How Misery Is Hilarious: Afterthoughts on FFVIII

You know what? I actually did go through Final Fantasy VIII during the weeks following my time with VII. You know what I found? Well, just about the same stuff everybody talks about (and more!), but is worth talking about again. You know what we're gonna do? Talk about them. Your damn right we are...

FFVIII is probably the most polarizing game in the proper franchise for a lot of reasons. Probably the first and foremost of these is its enormously complex stat boosting system. Known in the game as "junctioning", the player is forced to draw magic spells from enemies and assign (junction) them to their statistics. The more of the same spell you have junctioned (up to 100), the better the stat becomes. The more powerful the spell combined with the amount you have (100 Fire spells aren't half as good as 100 Flares, and so on), the stat becomes that much stronger. Bearing all of this in mind, getting your head firmly wrapped around this early on can make the game either a snap or a total drag. Specifically, drawing magic spells out of your enemies is so tedious that it makes you long for the time when you could just step on those fools and move on. In this game, each new enemy that you encounter (and in the overworld you will encounter a lot. The encounter rate here can get astronomical) must be checked to see if they have something that you want, and then you have to play the cat and mouse game of drawing their magic while you stay alive.

The second major problem with junctioning, and one my biggest beefs with the game in general, is it's stance on experience points. See, since you are allocating abundant resources to your stats (magic can be found all over the place, so it's relatively easy to find stat boosts through good junctions), the typical RPG growth system of accumulating experience points for level boosts is far less meaningful as you only get minor upgrades to base character statistics. That, really, is small potatoes to the real problem: ENEMIES LEVEL WITH YOU. It doesn't matter if it's the first slug you fought or the boss of the super secret dungeon (or whatever), if you don't have a lot of strong magic junctioned to you, you're going to get your ass kicked eventually on no matter how high leveled you are. What this essentially means is that the game forces you to accept it on its own terms. You are forced to make good use of the junction system, or you will succumb to the hell of 1000 Game Over screens.

How do I know this? Well, here's a story: a few years ago, when I played this game for the first time, I didn't follow a guide and let myself carelessly meander through the game. At first, it was fun getting to know the little ins and outs of the game world and powering up my Guardian Forces (summon spells in this game, which are also tied to junctions). Since the in-game tutorials were vague on little things (like strengthening junctions) and noticeably silent on others (ENEMIES LEVEL WITH YOU. Stupid.), I found myself spamming GF monsters incessantly. This was not only a totally boring way to play the game (those GF monster animations are long and repetitive), but it tied my hands in certain key endgame battles since I either couldn't use them or they weren't strong enough anyway. So there I sat, capped at level 100 with my characters, and consistently getting my ass handed to me by the final boss of the game. It's been my white whale ever since.

Now, the other side to this game system is how easily it can be exploited under the right circumstances. After doing the right amount of research, one can pretty easily blast through the beginning of the game (after obtaining some almost unfair early-game junctionable magic) and bide their time until near the end where they can easily grab all of the high-level magic, and then crack the whole thing wide open. Hell, that's what I did this time around, and it pretty much turned into a joke. Just goes to show how the internet proves yet again that it's always smarter than you were while in college.

FFVIII has many other noticeable faults. For one, every bit of it bleeds the word "excessive". Every battle that you fight starts with an unnecessary amount of zoomed and panned camera angles and pre-fight battle animations. While it may have seemed like a clever way to mask loading times back then seems like trite wastes of time now. The plot, also, takes far too long to get its feet on the ground. True, this is more of a character-driven story than some of the other Final Fantasy games, but much of events of the game are wrapped up way to easily near the end. Without giving anything away, it seemed that the solution to everyone's problems probably could have been thought of at the end of disk one, and that would have been the end of that. Sure, part of the fun of playing through games like this is to see how things fall together, but it was almost near the end of disk 3 (of 4) where it seemed like there was any cohesion to the story, and then it was over.

Then again, it has other differences compared to the FF pantheon that makes it just priceless. For one, main character Squall is a dick. I don't mean an angsty, somewhat self absorbed loner jerk like FFVII's Cloud and countless other main characters that came after him, I mean he's an absolute asshole. Now, I can see how people don't like this, but seeing a main character be so much of a detached chump was just hilarious. If every RPG character has "'tude", Squall has a nearly incurable attitude PROBLEM. What's better is that when he finally loses his cool later in the game, it has so many exclamation marks after his sentences that I feel a little cheated that there wasn't any voice acting. I love hearing pretty boy JRPG characters scream at the top of their lungs. That kind of comedy is a reason to wake up everyday.

After playing through Final Fantasy VII, I'm that much more impressed by the graphics. To be fair, Playstation One games do not age well as character models were large and blocky (at one point, I think a character was holding a clipboard. Or maybe it was a green sandwich. Or perhaps an Alaskan fish...), but the backgrounds still look spectacular decade later, and the fully rendered cut scenes -for the most part- still look great. The opening cinematic stands tall as a great set piece, and the fire fight in the Ragnarok late in the game is amazing. Even in their strange form, the characters animate pretty well and have realistic motions to them; all a huge step up from VII two years earlier.

So there you have it. Time has not been especially kind to FFVIII in terms of how some of it looks and how some of it plays, but what it got right almost makes the whole experience worth it. I truth, the whole game feels like a mish mash of really good ideas that just didn't equate to a cohesive whole. Then again, if you were ever inclined to find out for yourself, you can grab a copy of it in good shape pretty easily for under $20. After the last few weeks, I'd actually say it's worth it.

Here's a pretty interesting article for some further reading. As always, Gametrailers.com (which seems to be down at the moment) has a really well researched video retrospective, but it's squished in with Final Fantasy IX which, while fun, isn't worth getting into. Have a good weekend, fools.

The Chubbies

So it seems that Sony's corporate ninja squad will find me and do mean things to my own corporate ninja squad if I divulge toooooo much about Fat Princess. I love my ninjas, so I'll comply, but not before saying that I'm having lots of fun with the game and the beta process is really easy. I play the game and I post my thoughts, much like here. Only there, it's read by worker bees whereas here, it's read by... um...well more worker bees.

Shit. Walked right into that one.

Fat Princess

Cats and Kittens, I've been selected to be one of the Fat Princess beta testers. That's right, I'll be feeding cake to skinny fantasy chicks while my workers toss bombs at walls and build ladders (or whatever). More updates to follow with my thoughts on not only the game, but also the beta test process. This being the first one I've been in (not counting free MMOs when I'm ... oh, hell, I'll say it: when I'm cold and alone), I'm pretty curious to see how it all works.

Stay tuned

Oh, Times; You Is A-Changin' 5

Ok this is the end of it. Strangely, FFVII got posted on the Japanese Playstation Network 2 days after this post. No, I don't work for a viral marketing company trying to pimp games with spiky-headed characters (not that they even need it), I'm just a step ahead of all of you. So there.

And before you start giving me shit, Mr. mrbenning, this was copied from a fugly MySpace page
so the spacings and things are screwed up. Stinking M'space


4/8/09

The Last Word

So in lieu of my computer deep frying on me, let’s try this again…

So after a few weeks with Final Fantasy VII and finishing the game for the first time in 10+ years, I initially felt uneasy about how things turned out while still being satisfied. While not the transcendent classic that others remember it by, it’s
fair to say that FFVII is still a pretty good game now a decade removed.

How good? Let’s take a compartmented look.

Plot/Characters....

Taken as a whole, the pacing issues that I have been mentioning
through the last week or two coincide with some of bigger problems with the
overall story. Basically, it’s pretty much just Cloud’s show with a little bit
of Tifa thrown in at the end to give it some heart, making the ensemble ending
pointless. Then again, that pointlessness is even discounted by the fact that
you’re pretty much given nothing in terms of resolution for any character
outside of Red XIII in the ending, but let’s get back to the first concern.
Since I was able to select from individual characters throughout the vast
majority of the game, I only really got insight into many situations based on
which characters were in my active party whether I liked them or not. So if you
hate using, say Yuffie, but she seemed practical for you to fight with, you
probably went through the next story sequence with her and heard her gripe
about something. Most of the time, I found that pretty perturbing; sure, Yuffie
was a strong long-ranged character through most of the game, but the plot would
have been much better had Tifa been in my active party- even though I stopped
using her early and found her to be worthless by the end.

Then again, the interactions I had with the individual main
characters were fun and pretty well realized. Cloud serves as a pretty good
protagonist, even though he is blandly single minded as the game carries on
(“There’s Sephiroth! Let’s go get him!”). Tifa unexpectedly adds a lot of soul
to an otherwise mundane video game story near the end, and turned out to be a
pretty refreshing change compared to the rest of the clichés that just about
everyone else were. The real jewel here is Cid. From the first time you meet
him through the end credits, he was such a jerk that I had to love him. Even
though I found his motivation for joining the team a little thin and I kind of
think it was harsh the way he treated some of the other characters, he didn’t
degenerate into a plastic RPG hero in the endgame and I loved all of his
chain-smoking shenanigans. It really isn’t common (or at least wasn’t in 1997)
for a hero, even a minor hero in this case, to be so much of a chump in a video
game outside of the down-on-his-luck private investigator types in many 90s PC
games. Play the game for Cloud, finish the game for Cid.

Everything else was textbook. Sephiroth, unfortunately,
never went further than his initial descent into crazyhood into being much of a
fun character, especially since he only physically shows up to fight you for
real at the end of the game. While I think his back story and motivation were
very interesting, I find that it would have been far more interesting to find
that he was just another figment of Clouds shattered personality than an actual
corporal threat. That’s just me, though.

Difficulties In and
Around the Blank Slate....

Ok, this is going to sound hypocritical after I gushed over how much I love FXII, but I hate blank slate characters. In that, I mean that every character in this game is totally interchangeable outside of their desperation attacks (Limit Breaks, as
the lingo goes). Since the materia system of the game was designed so you could
freely swap them between characters, it made no sense at the 2/3^rd point to use characters that you didn’t think looked cool, and that was it. Blank slate characters kind of rob me of some of the escapism of these games. With
character classes in games like FFIV or X, specific uses of each character
dictate what strategies you use and lend to a deeper experience. In the case of
VII, it never matters who you’re controlling as long as they have the right materia equipped.

Case in point, here’s how I cracked the game wide open: I had been using Yuffie and Barret through the majority of my daily dealings only because I hadn’t yet stumbled on a Long Range materia (so I could basically turn all of my other characters into long-range fighters). I found myself near the end of the second disk in one of few optional areas that I thought would be worth it (as I found that most of them weren’t after this experience) where I ended up with Yuffie’s best weapon, Cid’s best Limit Break, and a Double Cut materia (I think that’s what it was called). Anyway, knowing that the end of the game was near, I thought it might be an alright idea to kill three birds at once: I’d level my characters, enhance the Double Cut so I could hit 4 times per attack, and train Cid so he could use that Limit Break because I hadn’t touched him for the entire game. A few hours later I was a god. To prove that newfound might, I bitch slapped one of the optional bosses- which, in turn, gave me Cloud’s best weapon. I had decided that no more unnecessary time wasting needed to happen, and I stepped on the end boss. Case closed. It didn’t matter what character I was using, I just happened to find better weapons for a few of them and that’s how I finished the game. Had I ended up in the same situation with anyone else, the outcome would have been identical.

If reading the above paragraph leads you to believe that the game was a joke, give yourself a cookie. The reality is that I didn’t spend too much time outside of blindly attacking my enemies with very little spell casting or monster summoning (if ever). When I figured out a way to set up my empty shells of characters how I wanted them, it was only a matter of time before I crushed some fools while not expending even one elixir from my inventory without straying too far from one button push. This, as it stands, was something of the end of an era for a lot of RPG design. In this game, and the six that preceded it from what I can recollect, a might-makes-right mentality can carry you through all the way to the end. Simply, take the time to level your characters and you’ll be fine. Other games, especially the way they are designed now, can force you to completely manipulate the game a different way to tackle end bosses, forcing you to basically deprogram yourself
from how you went through everything up to that point. Famously, while playing Final Fantasy VIII, I capped my main character’s level (99) after 80ish hours of my life only to find that I had been playing the game incorrectly until the end and was punished for it by the last boss. That is bad design. While I can appreciate how games like (in this case) FFVIII offer a more tactical approach to meatheaded level grinding; and yes, I’m sure there are more fun ways to fight endgame encounters than to just be stronger than they are; I didn’t find it necessary to either seek out a guide for killing the last boss or completely revaluate how I was playing altogether. I actually found it pretty refreshing.

Boogada....

So all in all, it turned out to be a pretty fun distraction from the games I typically buy now. It was comparatively short clocking in at around 35 hours, a nice round number that made sure that Cloud and co. didn’t overstay their welcome. As a cultural curio, and I say this especially after having restarted FFVIII, it’s more
than evident that VII is the beginning of a massive paradigm shift in RPG design. While I found the core game mechanics to be a toned down version of FFVI,
the use of the Playstation hardware in it’s overall presentation made it a successful test run for the later more complex (and far prettier) games of its ilk to surface. In a lot of ways, FFVII is like rap group N.W.A.: their influence on the genre cannot be understated, but the passage of time and their imitators have almost cheapened what we once thought was brilliance into a turning point in popular music, but not the transcendent, profound work of art we thought it was to begin with. For that, Final Fantasy VII, I can only say this to you: thanks for what you’ve done, but I think I’m done with you. With that, I hereby give you no more shit.

The End

Postscript

It’s become obvious over the past few years that guys like me have been ragging on FFVII more for its success rather than its flaws. While I’d be a liar if I didn’t
partially adhere to that mindset prior to the last few weeks, that doesn’t mean
that it’s fair to assess a game on how great it sold as opposed to how good it
may or may not be. I will still disapprove of its place in aftermarket collectability in this respect, though. People, please remember that before you find yourself considering buying this astronomically priced game, know that:

A- it is NOT rare. One could find abundant copies of it anywhere for less than $15 five years ago.

B- a remake is inevitable. Note that I don’t wait with baited breath for this to happen; I just see it as unavoidable as entropy. If Final Fantasy XIII (and it’s spin offs) turn out to suck, Square Enix knows that it need only to spend whatever money they have left on a remake of VII to get back in the black.

C- if a remake happens, or even if it doesn’t, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Square Enix rerelease it for the PSP or DS, or put it up on the PSN to download (for a steep price, I’m sure). As Square is prone to remaking, sequelling, and generally siphoning it’s past successes to death, I’m a little surprised it hasn’t happened already…

For some further research, it's best not to lurk through the murk (another unfortunate rhyme) of Gamefaqs.com's FFVII message boards (helpful as they may be for actual game play answers), this is a very interesting debate over the merits of the game from some of the writers at 1UP.com. Be warned that it degenerates into some pretty nerdy nitpicking, but the argument is somewhat lively (if a bit one-sided).Also linked below is GameTrailers.com's FFVII entry for their impeccable Final Fantasy Retrospective. A bit lengthy but fun to watch...

Have a good week

Oh, Times; You Is A-Changin'4

3/31/09

Pump the Brakes

So I'm almost at the end of disk 2 and things are moving pretty fast at this point. Faster, even, than I would have suspected, now that I think about it. For the most part, disk 2 affirms my initial reactions that there is something wrong with this game's overall pace. Midgard was a really a thrilling location with lots of fun environments and well designed scenarios. A plodded along a bit here and there, but the scenery was not only pretty, but the location felt alive. Midgard made me feel as though I was actually in the city; I was interacting with the environments and they all made sense. I hate to keep harping on it, but the overworld just doesn't give me that same satisfaction. The events that take place on the overworld are too fast and too cobbled together and the game doesn't feel cohesive any longer.



The plot from this point (and I'm guessing from here on out) has returned to the nonsense that befuddle most Japanese RPGs. I'm really a little bit let down by this because the game started so strong that, in the first few hours, I had almost completely threw up my hands in my own disgust in how unfair I was to it for so long. While I can't say that I was totally right either (I'll have to decide after the credits roll), I will say that that it's been really ...average. Yeah, average.

Hurmmm...

More hits against it so far have to do with managing my materia between characters. Since you only have three active party members in your menu at a time, trying to shuffle your cats and kittens in and out of the menu to equip/ dequip their stuff is fucking irritating. Read that again; it's not just irritating, it's fucking irritating. When the time comes for Square to finally bleed the VII franchise past its death rattle, I hope this is one of things fixed in the inevitable remake. Battle animations are also really getting on my nerves at this point. While it's easy to level my sights at the summon spells, I actually find that I use them pretty infrequently, so I can't blame them. No, I think if anything is really annoying with the combat it's the enemies and how long it takes for them to swing a sword or shoot rings at you or jump around and spasm for no good reason at all. It really drags battles out much longer than they need to go.



More to come

Oh, Times; You Is A-Changin' 3

3/23/09

So near the end of disk 1 I find I'm getting a little
bored. The really interesting story beats seemed to have come and gone to set
the stage for the conflict. While it's still interesting, I see the plot
starting to descend into RPG normalcy. Granted, even lame Final Fantasy
games still have good stories compared to their peers, but I'm starting to get
the impression that VII is just a graphically enhanced VI. That
may sound harsh, but the reality of if is that VI was still a really
good game and that the evolution of the genre wasn't really that profound at
this point; merely cosmetic changes as opposed to a massive game system
overhaul. Still, I'm having a good time playing it and I'm still glad I got a
chance to go back to it. For now.



Since I really want to get through it as fast as possible, I'm using various
walkthroughs on the internet. This is kind of a blessing and a curse since I
know there are some things that I would have missed completely without it, but
there isn't much of a sense of discovery. Then again, when I originally played
the game in 1997, I used the Bradygames guide to mosey on by my foes (which may
have been the last time I used one, now that I think about it), so it would be hypocritical
to complain now. In seeing the story unfold quicker than I remember, it seems
to me that my characters left Midgard way too early. Structurally, I think it
would have served the game better to keep me in the city for the first disk and
then open up the world with the second, effectively cutting the game in half.
The affecting, oppressive atmosphere that was a real draw for the beginning of
the game seems totally yanked out from under me when we left the city, and it
makes the rest of the game feel like the above mentioned RPG mediocrity when
you travel an over world and hop from town to town, dungeon to dungeon.



One last thing: I've had almost no trouble so far. Yes, some of the enemies can
gang up on you and one or two of the bosses have some dumb way of fighting it
(if it turns orange use melee attacks, magic if it turns purple), but most
things are a complete push over. Even though I'm doing a little bit of level
grinding here and there (which is a total fucking drag in this game), I didn't
expect to basically crush all incoming trouble. Of course, now that I say this
I'm going to start getting stomped on. My other big fear is that it will end up
like just about all of Tri-Ace's games where the enemies and bosses are a joke
during the game and the last boss is so totally different you have to basically
break the way you've been playing the whole game and get this one certain
item/skill/more levels to beat it. If that happens, you bet your ass that this
game will go unfinished. I just don't have the patience for another Lezard.



More to come

Oh, Times; You Is A-Changin' 2

3/20/09

The First from the Front

..............

..

Nothing really specific to report on today, so let’s talk
generals. Even though I’ve only played through the game once and it was more
than 10 years ago, a lot of it came flooding back to me; mostly music and
specific FMV sequences. Some of it’s good, some bad, but let’s start with the
good.

.. ..

So less than 10 hours in, I’m pleasantly surprised with the
writing thus far. Cloud and co. each have a clear voice in their dialogue, and
it most of it reads like natural conversation should. The transition from tough-talking,
no-nonsense Cloud to nice-guy, protect-my-pals Cloud seemed a bit too fast for
me, particularly in contrast to FFVIII’s
main jerk Squall (who’s particular brand of assholery lasted a gloriously large
chunk of the game), but it doesn’t mar his character in any way so far, and the
transition doesn’t seem out of place. Sephiroth is still a compelling villain,
as shown by the scene where he burns Nibbelheim. Watching him tear off the robotic
face to find the encapsulated remains of Jenova is as frightening as it is
fascinating. This scene and the burning of Nibbelheim cements his descent into
madness, not so unlike MacBeth killing his king, but, like other great video
game villains like Luc from Suikoden III,
his motivations are far more sympathetic than the black and white personality
of his genre peers. Sepheroth still stands as a prime example of the depth of
an interesting, layered RPG enemy should be. I expect great things from both
him and the plot of the game throughout after such a good start.

.. ..

The other side to all of this is a heap of problems that I
even recalled from the first time I played it. The most glaring of which is the
lack of clear entrances and exits from most areas. Since the addition of the
minimap in later FF games (like X), wandering through an area for 10+
minutes trying to find which is the way out gets old pretty fast. I’ll put most
of the blame here on the Square’s design team. I’m sure they tried to throw as
much little detail into their environments as the Playstation’s memory would
let them, but at the cost of having dumb level design. Areas that look like
exits probably aren’t, and took me far too long slogging through Midgard to
find where I should really be going. On that note, the context specific
movements and interactions (such as falling on to the swinging wire while
climbing out of Midgard) is downright painful. Never are you given a lot of
direction as to the best approach to clearing these obstacles, so you’re stuck
in an annoying trial and error session that can last far longer than the pace
of the game should allow. It’s nice, really, that they would try some thing a
little different than a point A- point B scenario, but not when it just starts
to pad the length of the game as opposed to fun distraction.

.. ..

At the risk of sounding kind of redundant to the rest of
internet community, the graphics for this game have aged very poorly. In fact,
many sections of this game –particularly the character models- look like trash compared
to even Final Fantasy VIII. Now, I
know that the game is long in the tooth and it was the first of its kind in
many ways, but Playstation games simply do not age well. The sound is fun and
interesting, particularly the music, but the bleeps and blops of the combat
scenes and spell effects are pretty lame by today’s standards. Granted, it’s
still pretty early in the game and I haven’t gotten into too many of the summon
spells yet (which I’m not really looking forward to. Those animations are long), but I’m unimpressed so far on the
audiovisual front. I’m going to try my best to be as even handed about this as
I can be from now on, but a spade’s a spade; these graphics suck.

Oh, Times; You Is A-Changin'

This being my first post in a blog that was started something like 8 months ago, I have to say I'm sorry to some of the other folks that I let down by not posting anything. We thought it would be hip and wacky to start posting about random stuff like video games and comics and lumberjacks and shit, but that seemed to fall by the wayside. So we tried to start again with talking about beer and what our favorite beers are, but that didn't happen either (probably because we couldn't get past the beer drinking part. Man, I can't write when I'm drunk and I don't know how Bukowski did it).

So I'm going to do my part and start over by talking about video games. Maybe lumberjacks, too. I bet we get into some beer, but it's only 3:30 in the afternoon.

Now that I think about it, though, that shit hasn't stopped me before. Hurm...

Moving on, though, I keep a separate blog about the used video game market that updates a couple times a week or so, depending on what's going on. I started that one by pretty much talking trash about Final Fantasy VII, so I think that would be a good place to start this one, too. See, I hadn't played the game in over a decade and was a pretty vocal hater in its place in the gray market. I'm kinda getting over that, but the wound is too deep.

Why the change of heart? Well, it turns out that I sort of stumbled upon a copy and had the nerve to play through it again to see if my ire was worth it. I decided to lay things out on the internets during my second coming, so this is kind of a repost of that until I get more wacky thoughts going. So, the following couple of posts are my afterthoughts of Final Fantasy VII, the second time around.

I'd like to leave you with the fact that Blogger wants me to label this post scooters, vacation, and fall. I'd like to think there's probably a metaphoric link to Final Fantasy VII in that way, but I'm drawing a blank. I'll leave it up to you to find something good...

3/19/09

Noam Chomsky

This is the second time I've posted this today, which means that I had to remember what I wrote the first time. Thanks, MySpace!

So I had this roommate in college, right. This roommate was a pretty well-read hipster kind of character that had seething, frothing hate on for linguist/philosopher/head case Noam Chomsky. I don't think anything gave The Roommate more pleasure than getting into heated, nigh violent altercations with the Chomsky love children and their colorless green ideas. The thing with The Roommate, though, is that it wasn't simply his ability to argue his points, but his want to hate. I say this because in his effort to hold up on the battlefield, The Roommate would read everything Chomsky had ever written (which is a lot) as to bring the right artillery. I always admired him for that.



I have, for years, been a pretty vocal opponent (read: hater) of Final Fantasy VII. I mean, I can't take away the fact that was massive leap forward in JRPG design and video games as a whole, as well as a watershed moment in forging Sony's console supremacy; but when someone gushes over how perfect it is and how maybe, just maybe, it's the greatest video game ever made I grind my teeth. For some reason, it also makes me want to take a shit, but I'm not entirely sure why. My own personal history the game really isn't all that remarkable: it may have been the first game I had ever pre-ordered and I grabbed it on day one. After playing through the first few disks, I got insane bored with it, played through Symphony of the Night (a few times, I think), and began getting sick of it staring me in the face while sitting on my shelf, so I promptly finished it as fast as possible and sold it off. This, of course, was 1997-98, more than a decade ago, and a lot may have changed since then. I've often thought about grabbing another copy to go through with an older, more critical eye to see if my wrath is warrented, but haven't pulled the trigger. Being one of the few games I can think of that's highly sought after based on popular opinion and not necessarily rarity, I just can't justify the $70+ used price tag.

Now, fate has basically dropped a copy of the game in my lap. Therefore, I'll be posting my thoughts on my second coming to what anime kids think is the promised land of video games as often as I can. I'm not sure my life will change, but I'm kind of open to that right now; I've been playing a lot of Street Fighter 4.