Blog: Thoughts on Final Fantasy VI (3)

As part of my ongoing tour through my childhood, SNES RPGs, I recently played through Final Fantasy VI (or 3 if you're from around where I was in space and time). As a kid, this game was the pinnacle of what a game should be, an rpg, full of adventure, drama, swords, magic and airships (sorry Earthbound, we'll catch up later). Replaying it, I found that the game generally holds up, but it definitely has some flaws. The characters were great, the story was very good and the combat was alright, but it also got in the way the characters and the story telling.

Final Fantasy VI as I remember it. (From GameFAQs user JagDogger2525)

This post covers my thoughts about Final Fantasy VI and it includes some spoilers. Incidentally I played on my SNES, so didn't have to deal with the *cough*crappy*cough* remake. (If you're interested, I did enjoy this article about what went on with the remake).

Things I Liked

Final Fantasy VI has an amazing sense of cinema, right from the opening cut scene. It isn't afraid to change up the gameplay to strengthen that cinema. The opening cutscene of the game provides a feeling of a cold and desperate team and that sense carries over as you start to get to play but you also get the added feeling of power as you have the magitec suits and are fighting really squishy minions. Other things like the rafting scene, the opera scene and the breaking of the world scene are also really interesting moments where you do something other than the normal game play but all in service to the cinema.

A strong opening (From GameFAQs user VinnyVideo)

The music and sound design are also really well done and serve that sense of cinema. The music may not be my overall favourite for a SNES game, but it's very very strong as you're entering new scenes and helps you to understand at a visceral level what a scene or location is about. The sound design is beautiful and I like the way the game uses sound effects (although some of that is a bit of nostalgia).

The thing I liked the most about Final Fantasy VI, is the characters. The game has twelve main characters, all protagging, and the story doesn't feel muddied. I think there are two main reasons why this works as well as it does. First each character is well written, with a clear arc, goals, dreams and flaws. Second the game is very good about managing when characters take up the story stick and when they don't. Characters, whether they're currently the main playable character or not, step up when it's their scene and contribute to the story. When it's not their scene they don't steal the show, but they do contribute. This lets the game have twelve main characters running around, all contributing but only a few holding the story focus at any point in time.

As I mentioned the characters are well written and that improves the game immensely. The heroes are all complex and the NPCs are interesting. For example, the character of Gsetahl leaves you guessing as to whether he was deluded, tricked, had a face-turn (or a heel-turn). Other characters,have a similar level of complexity through out the story and this helps flesh out both the world and the story.

Our enemy, but an honest man? (From GameFAQs user VinnyVideo)

Finally, there's Kefka. I think Kefka's may be one of the most interesting villains because he doesn't have a motivation, he's just crazy. In the same way Batman's endless resources are irrelevant in the face of the Joker, Kefka takes away all of the advantages the heroes may have and also that you have as the player. In terms of story, this has to be used sparingly (if too many games implement this then it's not special) and implemented carefully. You only really interact with Kefka a handful of times in the game and so it's surprising when his true nature is revealed and the world is destroyed. It also changes the nature of the story from a save the world story to a get revenge story and I think that's interesting as a less common video game story.

I quite like the story itself. It's Final Fantasy, so it inevitably gets to the point where you have to go save the world, but I prefer the ones where the saving the world is incidental to the rest of the story (this is one of the reasons why FF XII is probably my favourite Final Fantasy). I also like, as I said that this is the game where you don't save the world. The stories of video games tend to fall into a much smaller range than a lot of other media and so any game where the story does something unusual is a nice addition.

The strength of the story definitely comes back to the strength of the characters. Much of the story is based on the characters resolving problems that had been going on before the game began, but now heightened by the back drop of of a world war and the eventual end of the world. The characters aren't ever the chosen ones so much as the ones who are currently there who can probably do something.

The dialog isn't great, as it's suffers from early 90s translation and Woolseyisms (thought "Son of a Submariner" is and will always be a great line). But the story shines through the writing and especially now that it's been a few months since I finished the game, my feelings looking back are that the story was well done.

Finally, I liked the setting. As a kid FFVI was the game I set all other games by. Is it an RPG? Does everyone get a sword? Ok I think it'll be a good game (like I said, sorry Earthbound). So at it's heart the concept of an early industrial world powered by magic really appeals to me. The world is a little thin, there's not too many actual towns and not too many people in those towns and the towns are all very similar.  Still the game does a good job of making each place feel different and the people in each place feel different both from people in other places and from each other.

As with many games (especially from Square) at the time having spent hours walking across the land you get a really deep feeling for where things are and who's doing what. Then when you get the airship and can suddenly take in the whole world at once you get a real feeling of scale and speed, which supplements the adventure you'd already felt.

Final Fantasy VI really doubles down on this with the World of Ruin. After you've spent a long time getting attached to the world and the people in it, you're then forced to go around the world again and find where towns have gone and who managed to survive. So you get a very "home from away" feeling, which I think also heightens your attachment to the world.

Things I Didn't Like

The cinema of Final Fantasy VI is well served by the game play except for one big problem, the random encounters. It's pretty standard to bitch about random encounters, you're trying to get something done and then the game cuts into your peaceful walk with a loud clang and a messed up screen and then you have to fight a bunch of numpty little somethings that get killed without you actually paying any attention to what's going on.

Yay! A fight! Again! ... (From GameFAQs user KeyBlade999)

That's annoying. It certainly ruins the pace of the game and I think it's a reason why people have significantly fonder memories of games where this doesn't happen (Yes, yes, Earthbound, I'll get to you, I promise). I think that the problem in FFVI is a little more specific though.

The specific problem with random encounters in FFVI may be best illustrated by one instance in the game where having arrived at the top of a tower to fight a boss (and sorry I don't remember which tower or which boss), and watched the boss spar verbally with our heroes I then had to walk six tiles up to fight the boss. At this point I fought two meaningless random encounters before making it to the boss.

Gamewise of course this messed up my carefully refilled health and mp, but it also totally derailed the story. Suddenly the tension that had built up in the story was gone and the fight with the boss was a little anticlimactic. The game mechanic got in the way of the story.

The application of random encounters in FFVI creates this effect quite often (sneaking through an enemy base? Well don't forget to fight an endless series of soldiers). The game mechanic (which may have felt more relevant at the time) overrides the story and forces you to remember that you're playing a game. I'm not saying that the inverse, story overrides the game mechanic, isn't also a problem, it's just not the problem that FFVI has.

The other big problem the game has is that while in story each of the large cast of characters is interesting, in game play they're not. There tends to be a wide disparity in the usefulness/effectiveness of character's powers when fighting, some characters (such as Sabin) are so overpowered that you'd be dumb not to take them, but then they end up getting more power. However using underpowered heroes feels useless a lot of the time, since even if they get more levels their power is never useful (such as Setzer).

The crew is large and talented ... and at least Setzer brought the airship. (From GameFAQs user Super_Slash)

Square has done a lot of things in the following Final Fantasy games to try to manage this problem, but I think it largely comes down to it's hard to have a dozen interesting game mechanics in the same game.

The game also suffers from my pet peeve of unexplained status effects. Poison seems to mostly make sense both for the heroes and the monsters, but there's a lot of effects where I'm not sure what's happen or if anything is actually happening. The giant monster sprites are pretty and kinda cool, but obscure information really badly. As I've said in a few other of these posts, I think that status effects are by far the most interesting part of an RPG's combat system.

Finally the game is unnecessarily slow. I say unnecessarily because there's an item you can equip which makes the game faster. I recently realized that this might have been their attempt to include the concept of encumbrance, but really it just means that you're slightly less effective at fighting (very slightly considering that most random encounters last one round whether you have the sprint shoes equipped or not). This goes against what I think is one of the basic tenants of design, which is not to waste people's time. 

Things I'd Include in a Game

My favourite part of the gameplay from FFVI is the parts where it splits the party and lets you work through different parts of the action (or story) with different teams. It's certainly the most interesting game play (especially if you're used to cruising through fights with your over levelled team) and I think given a cast this big it's also the best way that the story gets told. So I think that's one thing I'd love to take forward, especially if you can start to include some of the concepts like party-chats you see in more modern RPGs.

I also like the way the game balances the gameplay and the story telling / cinema. Obviously the amount of ludo vs narrative you want in any game varies depending on what you want, but I think for a game about story this one does a pretty good job of managing the two, at least if you can ignore the random encounters.

Not enough opera simulators coming out these days (From GameFAQs user KeyBlade999)

Finally, I'm reminded again about how good a clear system for status ailments is. FFVI has really pretty enemy sprites, but as a consequence, it's almost impossible to see if you've inflicted an enemy with a status. It's also not very clear from the game generally what status effects are supposed to do and when they've worked or not (and why). So that's a thing I'd like to do better.

Final Thoughts

I love this game. I don't love it quite as much as I did when I was a kid and my replay has dropped it behind FFXII on my list of favourite Final Fantasy games. It doesn't have quite as much polish as I'd like, and I think having Chrono Trigger around puts it in a slightly dimmer light than it might stand it on it's own. I really like the story and the efforts the creators went to in realizing using cinematics and game play in a really balanced way.

A fight at the end of the world (From GameFAQs user KeyBlade999)

I like any game that doesn't involve "you are the chosen one now go save the world" and while this game has shadows of that, a the story isn't that one. I like how you're chosen by dint of being the only ones there and your saving the world has a lot more to do with getting revenge on the evil clown who's already destroyed everything.

If you haven't played FFVI, you should, or at least you should find a good Let's Play of it. I would be careful since apparently the new remake has some problems, not the least of which are really poorly implemented graphics. Still, it's a worthwhile game and I think it's an important part of gaming history as one of the strongest games before the dawn of the 3d era.

The End (From GameFAQs user noidentity)

Blog: Thoughts on Secret of Mana

Last year I returned to one of my favourite games of all time, Secret of Mana. It was one of the first RPGs I played on the Super Nintendo and it's one of the games that has stuck with me the most since. I have played it at least half a dozen times and started it up more often than that. It's one of those games where I spent hours looking for all the secrets and all the ways to break and bend the game. My nostalgia goggles for this game are pretty strong, so I may be biased in my assessment, but I still think is one of the best games ever made.

Secret of Mana - GameFaqs user PeTeRL90

Secret of Mana is also a game that has influenced my creativity. The first time I thought about writing fan fiction it was for this game (it's long lost, no way to find it, don't ask). It's also the game that has influenced how I would like to make an action RPG in the future. While it doesn't do everything perfectly, it's a very well executed game and I think it has a lot to offer when thinking about creating video games.

As always with my thoughts on video games, please expect spoilers for all of Secret of Mana below.

Things I Liked

I love the style of Secret of Mana. The game's music is astoundingly good, and is used to great effect to reinforce the feelings the player should have as they play. Early in the game you start out, after being ejected from your village, walking through green hills, fighting killer rabites and mushrooms and getting thrown into passing goblins' stew pots and the music is light and sets a tone of setting out on an adventure. Later, you'll walk through caves and forests, visit terrifying ruins where cults are absorbing the souls of the villagers and temples where you find surprise allies.

Don't trust its cute looks. That rabite a killer! - GameFaqs user MagicianMayLee

Later in the game, when you're the only one who can save the world you have to fight though the heart of the enemy's castle. Then you have to find your inner reserves in the pure lands  the power you need to fight though the enemy's psychedelic flying fortress and then you have to fight the terrifying final boss.

Visually the game also supports these feelings. Sprites area always big and bright and you're never left wondering where you are or what you're supposed to fight. The game gets darker as it goes on and you leave the Ghibli hills heading to more intense areas, but it always looks like you have an adventure in store everywhere you go.

Beyond its style, Secret of Mana also shines when it comes to combat. It's incredibly satisfying to be able to step into an enemy who's charging at you and knock a bunch of big orange numbers out of them. The timer that has to recharge between hits is slow by modern standards, but I still like the flow of attack, wait, attack, wait. Using the charged attacks also feels good since you're able to channel tension into making a stronger attack knocking more numbers out and frequently simply slicing through your enemies like they weren't even there. Playing through this recent time I was probably quite over-leveled but I certainly enjoyed being able to take down all those enemies that gave me trouble as a child.

It's time to fight! - GameFaqs user Storm Shadow

One aspect of combat that I particularly like is the use of status ailments. You can be poisoned, confused, immobilized, frozen, or set on fire. They're all immediately identifiable and you are as able to inflict them on your enemies as they are on you. Poisoned, frozen and on fire form a trio, when poisoned you lose health, when frozen you can't act and when on fire you lose health and can't act. They form a basic set of conditions to make combat more interesting without leaving you confused about what's happening and why.

The confused status effect is interesting since it changes the inputs on your controller, so if you're careful and organized you can still cope, but you always end up out of control for a second or two as you re-adjust, when first confused and then again when you stop being confused. Immobilization also fun since you're immobilized by being tied to a balloon, but you can still attack.

The game is also very good about managing tension, particularly by using frequent boss fights. I like this because you always feel like the skills you're developing fighting the little enemies are paying off. You also have a reason to save your magic, knowing that there will be something big to fire it at soon. It also helps pull you through the game since there's always an interesting fight on the horizon.

Secret of Mana also uses (pioneered?) the ring menu. Rather than having to go out to a menu, it's nice to have items, powers and even system options just pop up around your character in game. The icons are easy to identify and other than having trouble remembering where the rings are in relation to each other (do I go up or down to get the items?) I find it to be really fast to get heal up and jump back into combat.

I also like the characters in the game, both the playable ones and the NPCs. They might not be as well developed as in a lot of later games (more on this in the Things I Noticed section), but there's a lot of charm to them all. I recognize that this is probably the aspect of the game that my nostalgia goggles distort the most, but I still find that I'm invested in them. I want to see the good guys survive and do well and I want to take down, or redeem the bad guys. Characterization has certainly been done better but the number of NPCs I still remember, years after playing the game feels very high compared to a lot of other games.

Secret of Mana is one of the first games I can remember with 3 player co-op. While I didn't get to do it too often, being able to play the game with friends was great and it certainly made a lot of things easier when you were able to work with a real person. It's a pretty common element of gameplay today, but back then it was another factor that made me love this game.

Other than the game, I also happened to own  the Prima Player's Guide (picked when it got discarded at the Library, after having borrowed it on and off for years). While I didn't need it to play through the game, I love the way it's written as a story of the characters journeying through the world (going on that adventure). It makes the technical information of how to get past problems in the game more fun. It has a bunch of concept art which also helped me get into the world. Best of all it had maps, stitched together out of the screens of the game which I absolutely loved, because it gives you a sense of the world. It was great being able to see where I had adventured all at once.

    

Things I Didn't Like

The largest problem with Secret of Mana is the balance of the magic powers. Because of the limited amount of MP you have, you tend to limit your use of magic power to bosses, but your magic only levels up when you use it. Beyond this, you're limited in how much you can level up your magic based on how many mana seeds you've visited in the story. This results a lot of the time in your magic not being as strong as you'd like.

You probably don't actually need very high magic levels, but it's difficult not to want them to be as high as possible. It's simply nicer to have the ability to beat enemies more easily, it's not really necessary, but it's nice to be able to take down the final bosses in fewer hits than if you need to hang around and fight them "properly". The magic also gets cooler animation the higher the level it has, at the fourth and eighth levels and then an extra boost when it's fully powered up. It's simply nice to have the cooler magic effects, even though there's no real use for them in the game.

I'm going to set that flower on fire. WITH A FIRE DRAGON! - GameFaqs user Tropicon

The result of this is that if you do level up your magic, you're usually not doing it at the pace of the story and end up standing in a place where you can cast spells as quickly as possible to gain XP and then recharge your MP to start again. This is not exactly the most fun way to power up, and it's a bit of a shame that it seems to be at least somewhat necessary.

Another problem the game has is that despite having a wide selection of weapons to choose from, there's no real reason to pick a weapon over any other. There are differences in reach and very slight differences in power. Having at least some factor where different weapons recharge more quickly would definitely make the game more interesting or at least give you more reasons to try something out. Also having different weapons interact differently with different enemies would be interesting. Don't punch the electric thing use your javelin, don't use a boomerang on that living tree, get your axe.

Armour is worse than the weapons since new armour only increases your defence. It's boring, generally expensive and never feels interesting, especially since your characters appearance never changes. It's also not implemented well, it's several trips into the menu to see what defence you have, then buy the item, then equip the item then sell the old item. The number of times I screwed up the process is surprisingly high causing me to buy more of an item then I needed then have to sell it back afterwards.

As with weapons it would have been nice to see some variety in armour. Being able to put on heavier armour to fight the big hulking boss, or light armour to move quicker, or magic armour to stop the magic guy you have to fight. Having types rather than just "stronger" would have made that part of the game more fun, though it's a limited problem in the game.

The last part of the game that I didn't like was the party AI. They're ... dumb. The number of times I got a party member hooked on the other side of the stairs is so high I can't even tell you. I'm glad that they don't solve it the way a lot of games do by having the characters disappear and then reappear beside you, but there are definitely points where I've had to very carefully wiggle my way around to get us all unhooked and moving again. It would be nice if the path finding was a little more advanced.

There are controls for the AI, they're just limited. - GameFaqs user MagicianMayLee

Beyond the path finding the AI's contribution to combat is also not quite what you'd like. The game does let you set whether they should be aggressive or defensive, but having an AI with a better understanding of what you need to fight and how to fit into the timing of the game would be nice. Still for the time on the SNES I guess this is about as good as we could expect in an action RPG.

Things I Noticed

I have mixed feelings on the story in Secret of Mana. On the one hand, it's enough to pull you through the game and give you enough reason to go and explore the world and see what there is to see. On the other hand, the story is not terribly original and in fact seems to be split into several relatively disjointed parts.

And an adventure begins. - GameFaqs user KeyBlade999

The first part of the story is the hero's journey, from finding a rusty old sword, to unleashing monsters onto the world, to getting banished from his village, to journeying around the world gaining power and friends until he's able to defeat the great evil. For the first half of this game there's a lot of story to keep you moving, but in the second half you're basically running back and forth because a bird told you to (and it turns out that you actually don't even have to talk to Sage Joch, you can just go do the temples with no story at all).

The other part of the story is the fight between the "good guy" countries and the evil empire. This is somewhat tied into the first story, but it's tangential to the things you're doing. You're helping fight the good fight, but only when you're in the right place at the right time.

Then there are the weird side stories, which aren't side quests, they're part of the main journey. Like that time when Santa Claus steals a Mana seed to make people believe in Christmas again. Or when the not-terribly effective Scorpion Army kidnaps one of the elemental sources of magic and uses it to heat a small town in the middle of the ice land.

That's not to say that the story isn't good. I like it. It's interesting. But it is disjointed. All of these pieces are pretty cool, but there's very little stitching them together other than the fact that you happen to be there and smacking the enemies is fun.

A large part of the reason for this is that the game was significantly cut down during it's creation and then the story was further trimmed due to translation constraints. While I'm having trouble finding actual documentation of what was cut, Secret of Mana was originally slated to be the first title for the SNES-CD add on. This would have allowed the game to be much larger and have significantly more space for graphics and music. The original game would also have had a more branching story line. Based on the Wikipedia article, the cuts seem to have generally caused the story to be a lot more restricted and not as dark as the developers had originally wanted. It also seems to have caused some of the technical problems the game has when there are too many things on screen all at once.

Additionally the game was translated into English in only 30 days by a very new translator. Beyond the problem of having only a limited amount of space to put text, due to the fixed width English font, there were also a lot of problems even getting a unified script for the translator to work on. This seems to have reduced the nuance and characterization even further than the change from the SNES-CD.

It's disappointing to lose so much of plot of the game and further to lose the nuance and characterization. It would have been interesting to see the much more complete story, and I would have been happy to get to spend more time in the world. It's also disappointing to realize the points where you don't get to see the real emotion from the characters in the game (for example I had never even realized that there was supposed to be a love triangle between the girl, Phanna and Dyluc).

You'll notice all the hair on your arms stand up - GameFaqs user noidentity

I will say that I don't mind having the game not be as dark as they may have been intending. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with a dark game, and because I haven't seen what they wanted to produces I can't speak to it. But I think there are not enough games that combine strong game mechanics and good storytelling with a lighter story. I think there's a space in the market for serious games that are no so dark as a lot of game makers would like to develop. It's a hard balance to maintain.

Things I'd Include in a Game

Of course the number one thing I'd love to include in a game is music like Secret of Mana has. Beautiful, carefully composed, well produced music would be nice, but more to the point, I want to have evocative music that supports the theme of the game, both of the game generally and of the areas, the characters and the actions. Certainly when I get the chance, I would love to bring in a great composer to work with.

If a cave man asks you if you want to travel by cannon, YOU SAY YES! - GameFaqs user VinnyVideo

I love the sense of adventure of Secret of Mana. I love the way the game gives you a feeling of a safe harbour and an unknown destination. You always have to be careful, but there's always something to see. There may be times when the things you see aren't even really related to the quest your on, but they're just something to pique your interest.

More technically, I like the way the status ailments work in Secret of Mana, and I like that they're equally applicable to you an your enemies (and useful both ways as well). I also like have clear understandable imagery that indicates how you're afflicted and possibly how long it's going to last.

Finally I like the way the skills work. I didn't put points into being good with the sword, I got good with the sword because I used it a lot. It's a pretty common concept in RPGs, but it's still the way I like to see talents improve through game play.

Final Thoughts

I think Secret of Mana is one of the best games on the Super Nintendo. Actually, I think Secret of Mana is one of the best games on any platform. There are a few things that mark it as old, combat is slow and the story is a touch thin, but I think these are easily over come and not playing this game is skipping over a classic.

Replaying this game I thought a lot about how important the balance between game play and story telling is. I was always happy when the game switched me from one to the other. "Oh good, I get to go kill more monsters." "Oh good, I get to see more of the story." I think Secret of Mana has a good balance and it kept me interested even though the story is linear and you can't change it as you play. I think from a game creation view, this is a good platform to begin on. As you add more story, more choice or more gameplay elements make sure that you keep the fun balanced.

Blog: Thoughts on Breath of Fire

Nostalgia is a funny thing. There are a lot of games I remember a specific fight or a cut scene or a character moment, but Breath of Fire, I remember mostly for a cup of coffee... getting the morning off school in Junior High or High School and getting a fresh cup of coffee and sitting down to play.

Breath of Fire (yes that is a Fish to the left of the hero) - From Hardcore Gaming 101

Lately I've been feeling a pull to play a lot of the old games I keep kicking around and for whatever reason Breath of Fire was at the top of that list. I've play every entry in the series and found them all to be generally likeable if not quite outstanding.

On replay, I thought to myself that while Breath of Fire had some pretty significant limitations but since it must have been such an early SNES RPG that it's easy to forgive. The problem came when I started doing some research:

From the Wikipedia list, Breath of Fire was released in North America on August 10, 1994, just over 2 months before Final Fantasy III/VI was released and years after much stronger RPGS such as Secret of Mana, E.V.O. or Final Fantasy II/IV. It's out of place historically, but given what I've been able to gather from the Internet, it was a project with very limited support within Capcom. This is only in North America as well, I can't imagine how it must have been viewed in Japan compared to some of the RPGs that weren't released internationally.

The other thing to say is that despite the general problems with the first entry in the series, the rest of the games get increasing better (at least up to a point) and the series really manages to differentiate it self.

A dragon told me - From Hardcore Gaming 101

Overall I can't recommend playing Breath of Fire (at least on the SNES, I've never tried the 2001 GBA port), the story is mediocre and much of the game's length is in the form of compound fetch quests (aHaHA, I won't give you the thing until you go get this other thing from the guy who will want you do do something else for HIM! aHaHaHaHa). The combat system drags and when coupled with the very long (though sometimes interesting) dungeons makes for hours of vaguely tortured boredom. At least without a good cup of coffee and a free morning, you should probably give this a miss.

Things I Liked

There were a few things I generally liked about Breath of Fire. First, even though the story is not especially well crafted, I do like globe trotting RPGs and every location in the world is interesting enough that when you first get there you feel like it's worth exploring, even though most of the locals don't have anything useful to say.

Travel the world! Meet these people! They talk by flute. - From GameFaqs - Ofisil

I also liked that each of the characters in your party have a role outside of combat (on of the features they focused on to improve the rest of the series). Going into a dungeon? Better have your thief out so he can defuse the traps. Need to get though that wall? Get out the big guy. Running out of supplies? Bring out your hunter. Running out of money? Put the merchant to work. These all have plusses and minuses, but generally I like the way they add flavour to the game.

Beyond the main party, I also liked the once or twice when guest party members showed up. I like it particularly as an aspect of the story, having some extra people around who are not actually passive and incompetent around you and allowing you to do things with part of the party without having to change the difficulty. Mechanically (although less so in this game) it's also a nice chance to see more and different powers than your low level party might have.

The game also has an interesting tactic for dealing with your extra party members. One of your party can fuse several members together creating a character who is stronger than any of the separate members and has most of their abilities. In the late game this means that you can have seven of the eight characters in your party participating in big combat. The fusion system does produce one major question however: why do a monkey, a fox, an ox and a gold fish fused together form a floating green duck?

The dungeon design is also an interesting point for the game. When playing, it's awful, because the dungeons are long and the random encounter combat takes over every 4 steps on average. However, I do like that most of the dungeons make sense. When they're a ruined castle, they have rooms a castle might. When you're in a temple you have rooms a temple might. When you're in the great treasure store of the ancients there are traps and secrets hidden everywhere. I like this and I think that if the combat didn't drag the game down so far it would actually be a general boon to the game.

Another  thing I liked about Breath of Fire was the "surprise" extra HP on the bosses. Especially early in the game fighting down the super powerful boss, getting their HP bar to drop to zero and then having them stand up and laugh at you is pretty cool. That it happens on every boss throughout the game is a little silly and loses the effect, but for a one-off it's not a bad idea.

Finally I have to say that while it's frustrating that the game had to rely so heavily on them, I love all the extra maps and charts that Breath of Fire came with. I like that kind of stuff and actually needing to refer to the map or look up what an item will do. As I said the fact that you needed to within game was a bit of a draw back, but doing it was cool.

Things I Didn't Like

As I've mentioned by far and away the worst part of Breath of Fire is the combat. It's the worst of the old-style turn based combat. Swinging your sword causes a random amount of damage to the enemy, casting a spell causes a set of damage to the enemy. That's it.

For the whole game.

There is too much of this. Also she's not supposed to be blue ... I think. - From GameFaqs - Ofisil

There's a hint of a damage type system, but it's either glitched or not properly implemented because nothing ever changes. The hero can turn into several types of dragons, but the only thing to turn into is the one that will deal the most damage. To everything.

On top of that healing spells are cheap and your healer deals awful damage so even there the only question is how much damage to heal from the rest of the party.

The random encounters have another problem, they don't scale. The random encounter rate is set and you fight whatever is in the area. So if you're in an area with easy enemies, you fight them. Over and over again. And if there are enough of them then you can spend turn after turn dealing hundreds of times the health of the enemy but you can only hit them one at a time. Any kind of system to recognize that you're about to curb stomp the bad guys would have been great relief, especially given how much back tracking the game expects of you.

Another problem with Breath of Fire, but also one many RPGs of the age, is that clues about what's going on with the story are few and far between. If you weren't paying attention while plot was happening, or didn't understand, or heaven help you, you haven't played for a week, you're often left with no idea as to where to go next and there's no way within the game to get anyone to tell you anything. While I don't love some of the hand holding that modern games provide, Ni No Kuni's ever present plot instruction comes to mind, I think it's important to have something to give the player a direction to go if they're not finding it on their own.

Finally, as I already mentioned, for a game released this far into the SNES life, it doesn't look very good. The overworld sprites are not very detailed an animation though out the game is very limited. The combat sprites are nice and big, but are also oddly coloured compared to their overworld versions.

Generally I think a lot of the problems with this game come down to the size of the cartridge.  Breath of Fire was released on a 12Mbit cartridge which was significantly smaller than just about any other RPG released on the SNES before or after. I think generally this shows that Capcom was not willing to put much money into development or production.

Things I Noticed

One thing I thought was funny as I played Breath of Fire was how much I did and didn't remember about the game. There were a few dungeons that I remember the layout of perfectly having not played the game in at least a decade. Some of those were early but interestingly some were quite late in the game. At the same time there were parts of the game I had no recollection of at all (such as the fusion system) despite having used them before.

He's the first. Others will follow. Ryu - From Hardcore Gaming 101

Things I'd Include in a Game

I think the big thing to take away from Breath of fire is that if you're going to have a large group in an RPG make sure that they all have things to do. There are some games where you have a bunch of people sitting around because they're not as good as others and you don't have a reason to use them. While I might not always implement it the way Breath of Fire has, making sure that every playable character has a unique and required characteristic in gameplay is important.

I also always like to make sure that dungeons are reasonable, if a place was a place make it look like that place rather than just like a random assortment of rooms. I think this probably untenable in some situations but it's still an ideal I find important.

Finally I do like the bosses not getting knocked down when the "run out" of HP. If used sparingly I think that can give a game a little memorable spark. If overused, like in Breath of Fire, it gets uninteresting really quickly.

Final Thoughts

As I said in my introduction, there's not a lot of inherent reason to play Breath of Fire. Other games in the series are better and other games of the era are also better. I enjoyed it for the nostalgia and for some of the touches of the world, but that's about it. I'm glad it exists and I'll leave it there.

The End. Also that's a hell of a font.

Project 12: Chrono Trigger Sprites: Update

The Chrono Trigger Sprites are another project I stalled on.

One of the big concerns I ran into was figuring out what colours of perler I wanted to use. I had a sampler set of beads (which I made the test patch in the picture above from), which was a good starting point. I was able to create the original SNES Coasters out of that set, and I might have been able to start on the sprites, but there was one particularly large problem ... I can't figure out what colour (by name) each of these colours is.

So that slowed me down some, along with all the other usual distractions that lead to me not finishing a project. However I have now solved this problem, I went out (to the Internet) and bought myself ALL of the beads:

On the EK Sucess Perler site, they sell 1000 bead bags of every colour. I started to try to figure out what matched what I had already through the website, but then ended up just picking up one bag of everything they sold. Fortunately perler beads are relatively affordable and the promise of free shipping on large enough orders convinced me to just go ahead and do it. Sadly it turns out that that offer wasn't available to Canadians, but still at the end of the day a big box of perler beads appeared at my door, for not that much out of pocket. And now I know name of every colour of bead I have.

As a side note, I wanted to find a nice way to sort the beads that I had. Conveniently I found a screw sorter that happens to perfectly hold 1000 beads in each drawer and probably 3000 in the bigger drawers, which seems like a really nice way to be organized for a project.

Anyway, now that I have all the beads and I'm super organized, I'm out of good excuses not to work on the Chrono Trigger Sprites. So I'll bring the project back up and try to finish a Chrono in 20cm scale by September 30, 2014.

Project 5: SNES Coasters: Bigger, Better, Slightly Less Tippy, and Going on the Road

In my last update I finished making a set of 8 coasters using the exclamation blocks from Super Mario World.

I've now taken them out and used them in the real world and come to the conclusion that they're too small, as I suspected this in the last post. They've also suffered from a certain amount of cupping, all of which makes them a touch unstable. There has only been one major incident with spillage due to the coasters, but it still bugs me.

I've decided I want to try a couple of things, that will result in basically 3 mini-projects. 

• The first is that I want to make larger coasters, the current ones are 16 beads wide/tall and if I add an extra ring of beads they will end up being 18 beads wide/tall and that should improve the stability and make them a little more useable.
• The second is that I want to test mailing these. I'm tempted to start an Etsy shop and sell a few sets of these, although I'm not convinced that's something I really want to do. Either way a better understanding of how to mail these things around would be nice, so I'll make a second set of the larger coasters (assuming that the first batch come out right) and send them to a friend who thought they were cool.
• The third is to try a different pattern. There are some gifts I'd like give and I feel like taking a pattern from Illusion of Gaia, might be a good fit for the decor of the people to whom I'd like to give the gifts. Hopefully, I can end up with video game decor that doesn't look to video gamey.

So I'd like to finish the first batch of bigger coasters by August 31, 2014. I'll update about the other parts when I've done that.

Project 5: SNES Coasters: Update (and Wrap Up?)

I may have missed the deadline by a few (many) months, but I have finally finished making my first batch of SNES Coasters.

The Pattern

After taking a look at a sprite sheet from Super Mario World. I opted for the exclamation point blocks. I did this for a few reasons. One, they were probably my favorite block in the game (if you can have favorite blocks), secondly they come in 4 colours (green, yellow, blue and red) so they have a little diversity in their appearance.

The Beading

They were also quiet easy to build, since they only require you to build the exclamation point and then fill in a field of colour before putting on a coloured border and a black outer border. After a little bit of work I figured out that the easiest way to create the exclamation mark is to put in the black beads for the upper left hand side of the border, then fill in the top rows of white beads. After that I add the bottom square of four white beads with the surrounding black boarder and finish the right hand side of black beads. Then I fill in the right hand side of field beads and rom top to bottom, then rotate the board and fill in the other side of the field. Finally I add the border of darker beads and the outer border of black beads.

I found it easiest to scoop a large number of beads into my one hand and then simply put them into the board one at a time with the other. You can use tweezers (including the ones that perler sells, which have a great scoop attached to them) or toothpicks to set the beads into the board, but I found that to be relatively unhelpful.

I also found from time to time that it was necessary to remove the cat from the pegboard before continuing...

The Ironing (is delicious)

Once the beads were in place and ready (and maybe had sat on my shelf for a few months?), it was time for fusing the beads. I set up an old chopping board on the ironing board as a surface to work on.

My setup

My iron is slightly difficult to calibrate since it measures in fabric quality, but I eventually found that the "wool" setting worked best for me. This gave me slightly more time than I had on the "cotton" setting. I  find that the beads can go from unmelted to melted quite quickly. Some people aim to totally melt the beads to get a more pixelly effect, but I actually like having the holes visible a little still, so it's a bit of an art to get the balance correct and will be a thing I need to learn with more practice.

I find I still tend to get more melting done on the right hand side of the sprite than on the left. I need to remember to rotate the sprites more frequently as I iron them. Some kind of lazy Susan would be useful. For me the beads melted in about 3 minutes, once I had pretty good fusion, I flipped them off of the board and switched the paper to the other side and continued ironing them for about 2 more minutes.

I started using the parchment paper that came packed in with the multi-pack of beads I purchased, but it was folded into about 4cm squares which left creases in the sprites. They recommend ironing the paper before beginning to remove that crease, but I wasn't able to. In the end I just picked a larger piece of paper to protect the beads and the iron.

The sprites tend to cup when they're finished, so I pressed them under a stack of books to help them stay straight. We can thank Alton Brown for keeping my coasters flat as well as all the things he's taught us about food. I kept the coasters in the bookpress for several days (but some of that also included time after they'd had the backing put on). I also put the coasters between sheets of parchment, just to make sure nothing transfered to the books, but I assume this was largely unnecessary.

The Backing

In order to both help the coasters stay together and to help keep them from scratching I added a felt backing. I opted for a thin stiffened felt with an adhesive back. I cut the backing into squares just smaller than the coasters and then trimmed the corners to ensure that the backing didn't stick out and ruin the look. I cut the squares using a hemming ruler for measurement and then trimmed the corners with the guide of a template.

It's important not to cut the backs too small or they'll cause the coasters to be tippy, and also provide less support to the beads.

The Finished Product

The final coasters.

So far they seem to have worked quite well. After they were pressed for several days they seemed to stay flat (the backing may have also helped with this). They are be a bit smaller than I'd like, they're great for bear bottles, but a little small for some mugs. It's possible on a later run that I'd add an extra ring of the darker coloured beads, but I haven't really seen what that's like yet. I've used them for one D & D session so far and they lived up to expectations.

I'm quite pleased with these and am now looking forward to tackling a few more projects. I'm feeling tempted to see if I can make sets of coasters on Etsy, but I haven't really started to look at whether that would really be a good idea or not. Beyond that I'm going to keep working on the coasters, both using Mario blocks and some other SNES Sprites that will make good coasters too.

And the coasters in use.

Project 5 : SNES Geek Coasters

One of the problems I face on a semi-regular basis (at least whenever I host a D & D session) is that I don't have enough coasters and that the coasters I do have are just not cool enough. Fortunately the Internet has reminded me that this doesn't need to be an on-going problem and that I can do something cool to fix it.

As such, my next big project is going to be SNES Geek Coasters made from pearler beads.

I was inspired to this idea from two sources, one is a mario coin I bought at the Calgary Comic Expo this year and the other is a set of fridge magnets I saw on Pinterest (which were mis-labeled as coasters).

The coin over my desk. From my photo-project with a friend Seven-Fifty-Two-by-Two.

Fridge Magnets with retro style - found on Pinterest sourced from gadgetsin.com

Pearler beads work well with retro-video game concept because it's easy to put beads in for each pixel. This means that all I have to do to find plans is to hunt down the sprite sheets for any game I'm looking for. Then all I have to do is match the beads to the pixels, load them onto a hedgehog tray and iron. Or not, this may prove to be harder than I've imagined, but I do have my childhood memories saying this is pretty easy and it may be harder to get the sprites that I want.

My first thought was to go with the question mark blocks from Super Mario World, but the more I've been thinking the more I'm interested in trying for some RPGs of the era (Secret of Mana especially) since they're likely to get hauled out during RPG session most often.

My goal is to have at least a prototype version of these up and running by November 1, 2012.