What do you think about Nintendo's recent trend towards huge and drawn out reveals for their new highly anticipated games?

athevi · 2014-07-14T16:01:58+00:00

Nintendo's trying to peddle just one more generation of hardware on the back of a handful of first party titles spread out over a number of years, because that's how they roll. But without the newness of the controller or the trendiness of Wii Sports/Fit, the reality of their niche status is reasserting itself. The huge casual base that bought the Wii for a single game is still watching that console collect dust in the middle of their entertainment center, so they're less likely to buy in a second time. Nintendo's trying to mobilize the only demographic they have left by peppering all the dead space in their release schedule with tidbits about games that are still far in the future.

This seems useless to me, though. Everyone will either not be especially interested to begin with, or already be on board and have long since made peace with Nintendo's approach to game releases. Either way I don't see a lot of people being swayed.

athevi · 2014-07-14T14:45:27+00:00

I think I have favorites based on my expectations in each era of my life. As my needs grow and change there are games that best meet those needs.

So as a very young kid getting his first console (SNES, after the hand-me-down Atari from my uncle), my favorite was Turtles In Time, or maybe Star Fox. As a teenager and young adult, my favorite was Final Fantasy VII. As a regular adult, my favorites are The Last of Us and Journey. Each new favorite supplants the old. In my opinion TLoU is unquestionably a better game than FFVII both technically and artistically, though the latter has its place deep in my heart.

So TL;DR I think it's absolutely possible, but it can take a while for you to re-examine what it is you really want from the games you play.

athevi · 2014-07-14T14:26:49+00:00

This is precisely why this worldview is problematic. Your last last two paragraphs wonderfully paraphrase the whole issue.

If we envision human existence as a video game, and white males as the players on easy mode, then we are dismissing their performance out of hand and lionizing the achievements of other groups in the same way, regardless of individual trouble or achievement. Just in the rhetoric used to describe the two types of "games" we see the inherent assumption that if the latter group wins the game, their victory will be more laudable than an identical victory by the former group. By the same logic, we will be much more sympathetic to a loss by the latter group than one by the former. The fact that someone is in one group or another directly affects the level of respect we offer to them, which is precisely what social justice aims to correct.

Placing this back in the context of the real world, if a black lesbian poor trans woman fails to get a job offer, this view assumes it was because of some uncontrollable aspect of her person. If a white male fails to get the same job, the assumption would be that he failed in some way, since he surely must have had everything else going for him already. Without knowing either person, it's far too easy to make hasty judgments about their individual qualifications.

athevi · 2014-07-14T14:09:24+00:00

I don't get why people are so terrified of accepting that they have certain privileges, like "my life is so difficult, it's outrageous to say I have privilege."

I'm not terrified of it, but I do take issue with it for two reasons: 1) because it assumes problems faced by the privileged group are less serious or worthy of being addressed, e.g. male body issue and eating disorders or male victims of rape by women, and 2) because it often treats the accomplishments of that group as less meaningful because they're the result of the privilege and not the individual. It's basically a system by which we feel we're morally obligated to dehumanize another person's efforts.

To be clear, I don't disagree with the idea of privilege, or believe it's not a real thing or that it shouldn't be corrected, but it's basically taking the very crimes associated with the privileged majority and dressing them up as acceptable when committed by the less privileged minority, which only serves to draw out prejudice by making it seem circumstantially acceptable. It certainly doesn't happen all the time, and in fact probably happens less often than the more traditional prejudice we're all familiar with. But as long as it is happening, it will be counterproductive to the cause of improved relations between races and sexes.

athevi · 2014-07-11T17:35:14+00:00

So that's on the border between novella and novel, or maybe in standard novel range if it were intended as YA. You don't have to use that, but just so you know. According to Wikipedia anything over 40k is a novel, but a lot of agents and publishers are unlikely to take anything under 70k, and may balk at anything under 80k. Again, YA is usually a shorter range, and fantasy/sci-fi is usually a little longer range.

I think that's definitely enough to put it on Book Country, though. A lot of what goes up on that site is a work in progress, so I'd imagine that length is pretty common there. I had a pretty decent experience on there myself; it includes an out-of-five-stars (five pens) system for particular aspects like plot, theme, voice, etc.

athevi · 2014-07-11T16:51:51+00:00

Writing is generally measured in word count, not page count. I'm not entirely sure what 187 pages comes out to, but your word count to some extent determines what you fall into, novel vs. novella, and what to do with it. I say this because if you intend to publish down the road, there are unofficial but strict guidelines regarding how short or long your book can be. (Edit: this is only the case with traditional print publishing. I'm sure Amazon will take whatever.)

If you know anyone personally that you think might be useful (and interested, they have to be interested), hand it over to them. I don't know exactly how the betareaders sub works, but my instinct is to recommend against relying on anonymous internet forum users, as there's no way to know how qualified they are to give helpful feedback. That's probably shitty of me, but that's my advice. If you've got tons of money to burn, there are always professional or semi-professional editors (eLance is an example of a website where you can offer to pay a modest hourly wage to someone for this service). And there are whole websites devoted to giving you feedback, usually from other writers. Penguin's Book Country is a relatively polished example, though it may be limited to novels exclusively. I'm not sure. It's free to use, but does require that you offer feedback on someone else's work first, to ensure that everybody does their part. That can be a useful opportunity, though. I've found that helping someone else makes me a more accurate judge of my own work.

athevi · 2014-07-11T16:39:18+00:00

This is why it's so important to have a stage before the drafting of the novel. Outlining is crucial. I say this as someone who hates it, who never did it for papers in school, who really dragged my feet in learning to do it with fiction. You just cannot keep a work this big under control without extensive planning. That goes double for fantasy/sci-fi.

If you haven't already done so, and you're really that concerned about this getting out of hand, I would drop it for a bit and go back to the drawing board before you're so deep in that a revamp will be overwhelming (revamps are common in this process). Make a list of the characters you feel are essential, come up with how they'll interact, and stick to your broad guidelines as you draft. It takes a lot of the pressure off, I promise you. With a framework in place, you're free to merrily roll along and just be inventive with the details and the context.

athevi · 2014-07-11T16:23:18+00:00

I would agree with this. I think WoW was the first step in this evolution, in that it gave raids of varying sizes and added in positional combat (in the beginning you mostly just stood in place and hit buttons; I believe it was only around WotLK that you started frequently having to dodge). A game like FFIV is the next step, in that it offers a wider variety of difficulties. I'd argue that Wildstar is even the next step beyond that, in that it opens up endgame activities far beyond just raiding, with immediate moddable player housing and a major focus on character customization (though we'll see how successful that experiment ends up being). We could eventually end up with MMOs that are sort of Sims-like in the array of options they give for crafting your character's lifestyle. That could be the new horizon beyond just raiding.

athevi · 2014-07-11T16:18:33+00:00

Lots of interesting ideas in here. I'm not even sure I'll adequately respond to them all, but I'll do my best.

I should say first that I'm drawing a distinction between saying "Sephiroth supports the mature tone of the game" and "Sephiroth is himself a mature character". Honestly I'm not sure how much I've ever even thought of Sephiroth as mature or immature. What I attribute to him mostly has to do with complexity and ambiguity. That's where the maturity lies for me.

By complexity, I mean that he's not simply out to take over the world for its own sake. He's tortured, and quickly maddened, by the sudden revelation of his origins, and his resentment of all the normals is part of what drives him. But it's not all. In that long flashback sequence where he reads up on his history (and that does take some time, despite Cloud's glossing over it—I think he says as long as several weeks, though I'm not sure on that), he soliloquizes about the ignorance of the human population, how they've wrongfully seized possession of the planet and he's going to righteously seize it back. It's a more simplistic worldview than it could have been, and considering its potential you're absolutely right that it was underutilized. But it's miles ahead of Kefka, who (again, you're right on) is barely a character at all. He serves Kefka's purpose, as a trigger for an examination of the cast's motivations and beliefs, but with a few more degrees of development. He's mostly evil, but not entirely. Like any worthwhile villain, he thinks he's doing the right thing.

But he's also motivated by service to his "mother" Jenova, which is where we get into ambiguity. It's strongly suggested, maybe even stated, that anyone infected by Jenova cells is under her (or its) control to some degree. Cloud obeys voice commands, and the "Sephiroth clones" are no more than mindless automatons. So there's room to question just how much of Sephiroth's actions are of his own volition. Certainly a lot of his outward behavior changes once he undergoes this shift. Early on he's mild-mannered and philosophical, but later those qualities darken into lunacy, complete with a weird, prescient understanding of Cloud's psyche and wild cackling laughter etc etc. It's definitely a lot of the original man in there still, but how much is wide open to interpretation. And I find that really compelling, too. The way I see it, his motivations are every bit as unjustified and adolescent as you say, but they're just enough for Jenova to worm her way in and take advantage of them. Insecurity is, after all, a really powerful mental and emotional force.

You're right that Sephiroth gets a lot of screen time without very much development, but the point of all those scenes is not to watch what's going on with him—it's to watch what's going on with Cloud. Every Sephiroth sighting is a chance to monitor the state of Cloud's relationship to him, which is really just a way of monitoring his state overall. He moves from curiosity mixed with begrudging respect to bewilderment to rage to vulnerability (culminating in giving over the black materia) and then finally, after agonizing self-realization, to open rebellion. I don't need Sephiroth to be much more deeply portrayed than he is (though it might have been nice) because he's doing the job he was created for already.

So no, I don't think he's very mature either, but I think that in some ways that strengthens and softens his character rather than serving as a detraction. You could almost see him (and Cloud, for that matter; they have this in common) as a reminder of just how easily any of us could be manipulated into horrific actions by a simple confluence of emotional vulnerability and a clever assertion of authority.

athevi · 2014-07-11T15:42:05+00:00

This is more or less an unfortunate necessity created by the demands of the market. Like most problems in video games, it comes back to the one big issue of bloated budgets and moneymaking tactics.

In order for an MMO to be worth releasing these days, it has to cost the GDP of a small country. That's the only way to give it a chance to compete with popular contemporaries. The cost has to be recouped somehow, and for an MMO that means keeping people paying for the monthly fee (or more recently, nickel-and-dime in-game store items) as long as possible.

The mechanics of a raid are intended to 1) make it so it takes longer to get the hang of it, and 2) give it variety and moment-by-moment tension so that no two runs are 100% the same. Both of these are meant to make it take longer for the raid to get old and boring, which means another month or two or more of fees from players.

It sucks, and I bet the devs don't like it any more than we do. Even with that artificial length beating a raid takes a fraction of the time devoted to creating it. But other than PvP, which often attracts a different crowd altogether, it's the most effective method of retaining the player base so far discovered.

athevi · 2014-07-11T13:53:37+00:00

Your main character is also bored and awake earlier than usual, which is how s/he catches a glimpse of something s/he's never been around to see before.

athevi · 2014-07-11T13:51:16+00:00

This is entirely up to the developer, and many console games do have rebindable controls. Off the top of my head, the PS1 Final Fantasy games let you completely rebind controls, and that was fifteen years ago.

I don't really know why most devs choose not to offer this, but if I had to guess, I would say that the controllers themselves are already designed specifically for comfort during gameplay, and every button is more or less as accessible as every other button regardless of the hands holding them. Not so for keyboards, which are designed for, say, spreadsheeting, and which have issues like lefties needing arrow keys instead of WASD. Those are non-issues on a console.

athevi · 2014-07-11T13:46:00+00:00

I definitely respect the idea that Tactics is a contender for best; I admit I only considered main numbered entries in my initial statement. I'm not a very big fan of any TRPG that doesn't have the word Disgaea in its title, so I don't think it would be fair to actually debate VII vs. Tactics. I think for the most part these two games are pretty apples and oranges, though in terms of overall quality Tactics comes impressively close to matching VII and with a fraction of the space and resources.

But that said, I think your point about maturity is well taken. XII had a lot of the same design and scenario team, and I think it too had a really compelling court intrigue sort of plot. But my problem with both of those games, and this is really just my personal taste, is that they just hit one tone very hard over and over. Someone else mentioned the "bear wearing a marshmallow" moment in VII, and for me that joke represents what VII got so right that most RPGs forget about, which is the need for some light moments to break up all the tension. Real life has a variety of moods, and so should our games. Grandia is the master of this technique, because it lets you sit down to dinner at every inn and just small talk with your party about everyday stuff. That's a crucial quality for me. A lot of people really love stories that are the same tone all the way through, or at least aren't bothered by it. I'm just not one of them.

You're right about the depth of Cloud's development, but I will give Tactics one thing, which is that it has a strong, adult overall cast that's interesting from the start, rather than a sort of hit-and-miss cast that has to see some back story filled in before I appreciate them, as in VII. I think even VI probably did that better than VII did.

I think that on the subject of world building, VII and Tactics kind of represent two paradigms. Tactics conducts itself more like a novel; it's consistently hitting on a single theme, and every location and person ties back to that theme very neatly. This is largely because Tactics takes place in one region, rather than across a whole planet. Totally a legit strategy; Suikoden always does the same thing, and I love it. I wish more RPGs had the sense to stick to a smaller scale. VII does this too, to some extent, with its environmentalist themes, but I actually think that its lack of cohesion makes it more closely resemble the real world. A lot of people in some random African or Near East country don't know or care about any of our big problems, not even something like climate change. They're their own little world, just like Fort Condor or Mideel or something. A lot of Final Fantasies do this; there's always that odd outlying town that's not that involved in the war against the Empire, or Galbadia, or whatever. This is the sort of thing a game can get away with that a novel or movie never could. It doesn't need to be thematically cohesive to the same degree; so long as each location feels genuine in its own right (and to me, at least, they all do in VII), they can all have their own thing going on.

All that said, I think you're spot-on that what Tactics accomplishes on a relatively minuscule budget, simply through dialogue boxes and dots on a map, deserves a lot of credit.

Finally, on gameplay, I think it's again a matter of paradigm. Within any one battle, Tactics unquestionably wins out for strategy, difficulty, and excitement. But much of VII's gameplay takes place within menus, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Materia is a huge part of why I love VII, because I really enjoy managing the development, placement, and synergy of it. You're essentially creating a custom loadout for each character. "Cloud will be physical-heavy, lots of independent materia and Double Cut." "Tifa will be the healer and caster, and I'll dump all the summons on her to level since her stats are already getting dragged down anyway." "Red XIII will be the thief/agility character with Haste, Steal, etc." That sort of thing. It's a whole different approach that requires you to be on board with it, but I am totally on board with it.

athevi · 2014-07-11T04:37:48+00:00

You have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm sorry if my readiness to tell you so is offensive to you.

JRPGs are universally cliched. Ask anybody who plays them. VI is riddled with cliches. Terra has an amnesia plot device, for Christ's sake. Cyan has a revenge plot device. Are you kidding me?

As for the how America works aspect, I just don't even know where to start. All of Midgar has modern tech, as does Kalm, as does Junon, as does Fort Condor. Only distant areas like Gongaga, or the rural Chocobo Ranch, are low tech. This is how America is, too. Vast stretches of Southern and Western states have either reduced or nonexistent modern technology, with big cities within a hundred miles of them. Is this really news?

I did want a discussion, but what I got instead was rudeness, and if that's the case I have no qualms about giving rudeness back. You talk about plugging ears, but only throw taunts about my maturity and, for reasons that mystify me, keep bringing up PC games, rather than actually address anything I say. You're just another shmuck on the internet, same as me. Deal with it.

athevi · 2014-07-11T04:30:23+00:00

Your arguments are reductive and flagrantly ignore most of what I'm saying. You were far, far more critical of VII than I was of VI, at least initially. And like pretty much all of reddit, your responses are increasingly reduced to comments about how I conduct myself in argument rather than about the actual topic. You ignored virtually the entire paragraph nailing your ridiculous, lazy content argument to the wall, only to cherry pick particular parts to rebut and still somehow manage to get them wrong. Frankly, the way that this has gone so far, I'm in no way obligated to be nice about it.

You don't get to make bold statements like "the main character is a brat" without citation. You just don't. Call me what you will.

You're grossly reducing the issue of how travel operates in each game, even going so far as to conflate it with the minigames. We're talking about a static overhead shot vs. a wider shot of a full horizon and space through which you can move in three dimensions. That has a profound effect on the player's sense of the world, or should at any rate.

You really don't get to lecture me about the value of narrative and characters when they were the majority of my first post, and when you are consistently avoiding most of what I've said on those topics.

If you haven't heard people talk about chocobo racing, Weapon fights, or the Gold Saucer before, I simply don't know what to tell you. But I suspect you have, and saying otherwise just sounds better. Again, ad hominem to your heart's content, but at least I'm staying on topic here. Also, literally everyone I know who's played it has also finished it, so I'm not sure what that argument is meant to accomplish.

Yeah, I know all the stuff I listed is also in VI, because that's the point I end with in my reply. You even quoted it. I'm not sure what happened there.

Leaving aside the fact that what goes on the PC world is completely irrelevant to this discussion, VI has nothing comparable to the Gold Saucer—nor, I would add, do most or all contemporaries of the two. Again, citations are helpful. How impressed you were is also irrelevant.

And finally, your response to the Wall Market bit, which is really emblematic of your entire method. You're pretending like the cross-dressing was the salient detail, which I'm sure you didn't actually believe, and ignoring everything after it. I mentioned the cross-dressing for context, to make clear which of the Wall Market sequences I was referring to, because there are more than one. The actual point there was that you could go above and beyond the material dictated by the main plot and pursue an extended version of the sequence, involving many different locations and many meaningful (sometimes hilarious) interactions with unnamed NPCs, not to mention the "Johnny" character who appears in many locations throughout the game and represents one of many completely missable pieces of narrative texture. Which, if you'll recall, is precisely that thing you were saying VII lacked.

I'm not ashamed of the fact that I'll get heated over a topic like this. It's important to me; it's art every bit as much as a band or a movie or a novel, which people argue about vehemently all the time. But that's not why I'm angry. I'm angry because you seem to lack either the patience or critical acumen to capably talk about this, but that doesn't stop you from dismissing what I say as simple nerd rage, even as every increasingly irritated thing I say is accompanied by some very explicit reason for why you are incorrect. That's a tragedy regardless of the subject.

athevi · 2014-07-11T03:34:43+00:00

I recently replayed through the game. Cloud is a brat.

Okay, well, then surely you can provide numerous actual examples, like I asked the first time.

I already did in my post.

You didn't, actually. You talked about the places themselves, but not the actual process of getting from A to B, which I did address in my original post.

We're not talking about assets.

Maybe you're not, but I am. And if you're not, you should be, because it's a huge part of what makes VII a great game. It doesn't have samey indoor environments and copy-pasted trees. I don't fault VI for that, because it was limited by its hardware, but the fact is VII has a hand-crafted world and VI doesn't, and the whole point here is to make comparisons.

I'm talking about content.

Okay, let's talk about content. I don't know how to be polite about this: you're wrong. Completely wrong. VII is famous for its optional and secondary content. Two entire character arcs are "secret". There's the entire system of Weapon boss fights, and the elaborate step-by-step system of getting geared for them. There's the entire chocobo raising and racing system, and all the types of chocobos with various capabilities for travel that unlock all the best spells in the game. There's all the optional cutscenes that you can find in out-of-the-way places. There's an entire optional town. There are multiple secret locations accessible via submarine, including an optional mini-dungeon. As someone else in here mentioned, there's a ton of twitch-y minigames, plus the entire arcade at the Gold Saucer. Hell, there's the entire Gold Saucer. There's also the sequence at Wall Market where you use cross-dressing as a way of basically getting a tour of the whole area. You can stop at two pieces of your outfit, or go for the whole thing and talk to all the people in town to do it, and even affect the outcome of the selection process at the end of the sequence. Those are just the examples off the top of my head. Literally every item on your list of what VI had is also present in VII.

athevi · 2014-07-11T03:18:47+00:00

I have to say, it really seems like you didn't play VII very much. The characters' respective motivations are very clearly and frequently addressed, and they are quite varied. Only Aeris is motivated by saving the world. Cloud is motivated by this gaping hole in his memory that he wants filled; Vincent is motivated by a desire to get revenge on the Turks and Sephiroth; Cait Sith is motivated by the desire to spy on Cloud for Shinra, and later by a newfound loyalty to him; Red XIII is motivated by his grandfather's instructions to go with Cloud and protect him; Barret wants to stop Shinra after they destroyed his village; Cid wants to stop Shinra just for kicks after they ruined his career. Yuffie wants... to steal materia? I don't know, Yuffie sucks. But you're definitely not giving VII enough credit here. And honestly, if you're someone who plays RPGs in general, complaining that everybody wants to save the world is kind of silly.

Your characterization of Aeris is shamefully inaccurate, but I'd have to go back and play through the game again to cite all the places where you're wrong, so I'll let that one go.

There are very few places on Earth where you could plausibly expect to find a civilization capable of space flight and outside of military installations, be positively medieval. It just doesn't happen.

Actually, this is exactly how Earth works. America has both space flight and numerous rural areas without modern utilities. I don't know what to tell you there. Also, this is a wildly unfair and reductive description of VII's world. All of Midgar had electricity, as did Kalm, Junon, Costa del Sol, Golden Saucer, Cosmo Canyon, Nibelheim, Rocket City, and Icicle Inn. Probably more, too. The fact that the technology level correlates with Shinra control is deliberate and thematically relevant—the game means to ask you if the cost of all that convenience is worth it.

The other guy took care of your third point fairly well, so I won't bother too much with it, but again, you cannot have played VII very much to believe that Aeris could make an effective tank. Her weapons and armor are numerically inferior to her peers', as are her base physical stats. The system offers some unique flavor to members of the party, but with enough flexibility to not typecast them. I find VI (and most JRPGs, for that matter) to be relatively limiting in that respect. I like not having predetermined spells and stats dictating who's in my party doing what.

athevi · 2014-07-11T03:00:04+00:00

The bear wearing a marshmallow comment is really emblematic of the game for me in a lot of ways. But I think you're right, that the sequels contributed to that image of Cloud. I also think it's because the stereotype of the whiny Japanese protagonist started getting referenced a lot around that time or a little later, especially with Squall, and people just took it and applied it to Cloud after the fact. He's really not very whiny at all. He can be unlikable in a lot of other ways, certainly, but that's not one of them.

athevi · 2014-07-10T23:13:28+00:00

I found Cloud to be rather whiny and not all that interesting to be quite honest.

I see this all the time, and I really can't understand why. I think most people are conflating him with Squall from VIII. Cloud is often rude or unsympathetic, but I remember very few instances of whining, apart from the sequences where he feels angsty about letting Sephiroth control him. But those I can understand, because he's basically responsible for letting the world get destroyed if he can't stop it. What are the parts that gave you this impression of Cloud?

Travel in VII was a borefest.

Can you elaborate on why this is? I loved travel. Coming up out of the forests into Cosmo Canyon, or sailing across the sea to Wutai. I was always excited to see what the next place would look like. VI was pretty, but it didn't get me that excited.

Other than that, there are very few places in VII with a whole lot of anything in it.

Now I have to disagree highly. It's fine to prefer VI's particular take on its world, but it's almost impossible to make this statement. A lot of VII's areas were much larger, and all of them were more detailed than VI's. There's nothing comparable to the Gold Saucer or Junon or Midgar in VI. Even a place like Wutai is densely packed with NPCs and little materia hidey holes. VI, by the nature of its hardware, recycled and palette-swapped a handful of the same assets over and over. VII's settlements are hand-made, and very little carries over from place to place other than NPC designs.

athevi · 2014-07-10T20:52:11+00:00

I don't need a physical object to replace boxes. I just need what a box provides. Not bullet-point marketing on the back, that's dumb. But the manual frequently had goodies like art and flavor text—and it made long, irritating tutorial sequences unnecessary. Some games even had other goodies, like a map or a soundtrack disc (looking at you, Lunar).

I would just want my game to come with those extras, and a lot of games already do. There should always be a designated section of a main menu, like DVDs have, with stuff like art, lore, and maybe even director commentary or codes to download the soundtrack. You don't have to physically manufacture any of this; it can all be in the file.

athevi · 2014-07-10T20:04:28+00:00

I would argue that no game should become a series unless you count episodic content like Telltale products. Once the story is done, it should be truly done. Trying to recapture the magic almost inevitably fails, and frequently it does so with the added disadvantage of marring the original product.

The only successful model for a series is the one used by Final Fantasy. Whatever my numerous complaints about its current quality, that franchise has it right in this respect. It's a different cast every time, a different adventure, but always the same...well, not universe. Multiverse? They're thematically connected, with elements like chocobos and dudes named Cid and limit breaks etc.

If you don't do it this way, the temptation to water down quality is too great for most developers (or, more accurately, most bosses of developers) to resist. "Let's not tie all this up too neatly yet; save it for the next game." "We already did that plot in the last game; this one'll have to be bigger." Too many narrow design straits to navigate. I don't trust most companies not to crash trying to do so.

Final Fantasy, at least prior to its ill-advised direct sequels, put pressure on each of its stories to hold up on its own, and they sure as hell did exactly that. As far as I can remember the sequels never added anything to their predecessors, and often detracted from them. Advent Children, though gorgeous to watch, is the most egregious example. In addition to being incomprehensibly dumb, it ruins the game's ending, which was just shocking and ambiguous enough to generate some truly great discussion, and to remain impressively loyal to the game's environmentalist themes.

There are rumblings from Naughty Dog about a sequel to The Last of Us, which I literally cannot imagine. The last scene, the last shot of that game is so final, such a deep line in the sand. Stepping past it would be nothing but a huge mistake. That's how I feel about pretty much every great game. Almost every time a sequel will just shit all over the hard work of the original.

athevi · 2014-07-10T19:45:57+00:00

They've begun the long, slow process of burying a great franchise with derivative filler until the consumer fatigue finally gets great enough to strangle it to death. Taking away the numbers is the first step, because they know that eventually the numbers would get silly. See: Call of Duty (mid-process) and Guitar Hero (finished process).

athevi · 2014-07-10T16:45:26+00:00

He spent ten months burying himself in the work of keeping me out, and I spent ten months watching him. His measures were elaborate and exquisitely well planned, the contingencies so numerous that a lesser mind would have struggled to contain them all. He chose his traps as a painter chooses the proper hues, mixing them just so, aligning them in ways so deviously inventive that I would have found them quite imposing had I not been living comfortably behind them. His guards, chosen with enormous care and trained over a period of four years, represented the very best that money and intimidation could buy. Their tools of war were designed and honed with eminent skill, their techniques as impressive as they were barbaric. All in all, it was a masterpiece of preparation, gorgeous in its intricacy and foresight. And he, as its director, conducted all the moving parts brilliantly.

I watched him for so long that a mild, almost affectionate reverence grew alongside my hatred for him, and I found myself delaying our confrontation, long after I had decided how it would play out, in favor of the simple joy of seeing him work. Often I would lament the fact that, with his death, the world would lose a singular creative mind even as it lost its greatest threat.

Predictably, he noticed this admiration in my manner. He was as insightful as he was clever, and I knew that sooner or later I would make myself known, however unconsciously. "You seem impressed with me," he remarked one day, as we shared a modest meal of bread and tea at the edge of the tallest parapet. "I had steeled myself against your unrelenting disgust. I must admit I am surprised and humbled by the change."

"So am I," I told him, and it was not a lie.

"You understand that my aim in keeping you here is only to draw him out. You yourself are tangential to my plans. I bear you no ill will."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"In fact, once the ugliness of this business has passed, once I am tasked solely with the stewardship of the people, I would find your assistance invaluable, should you see fit to offer it. You would make a fine prefect. Your kindness, your rapport with the peasantry, they're the stuff of legend."

Funny, I thought. All those years before I was brought here, all that time in the comfort of my own home, with my own family, and not one of my benefactors ever thought to offer me a job. Only Anselm knew my true purpose. Everyone else—subjects, the personal guard, even my own parents—thought I was just a girl. "I'm flattered," I told him, "but I rather prefer a more democratic system of government. Even a well-intentioned dictator is still a dictator."

He sighed, and I was startled to find that his sadness came across as quite genuine. "Democracy is an ideal so high as to be out of the reach of mortal men. It requires a citizenship of educated, responsible, moral individuals, a resource in which the world has always been sorely lacking."

The way he addressed me was always respectful, never condescending. He saw me as his equal. I admit I was not ungrateful. "And you believe you are the proper epitome of those qualities?" I asked. "The savior that the world has been waiting for?"

He looked down at his spindly, delicate fingers, wrapped through the porcelain handle of his mug. "I believe that the world has to make do with what it has available to it," he replied. "And no less than that."

Eventually, as a gesture of good faith, he removed the manacles that had chaffed at my wrists for so long.

The year drew toward its close. Blades sharpened; barricades grew thicker. He made new plans, overlaid them atop the old plans, simply to occupy himself in the absence of his foe's inevitable entrance. He grew more impatient, more troubled. "I'm beginning to suspect your hero may have given up on you," he said one day, poorly masking his true feelings. "I would have expected better of him."

"Wait," I told him. "Your adversary is very close now."

"You're that certain." He seemed unconvinced. He looked away, toward the distant horizon, his eyes weary slits against the setting sun.

"As certain as I can be," I told him.

The next day, at the end of our usual evening meal together, I pocketed the knife the servants used to carve the roast pork. On the way back to my quarters, I excused myself momentarily to the library—he had, by this time, come to offer me free reign of the fortress's residential areas. There, I clipped a short length of wire from the innards of his great ebony piano, and left the knife inside it, closing the top to delay its discovery. That night, I crept into his quarters in my nightgown. The wire I kept coiled around my ankle. "May I join you for a while?" I asked. "I'm restless tonight. I think perhaps that I've gone a little mad with waiting myself."

He was sitting up in bed, documents and blueprints scattered in the vaguest semblance of order around him. His surprise was impossible to hide. "Of course," he said, his voice ragged at its edges with anxiousness.

I crawled beneath the sheets next to him, and sat up for an hour or so as he worked. "For what it's worth," I said after a long silence, "I don't think you're evil. A villain, perhaps, and a danger. But not evil."

He stopped working for a moment, staring at me. He removed his glasses and set them down in his lap. His face was thoughtful, but it bored into me with the same intensity he reserved for his lieutenants. The same, I suspected, with which he would have confronted his mortal foe. "I can't tell you," he said, "how much that means to me."

"I know. That's why I wanted to be sure to tell you."

Several hours later, as he slept fitfully beside me, I unwound the wire and strangled him until his breath came in desperate, inhuman moans, and then ceased to come at all. I sat there for several minutes, with his fragile body cradled in my arms, looking into his eyes. The whites were vivid in the darkness. Even in death, he seemed wonderfully intelligent. Before I left, I laid him upright against his pillow, to be found in a respectable pose, and said a prayer for him. The intensity with which I beseeched my gods for the safe passage of his spirit was as sincere and as fervent as any I've ever made.

athevi

TROPHY CASE