Tatsunoko Vs. Schizophrenia

I guess I should have titled this Autism Vs. Capcom, because if I ever really get consistently good at this game I'll be able to do absurd mathematical calculations at Rain Man speed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Yesterday, I told you that my PlayStation took a shit on me. In what I'm now thinking was probably disgust, I decided to play my Wii for the first time since... well, you know. Anyway, after doing what little research that I deemed necessary on the subject, it seems almost abundantly clear that last year was a pretty damn good year for Wii games: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on many (many, many) best-of lists, Kirby's Epic Yarn has seen universally strong reviews, as have Donkey Kong Country Returns and Cave Story. And that's just the big stuff. A lot of people, though, seemed to have forgotten Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

This is fine, really. It did come out last January, and unless your name is "Mass Effect 2" then coming out in January means that folks are going to forget that you exist when the spring rolls around. This is where you also pour one out for No More Heroes 2. Sad, but I don't make the rules. Now, to be fair, this wasn't exactly a game that got completely looked over when it first hit retail. From what I recall, sales numbers were pretty good; at least good enough that Capcom went ahead with plans for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (which, and I could be wrong about this, but TvC was the deciding factor).

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I play a lot of Street Fighter. Notice that I didn't say that I was especially good at Street Fighter, but a SF game is played more often in my home than just about anything else by a landslide. My fundamentals are good, and I can hang pretty well online in 4 and HDR. When I finally met my local crowd of tournament players, I could hang with them, too. This is about where they decided to try and teach my Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 -a game I have never cared for. Too little choice at high level. Too frenetic. Too much. Not for me. Anyway, the guy whom I was learning from, a hepcat named Chris who runs a bigger midwest tourney called Seasons Beatings in October, told me completely straight faced that by learning MvC2, I would be good (or at least better) at every other fighting game I'll ever play. At first, I thought this was arrogant. After a while, I see what he meant.

Fast forward a year or so and we get TvC, a game I bought day one. Now I won't bore you by bringing up the common mud slung at it like "it shouldn't have been on the Wii" and "there's no competition, it's a dead scene." But I will level a few strikes against it now a year removed from a release date:

First, it is a misconception that there is not crowd or competition for this game. It isn't often that I go online with it and not find an opponent. The problem is that fringe players are gone at this point and we're mostly left with the hard core. This is something that you should expect; even Super Street Fighter 4 will ge to this point eventually. It just happened a bit faster in TvC's case, making picking it back up after nearly a year like climbing Everest without a rope. This being the first game I played when I decided to started playing my Wii again I knew what I was getting into, but I still needed to spend some time in Training Mode to get my thumbs up to snuff.

That brings me to the second major problem: there just aren't that many stick options. Yes, you can find the MadCatz Fightstick on the internet for around 40 bones (which is a pretty good deal), but your only other option is to get a PS-to-GameCube converter and plug in a custom (if you have one) or an older stick that may just have laying around. Me? I live in a smallish apartment with a wife and wifestuff (which is now a word), and the PS3 MadCatz TE stick is about all I can justify, especially if I'm not playing this game every night to get ready for a tournaments (which I'll probably enter as far as this game is concerned). I'm stuck with a classic controller. I am gimped.

Lastly, and probably most crushing, is that the Wii's online components just aren't that good. Now, I will say that I just started Monster Hunter Tri (we'll get to that later) and haven't fully tested that game's online portions yet, so TvC is really the only litmus test that I have, but it never feels like 100% to me. The thing is, the Wii is a wi-fi machine with no innate hard wiring. In comparison to playing online via wi-fi to my PS3 and Street Fighter 4, there are more consistent lag-free matches on the PlayStation (I tested this. You should have been there; it was downright scientific). After grabbing the USB LAN adapter for the Wii things got a little better, but probably 50% of the time I get a good, stable fight. This is a problem, especially if you want to get better at the game. If there's no level playing field, it's just about impossible to rise to the level of an opponent better than you.

But TvC is good. It's not as chaotic as its Vs. game predecessors, but still nuts enough that you have to be acutely aware of everything around (meter level, opponent meter, height of attacks, how much beer you have left, etc.). In flipping on the Wii after so long, I actually feel kind of bad that I let this game languish for so many months. I find myself back to looking up combo videos on YouTube and checking the Shoryuken message boards for the first time since Super SF4 dropped. As far as Wii games go, it looks pretty effing good. But I don't need to sell it to you.

All I need now is some local competition. Online, too. That's where you come in, I guess.

The Yellow Peril

So two weeks ago my PS3 decided to take a shit on me. Cruelly, right in the beginning of Armory DLC for Borderlands. Much, much more cruel, it was a week before the release of DC Universe Online; something I've been planning on playing with a large group for months now. For those not in the know, your game will freeze on you briefly before the machine shuts itself down, followed by the fuck-you of a blinking red light. When you try to turn the thing back on (because you can delude yourself into thinking that it simply overheated), you'll be greeted with something of a bitter rainbow of blinking lights as it cycles from green to yellow to red. See, the yellow is the writing on the wall; you get that and you may as well chuck the thing out the window and into traffic. If you plan on sending it back to Sony to fix, though, then a cat will do.

Shitty as this happens to be, it's hardly a surprise. Between my own gaming habits and my main squeeze's use of Netflix, the thing is basically on at any given moment when either of us are home. I'm (usually) pretty good about keeping it tidy and vacuuming the air vents, but this was bound to happen eventually. It isn't exactly a precedent, either. I sent my PS2 back to Sony twice for repairs back in the day, but at least they didn't charge me. It's $140 to fix a 60 gig backward compatible model. Do you know how many Snickers bars you can get for 140 clams? Well, none in your case. You just broke off a chunk of your soul that could be refilled with caramel and peanuts and handed it over to Sony via your credit card.

Now, as one of those nuts (there it is again!) that found the need to own all three of the current consoles, you would think that I would naturally just shift over to my 360, especially since the thing's only about 6 months old and I haven't gotten a ton of use out of it. However, maybe it's because I played it so much when I got it that I became burned out quickly. Or maybe that since I played all of the exclusive games for it right off the bat that I feel that there really isn't that much left. Maybe I'm spoiled by not having to pay for internet play with the PS3 and am still disgusted at the notion of it. Maybe I feel especially gun shy about it Red Ringing on me given what just happened. So I decided to play the Wii.

Sit down, because this is going to sound stupid: it was weirdly liberating to turn on my Wii and play it. Sure I'll occasionally flip the thing on when other people come over, but anybody that even comes close to reading about this stuff on the internet will agree that this is becoming an exceedingly rare occurrence. In fact, I'm not that far off in saying that the Wii takes its share of shit on the intertron almost daily. This always bugged me a little bit in that I'm pretty good about being impartial in my love for my console children. But since I never really play my Wii either, I can't help but to agree a little bit deep down in the cockles. Hitting the power button and seeing a field of downloaded games (good ones. I don't buy shit) after a pretty long stretch gave me an oddly warm feeling, though. Kind of like when you first buy a system and realize the scope of games you can pay now that you have one. Sure, it wasn't exactly like that, but still kind of close.

Outside of the normal "lose a little weight/ drink less beer/ stop getting into bar fights" bullshit resolutions, I think I finally found one to stick with: This year, I will rekindle the love affair between myself and my long-dormant Nintendo Wii. For the cynical, we can say that this year, I will rejustify having it hooked into my TV. As with all resolutions, we'll see how long this actually lasts, but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. I'll tell you all about it later.

Ok, So It's Been a Month...

... and since I've basically been mainlining Xbox 360 games lately, I think that now is a fine time to look back and reflect. Meditate, even. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm pretty lucky in that I have very giving friends (and even friends of friends of friends) that have been steadily unloading games for me to play like a Darma supply crate (or is that too soon?). It means that I've only actually paid for two games outside of the pack-ins that came with the machine; and I haven't even come close to touching those.

What have I touched? Perhaps more importantly, what has touched me? Lovingly? Well, shit, let's do some short reviews. It's my List Issue...

Halo ODST:
Again being the first Halo game that I've even considered playing, a lot of people are telling me that I started at the bottom of the quality totem pole and should have just started with Halo 1 and moved chronologically. After playing ODST, though, I'll say that I still really don't give much of a shit, but that doesn't mean that I didn't have a good time. The combat was fun and the first mission in the 'sploded city was pretty neat. However, it didn't really do anything that touched my soul like the many, many other Xbox people out there. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not fair for me to judge the series based on this one, seemingly weak game, especially since I just said that I liked it. But the setting and story just didn't really do it for me.

Plus, I'm too far removed to start playing these games competitively online. For one, it looks like a lot of work for me right now to really learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics for competitive play, and since I barely play first-person shooters at all to begin with means that I'd be almost starting from scratch. Thanks for the memories, Halo, but you may be on the way to the resale shop this weekend.

Mass Effect:
Being nearly the sole reason for me to buy a 360 that I didn't really need, it's time for me to suck it up and say that I was a little bit let down with its brilliance. Is that a sentence your noggin can't reconcile? Ok, then. I really, really dug ME, but it wasn't half as great as I made it out to be in my head. I think after hearing all of the good press that ME 2 has been getting and all of the Dragon Age that I've played since November pretty much made Mass 1 into a rock star that I met in real life that just didn't stack up to my idol worship. The lunar tank thing was a total drag to drive around, even stressful at times. The graphics were really good for a lot of it, but the backgrounds got pretty bland, pretty fast. And on that note, a whole lot of locations were recycled throughout the game that made me wonder how many original areas there really were. This game also had the misfortune (like Persona 3 and Final Fantasy XIII) of being one in which when the main character gets killed off its game over, even though your comrades get popped constantly and get up after the fight is over and they're totally fine. I get why, but still. Stupid.

Though there really wasn't that much to make me want to run through the game again (although I still probably will at some point), I did like the skill building system enough that I'd be interested to see how I'd use more weapons than just the assault rifles. The morality system of the game was fine but very binary. The good vs. bad choices were really easy to spot, and I climbed to number one on the Paragon charts (as well as number one in your hearts) steadily without much trouble. I didn't really use a lot of special skills and powers during my trip through the game since I found it easy enough to just rely on blasting people, but the few times that I used them made for some diversity from pointing, shooting, and hoping the craps game of RPG shooting landed in my favor. So to sum up, another play through as an evil female space wizard that packs pistol heat seems to be in my future. Yeah, that sounds about right.

On the absolute plus side is the stellar voice acting. I know that many prefer the female Commander Shepherd voice over the male, but he did a pretty good job if you ask me. The characters weren't as memorable to me as the Dragon Age ones, but they were still a bunch of cool people. I was surprised how pro-Christian some of the tone (and one specific character) of the game was, almost refreshingly so. Not that I think that a video game should be pushing a specific religion to the player, but since the topic of God is something either danced around (Xenosaga) in gaming or completely against (see Final Fantasy IX, X, and to a lesser extent, XII and XIII). Sure, Ashley turned out to be kind of a bitch by the end of the game, but I appreciated that faith was a defining character trait.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
The biggest video game release of all time. Ok I've gotten the requisite finger pointing out of the way. It was pretty fun for the same reasons that I liked Halo, but I honestly didn't have any idea what was happening half of the time. At least with Halo I was pretty good about keeping a level head, but if Modern Warfare 2 is any indication, I would be the worst infantryman in the history of armed forces: comrades would be shot on sight, running would happen in complete opposite ends of where objectives would be, and gunfire-induced panic would usually overtake me during the first 45 seconds of any mission until I died once or twice and got my head straight. Still, I can see why people like this game and it's brethren. The game certainly looks pretty and the online modes that I actually tried out where pretty fun, albeit overwhelming bloodbaths (I was never against anyone lower than level 43).

Ok, Modern Warfare. I get it. You're just not for me.

Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition:
Though I'm man enough to admit that I was more hungover than I usually am at 8am on a Saturday and that that may have played a part of it, I really didn't like the beginning of this game. After all of my friends gushed over how deep the customization was and how vast and varied the world was and blah blah blah, getting out of Vault 101 and getting my ass constantly kicked by monsters from the blue lagoon and Thunderdome rejects because I was better with a lead pipe than the fucking hand gun my stats said I would be fine with made the Fallout 3 feel more like work and less like fun. I like fun, and I sure as shit don't like work. Persevere, they all said. So I did.

Fallout 3 turned out to be one of the better games I've played since, well, Dragon Age. Though I didn't really think the story was as great as it could have been (though that ain't Liam Neeson's fault. He's a cool guy), turning my lowly vault-dwelling jive turkey into a walking death machine is one of my favorite things about RPGs, and by the time I was done with Fallout 3 I felt empowered with every single shotgun blast that killed my enemies. But maybe that just makes me weird. I'll probably go back and play the game again someday, especially since I only finished half of the packed-in DLC for the GOTY edition.

I also finished the game one night, and spent nearly eight straight hours the next day collecting all of the missed bobble heads if that tells you anything. Fallout 3 was really, really, really good.

Brutal Legend:
With my limited exposure to Tim Schafer games, I'm starting to think that he's a better writer than he is a full on designer. That isn't to say that BL isn't an alright game, but that's just what it is: alright. The single action goes out the window almost right away (one of the things I thought was stronger than the rest of the game) in favor of really jank RTS trappings that make it feel like a bastardized Overlord than a bastardized Starcraft. That's not a compliment.

On the flip side, the dialogue is really hilarious. Jack Black stood right at the edge of the annoyance cliff, but didn't take the plunge with a somewhat restrained performance, and the metal icon guest stars like Halford and Ozzy were surprisingly good actors. Sure, they were kind of just playing themselves (well, not really Halford, but still), but Ozzy in particular delivered his lines perfectly. I find that I can't really play this game more than maybe an hour at a time because I get stupid bored, but I finished it because of the characters, not the gameplay.

On Deck and in No Particular Order:
Bioshock 1 and 2
Gears of War 1 and 2
Mass Effect 2
Shadow Complex
Alan Wake
Blur
MagnaCarta 2
Forza Motorsport 3

So if you've been paying attention, that's two 360 exclusives and three multiplatform games. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to playing those multi- titles if the goodwill of some folks hadn't led them to loan them to me, and for that I'm pretty grateful. The BioShock games fall into that category. Not that I've ever been opposed to playing them in the past, they just happen to fall in my lap right now, so I'll be giving them a shot sooner than later.

Mass Effect 2, being on of the two games that I've actually purchased, is something I'm excited to play. Since I own it, though, I feel a little guilty about playing that instead of the shitload of stuff people have thrown my way. Same goes with Shadow Complex. I played a demo of it last night and was very happy with it.

I am morbidly curious about MagnaCarta 2. Reports from across the internet mix from "worst RPG of the last decade" to "most underrated game of last year." It's usually that kind of wadded up spaghetti press that attracts me to niche games in the first place. I own the last one for PS2 and even though it sure wasn't all that great, it still wasn't too shabby, so I'll probably grab this one.

Probably see you in a month. Go Comments!

Hello and Hello

Cats and kittens, ladies and germs, you and you and you and you...

Sorry that I've been away. I rarely get a ton of time to do bloggy writing these days now that I've taken up the Senior Editor gig at Twin Galaxies. Life, as it happens, tends to keep me pretty busy, too. So here's a quick rundown of what you missed in the last 9 or 10 months:

1. I write a lot for TGI, but you knew that already. I've been keeping busy with writing reviews and news. The Straight Dope is my baby (as well as the ones from my Lothario travels throughout the world. One day I'll unite them and appoint them code names and THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY), so go read it.
2. I think I've put some weight on, but am assured that much of it is muscle. Now my biceps are nearly as big as my ego!
3. The above sentence aside, I still hate exclamation points. Just sayin'.
4. I got hitched in September. Boom.
5. I bought an Xbox 360 two weeks ago. Refer to number 4 and know that it was her idea.
   
6. I've played a lot of video games over the past year. Many of them have sucked.
7. I turned 30. And into a werewolf. So I'm no longer a teen wolf.
   

For the purposes of this video game blog (which is what I think this has just finally become), let's concern ourselves with numbers five and six. While it isn't exactly unheard of for me to buy video game consoles, a couple of questions come to mind in regard to the 360: why did I buy it, and maybe more interestingly, why did I buy it now?

Well the answer to that first question is just as easy as you think it is. I play a lot of video games, and I kinda wanted one. There. Other than that, I do write about video games on the regular, so having one of everything (I already own a PS3 and a Wii) kind of helps in that regard. Sure, I have access to a 360 for game reviews and other journalistic ventures when absolutely necessary, but I've never had one laying around for personal amusement, so I finally get to catch up on stuff that I've been missing over the last few years.

But what took so long? The machine's been out for five years now, so what gives?

For some reason I feel ashamed to admit this, but part of it was do to brand loyalty. I've never been the kind of person to hold to particular console manufacturer for very long. When I was a young'n and had my NES, the prospect of a newer, swankier machine appealed to me very early on, so I didn't wait for the SNES and went right ahead to the Genesis (a decision that I do not, under any circumstance, regret). After that my options were pretty wide open. Being an early adopter at an early age, I wasn't about to sit on my hands and watch until a one machine came out on top the other, and at the time, the choices were the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn with the Nintendo 64 still a ways off. I mowed a shit load of lawns that year and shoveled a metric fuck ton of snow, but the deciding factor finally boiled down to the fact that my brother worked at a Camelot Music (remember those?) in a mall and that he got a discount, and they just happened to have a Playstation and not a Saturn. From here on, we can call this game/set/match for Sony.

It had a slow start, but I was very happy with my PSOne until I basically ran the thing into the ground. Like many of my nerd peers, I had to play with the console upside down due to heating issues in its waning years. I call that a badge of honor. But it wasn't to last; there will always be evolutions to video game consoles and I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Playstation die of old age and over abundance of Tekken 3. But the choice was clear for me: I would be buying a Playstation 2, and this was without question. Sure, I got starry-eyed like Davey Jones on The Monkees when I first played Soulcalibur on the Saturn, but I knew that all of those pretty graphics and steering wheel- like controllers won't hold my interest as much as whatever Sony's got cooking in their mad laboratory. History has shown that I was correct, but if not for one small, though significant, factor I would probably be writing either requiem for the Dreamcast right now, or perhaps nothing at all (the PS2 had quite an effect on me).

I speak, of course, of backward compatibility. Amen, I say to you, the prospect of building a video game library only to sell it off has always been the catch-22 of video game collecting at a young age: you may want to play these older games again, but you need the capital to buy stuff for that new console. I'll remind the world that emulation was still in something of an infancy, so the idea of playing all of those old PSOne games that scrimped and saved for in high school was almost kablammo if not for a new machine that played old games, and it was practically a god send.

Fast forward to the current console generation. While I had a bit more disposable income than I did in my poverty-stricken college and immediate post-college days, I tried to be a bit more discerning about my future purchases. Having gotten over a previous prejudice against Microsoft (you can thank Fable and Ninja Gaiden for that), I was more than willing to give them a chance very early in the 360s life cycle, but once word came down from the Sony mountain that the Playstation 3 would not only be backward compatible with PS2 and PSOne games my fate was sealed. Plus they it was going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII as exclusives, so it wasn't that hard of a call to make.

Now just try to imagine my fury when, scant months before finally buying one, Sony decides to cut backward compatibility for their machine. Multiply this rage when I hear, a few months after tracking down a BC PS3, that Final Fantasy XIII was also coming to the 360. The five stages of grief set in hard for me, and the worst of it was acceptance where I found that I was a mope for months after deciding that I probably backed the wrong horse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with my Playstation 3. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and the Uncharted games are some of the best I've played in this generation, and most of the stuff I would have played on 360 ended up being multi-platform anyway, so I eventually got over it. But the larger player-base (aside from their negative reputation for being childish assholes), strong exclusives (I'm looking at you, Fable II), and feature-rich online components were something I knew I was going to miss. Though, like the tenth person for caller nine of a radio station contest, I got over it.

Know this: the best and worst shopping decisions you make are while you're inebriated. Those Britney Spears disks of my wife's, that SportsNight boxed set, the wooden sign above my microwave that reads "cooking is love:" all made after beer number 4. I stand by them, even if I have to piece together why I did it in the first place. Then again, these are purchases that are under $250, but whatever. Walking through a Target about week and a half ago after an early dinner and having your wife tell you that I should buy an Xbox? That, friends, is what love is.

But what can we take from the concept of "brand loyalty?" Personally, I felt cheated that Sony would remove a feature of their high-powered super computer that many people see as important. With a tradition and promise of backward compatibility, you send a message to your user base that you thank them for their continued support and welcome them into your plans for the future with open arms; almost transitioning the user from one generation to the next. In the PS3's case, it made the outrageously high price of the machine a bit more palatable: you could sell your old PS2 to help curb the cost and get the same service. To maintain that high price and disarm the machine of that feature was like dropping trou and pissing in my face after punching me in the stomach. It sent a message to me that cutting costs of the system to lower overhead was far more important than keeping your return customers satisfied, and forced me to give my money to the used market instead to the company. At that point I was completely fine with that, though.

The bottom line is that I had exclusives to look forward to and older games that I still wanted to play, and it seemed to me then (and still does now) that Sony did their best to bungle both of the reasons I wanted a PS3. It almost came to the point of sending an irate letter to them explaining my concerns (their continued high price and botched lock downs of exclusives was slowly killing them), but they didn't need me to tell them that they were fucking up; the sales alone were letting them know. But it doesn't mask the fact that I bought a Playstation 3 anyway, and I did it because I was loyal, though with definite feelings of dissent. Does this make me an idiot? Maybe, I guess, but I've definitely learned to love my monstrous, though sleek, black machine. My past few years with it have been far from awful, but like turning down a job or not calling someone back, you sometimes wonder how things could have been. In this case, though, I actually get to find out.

So it's been almost two weeks. I bet you're wondering how that Xbox thing's going, right?

Ok, forget a bunch of that bullshit that I told you up there, because I wanted to get a 360 for Mass Effect and that's pretty much long and short of it. I'll tell you all about my experience with it when I'm finished (I hope), but I'm happy with my decision with less buyer's guilt than I thought I'd have. So far, I'm finding that paying for an Xbox LIVE Gold account a bitter pill to swallow after years of not shelling out for online gaming. And since I've been playing Mass Effect almost exclusively thus far, I'm not even using it so I feel kind of guilty.

But to say that I feel "complete" still seems weirdly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that I'm wishing that there more systems for me to buy or that I now need to go trick out my PC to effectively play Crysis or something. No, I have come across a surprising feeling of emptiness now that almost all of gaminghood is open to me on a personal level. There's no more hoping that a game that looks good on x system will show up on the y system that I own. There's no more feeling of superiority when the exclusive game for one console rakes in the GOTY awards, or that great downloadable content is available only for that one machine. Having all three of the current generation of home machines simply means that when something comes up that sounds good, I go get it, and that's that. I never thought I would lament what I used to think of as a limitation. I feel like I've exhausted my possibilities when all of them have just opened up to me.

You know, just something to ponder.

Oh Vacation...

So I found myself on vacation last week and instead of continuing with the Summer of Phantasy Star (which will happen) I wound up playing through Dragon Quest V for the DS. Strike that. I suckered myself into playing Dragon Quest V for the DS. You see, while my experiences with the DQ series isn't that extensive, every time I think it may be a good idea to start one, I find myself bored stupid within the first few hours of the game. Somehow, somehow, I slog through it anyway to completion; all the while thinking to myself, "they can't possibly take this game that much further if this is all it is". And there I sit; wrong every time.

I'm not a very vocal opponent of the DQ series, really. I respect that it's big business in Japan and that the original Dragon Quest is the founding father of what we know as console RPGs. But after decades of development and various sequels and spin offs, there just isn't that much of a clear evolution of the series outside of aesthetics. In fact, you could say that the DQ series represents everything wrong with console role playing on a technical level: you find yourself in a location, locate the nearest town, level grind, conquer a dungeon, get to the next town or location. That's it. There's a story in there someplace, but really, in an endless cycle of RPG rinse-and-repeat it gets pretty meaningless awfully fast. They make me feel every minute of the experience as opposed to sweeping me off of my feet like, say, many Final Fantasy games try to (in their way, I suppose).

But wait! Are Final Fantasy games -the only real competitor to the Dragon Quest series (even though they're published by the same company- better? Why do 2.3 million people buy DQ games in the first week? Why do Americans tend to drift more to what seems more Final and less, um, Dragon-y? So after some brief bathroom meditation, I present you the major differences between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and what, potentially, might make the former better than the latter (at least to those wacky Japanese, God love 'em).

1. The Plot is Rarely Incomprehensible Trash It seemed unfair to rag on Dragon Quest V for being as straight up as it is, or really, the entire franchise. Never has an amnesiac kid from an orphanage (built by his future enemy) grown to wield unreasonably absurd weapons before massive plot twists happen (because he was the dream of dead people all along). While there's something to be said about more involved stories -and really, the FF games have them- DQ games are all about one thing: good guys and bad guys. And I'm gonna make those bad guys pay. Over time, it's fair to say that the Final Fantasy franchise has tried to outdo itself with each numeric entry, only to have their epic and grandiose stories fall flat by the end. Sure, there are tons of those that love a specific FF game and its cast of characters, but they just end up trying too hard to be transcendent of its genre. Not DQ, where it's just a fun romp through a fantasy world. I have to respect that.
   
2. The Mini Games and Side Quests Are Just That Too often, Final Fantasy games either end after several (meaning multiples of 10) hours of backtracking and side questing for either completion's sake or to find those crazy extra weapons that, in reality, take away all semblance of challenge anyway. The newer entries are worse offenders than others (I'm looking at you, FFXII), but the focus is just about lost when the end is nigh. Now, I'm completely behind wanting consumers to get their money's worth out of your product, but Dragon Quest V had, perhaps, 2-3 real side quests to it. This meant that I, in absolutely no way, was going to overpower the end boss and finish the game as a god. After a whole lot of RPG conditioning, I was pretty put off by this, but when it finally came down to killing the end boss with just my wits and what was left over in my inventory, it was pretty satisfying delivering the killing blow, and just as exciting that all of my party members lived through the fight. That, friends, is a sense of accomplishment.
3. Charm That's right, charm. While some of the recent FF games have been much, much better about this, I find myself reflecting my ire a little and blaming them for everything that's wrong with console RPGs on an artistic level. Overly cheesy and ridiculously chirpy anime characters were built by the dynasty that is Final Fantasy while Dragon Quest is perfectly content remaining as, basically, a somewhat British adventure drawn by manga legend Akira Toriyama. Characters speak in cockney accents and the setting is always decidedly medieval. Sure, credit is due to the Final Fantasy games as evolving popular RPG tropes past sword-and-sorcery, but it's a little difficult to give too much respect to them knowing how absurd those settings and stories are now. Final Fantasy XIII, whenever the fuck it comes out, seems to be basically Final Fantasy VII with a fresh coat of paint and a unwieldy- sounding combat system (it may sound like I'm judging it, but I'm not). Final Fantasy games can't fall back on their simple charm anymore, and Dragon Quest will/ does, and it works for them.

So thems the berries. I'm still very excited for FFXIII when it launches next year, and probably won't start playing another DQ game anytime soon. But it does go to show that it pays to step back and be a bit more critical.

SOS

I'm modding a super old Hori Fighting Stick PS from, like, 15 years ago. I need to drop some new buttons into it, but it has a really specific wiring harness. The buttons looks like these pictures. Anyone have any ideas?

RE5

For the two or three of you that want to know what I think of Resident Evil 5, you can read my review at twingalaxies.com. Dig it