June 11, 2013

Games I Suck At - Bomberman 64

Being in a all year school is strange for a kid. While it’s nice to get 3 weeks off for every 9 on, there are some things you start missing. I’m not talking about summer vacation. Contrary to popular belief, you still get summer vacation. Just not as much of it. Of course, my track was running so that I was off track right at the end of summer, meaning 3 extra weeks of pre-teen hedonism.
You start missing things like friends to play with. None of my friends were on the same track as me which meant that I had to figure out how to keep myself entertained. Both of my parents worked and my siblings were off at school. So, in reality, being off track meant three weeks of pizza Lunchables and a new game to rent every week.

PIZZA
The only thing magical about those pizzas was how you managed to have enough sauce for 7 pizzas, but only enough cheese and pepperoni for 2.
Of course, this meant that I had to navigate the odd world of N64 releases around 1998. It was a tricky minefield. Because you only have so long at the video store before your mom says it’s time to go. You have this fun little panic attack where you have to decide right then and there if you were going to risk your entertainment for next week on something new and unproven. Or if you were going to rent Banjo-Kazooie again. This lead to me having to also decide what game to rent solely on the front cover. Anything that looked mature was out because my mother would veto that pretty quick. So I had to stick with kiddy looking games. That’s how I discovered how hard something can be while looking so cute.

This looked innocuous enough to my 8 year old self. Of course, there’s no way of telling based on the cover certain gameplay limitations that might be frustrating or impossible for a small child to wrap his head around. The back of the box will tell you about what you can do. You can play in frantic 4-player multiplayer! (A moot point, since I was alone at home with no friends.) Customize your Bomerman with different costume parts. (Sounds awesome until you realize that it’s linked firmly to point number 1) And 24 levels to explore. Well, that sounds hunky-dory until you start thinking about what Bomberman can’t do.
First and foremost, Bomberman cannot go through airport security. Like, at all. You do not want to be anywhere behind this guy if you’re in a hurry. Bomberman cannot survive his own bomb blasts. I suppose that’s fair. I mean, most bombers can’t, right? Well, except the “Blue Bomber” but then again, I never understood that particular nickname for Mega Man. But I think the most important thing that Bomberman can’t do is jump.

In previous Bomberman games, this wasn’t really that much of a problem. Mostly because of the 2-D nature of the games, jumping  would’ve been a convenience at worst and game breaking at best. But in a world of full 3D, the ability to traverse the Y axis is pretty important. Especially since the games’ worlds and levels are all built to utilize all three axis. Now, there’s little more frustrating to a kid than to put something on one platform, place you on a different platform, and then tell you to get said something but not tell you how to jump. So, naturally, this became extremely irritating, and it also became extremely difficult for me to enjoy during the week that I had it. After watching a Tool Assisted Speed run, I now understand (being some 14 years older than I was at the time) that in order to traverse the scary world of “Up and Down” required me to plant bombs and then “bomb jump”. That is, Bomberman is rigged to bounce if he lands on one of his bombs. That’s neat and all, until you remember that these are the same volatile explosives that can detonate with nary a moment’s notice and take you to your grave in a fiery ball of charred flesh. Even worse is that some secrets and collectables, required you to make a “bomb staircase” which involved planting bombs in just such a way that they’d bounce on top of one another, stacking two or three of these in sequence and then jumping on the first to go up the slope of explosive death. (Hopefully still alive.) This required both precision timing and being able to movie precisely so you could bounce in the right direction, since if you were off, you’d bounce off the stairs and then have to restart the whole damn thing.
screw it
Well shit…
Bomb planting was made easier, partially, by finding a little heart with a bomb in it. Somehow, this translates to remote detonator, which was damn handy once I figured out what the hell I’d done to my bombs! Since this game was ridiculously difficult for me, I turned to my Game Shark. The first thing I discovered was that the white guy who showed up in some levels, Sirius, wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Which meant no more cryptic hints or tips to help me navigate this labyrinth of hell-spawn and cutesy graphics. But soon after I made the connection that my Game Shark had negatively impacted the game, just by using it (a new concept to me at the time), I picked up the remote bombs and suddenly, my bombs wouldn’t explode. I thought I’d borked my game. I think I started crying bitter tears of frustration, since I was kind of a crybaby then. It’s funny now, but put yourself in my shoes. I had just “broke” the game that I was supposed to at least pretend to enjoy for the week that I had it so as not to anger my parents about wasting their cash. I had no clue that in order to detonate the bombs, I needed to press the Z button. The very button that up to that exact moment served no use in the game.
Of course, this is exactly the kind of thing that Sirius would tell you in the game, if he wasn’t being all angsty about you cheating.
Sirius
Your general incompetence at this game hurt my feelings. So, no, I won’t help you. Not until you apologize and stop being such a pussy.
This was just basic navigating the levels. The boss fights were hard. Not the one on one boss fights. Those were ridiculously easy, even for me. Especially once I figured out about the remote bombs. But the end of world boss fights were a pain, since they moved so easily and Bomberman was so damn clunky with his movement. They’re shooting lasers and I’m lobbing a bomb that’s going to land nowhere near the enemy. I felt overwhelmed. It wasn’t a pleasant experience for a kid. Even worse is that the game looked like it should be easily accessible to a small child. I didn’t want to ask my brother for help. Just judging from the visual style and music, it seemed too damn cutesy. In fact, I felt almost embarrassed to rent it at that age, because I was afraid of ridicule of any kind. So I just had to angst quietly at home, hoping that maybe this time I wouldn’t suck so bad at a kiddie game.Of course, I would suck, play frustratedly for a few hours, switch off the 64 to eat some cold Lunchables pizza and watch whatever was on PBS in the middle of a weekday.
slim
Looking back, my childhood wasn’t an exceptionally happy one…

This post was simulcast both here and at Thoseguys.tv Why not pop on over and see what else they're cooking?

May 7, 2013

Why Square is for Squares

So by now you know a little bit about me, I'd hope.

You know all about how I tend towards the retro market and RPGs. You know how I procrastinate and how much I let having  job influence my off-time. You know that I have access to the murky depths of Google Images and am not afraid to show what I find. You also know that I have some weird obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog and have a thing for Sally Acorn.

I swear this is the last Sally joke.
So you also know that I'm huge into Kingdom Hearts. I somehow got sucked into easily one of the worst-sounding cross-overs in history. Let's all be honest. The concept was complete crap, and yet it was so wonderfully done. I'm a little surprised that I even get so invested in the story, despite the fact that it sounds like weirdly optimistic poetry written by a 14 year old girl.

"My Friend's Heart Memories
By Mary Sue Ellen (Grade 8)

My friends hearts are in my heart. And that's where I store my memories of our friendship. And even though darkness is all around me, the light that our memories share will shine from my heart into the memory of that darkness so that all of my friend's hearts can be one in memory and heart."

(Teacher's note: This is the third F you've gotten in a row. I think you seriously misunderstand the concept behind a 'Haiku'. See me after class.)

The story is kind of a cluster-bomb of random themes and words that somehow come up with a compelling, if not a little silly, story. Even with glaring plot holes how by Kingdom Hearts II, the Heartless had hearts and no body, while the Nobodies had bodies but no hearts. Seemed kind of weird to me. But then so does having a death scene with Goofy in it. I'd seen the guy survive falling off cliffs, waterfalls, and having anvils and safes dropped on his head. No way is a piece of rock doing him in.

I've played all the games, and even shelled out cash for the Final Mix+ for Kingdom Hearts II that I've still yet to play since I botched the modchip in my PS2 and now it's a fancy brick. I've beaten all but one of them. (I've explained before that card-based battle systems aren't my forte.)

So, of course, no one is more excited than me for some sort of Kingdom Hearts III related news.
Alright, maybe him...
But of course, there isn't any to be had. Not since the teaser trailer from Kingdom Hearts 3DS that we learned that the next installment will be Kingdom Hearts III and not a side-story.

Ahem...
HD Remixes don't count. Although I will be pre-ordering the hell out of this as soon as I have money.

No, the real reason why there's been such a lull in the story after KH II is because the creator, Tetsuya Nomura, said that while he had a bunch of ideas for Kingdom Hearts III, there'd be no work made on it until his work with Final Fantasy XIII Versus was finished. Which, when I first heard it, didn't sound so bad. Disappointing yeah, but not the end of the world.

Of course, that was like, 7 years ago and Square has gone scarily silent about Final Fantasy Versus. It's becoming the Half-Life 3 of the RPG world. Not only did FF XIII come out (the game Versus was supposed to come out against, hence the name) but the sequel to FF XIII came out as well. And Square has already announced production on Final Fantasy XV. (XIV was another MMO like XI was, and it turned out to be a bust). What's even more worrying is that the dev team for Versus explicitly stated that Versus would be for the PS3. Now, we're getting on towards the PS4 being announced, and things are looking bleak for Versus. It's either going to be recycled in development time to take advantage of the PS4, or it'll be released as a blockbuster hit (or flop) on a dying system. One that already came out stillborn and was just barely starting to gain a pulse.

Of course, that also means that the PS3 will come and go without a Kingdom Hearts title. And while that really sucks, it's even more disappointing that Square seems to think that Final Fantasy is its only franchise worth working with.

Name three things wrong with this picture.
In the sake of journalistic integrity (I know! I'm surprised as you are!) I actually looked up Square-Enix's financial situation. This is from their investors report from the last fiscal year.

"In view of the rapidly changing environment of the game businesses, the Company has decided to implement major reforms and restructuring in its development policy, organizational structure, some business models, and others. The Company expects to incur loss of approximately ¥10 billion [approx. $100 million] from such restructuring efforts to be recognized as extraordinary loss about loss from restructuring in the settlement of the account for its fiscal year ending March 31, 2013"

The company is starting to realize that its, "Churn out a Final Fantasy game and re-release crap" business model is a poor one. This is extremely important, but kind of a no-brainer. Square has been sitting on so many cash-cows that they might be better off going into the dairy business. 
Then their only competition would be Natsume.

A Final Fantasy VII remake would sell like hot-cakes at a weight-watcher's convention. But of course, what I really want to get at is the Chrono Trigger series.

Despite the initial game being hailed as a cult-classic, warranting two re-releases (one for the PSX and one for the DS. I have all three versions.) and all of them doing well financially, Square refuses to do anything but sit on the franchise. Sure Chrono Cross was a disappointment. (To them) But that's not because they'd lost their "dream team" that produced Chrono Trigger. It was because they were trying to implement a wonky battle system while trying to claim its sequel status even though no sequel-like elements are found in the game until far late in the game. It'd be kind of like having Super Mario Bros. 2, only you don't play as Mario or any of the cast from the first game, and only near the end was there a convoluted and confusing series of dialogue heavy scenes connecting the two. I guess that's not really a perfect metaphor since Super Mario Bros. 2 has about as much to do with Super Mario Bros. as Super Mario Bros. has to do with Donkey Kong. But at least the protagonist is the same, allowing for easy sequel status.

Chrono Cross is a great game in its own right. The battle system takes some getting used to (Square went through a time where they could crap out a battle system and label it innovative.) but the story is extremely deep, even though you really have to work for it. Most of the surface elements you're going to pick up on the first time around seem almost like cameos. The Prometheus Circuit actually being Robo. Lucca's involvement in the whole shebang. (Only later retconned into the ending of Chrono Trigger.) And then getting accosted by the ghosts of Crono, Marle, and Lucca, though the committee is still out to debate on that one.

But Square has done jack-shit with the franchise. The only thing it has done is shoot down all fan-made efforts to expand on the series. It's understandable that Square would want to protect its intellectual property, but they come off as dicks by not doing anything with it themselves. I mean, hell, Square looks like the rich kid who invites kids over to play, but doesn't let them touch his toys. Selfishly holding on to the RC Car, saying, "I don't want to play it, but I don't want you to play with it either. It's mine."

And it's a real shame because even though Chrono Cross pretty much satisfactorily ended the story line, there's still more story to be told. There's something of a sub-plot in Cross about the Porre army conquering Guardia. The very place where Crono and Marle should be ruling. So, the question is: What's become of them? I doubt very much that an army could kill Crono and Marle considering that Crono stopped Lavos all by himself. Besides he's literally survived death. So, what happened to them? What happens when the Time Devourer is defeated and the time-lines are merged again? Does the whole archipelago disappear too?
Does Magus ever find his long, lost twin brother, Guile?


There is very fertile ground for a series if I'd ever seen one. But the longer that Square sits on the property, the more the fanbase is going to expect from the next game. That's only going to make the shock of what they get even worse. Let's face it, if Duke Nukem Forever came out when it was originally scheduled, it would've been the game fans had been dying for. If Half-Life 3 came out when it was scheduled th- Wait... When was Half-Life 3 supposed to come out?
Uh... eh... What was I talking about again? Something about... Bomberman??? Does that sound right?
I'm afraid that the same thing will happen to Final Fantasy Versus at this point. Sure the demo video they've got looks effin' amazing. But that doesn't mean anything. There's tons of pretty looking games out there that are terribly disappointing. If Final Fantasy Versus doesn't get the push that it needs when Fitch, God of ruling and arbitration finally smiles upon us and deems us worthy of such a gift, how long do you think it'll take for Square to start looking to put blame on someone for the struggling finances of the company? Do you think it'll be the production crew that got stuff out on time, but it turned out to be crap? Or the crew that kept a highly anticipated game in production for almost a decade, spanning two consoles, and it turned out to be overhyped?

Of course, this being Square they might just try and release another Final Fantasy Spin Off.
Heavens knows they love doing that.

April 30, 2013

Games as Art

So, it's been only a scant two months since my last post. Mostly because I discovered something interesting: a job gets in the way of my previous writing style.

It used to be, another day off. Which NES game am I going to gripe about today? I'd find a comically bad one, play it while snagging a bunch of screenshots and then write about it right afterwards.
Then I'd find random stuff on Google Images and write funny captions to them.
Having a job complicated that quite a bit. Since I'd come home, sit down and if I was going to play a game, I was going to enjoy it. I didn't have time to play crap.

Well, that's not true.

Just recently, for some reason (which I'm sure is inspired by Game Grumps) I decided to play Sonic 06 again, but this time, to completion. Upon playing it again, I was surprised by how playable it was. Provided that you knew exactly what was going to happen. And, having watched the Game Grumps struggle through every level twice now (still working on Silver) I knew it all by heart.

It never ceases to amaze me how bad the Game Grumps are at playing games. Due to them talking about random crap that is barely even funny, they miss out on golden moments in the game, instructions, or even basic patterns needed (to quote Egoraptor) "to live and to... be..." But the really amazing thing is that I continue to watch them for some reason. They're entertaining somehow. Even when they're frustratingly bad at simple tasks.

But that's beside the point. I promised myself that I'd wait at least another year before writing in depth about Sonic again.

No, today is a much meatier discussion that me and my friend had recently.

I discovered that a close friend of mine, someone I grew up with and was practically a brother to me, doesn't like Earthbound. This actually took me off guard since much of our childhood consisted of us playing it during sleep overs and thoroughly enjoying the writing and game in general.
Ah ha ha ha ha!


Recently he finally played it all the way through and found several aspects of the game to be irritating. And I discovered that he and I diverge greatly on the subject of rating games. Whereas I judge a game on pretty much everything included in the game (graphics, story, gameplay, music, etc) he judges primarily on whether or not he thought it was fun. Earthbound ranked a solid 5/10 for him. He admitted to loving the story, the music and the graphics, the gameplay was too cut and dried for him. To be fair, I knew he was biased against Dragon Warrior-esque RPGs from the get go, but this was a real eye-opener to me. Since I have it on pretty good authority that the game is far from average, as he claims.

This got us talking about the medium of video games in general. And I think that the big difference that we have is that when he pops in a game, he wants to have fun. Pure and unadulterated fun. For me, I go for immersion. I like to be swept away to a different world. A world of magic, or aliens, or incredibly awesome psychic hedgehogs from the future.
Yeah, I drew that.
But this opened up a large can of worms that had never before been in our friendship. Now, sometimes I can't tell if he's just trolling me or not, but he acts pretty scornful of the concept of video games as art. I wholeheartedly believe that games can be art, but admit that scant few are.

This is a discussion raging on somewhere else. We have people throwing up games like Shadow of the Colossus or ICO to demonstrate that they can be art. Then you have people like Roger Ebert saying that they'll never be art. I'm sure the same argument raged about movies, plays, books, and even story telling in general back their respectful haydays.

But video games are interesting since they have the perfect vantage point to be art. Since my definition of art is any piece intended to make you feel a certain emotion, games have a way of touching you that no other medium can. They make you the character. Or you control him. You live in that world. You decide what happens and you can get invested in the happenings like no other medium. It's a lot easier for a plot twist to impact you since it's you doing it. Imagine Bioshock's big twist ("Would you kindly?") if it were in a book or movie. It would lose almost all of its impact since it'd be up to the narrator or actor in question to depict to us that strange mixture of feelings of being both violated and manipulated at the same time. It wouldn't work. Bioshock used the medium of interactivity, coupled with the standard convention of quest-based obstacles to suddenly pull the rug out from the observer (the player). Every move that the player has made has been without question. You thought that it was just because you were playing a game. Suddenly the game asks you why you would do these things, and then tells you that you had no choice. The player character was mentally conditioned to follow the phrase "Would you kindly?" and without realizing it, the player was too. Blindly following the next objective that was always asked of you following the trigger phrase.

This was an awesome moment where we got a sneak-peek behind the curtain and understood a little about the possibilities that games offer over movies or books.
"Would you kindly buy the sequel?"
A book is a great illustrative device to paint a world from a certain point of view. There can be sparse detail or enormous amounts of it. Try reading Bram Stoker's Dracula to see what I mean. There was a time when books were something of more story-driven poetry, it seems. It was there to paint a picture with words more than to tell a story. And so, older books tend to be verbose and hard to read now because we just don't get into that much detail any more. And part of that is because we now have movies.

Movies deal with the imagery itself. If a book needed to have a really scary setting or imagery to convey the feeling it was trying to establish, it would have to be really longwinded. This causes the more modern reader to skim through paragraphs of sheer descriptions just to move the story along. A movie allows the story to move unhindered by needless descriptions by using a visual medium to demonstrate... well... the visuals. Instead of having a character describe Dracula has being pale with a thick mustache, we can simply call up a picture instead.
Somewhere along the way, vampires learned to shave.
Now this is a great medium to show off impressive visuals. Large explosions and flashy gadgets are a lot more fun to look at then to read about.

But early movies were terrible. They were badly paced, the acting was sub-par, and the camera techniques were practically non-existant. It was like someone just recorded a live play. Which of course, was exactly it. Plays, in turn, were just people acting out what was in a written story. Which is why we study plays in English class as part of the curriculum while we only watch movies when the teacher needs a nap.

Eventually, people realized that there was more you could do with a visual medium than just watch people stiltedly rehearsing lines at one another, moving for little or no reason across the stage with big sweeping gestures. And that was when people started realizing that you can tell a distinct story in a movie than one in a book.
Even if you use the same title.
Now, I would hesitate to call early movies art. But there are a lot of purists who say I'm wrong about that. And I'll grant that I'm woefully ignorant about early movies, since I don't find them entertaining. But I do understand that I share the same feeling about games. And I am starting to come around to the idea of why people might not enjoy Final Fantasy VI when compared to Final Fantasy XIII based solely on quality and entertainment.

But, here's the thing. Even though we're well into our third or fourth decade of having video games, we're just now starting to break out with ideas that challenge the way we conceive the interaction with these things. But most of the best games, with the best story telling, still rely heavily on concepts from movies. The cutscene for instance. Taking away interactivity so the game can show us something cool or pretty. There was a time when you were rewarded with a cutscene in a game. Now it's commonplace. It's not a unique story-telling device. In fact, it's a horrible one when the main defining purpose of a video game is interactivity. This is abundantly clear in movie-based games from the PSX era. If you beat the game or a level, you'd be treated to a low-quality clip of the actual movie. At some point, every kid had to ask himself why he rented the game itself instead of the movie. Especially since the gameplay of movie games are usually in the pits. But we all rented Spider-Man at some point, right?

The point is, video games are at a very early age as far as art goes. Just like movies borrowed heavily from conventions used on stage. And stage conventions relied heavily on conventions used in literature, video games are still relying heavily on conventions used in film. But we're now just coming to a point where we might actually be able to start doing things that can't be done via film or literature, due to the unique aspect that games bring to the table.

Bioshock used an interesting way to tell the narrative, not by coming up with anything new or revolutionary, but by using an outdated form of entertainment, the radio-drama. By having us listen to the recordings of people living in Rapture, we began to understand the events that unfolded before. This was a step up, as far as immersion and interactivity went, from using a cutscene or "flash-back". Instead of having a long, drawn-out explanation of the world Rapture was from a non-interactive movie, we were given the narrative as we could see the after-math of the events. So when we first see the banners for the New Year's party that was attacked, we can continue to poke around and look at the set while someone else gives us some information that is relevant to the story, while not going out of their way and saying, "It was 1958 when the Splicers attacked the New Year's Eve party. Splicers are people..." It helped build immersion by finding left-overs instead of straight up exposition. Allowing you to naturally understand the story like you would in real life.

Movies and books can do this too, but it's much harder. Books can often give too much exposition, because too little and the plot seems to come out of nowhere. Movies can do it too, but have to be careful. If a movie goes out of its way to hold on one plot point too long or one set piece too long, it will tip people off that it's relevant to the plot. Video games, where you interact within the story might give you an opportunity to learn about the world its set in without having to yank the camera away and force you to understand something.

That's why Bioshock has a much better story-telling mechanic than, say, Skyrim. Skyrim has a lot of story, but it's given to you in large info-dumps (books) or by listening to other characters. You rarely learn more about the setting by actually playing the game. By which I mean, you wouldn't really understand the struggle between the Stormcloaks and the Imperialists if you didn't actively talk to people. And that is a large part of the overall plot of the game. Whereas in Bioshock, you can get an idea of what happened in Rapture, even if you were to take out all the dialogue in the game.

This is a hallmark that most, if not all, games should shoot for.

But the problem is that games are funded in much the same way a movie is. So producers are less likely to spend money on a game that isn't a sure return of investment. Which in turn means that if a game can be like a blockbuster movie, then that game will get funding. If the game is deep and thoughtful and really makes you think about the way you interact with it, but isn't exactly marketable, that game will go in the "nice idea" category to be picked over when the company gets really desperate. (It's happened before, Square)

But, here's where video games are starting to take off on their own. Independent developers, which are small groups of people or small companies, are really starting to bloom. Now with marketing and distribution mostly handled via clients like Steam or Xbox Live Arcade, it's less costly and therefore less risky to take a chance on a game that deals with something as strange as, say, traveling back in time. Games are starting to evolve on their own merits, and that's great for me.

In the end, though, I feel like I'm a purist when it comes to games. Just like someone can watch a "classic movie" and think it's way better than anything coming out now, I can play an older game and appreciate it often times more so than a blockbuster game that's more recent. But, that doesn't mean we can't be tolerant of what is after-all something good. For example: I doubt that I would like Casablanca. Much to the shock of many, I just can't get into a black-and-white movie very easily, much less a drama. But, it would be near sacrilege for me to say it was an "average movie". I might not understand the appeal to it, but I wouldn't ever go so far as to say that.

And in the same vein, my friend is dead wrong about Earthbound.
True genius is never appreciated...

February 3, 2013

Random RPG Rant




So, only being behind by a couple of years, I've finally finished Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. First of all, it was awesome. Definitely was worth playing. Now I've officially played all the Kingdom Hearts games. I've beaten almost every one except Chain of Memories, but then again, I've always been terrible with card-based battle systems. Phantasy Star Online Episode 3 was terribly disappointing for me, as you could imagine.

I remember first hearing Simple and Clean in the commercials for the first Kingdom Hearts, and being a boy who was trying to prove to everyone that he wasn't some weird nerdy kid, I scoffed out loud at the very premise of Kingdom Hearts. But I knew that deep down, I was going to thoroughly enjoy that game. And I did. I beat the hell out of that game. Just never beat Sephiroth, but then again, he was nigh impossible to beat.

Using that as a springboard to segue into the topic I want to talk about, which is Final Fantasy, I'll start with what bugs me: the characters in Kingdom Hearts.

First of all, it's tragic to see Zack in Birth By Sleep. He's looking forward to the world, becoming a hero and all that. But every time I start to feel happy for him I remember how he's inevitably going to end up. Dead. It's like watching Romeo and Juliet, only they die years apart.

"Promise to die a tragic death if I do?"
Second is Sephiroth who, for some reason, is perpetually in some weird mixture of normal and Safer Sephiroth. Safer Sephiroth looked more monstrous and Sephiroth normally looked pretty bishi with a long sword. His character in Final Fantasy VII itself  wasn't quite the embodiment of evil that subsequent portrayals would make him out to be. Remember, for a large part of his life, Cloud wanted to be great like Sephiroth. He just snapped one day after discovering the truth about his origins and then wanted to destroy the world. Hell, I feel like that if someone cuts me off on my way to work. Much less if I discovered that my entire existence was a lie.

But most importantly is the portrayal of Cloud. Everything you see Cloud in after Final Fantasy VII has him as an angst ridden loner who is bitterly torn up about... well, something. I'm not entirely sure what. Either the mind-f*** of his past or the fact that Aerith died. I'm still not clear on why he's moping around so much. But the fact of the matter is he simply isn't like that in his own game. I'm playing Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded and there's a part where you try to get Cloud's help in the Colosseum and he refuses because he can't help anybody or somesuch. He just mopes around and wanders aimlessly like he's about to cry. And all I can think is, 'Is this supposed to be the same guy who cross-dressed to save Tifa from some lecherous thug?'

The part where Cloud was morose in Final Fantasy VII were pretty short compared to the rest of the game. There's a small issue when Aerith dies, since he feels somehow responsible for that. And the fact that he might have been created to be a backup Sephiroth or something. But the feeling in the end of the game is that what happened in the past happened in the past and what happens now is the most important thing of all. He saved the world for a reason and he was feeling pretty damn good about it.
And why the hell wouldn't he? Tifa totally is diggin' on the Cloud.
 For some reason, Cloud has lost all motivation after Final Fantasy VII and has become the most irritatingly angsty character that has ever been created. And it's a damn shame since when I was replaying Final Fantasy VII, I came to realize how much I actually liked Cloud's character. He was pretty gung-ho about everything and handled terrible circumstances surprisingly well. He was upbeat and kind of snarky, in fact.

If he wants to have a reason to be angsty, he should've been in Final Fantasy VI. Then at least he could complain that he didn't save the world.

That's the masterpiece for me as far as Final Fantasies are concerned. Kefka's destruction of the world of order in Final Fantasy VI. Honestly, there was none of this, heroes swoop in at the last minute and save the world thing. No, they're too underpowered and show up just a touch too late and therefore have to defeat the big bad about a year after he's destroyed the world. Kefka is probably the best villain since he actually won. Though I'll admit he had little character depth. When you can describe the entirety of his motivation with three words, "Hate", "Hate", and "HATE" you've made a pretty shallow character. But at least he consistent. He's a mental psychopath who dresses like a clown and is the embodiment of hate and chaos.
...No... The other guy...