Category: Uncategorized

Very timely, I know. It only took me around 6-8 months to finally finish Final Fantasy XVI, and I purchased it well after its initial release.

I used to love JRPGs and easily clocked dozens to hundreds of hours in various titles, but lately they kind of burn me out. Plus adult life is busy. There’s work and chores and food and exercise. Sitting down to play one game for 60 hours wears away at my soul.

Regardless, I do recommend FFXVI if you have time for it. Story was good. It starts out kind of like a teenager trying to imitate Game of Thrones’ dark, edgy writing and then gets legitimately dark in the second act. Characters are good. Relatable. Flawed. Overall message about free will is kind of beaten like a horse in the end. Boss fights are pretty insane in a good way. Awesome spectacles. And the soundtrack is the kind where I have saved several tracks in YouTube Music and listen to them throughout the day. Fantastic all around.

Praise over. If you want a full summary or review, go to IGN.

This is Dude, Fix It. So let’s fix it.

1- Lots of powers, only a handful are useful. Instead of summons, you beat an enemy and unlock some of its abilities. They change your basic magic attack, which does the same damage to everything. There are no elemental weaknesses (at least from what I saw.) They each have a special ability that does one of the following:

Fire- Dash toward the enemy. Really useful.

Wind- Pull small enemies to you or pull yourself three feet towards a big enemy, and at an enemy’s halfway stun point can add a mega stun. Kind of useful, but against big enemies it honestly gets you a little closer instead of snapping you to them, limiting its usefulness.

Lighting- You make lightning balls. I never used it.

Earth- You have a block that reduces some damage. Barely used it since dodging is better.

Light- Shoots lasers? I don’t know. I didn’t use it.

Ice- You dodge and freeze enemies if you are close to them. Freezes bosses mid-attack. Freezes everything mid-attack. Absolutely overpowered.

Dark- You whip out a different sword that does next to no damage but if it’s fully charged it unleashes the strongest attack in the game.

You can select three movesets, each of which can only map two special attacks. So it presents this giant buffet of something like 30 abilities and only lets you use a handful. When you switch into a moveset, your basic moves are the same. It’s trying to be like Devil May Cry but is afraid to make anything intricate. The Dark set lets you use a different weapon, but it’s barely different from the normal sword except it does 1/4 of the damage. There are two things we can fix with this system:

1.a- More abilities as standard abilities. What if the freezing dodge became your normal dodge? Or there was a dedicated block button and it was stronger after you got the earth powers? Lightning strengthens your melee attacks and lets you chain strong attacks. Light adds a third tier of ultra-charging your magic attacks. The grapple is just always available and can be used for environments as well. Instead of six modes with barely any difference between them, just buff up the core gameplay loop.

1.b- More weapon variety. Just go full Devil May Cry. The idea of the Dark sword moveset was decent. Have three weapons to switch between, with multiple elements dedicated to each weapon. Fire and ice for the main sword. Earth, Wind, and Lightning for dual-swords. Dark and Light for a two-handed sword. Have distinct movesets for each. If you rack up combos with a weapon, it unlocks a mega attack. Picking up a random new weapon that sucks on the second to last boss of the game just leaves me wondering what could have been.

1.c- Enemy elemental types. The enemies don’t have weaknesses or strengths vs certain elements. The giant fire boss will take just as much damage from fire attacks as ice attacks. It had to be designed this way because the game was based around only giving you access to 1/3 of potential movesets at any given time. With my above fixes, you can add in elemental weaknesses and strengths. Sorry, it’s just really weird that I am up against a dude made of literal fire and wrecking his day with my fire attacks.

2- Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. The characters repeat themselves ad nauseum near the end. Good guy said, “Free will, free will, not slaves, free will, reject fate,” and bad guy said, “Free will bad, free will bad, no free will, free will bad.” For hours. Hours upon hours upon hours of saying the same things. Shut up. Take the script. Cut it in half. I liked the story. The themes are solid. But I don’t need a 20 minute dialogue-heavy cutscene to share one idea. Just shut up and let me play.

3- Shut up and let me play. The fights are cinematic. Beautiful. Tense. But they keep slapping the controller out of your hands to watch yet another movie. Near the end you have a literal 10 minute sequence where you do a quick-time event every two minutes to make sure you’re paying attention. The whole time I was just thinking, “What a cool fight. Sure wish I was participating in it.” When the game begrudgingly lets you have control during a boss fight, they’re top-notch. The flow is incredible. Enemy attacks are relentless yet leave enough warning to let you time your dodges well. But it’s almost like it’s afraid of what it does best and needs to keep interrupting the action to make sure you’re not getting tired of the adrenaline rush.

4- Let me become the big fire dog at will. The game features sequences where you play as Ifrit during boss battles. They’re really fun and do a good job of leaving your moveset roughly the same and just increasing the scale. But every time they pop up there’s a tutorial because a new ability gets added. You get to enjoy it during the 10 minute boss fight and then you don’t get to use it again for another eight hours until the next boss fight. I know it’s part of the story that becoming Ifrit is hard, but add in some big tough enemies as standard foes and let the player fill up a summon bar that lets them turn into Ifrit for a few seconds. Even a mini-version is fine. As it stands, it’s just too rare of an opportunity to enjoy life as a giant fire dog.

Conclusion: I have some gripes about the game, but it’s still good. The main issue is it’s way too long with not enough depth to make the most of its length. All of my points of criticism are about spicing up the combat because it does get pretty repetitive once you find the strongest combos and start moving on muscle memory.

Adjusting my schedule a bit. Now, instead of daily posts, it will just be Monday-Friday. (Or Sunday through Thursday most likely on the website, since I post updates immediately here and have them go up on the various social medias the following day.)

Want to enjoy life a little more, so I’m trying to relax on weekends. That sigma male daily grindset can only get a man so far.

Although I did find it funny that I post daily on Instagram and haven’t received any new followers for a while, but the moment I stop posting for a few days I get some random follows.

So I don’t understand the algorithm at all. Apparently the secret to getting more followers is post… less?

During a partially comatose, post-Thanksgiving doom-scrolling session, I came across an advertisement for an upcoming Netflix movie based on a 2007 video game called Bioshock. When it comes to video game adaptations, I follow a policy of guilty until proven innocent (or terrible until proven adequate.) I grew up in an era with cartoons based on Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter, Kirby, and Sonic the Hedgehog that were great for an ignorant five year old but toxic upon closer reinspection as an adult. I do enjoy ’90’s ‘tude and cringe, but it all aged about as gracefully as me.

And I did not age well. I saw Sonic scarfing down chili dogs and thought they would help me run fast. The chili dogs did not help my running abilities. He ruined me.

One of the biggest fundamental issues with game-to-film adaptations is that video games are designed to be games. Their narrative and mechanics are based around an active player experience. Mario saying, “It’s a me,” “Wa-ha,” and “Let’s a go,” are fine as sound clips for a character who is mostly running and jumping without soliloquy. Link doesn’t need to say anything because he is an empty vessel for me to reside within while I complete puzzles and dungeons. Street Fighter is a fast-paced fighting game designed for fast, furious matches and did not mesh well with cartoons and films that were 70% dialogue and plot. Making such beloved characters into Saturday morning cartoons was nothing more than a shameless cash grab that failed to replicate what made the games so fun in the first place.

So am I biased against video game film adaptations? Yes. Of course. I’ve been hurt before.

Let’s talk about Bioshock. Was it a good game? Yes. Of course. It hurt me before, but in a good way. It was a fantastic game that absolutely messed with the concept of free will and player choice. The first game had one of the greatest twists of all time best summarized with the line, “A man chooses, a slave obeys.” Still gives me chills thinking of the first time I saw it. Experienced it. Realized that I suddenly had no control over my actions, even when the controller was in my hands.

However, the only reason the twist worked was because it was a video game. If you have never played Bioshock, you might be tempted to watch a stream or read a Wiki to get a summary of the plot. Stop right there. Don’t stream it. Don’t read about it. Play it. Live it. That is the intent. That is the point. And it will blow you away.

So if I take Bioshock and turn it into a movie and sprinkle in Big Daddies and Little Sisters and Rapture, it will be a Bioshock-like product. An imitation. Particularly if they base it off the first game and if they maintain the twist. If they do, it might be decent. It might even be pretty dang good. But if they maintain the original twist, it will only have a fraction of the impact and meaning. After all, if you watch a movie, you are already the slave unable to choose anything. Films don’t let you choose. “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” has no meaning in a film beyond being a cool line because your only choice when watching a film is whether or not to keep watching.

The only way the Bioshock film will be incredible will be if it abandons or overhauls the plot of the first game. It needs its own twist that directly targets the experience of watching a film. Any attempt to replicate the original twist will result in nothing more than crude imitation. You can put in as much effort as you want to make the film great, but without changes, it will always be inferior to the game. You failed before you even started by trying to mimic the intensity of a brutal gut-punch by showing people a picture of someone else being punched in the gut.

If you disagree with my points, allow me to quote 1989 cartoon Link:

“Excuuuuse me, Princess.”

Good evening, or morning, or whenever it is wherever you are.

In my mind I have a poorly defined yet incredibly ambitious plan for what I intend to do with this website. Rather than a giant roadmap of projects and ideas that will come across like drunken, incoherent ramblings, I’ll start simple and proceed into incomprehensibility as the site matures.

Comics will be posted Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 1700* EDT. (Or 2200 UTC/Zulu)

A lot of global travel has left me very cognizant of the absurdities of time. I received a lot of calls at 0200 in the morning from family and friends who seemed to forget that if the sun is up on one side of the Earth, it’s probably down on the other. Concurrent illumination would only be possible if there were multiple suns circling the Earth, and any intelligent person knows that there is in fact only one sun circling the Earth.

Don’t fact check me.

*No, I won’t use AM/PM. I prefer only having to live through one 5:00 each day.