FF5, Ex-Death, is also bad, but he was both cool AND it's a mistranslation, as he was suppose to be called Exodus.) But it's not just her character that's bad, but other things like...how she comes out of frigging NOWHERE, the same problem Zemus/Zeromus had in Final Fantasy 4 (which was also bland). The previous three games showcased our villains nicely. I don't even like Kefka, but he was characterized. LAVOS has more character than Ultimecia, and he doesn't speak english!
All that, however, isn't even as bad as her battle. Remember, this is after having to go through everything I mentioned above. This is after slogging through an entire game that pretty much does not award your efforts for that mega-slog. There's no satisfaction that you have created an elite group of badasses who can take on anything, because everything followed your level along the way. Because Square wanted to top their last few multi-stage final bosses, they invented this four-stage (or five, if you include the part where part right before the last one where some of Ulti-Griever has fallen apart) battle, which...was just one long un-exciting work. The whole game feels like work, and this is even MORE work. And I checked. No matter what you do, no matter how good you are, Ultimecia always has stupid-ridiculous amounts of HP for no goddamn reason. Let's break it down.
Firstly, sorceresses are NOT tough. They are glass cannons. It shouldn't have taken as long or as much effort to exhaust her enough to bring forth her OWN Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, Griever. I know we did the thing where we actually named this bastard mid-game, but some kinda' note in the future stating "Oh god, our forces were crushed by Griever! DAMN YOU, LEONHART!" might've helped. A tiny bit of REAL foreshadowing would've gone a long way. So, he slaps us around and GF gets beaten. He's tougher, sure. And now, they merge. ...fuck. I can understand why that might be bad normally, but their asses are kicked at this point! Where's the power coming from? Yu Yevon never became more powerful than the Aeons he possessed, not without time and effort, like everyone else. Exodus possessed alot of things, but they were only marginally stronger because of his black magic. How's THIS work? The Giant Space Flea From Nowhere has mounted one of its own kind and has thus divided by zero!
Okay, so we beat that until it starts falling apart and then we destroy it entirely, remembering of course that each successive stage here has had more HP than the last. So, Ulti-Griever EXPLODES. Is she dead? NO! Why? I don't know! If the time-compressor was engaged to create ANY of this mess, or that it's suppose to give her godly powers AFTER getting her ass multi-kicked, it's not mentioned. Some kind of timey-wimey thing is going on to make her final form, and I know that both Chaos and Lavos did it better and deserved it more. I can forgive Necron of Final Fantasy 9 more than this. He's even LESS-EXPLAINED, but it's pretty easy to accept that he's a death god summoned to the heroes' plain by Kuja wrecking the all-important soul crystal. I can get behind that. I can't get behind this sorceress. I'm a writer by trade and my first, second, and third impressions say no.
All that, however, isn't even as bad as her battle. Remember, this is after having to go through everything I mentioned above. This is after slogging through an entire game that pretty much does not award your efforts for that mega-slog. There's no satisfaction that you have created an elite group of badasses who can take on anything, because everything followed your level along the way. Because Square wanted to top their last few multi-stage final bosses, they invented this four-stage (or five, if you include the part where part right before the last one where some of Ulti-Griever has fallen apart) battle, which...was just one long un-exciting work. The whole game feels like work, and this is even MORE work. And I checked. No matter what you do, no matter how good you are, Ultimecia always has stupid-ridiculous amounts of HP for no goddamn reason. Let's break it down.
Firstly, sorceresses are NOT tough. They are glass cannons. It shouldn't have taken as long or as much effort to exhaust her enough to bring forth her OWN Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, Griever. I know we did the thing where we actually named this bastard mid-game, but some kinda' note in the future stating "Oh god, our forces were crushed by Griever! DAMN YOU, LEONHART!" might've helped. A tiny bit of REAL foreshadowing would've gone a long way. So, he slaps us around and GF gets beaten. He's tougher, sure. And now, they merge. ...fuck. I can understand why that might be bad normally, but their asses are kicked at this point! Where's the power coming from? Yu Yevon never became more powerful than the Aeons he possessed, not without time and effort, like everyone else. Exodus possessed alot of things, but they were only marginally stronger because of his black magic. How's THIS work? The Giant Space Flea From Nowhere has mounted one of its own kind and has thus divided by zero!
Okay, so we beat that until it starts falling apart and then we destroy it entirely, remembering of course that each successive stage here has had more HP than the last. So, Ulti-Griever EXPLODES. Is she dead? NO! Why? I don't know! If the time-compressor was engaged to create ANY of this mess, or that it's suppose to give her godly powers AFTER getting her ass multi-kicked, it's not mentioned. Some kind of timey-wimey thing is going on to make her final form, and I know that both Chaos and Lavos did it better and deserved it more. I can forgive Necron of Final Fantasy 9 more than this. He's even LESS-EXPLAINED, but it's pretty easy to accept that he's a death god summoned to the heroes' plain by Kuja wrecking the all-important soul crystal. I can get behind that. I can't get behind this sorceress. I'm a writer by trade and my first, second, and third impressions say no.
The above rant is the new and refined version of one I made earlier that was hard as hell to find, so I hope it was enjoyable to all.
NEXT!
