I got yet another shout out from Extra Life Community Website editor Jack Gardner on The Best Games Period podcast. With this much hype for my upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children article, it’d better be good, right?
You can listen to the podcast here. The teaser occurs at about 1:04:00, but listen to the full podcast for a discussion of Devil May Cry. Is it one of the best games ever, questionable voice acting and all? Listen in to find out!
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event occurs on November 4, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
I got another shoutout on The Best Games Period podcast. This time, the Extra Life Community Website editor Jack Gardner gives a quick teaser of my upcoming article on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Hopefully, we can get it out in the next month or two for all to see. This is the same article I was talking about in Improvised Incoherence #1.5. Keep an eye out for it. It should be pretty awesome.
You can listen to the podcast here. The teaser occurs about 37 minutes in, but listen to the full podcast to learn about Oíche Mhaith, a strange flash game about a child’s experience of her abusive parents. It’s dark but interesting.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event occurs on November 4, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
I know it’s April Fool’s Day, but I thought you could all use a heavy dose of reality. 😛
Also, one of the questions I answered for this video spawned a lengthy answer, involving how reading reviews of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children changed my perception of reality.
So Final Fantasy XIII is officially the first Final Fantasy game I’ve beaten in… at least five years. I beat in it probably record time for me, too: ~90 hours over 3 months.
Personally, I found the majority of the story and the characters interesting. The last third of the game and story, however, I found to be boring, tedious, and confusing.
I have a theory. For as much as Final Fantasy fans complain about how moody everyone in this game is, their moodiness makes the story interesting. All the characters have the same problems: someone they love died and they’re facing their own death. They react to their grief in different ways, which reveals their personalities and goals. Some are angry and act out of vengeance. Some are depressed and try to ignore their problems. Some smile outwardly and act on their beliefs. Tensions are high. The characters clash with one another and have complicated relationships.
In the final third of the game, all the characters have decided to save Cocoon even if they die in the process. They’ve dealt with their grief and feel determined and hopeful. The conflicts that made them feel real and defined who they are and how they act, however, don’t exist anymore. All the characters feel and act the same.
When the characters’ internal and interpersonal conflicts are resolved, the story proceeds by trying to explain the l’cie, c’eith, fal’cie, ragnarok, Cocoon, and Gran Pulse alphabet soup, which doesn’t work. It’s like trying to explain linear algebra to someone without explaining why they should care. For me, I could understand and invest in the first two thirds of the story because the characters felt real and dealt with problems that felt real even if they lived in a crazy, fantasy world. They made the game a giant metaphor about dealing with grief and finding a way past it. l’cie, c’eith, and fal’cie were easy to map to real-world concepts in this context. Perhaps the metaphor continues, but without the characters giving it context, it’s difficult to follow. When the character arcs end but the explanation continues, it becomes pure fantasy with no basis in reality.
TL;DR I think people blame the emo characters for Final Fantasy XIII’s poor story because the third of the game where they’re not emo is so convoluted and forgettable.
The idea for my latest AMV came about six months ago when I was writing The Art of the World for the Extra Life Community website. Both .hack//Sign and Neuroticfish’s “Silence” are very topical to me, and I’ve been dying to smash them together. I haven’t had time to make the video until recently though. Finally, here it is!
Apologies for the month-long hiatus! Part of the reason was a variety show called The Cheeky Geeky Vaudeville Vol. 5: This Very Odd World that I ran lights and sound for at the beginning of the month. I also created a few projections. Here is the opening to the show:
The Extra Life editor Jack Gardner is part of a podcast called The Best Games Period. In a recent episode, he made a quick comment on my most recent Extra Life article. The shout out appears near the beginning, but stick around for the whole episode. Whether you’ve played Bastion or not, it’s entertaining.
I recently rediscovered Google Translate Sings: “Do you want to Build a Snowman?” and felt compelled to share the creator of the Google Translate Sings series. She doesn’t have nearly enough subscribers. Here are my favorites of her Frozen videos, but she has many other videos with music from other movies, series, and popular songs.
I recently heard about the Skip Ender’s Game pledge. I’m all for supporting gay marriage and the LGBT community. My best friends and at least one of my family members are gay or transgendered. I personally haven’t figured out what I am, but I wouldn’t have anyone punish me for whatever I decide. But something didn’t sit right with me about this pledge.
It seems to me that this movement is boiling down thousands of hours of work into the hateful personal opinion of one man, an opinion that has nothing to do with Ender’s Game. Pledgers aren’t just hurting Orson Scott Card. They’re also hurting Harrison Ford, this kind-eyed child, and the hundreds of other people who made this movie possible. These people didn’t sign up to make a political film that would support anti-gay activism. They just wanted to make a movie based a good book… and money.
By making this campaign, Geeks Out suggests that Orson Scott Card is so horrible we shouldn’t give him any money even if it means hurting innocent people in the process. Anti-LGBT perspectives are very interesting to me. They give me an idea of who these people are, what they believe and why, and what they may know that I don’t. So I decided to look into Geeks Out’s claim that Card is a monster.
Card’s view was particularly interesting in that he didn’t rave about God and that it was based around the sad knowledge that humans exist only to breed. Basically, he believes that because everyone should want to pass on their genes and have their children pass on their genes, all of society should be dedicated to encouraging and supporting people to do just that. As much as they may want to, homosexual couples can’t have children of their own, so that behavior shouldn’t be encouraged for the survival of the human race.
This is a pretty legitimate argument in comparison to the usual argument, God hates gays, or the conspiracy theorists’ argument, the government is making us gay to reduce the population. Card lost me, however, when he started ranting about “The Left,” an unspecified group of people that he made sound as infamous as Alex Jones’ “Bilderberg Group.” It also didn’t help that he writes about how heterosexuals will be the ones discriminated against in the future… Oh my god…
I could spend hours debating Card’s arguments, but the point is that I don’t think this article, or any that I’ve read of his so far, establishes Orson Scott Card as evil. I don’t know if it even establishes him as a homophobe. I think he’s genuinely concerned about the survival of the human race and the welfare of children in a new age where behavior that doesn’t seem to be conducive to survival is acceptable. How will children develop with two parents of the same sex? Will they choose to have children of their own? How will humans and society evolve in the coming generations? Will we survive? These are kind of scary questions, ones that scare a lot of people and ones that I don’t think have been answered definitively. Card is only doing what he thinks is right, and that’s hardly worth punishing hundreds of unrelated people for.
If you think Card’s fears sound stupid, think of your own daily anxieties, what they’ve driven you to do, and how dumb they may sound to someone else. I like to think that humans aren’t stupid enough to die off without constant reminders of how to have productive sex… but I could be wrong.
So if you’re not going to see Ender’s Game in November, do it for a better reason than “because Orson Scott Card is anti-gay.” Don’t see it because you love Ender’s Game. Don’t see it because you’re still shocked by how horrible Man of Steel was. Or don’t see it because you’re too damn lazy. Or do see it! See it because you love Ender’s Game. Or because you believe this child is the next Keanu Reeves. Or because you have nothing better to do.
I give you permission. Either way, you aren’t supporting or denying the gay or anti-gay communities. Now go! Watch a stupid movie! Any movie! Talk at you next time!
