Despite doing my utmost to remain balanced in writing this second retrospective on the Final Fantasy games, I’d imagine things are about to get ugly in its comments thread. I wasn’t commissioned to simply write a wikipedia-style historical document – but rather an informative opinion piece. As the latter FF games have been played and loved by a vast number of people (a far larger audience than the Nintendo FF games ever enjoyed) readers will likely be closely reading this to see their opinions validated. Generally speaking people don’t like other people with a platform telling them that things they love sometimes actually aren’t very good (or vice versa), so I’d imagine I’m going to get a hard time from some quarters.

We live in a society where everybody is entitled to their opinion and the attacking of others’ opinions is seen as a cardinal sin. There is no ultimate standard against which something is judged: if it’s good for you, it’s good, after all, that’s just your opinion. So the only right of expression left to people who disagree with one another is to attack the presentation of those opinions that differ to their own. In my experience, that usually means disagreeing readers shout that I’m a terrible writer when, what they probably mean is: ‘Your opinion frightens me because it’s different to mine but it was you, not me, that somebody paid to express it’*.

Indeed, the fact that everybody has an opinion and that all opinions are seen as equally valid, for websites in particular, is a primary source of generating income. By having a comments thread a web page can greatly multiply its number of hits (a good discussion will ensure participants hit refresh many times over) and so the advertisers are kept happy. That’s partly why the newspapers/ news phone-in shows do it these days.

But doing so devalues the critic/ commentator to just another voice amongst many: the start point to a discussion rather than the final word. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps I’m just kidding myself and I’m actually really no good after all.

Eiether way, I’m happy the editor left this cheeky footnote in: “If any of the views represented in this article have affected you, sit down, take a deep breath and maybe pop outside for some fresh air. Don’t worry; the world will still be there after all. Always remember, the views expressed in this article are Eurogamer’s own and do not necessarily represent the general views of Final Fantasy fandom, although, if we’re honest about it, we really do think ours are the right ones.”

You can read the article here

*EDIT: As if by magic!: Feanor says: “What a surprise, a poorly written attack on 8 and 10 while the terminally boring 9 gets praised”.

Now, those two sections might well be poorly-written (how odd to pick them out in isolation though) but why throw that insult in when the point you’re trying to make is that you disagree with the opinion?

All opinions are equal but some opinions are more equal than others.

Occasionally a videogame so perfectly exemplifies a particular type of gameplay that its name becomes interchangeable with that of its genre. Mario is easy shorthand for the Platform game; Tetris, piece by piece epitomises the Puzzle genre; Dance Dance Revolution is foot sign language for Rhythm Action; and Street Fighter’s Ryu and Ken, even today, bounce hunched as poster boys for Beat-‘em-ups everywhere.

And so it is with Final Fantasy, a brand so synonymous with the Japanese Role-Playing Game that your affection, indifference or dislike towards one is almost undeniably tied to that of the other. Indeed, surely the reason that Final Fantasy divides opinion perhaps more than any videogame series is because it has so typified an avenue of gaming that, perhaps more than any other, divides opinion.

Sceptics argue that the series has increasingly just dressed ancient mechanics in fanciful multi-million-dollar clothing; that tired narrative and battle conventions, created 20 years ago as a way to best construct an epic from rudimentary technological building blocks, have been left to age hidden and unattended under increasingly thick graphical make-up. They argue that those universal threads that tie the disparate worlds of each game together – the Chocobos and Phoenix Downs and Cids and orphans and airships – have weaved a prison of a template against which creativity strains; that underneath the curves and go-ever-faster stripes, a decrepit engine splutters ­- one that should have been long consigned to videogames’ mechanical scrapheap.

Fans, meanwhile, talk in hit points: Four of the top ten slots in Famitsu’s Greatest Videogames of all Time poll earlier this year (including the top two positions); over twenty games released, each one more successful and ambitious than the last; thousands of adults in tears over unseen plot twists, death and opera; tens of millions of units sold, each one further propelling the Final Fantasy brandwagon deeper into a mainstream consciousness that haters argued could never be penetrated by such nerdy carriage.

You can read the rest here and, if all goes to plan, Part 2 will publish tomorrow.

I’m broken. At the start of the week I inexplicably pitched and then agreed to write an article in my spare time reviewing afresh every Final fantasy game released thus far in the run up to next week’s release of the superb twelfth game in the series. It’s only once I started that I remembered how completely watertight the facts in the piece need to be. Seriously: hell is ten thousand Final Fantasy fans checking each and every word of your writing against the memorised gospel of wikipedia.

In the meantime here are some thoughts inspired by a BBC interview with that most considered and moderate Oxford proponent of all things secular: Richard Dawkins. He appears here promoting his new book: The God Delusion. Watch the video then continue.

My first response was to point out it’s a bit silly to quote Jesus (saying: “[We can and should find our ethical/ moral conscience in a variety of places such as...] the golden rule of ‘Do as you would be done…’”) when urging viewers to imagine just what a mess we’d be in “if we were to follow the rules of the Bible”. He might argue that Jesus probably didn’t invent that moral code but, nevertheless I can’t think of anybody pre-Jesus in antiquity that articulated the idea in the near exact words Dawkins quoted.

The context of Jesus’ words in a debate with Pharisees over observance of the Torah makes that whole section of Dawkins’ interview (especially his bit about ‘cherry picking’) even more ironic.

My feelings on Dawkins are that, while he might be a completely brilliant scientist, theologically and philosophically I find him embarrassing and as transparent as any fanatical ideologist in his constant pitting of his best against their worst. He is, as one friend put it, a Fundamentalist preacher who doesn’t believe in God. His evangelical fervour certainly seems to indicate he believes some kind of salvation lies in converting the world to his viewpoint.

My second response was incredulity at the seemingpointlessness of his mission: the telos of his book, as he puts it here, is to undermine the tenuous faith of those who might visit church once a year. Such worthy use of a brilliant mind!

However, thinking about it, his reasons for targeting this demographic are fairly obvious. By winning the minds of those for whom faith and God is a possible maybe or perhaps an inherited awareness/ possibility from their upbringing, Dawkins is trying to polarize the debate into two neat camps: on one side the scientific logic and reason of secularism and on the other the fanatical, Fundamentalist narrow-mindedness of the deeply religious. After all, what better time to make such a move than in a political climate of fear of radical Muslims increasingly understood by society to have been provoked to threaten us (London) by the radical Christianity of Bush and, through association, Blair.

The problem with all that is it’s not debate – it’s cheap politicking. Dawkins never interfaces with respected theologians or scholars or, when he does (e.g. with his Oxford contemporary Alister McGrath) he just dismisses them (and indeed all theology that doesn’t work to demonstrate God’s existence) as vacuous. This makes any a debate that would presumably produce interesting and helpful dialogue largely impossible and sets Dawkins at an impasse he presumably is very happy with.

However, and bafflingly when regarding his argument against talking to those equipped to debate him, he routinely does seek out the outrageous, extreme and oppositely narrow-minded to argue with (like in Channel 4’s The Root of all Evil?). So in the end he’s no different to Pat Robertson or Jack Thompson in that he only picks fights he knows he will win by bullying, ridicule or derision – hardly the kind of spokesperson any robust and gracious secularist would want fighting their corner.

Firstly, my apologies for the site’s absence this week. There was a problem with my hitherto spotless host Dreamhost and it took them a few days to work it out. Nevertheless, should you want iron-clad hosting for a reasonable rate go here (and please use that link when you sign up as doing so sends a truck of sweets and kisses to my house).

This week I finished Ghostwritten and bought Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in its place. It’s a book that has been happily shortlistled for the Man Booker Prize while also being sadly nominated Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year. I guess you can’t always pick the people who fall in love with/ rape you.

While dipping into the (stifling) first chapters of Cloud Atlas I’ve also been enjoying the pain of having my mind stretched and prodded by the mostly brilliant post-modernist theologian Brian McLaren and his mostly brilliant, A Generous Orthodoxy.

In this book he seeks to channel G K Chesterton while trying to knit a useful and loving pattern from seemingly countless threads of disparate (and often ungenerous) Christian traditions and scholarship. It’s good, fair, balanced and authoritative stuff.

Then I read this in Cloud Atlas:

“Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.”

There’s an exquisite symmetry and rhyme of concept in my parallel reading. I feel the peace of the poet who floats in awe across an infinite sea while the anguish and inevitable madness of the scientist seeking only to cross it slips happily away.

The second thing you’ll notice about Valkyrie Profile 2 is that you can only move your character left and right. In a bold move, the developers have inverted the traditional dimensions of an RPG. Towns and dungeons are explored like a classical 2D side-scrolling platformer, across flat, interconnected planes. Conversely, battles fling open the windows and throw the player out into fully 3D arenas – a plain swap for the tradition.

But, as I say, this remarkable decision will almost certainly be the second thing to grab your attention. It’s love, at first sight.

The glorious if a little artistically passé FMV introduction hearkens back to Square’s PSone era of stentorian visual introductions, and reaffirms the company’s considerable talent for the lavish CG. But it’s when the in-game visuals take centre stage, and through dilating pupils the player’s pulled into a 16th Century French-style Centreville, that the jaw hangs loose and the heart-rate quickens.
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Each camera angle and pan is perfectly pitched, and the scenery has an immemorial age and ambience that’s missing from most game worlds outside of ICO’s castle walls. Characters are dressed in lavish, Vagrant Story-esque costumes, dripping with understated, believable jewellery and the dust and grime of imagined history. Your window on their world is gently filtered through a washed out, melancholy lens that infuses colours with irresistible sadness. In this dulled light every century-old chip in the cobblestone, every tuft of weed in the cement and each creaking floorboard in the inn is perfectly and dramatically accentuated.

You can read the rest here

I wonder what the sub-editor did with this?

Briefly: Yes, it’s going well thanks. You know that first time you meet your boss and you first try to give a firm-but-unthreatening handshake and then you try to hold his stare just long enough to let him know that you mean business, that you’ll work hard and if, IF, you graciously decide to keep working here you’ll probably be MD in two years’ time because you’re THAT competent and determined, while ensuring you look away before you start to make him uncomfortable and think you’re a loose canon of insubordination tightly loaded with such fiery temperament as could sink the whole sorry ship if given half a chance? Well, I think I just about approximated that.

Actually, maybe I should tell him I have a wife and kid just to be safe.

Anyway, everybody seems nice, quiet and a little geeky which is comforting in the meeting-of-expectations sense. Problematically, thanks to my impeccable taste and/or the impeccable recommendations of friends, my delicious 30-minute train journey of reading time has become a constant source of worry.

This week, as David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten draws to a glorious and perfect conclusion – every other paragraph nurturing a diamond of a metaphor or turn of phrase – I’m panicking that I’ve set off down the wrong fork in the vocational road. Of course, all the while knowing that I’ll never be fit to tie Micthell’s parentheses. But the dream’s still in there somewhere.

But everyone gets that, right?

Oh! And before I forget, and to complete the transformation into identikit blog, check out what the geek did with the dead rat and the LEDs! Seriously.

I start a new job in the morning.

I become a game designer.

‘A critic is somebody who knows the way but can’t drive the car’ said somebody whose name neither I nor google can remember right now, a tall whisky into the evening. Still, tomorrow I make the jump from critic to creator, map in hand, L-plate on the skew and I’m as nervous as you’d be.

Perhaps being criticised on the Internet for making a terrible game rather than for penning a review that bucks expectation is an easier pill to swallow thanks to the shared responsibility? Hopefully I’ll never find out because this game will be everything it already is in my imagination.

Obviously my mouth is stuffed with NDAs so there’s little I can tell you other than I’ll work for Kuju in Brighton and I couldn’t have picked a more delicious first project. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I may.

Hopefully I’ll still be writing for Eurogamer and a few other places and doing bits and pieces of production and, needless to say Chewing Pixels will continue to be erratically updated. I realise it’s strayed from the brief of pixel media ethics a fair bit in the first year but I’ll try and get back on track when and where I’ve something interesting to say.

This is obviously a time of anticipation and forward-facing but there’s still that inevitavle undercurrent of reflection in my thinking at this moment of new things, even if it’s yet to be expressed. That time will come, maybe here, maybe not.

As with the BBC, Kuju works on 6-month rolling contracts so, hopefully I’ll last my 3-month probation and then won’t be so terrible as to be fired at the second hurdle.

Why am I doing it? Well, partly because, as one of my friends (who already works at Kuju) said: you can always return to writing but good game design jobs are few and far between. That’s true, but also I’m here just because I’m pretty sure I can do it and, in time, do it well: Isn’t that why anyone does anything?

Wish me well.

Gitaroo Man Lives! starts with a scene that anybody with a healthy imagination and a CD player has already lived. We’ve all been there: posed in front of the mirror, topless and pouting as the silk-toned riff of Sweet Child ‘O Mine cuts the air. You hammer the strings on your squash racket with 12-year-old fingers, role-playing Rock God to 60,000 screaming Wembley fans, represented for this moment of bedroom immortality as six assorted cuddly toys and an armless action man.

And so it is that Gitaroo Man begins. Well, minus the Guns & Roses bit and plus a diminutive talking pet dog giving you air guitar instructions, not to mention a bizarre googly-eyed chicken with a cymbal keeping time behind your right shoulder.

Gitaroo Man Lives!, if you haven’t already guessed, follows the story of a young spiky haired boy (the awkwardly named U-1), who dreams of being a guitar legend.

No sooner has his canine guitar tutelage finished, however, than the dastardly Gravillian family burst through the bedroom window announcing their mission to capture all the guitars in the world, conquering it and subjugating humanity. Without a moment’s thought, U-1 straps on a futuristic rock suit and an implausibly angled axe and is instantly turned from boy-with-The-Dream to instrumentalist impresario upon whose fretboard rests the very fate of humanity.

You can read the rest on pocketgamer here

The Wild Arms series is videogame beige. Viewed with a critical eye these are the blandest of RPG games, each barely characterised by unremarkable features, less-than-one dimensional characters, insipid storylines and unrelenting cliché.

Even viewed generously, the Wild Arms franchise avoids imagination and creativity at each turn in its embarrassing aping of Final Fantasy – a remarkable fact perhaps, but a far from interesting one. And viewed blindly, which is presumably how the swathes of fans that have promoted the brand to multi-million-seller look upon it, it’s surely nothing more than a consistently average way to pass those time-rich teenage years.

And for this, the fourth game in the shuffling, near-pointless lineage, the series’ one distinctive element, its wild west setting, is diluted beyond note, bringing the devolution of the Wild Arms concept to a most lacklustre conclusion before the game even starts.

Opening with the destruction of 13-year-old boy Jude’s hometown village, an act which thrusts him into the spiky arms of an unfriendly and threatened world, Wild Arms 4′s narrative pathway couldn’t be deeper furrowed if it led straight from the shire to the gates of Mordor. Jude is immediately paired up with Yulie, a weak magic user you must protect that the empire wants to capture for secret and clearly-dastardly-but-not-in-that-way-you-filthy-reader reasons. Two other forgettable but clichéd supporting-cast members complete the set and it’s business as it ever was.

You can read the rest here

You can tell a lot about a person from their toilet reading. In my home the books and magazines found there change every few weeks but one remains constant: Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s ‘Tokyo; a certain style’.

It’s a small and thick glossy picture book featuring the author’s photographs of hundreds of tiny Tokyo apartments and their internal contents. Each flat is presented over a couple of pages – on each a straightforwardly framed photograph is displayed full and bleeding into the edge of the page. Every now and again a few of Tsuzuki’s thoughts are offered in tiny, barely noticeable text.

There are no pictures of the owners or residents of each home shown and that’s what makes it so amazing. You spend ten minutes gazing into a home, squinting to discern the text on book or CD spines, smiling at each fluffy plush anime toy or marvelling at how anybody could function in modern Tokyo with just a tatami mat and toothbrush and a material vacuum for a home. As you do so you’re unwittingly creating a vision of each owner, a vision deeper and more accurate than any simple passport portrait could reveal.

Tsuzuki argues in one of the tiny panels of text in his book that this is because the things we put into our homes are to remind ourselves and show others the kinds of people we are.

Why do we keep books we’ve already read? Is it really because we’re likely to reread them? Or do we keep the books we love in order to remind ourselves of what we love and, as a result, who we are?

This presupposes that the things we love define the people we are but, even if you don’t subscribe to that view, the things we own undeniably display our likes and, by inference, our dislikes. This alongside the way we keep our homes and the colours we paint our walls and which line of Ikea furniture we choose or reject, serve as a powerful and tangible outworking of our personality. Our homes are comfortable because our homes become extensions of who we are and what we believe in.

In years past we owned and displayed heirlooms passed down from generation to generation to remind us of where we came from and what our heritage is. Now, in a mass-market and mass-cultured world we find expression, or rather definition, in the types of CDs, art, films and videogames we own and enjoy.

We might roll-eyes at teenagers subscribing to corporate-defined pigeon holes of emo, or townie or Goth or punk or normal or whatever the classifications of belonging are this week but surely adults play the same games albeit with a wider and subtler vocabulary and catalogue of choices.

Over the last few weeks I’ve cleared out the spare room and put lots of items on eBay – including, some rare and valuable videogames I collected over the years. In the first feature I wrote for Edge magazine I apologised videogame collecting to doubters who would contest it’s relevance in an age of easy emulation. After all, they’d say, why spend £50 on an old torn Super Nintendo game when you can own the ROM on a PC Emulator for free. I argued it was because it’s far easier to identify with the past with a tangible object than a 300k .sms file on your desktop.

There’s truth in that of course, but now, I think I collected videogames (albeit in a fairly leisurely way) because they helped define my tastes to myself and others. What we want to say and who we want to say it to plays as much part in the things we own and allow ourselves to enjoy as how much we actually like the product. It’s very rarely just about the music these days.

So, in putting some belongings on eBay (mainly the things I no longer want to define me) I am, in a sense, letting the parts of that tangible identity that no longer fit with my internal view go. In taking belongings to the dump or the charity shop or eBay we reshape and redefine our home environment and, as the language of that environment changes, so the illustrated conclusion of who we are changes also.

But, you say, I’m not so calculating in the things I own! I buy and enjoy things I like for what they are, not because I think they will impress others or say something about me. Perhaps. It’s very rarely just about the music these days.

And that’s why toilet reading is important. Toilet reading is different to most other reading in the house. It’s usually not there to impress or make a statement. It’s not there to remind you of who you are because it is mostly transient and functional. This is where you keep the books or magazines or comics (or, in a friend’s case, Tetris on an original chunky Gameboy) that you don’t mind dipping into a number of times week on week. There’s honesty in this place that says something about what you like and who you are with a purity you don’t often find elsewhere in the home.

So…yeah. You can tell a lot about a person from their toilet reading.

(Namely, in my case – that I like looking at pretty picture books littered with pithy and concise truths that I can later spend 1000 words expounding upon in a barely coherent, overly-verbose manner on the internet.)