Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

     'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

”The most detestable habit in modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie.” - Orson Welles, speaking at the Cinémathèque Française in 1982

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games. In The Silver Case, Tetsugoro Kusabi says a moment in time reminds him of the Rocky movies; Stephan Charbonie name-drops the 1994 FIFA World Cup in Flower, Sun, and Rain; one of my favourite vignettes in The 25th Ward essentially boils down to two detectives being jacked to the tits about going to Starbucks for a caramel macchiato. 


I didn’t bother fact-checking the references above for correctness - is that what those references were again? Is that what they actually referred to? I don’t remember. It was something like that, but I’m not sure - I doubt you knew if my references to these references were right, either. You just know that Suda 51 and his staff love to acknowledge things that they like inside things that they’ve created, right? That jarring feeling of hearing a sci-fi psycho killer monologue about the dollar menu at McDonalds, or watching the lyrics from your favourite moody new-wave hit crawl across the LEVEL COMPLETE screen. There’s something special about seeing and hearing a virtual world acknowledge another (real or fictional) world in material terms that we can recognise and appreciate.


References are, of course, an oft-maligned artistic technique - Orson Welles infamously condemned any artist who leaned on referential crutches. Ironically and hypocritically, the Welles filmography is stuffed with creations that he used as vessels of reference to other works of art. F for Fake - one of his best - is not much more than a series of homages to performances and works of art - both real and imagined - that Welles admired. Transformers: The Movie, his final performance, is nothing more than one big reference to a line of plastic Hasbro toys. Despite his trademark bullish blustering, even one of the all-time greats couldn’t avoid contradicting himself on the matter of referencing. Reference is an inevitable part of self-expression that even some of the best directors of adverts for frozen peas simply cannot avoid.

Cantankerous contradictions aside, I imagine most of us feel similarly to Welles about references. As the always-rolling stone of pop culture gathers more and more digital detritus, films, television shows and video games gain an ever-increasing pool of other people’s popular history to lean on - we’ve all no doubt rolled our eyes at a shameless Star Wars parody or Skyrim knee joke a few hundred times in our lives. Captain America’s infamous “I got that reference” line from Avengers has itself become a reference. 2020s culture has essentially become a referential ouroboros, with creators cyclically patting each other on the back with cameos, shoutouts and in-game tshirts.


Filling your own work with someone else’s work is often just a tedious exercise that outwardly effuses appreciation for another artist, but really just serves as a way for you to self-congratulate and show people what you and they already know. Despite the fact that all these shoutouts are essentially made unto a cultural void, there are still some references being made today that can become special to you or me. After all, we still hold some level of care for the pieces that make up each other's identities. 


Since playing Travis Strikes Again earlier this year, I’ve not been able to shake the memory of a moment that held an eerie serendipity for me. It happened during one of the game’s visual novel detours - in pursuit of a Death Ball, Travis is sent to a festival in Split, Croatia. Whoa! In 2019, the year TSA launched, I went to a festival in Split, Croatia! And then, not long after that, Travis talks about how his handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now - my handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now! What are the chances, eh?! Travis is just like me! Are we on the same journey? If we read Travis as an extension of Suda 51, is Mr. Goichi Suda himself on that journey with me, too?


Such is the power of a meaningless reference. Two throwaway lines with no broader meaning or significance can suddenly bring a viewer/consumer deeper into an artist/character’s world by giving them something in common - but only for the people who rolled the same numbers on the die of life and culture that the creator did. A true artist, Orson would likely argue, could create meaning through depiction of a universal human experience - one that doesn’t rely on creator and observer both owning the same DVDs or liking the same sports team.


I don’t think I’m alone in seeing superficial-referential similarities between myself and Travis Touchdown. In the wake of No More Heroes 3’s launch, I read a tweet about the game that was making the rounds on KamuiNet - not only did it praise the game for allowing Travis, Shinobu and Bad Girl to age in line with the real-life release dates of the No More Heroes video games, it also suggested that it was refreshing to see a creation where older characters can let their geek-freak flags fly. It’s cool that a 40 year old man can like Chr’s Cunterttack; it’s cool to drink beers on your couch and watch moe anime; it’s cool to be a fully grown adult and still swing a toy lightsaber around; uhhh… and more of that sort of thing (I wager the tweeter would love Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2). I’d reference the tweet, but I don’t know where it is now - hopefully this allusion is enough to keep you in the loop, even if I have likely muddied the specifics once again.


So - was that tweet made with tongue planted firmly in cheek? It’s hard to say. You’d assume a fan of No More Heroes would think twice before praising a game for permitting revelry in stunted consumerism, but hey - I know of people who own replicas of Travis Touchdown’s jacket. Suda himself retweeted a dude who has the beam katana tattooed all the way down his calf. Some people love these games without thinking too hard about all of it. And that’s fine! Whether the tweet was intentionally ironic or not, though, I still think it’s a worthy observation that drives its Akira motorcycle (omg it does The Slide!! sick reference!!!) quite close to what No More Heroes 3 is hopefully trying to truthfully achieve in its own scrappy texture-popping, frame-hitching, wall-clipping little way. 


I won’t waste too much time recapping how we got to No More Heroes 3 (you’re on Backloggd, after all, and can read excellent Top Reviews for each game in the series) but it’s worth considering what each NMH game was really about. The original game in particular, as it’s NMH3’s closest relative - No More Heroes 3 is to No More Heroes 1 as The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, to make another meaningless reference. A reboot and retread of well-worn ground that revels in all the superficial signifiers we’ve come to expect from each series. Revived from the dead with an injection of Disney/Marvelous cash and creatively controlled for a whole new generation. With each re-awakening, the main characters are now older and not necessarily any wiser, reliving glory days by referencing all that Good Shit you loved so much countless decades ago. Hey… They even both have blue lightsabers! What a reference! 


Surface-level symbology and parallels aside, probably the most important thing to keep in mind about No More Heroes 1 while playing No More Heroes 3 is its pop-punk meditation on consumer identity and how it was essentially used to trap Travis in someone else’s violent cycle of gig economics (again: read those Top Reviews!). It doesn’t even matter if he’s aware of the grind he’s trapped in and why it sucks - you and Travis still have to participate in your literal or figurative lawn-mowing in order to afford your new video game t-shirts. And this was before the inescapable collective consciousness of the 2.0 and 3.0 Internets forced us all to look at and buy the same things all the time. Ultimately, the only way Travis could escape his perpetual consumer torment was to go live in the woods and play someone else’s video game (fuck!!! a reference!!) all day instead. And even then, the past he wasn’t able to kill (in the form of a reference to a prior NMH game) still found him and brought him back to the modern metropolis.


When looked at through a lens crafted in the present day, the original No More Heroes couldn't have dropped at a better time. It released the same year as the first iPhone and the '07 Global Financial Crash, and just a few months later, Iron Man hit cinemas. Can you think of three bigger social and cultural touchstones for the 2010/20s era? NMH was the final checkpoint before the end of nerd culture's Bronze Age and the beginning of its Iron (Man) Age. Not a smartphone in sight. Just NEETs living in the moe-ment.

It may just be me attributing my own meaning to a personal period of time, of course - I played the first game as an unemployed 18 year old dweeb hiding out in his parents' back room, and I'm now a 31 year old dweeb with a mortgage and a (furry) child - but it does feel like there's been a momentous paradigm shift in The Culture since 2007. When I went to university, my peers at the pub would turn up their noses when I talked about comics, video games and anime - they were fringe, outsider topics that swam in channels separate from the mainstream. Nowadays, everyone I know knows their Monkey Balls from their Dragon Balls. My own grandmother congratulated me for putting out a Doom wad, for fuck's sake! Make a Super Mario reference in 2021, and the chances are high that your own mother would probably know what you're talking about. Whether they like it or not, everyone is at least partially immersed in this grand nouveau-nerd culture that capital has kindly crafted for us to consume. It's no coincidence that Damon Riccitiello, landlord maximus and CEO of Not-EA Games, is Earth's ambassador for an extraterrestrial apocalypse.

And that is the main thrust of what I think No More Heroes 3 is trying to drive itself toward. Despite the introspective events of Travis Strikes Again, Travis Touchdown returns to his mainline series in a relatively unscathed blaze of geeky glory. Like that tweeter I referenced earlier said, the 40 year old Travis is now definitively a child walking in the realm of adults. He even has 2.5 children and a wife - the all-time classic societal markers of adulthood - but still somehow lives alone with his punk IPAs and wrestling figures, decorating his motel room with anime witch girl posters and collecting trading cards for an 80s video game that he watches obsessively on YouTube. Not exactly society's Dad of the Year material. Is that his fault, though? And is that necessarily a bad thing? I feel like NMH3 is trying to explore these questions without being particularly confrontational or condemnational about them. Grasshopper are holding up a mirror in your peripheral vision while you play their latest game; they're showing you their painting of that guy at your job who wears his Joker t-shirt three times a week and takes his kids to Disneyland so that he and his wife can go see the Millennium Falcon. Is Travis that guy?

Travis is probably the most frequently and meticulously discussed video game character on Backloggd. If ever there was a meme to sum up the whole site, it would likely be that "OMG! THATS ME!" guy, looking at a picture of Travis Touchdown (alongside his close friends Tokio and Sumio). The type of person who likes Suda 51 games and posts on Backloggd is unlikely to clap when Captain America references Fortnite in a Marvel movie, though. They’re probably not going to laugh when Elon Musk acknowledges Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in an episode of Rick and Morty. A Neon Genesis Evangelion reference in YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG is not gonna delight them. But they’ll still play these games, watch these movies, see these shows, and then seek out a social blogging website where they can share their disdain for said references and assign an appropriate star rating - as if that absolves them of their participation in said culture. What video game t-shirt did you wear in Travis Strikes Again, by the way? And how thick is that line of the web that separates you from that guy in the Joker t-shirt? How deep does your appreciation of the culture you appreciate really go? Could you pronounce "itadakimasu" (love the lyrics on that song!) any better than Travis does, despite playing all those Japanese video games of yours?

I say we're all "participating" in this international smorgasbord of culture-lite, but I think none of us are really all that free to choose how we interact with these things or allow ourselves to be molded by them, short of renting a trailer in the forest. Our friends chat about it, our mutuals snark about it, our coworkers use it for small talk. I didn't watch Loki, but it came up a lot in my daily team meetings. I know what happened in the show, even though I didn't want to think about it. I've played Call of Duty: Warzone with my buds, despite the fact I regularly condemn the Activision war machine. You gotta do what you gotta do. I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home because it's what my friends wanted to do one day. It wasn't a big deal. It's all a common ground we can embrace each other upon. In No More Heroes 3, one of the only ways Travis can relate to a bereaved Bad Girl is by barging into her bedroom and telling her to watch F-te/St-y N-ght or whatever that was. Meaningless references emit powerful psychoframes that connect us.

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games, and No More Heroes 3 is the platinum-stamped standard-bearer of that hallmark. You could even argue the gameplay itself (which I didn't even talk about here, lol) is just a series of references - you boot up your beam katana to the classic NMH beat, pull off various suplexes from the annals of NJPW and WWE history, drive the Akira bike down the highway, fly around in a knock-off Full Armor Unicorn Gundam, and mow lawns because you mowed lawns in the original No More Heroes. There's very little here that's of original invention, and Orson Welles, were he alive today and gaming his big ass off, would fucking hate that. It's all goddamn homage, all the goddamn time, you goddamn fuckhead. But in some weird way, there's an artistic bravery in building a game that's entirely about other people's work and how that makes you feel. If you can have a podcast about Takashi Miike, why can't you have a video game about Takashi Miike?

No More Heroes asked the player two questions - “Is this you?” and “Does it feel good?”

No More Heroes 3 tells the player two things - “This is you!” and “Man, does it feel good!” 

Those two new statements might not end with question marks, but I think they're intended to provoke you. Whether you like it or not, this is the way that it is.

Can you do anything about it?

Can Travis (that's me!) really change the future?

Is this really the end of history?

Is this really the end?

No more heroes.

Y'know, maybe I should have been more wary. RGG have now proven they have a serious track record of fucking up re-releases. Monkey ball 1+2 got borked physics. VF5 got racist netcode. Yakuza 1+2 got Kiwami'd. And now it really feels like Ishin has as well.

RGG will really add an unforgivably terrible gacha Card system on what already seems like a way too bloated game, but not address that you can just bait one attack and gun down from across the room every story boss.

RGG will really just change what seems like a pretty well thought out original cast considering the conceit in what is obviously a shortsighted fanservice move that will reek in like 3 years.

RGG will really just not address the game's blatant issues like a quarter of the runtime consisting of you running to and from work, attaching Kiryu's morality system onto thi main character requiring consant contrivance and the game's map clearly being hamstrung by loading times on the PS3.

Deep,, deep under Nu-Ishin is the best Yakuza game. And frankly, I get the impression that it's buried a fair bit under the original Ishin as well - I don't think the Yakuza stuff helps tell the story at play (not-Kiryu just sucks the life out of what seems like a truly fascinating real person imo) there's a pointless aount of RPG nonsense that only detracts from the combat that I can't blame entirely on the remake, and the map is probably the series' weakest if you arent a huge nerd for this shit like me.

But im a huge sucker for stories from this period (WATCH YOJIMBO) i love the aesthetic, the combat whilst having issues gainst greatly from swords and guns, and the general plot is really cool. Frankly, just experiencing thils state of japan from the viewpoint of an RGG game is satiation enough for me, huge nerd. But god it could be so much better.

And Nu-Ishin is just the worst kind of re-release. It reminds me a lot of Strange Journey Redux - making pointless changes that dont help and just alienate, whilst adding pointless new stuff that's both terrible and bloats out a game that if anything needs cutting down.

RGG are a very competent studio, but god they need to stop doing this shit.

PS: the translation/localisation here feels really rough. To the point i've spotted multiple spelling mistakes. Makes it particularly tempting to go back to the original once i've improved my Japanese... a lot.

I’m gonna start this off by getting right to the heart. What Final Fantasy VIII is all about, is the reconciliation between the self and its relationship with time. This relationship and its characteristics refer specifically to the changes in the self’s relation to time as historical advances are made to the interconnectivity of physical places, communication, and people as byproducts of the increasing demands of world-wide capitalist economy and its impacts on culture.

The concept of the annihilation of space by time, or time-space compression, is an idea posited by Karl Marx in 1857 that continued to be applied, articulated, and changed by writers and theorists as a global economy continued to form through modern history, which created the incentive to overcome both the spatial and communication barriers by which space between people, places, and thought had been previously manifest. These advances include things like transportation (railroads, cars, jets), communication channels (fax, radio, phone), and most recently online communication, or construction of non-physical spaces based on information transfer and delivery.

Keep in mind the fundamental striking changes to the world design of VIII from past games includes all these things that are shown to the player right from the start—trains running automatically between locations, rental cars available to the player, as well as the narrative’s emphasis on satellite, radio, and cable-based communications, and most importantly, the online forums and pages running on the school’s closed network servers.

Final Fantasy VIII’s fundamental design was actually heavily inspired by internet forums, as scenario writer Nojima recently discussed his experience with using a personal computer to search for online discussions about previous games he’d worked on for the first time, and how impacted he was to see all kinds of criticisms on his use of character death and tragedy and the “overuse of flashbacks” as a narrative device, all of which directly affected the decisions made during the narrative development of VIII. It doesn’t just stop there either, as VIII is really the first game to begin a trend in the series where the narrative is made of hints and clues at hidden information, context, and details to serve the main storyline, something directly designed to bolster online and forum discussions among players. Do you remember the datalog of FFXIII? Did you ever realize that whole thing began with VIII? The ‘tutorial’ section of the menu has sections among sections detailing not just the various unexplained aspects of the game systems, but information about characters, locations, plot events, and the history of the world that go mostly unspoken during the game, key terms with which to read the several intended playthroughs of the game and to put pieces together with others.

I wholly believe that the direct exposure to other people and places via the internet as an extension of previous historical accelerations and compressions of time and their subsequent erasure of borders and discreet identities in time and space directly informs the themes, message, and the narrative and mechanical design of Final Fantasy VIII.
“We are entering a space which is speed-space…[a] time of electronic transmission…and therefore, man is present not via his physical presence, but via programming.”

NARRATIVE 1 - VHS

I think a lot of people will agree that the narrative and plot of FFVIII has a unique flair to it. It took me some time to realize how to describe it, but I think I’ve reached something I’m satisfied with. The plot of FFVIII, from the beginning, feels compressed, with events happening of wildly ranging content, tones, fictional genres, compiled together in tight bouts of non-sequitur editing. What it really feels like, is an old, worn-out inherited VHS tape that’s seen years of use and rewriting between various films and programs, to the extent that you can no longer tell where one film ends and the next begins. Storylines and cinema modes blend together, events unpredictable in nature only loosely related to the ones immediately surrounding them dissolve with the seams between so worn out that the lack of cuts itself is jarring (note the cinematics’ consistent, heavy use of dissolves) and characters appear to change fundamental roles based not on character or plot developments but on the tape’s runtime itself, dictated by the speed of the dream, as if resembling a worn-out existential footprint of a person’s interests and entertainment dispositions over a long period of time. The plot of FFVIII grabs from ranges of Hollywood films between Star Wars to minutes of Jurassic Park to Saving Private Ryan, Aliens to hints of Harry Potter (unreleased as of ff8’s release), Titanic, etc. Each section feels iconic, but they all feel like different, unrelated works stitched together, bound by culture and speed.

What effect does living in that kind of existence have on a person? Final Fantasy VIII has large swaths of time the player can experience, if they so choose, between important plot events, where nothing important happens and time seems to feel like a paranoid stand-still, as if frozen between actions but never at rest, where players are pulled along mainly by interest in the trading card game system. But when plot events happen, they happen fast, in intense succession, one after another. Final Fantasy VIII is a story about young people, especially Squall, being consistently overwhelmed by events they have no control over, by a world that deems all the elements of discrete eras of history as totally equivalent, permitted to happen simultaneously.

Unlike a typical narrative’s sense of time where at any moment that the present takes place the threat of the unknown would come from the future, the characters of VIII are attacked from all sides, so little is their grasp on both the grand scope of time and the minuteness of its intervals. VIII is a story where enemies become mothers (your own), and not in the Luke Skywalker sense. Relationships are given unknown meanings, and then immediately dropped, recontextualized, and then decontextualized. No form of understanding about the nature of this world is stable. It is a dream where your own personal reality rewrites itself so fast and frequently as everything changes and morphs all around you.

“When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast…But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and [programmed] systems.”

MECHANICS 1 – Deconsolidation and Assembly

The act of dealing with that world, where everything is connected to the point where nothing is any more relevant than anything else, is to acknowledge its implicit existential anxiety and death anxiety.

More than anything else, I think, the makeup of Final Fantasy VIII’s world and mechanics design is that of a consolidated, disassembled world, where everything remains clumped together in chunks, but nothing is really pre-built for the player. The content, from quests to acquirable resources are concentrated in select points along the map. Rather than spread across the map so the player is led to find the Necessary Keys ala Dragon Quest, as it were, they are in distinct points the player is meant to remember and return to should they seek those properties. Even the system of magic itself implies that magic, the most important resource of this world, is located along concentrated areas that spurt out from physical locations, or from the monsters who originate from the moon. Item drops only come from specific monsters and have very specific uses, and monsters themselves are often limited to specific continents or areas. But it isn’t just content that’s consolidated, the rules of the game themselves are. Each new Guardian Force (summon) acquisition and new type of magic has the power to fundamentally change how the game works for the player and the psychology of the battles and exploration, exactly the same as how Triple Triad’s (card game side mode) rulesets change as you travel.

You might have heard the complaint that Final Fantasy VIII is easy to break, but in truth, you cannot break Final Fantasy VIII because you cannot break something that is not yet assembled. The assembly of its elements is entirely up to the player, with what you do in the game, what you find, what you explore, how you allocate things, and what affordances you define each element with. And none of these decisions are permanent; the game can be rewritten any time and as many times as you choose.

CONTEXTUALIZATION – Putting VIII into Perspective of the Series

Put simply, the identity of Final Fantasy is that it attempts to encapsulate everything that can be said regarding a theme using both fantasy and role-playing mechanics within a single game. They are a lot like the Star Wars films in how those films cover an extremely broad and encompassing range of visual, cinematographic, and mythological elements taken from various sources and put together to form a narrative that explores narrative. Final Fantasy games are all encompassing works of the same kind; each game is both the first work and the last work in a series that explores the art of game-driven narrative.

I would like now to break down each game in the series until VIII and paint them as a specific type of Final Fantasy with regards to how each approaches its interpretation and style of roleplaying to demonstrate the path taken to get to VIII's approach.

1 Final Dungeon Fantasy

A game mainly driven by individual dungeons that require the player to explore and plan routes through several times until coming away with the most important treasure, a narrative key, that applies itself in some way to the overworld, itself a large dungeon. This form of dungeon diving heavily tests resource management and planning as well as managing encounter based risk and reward.

2 Final Campaign Fantasy

A game that serves a narrative campaign about rebellion first and foremost, and requires the player to consistently return to a specific location as they seek the resources and keys necessary to develop a resistance strong enough against an empire. Rather than resource management, the behavior of the player is heavily tracked and used to shape the growth of the characters nonlinearly which requires appropriate use of spells and weaponry to modify characters temporarily and permanently to approach the challenges.

3 Final Exploration Fantasy

A story centered around a freewheeling party exploring both a shifting world and their own shifting selves. Tasks are found on volition and approached through an economy of mechanical roles.

4 Final Theater Fantasy

A game that defines all mechanics and roles of its participants by and for narrative, and allows the player to be the discoverer and actor of their interplay.

5 Final Television Fantasy

A game about approaching challenges by not just trying different classes and mechanical roles but by combining their aspects and seeing their effects. An episodic costume narrative directed by the player with a party as cast members in on-going production.

6 Final Opera Fantasy

An extension of the fourth game's theater, developed into a full multi-character parallel storied narrative where each character is less defined by role and more by personal quirks and distance from the former games' magic, never being able to take ownership of it.

7 Final Everything Fantasy

7 is like a culmination and convergence of so many things and ideas. It feels like it contains so many settings, story genres, and pieces as an urban fantasy. From sidewalks and ceos, mythical creatures, crazed scientists and test subjects, caves of natural wonder, haunted mansions, a “princess”-like and a “knight”-like, lost magic cities, amusement parks, giant robots, kaiju, space, special soldiers, secret agents, aliens, I mean the list just goes on, and it all works because none of these things take up too much of the time and the pace is fast enough to be riveting but with deep enough character writing and psychology between the turnarounds to keep consistent interest on a main through-line.

Final fantasy VII is the fantasy of everything, contextualized by the concept of the lifestream, where all life and concepts flow through the planet in a physical, manifested way. Anything can happen because it’s part of the same stream of planetary existence, like a wave that comes and goes.

8 Final RPG Fantasy

How do you go past “everything”? What do you look toward once you’ve created a story about the concept of “everything”? The answer VIII arrives at, is to look at the container itself, the RPG wrapper that houses the content of the game. Whereas VII asked what are all the things we can put and keep in an RPG, VIII asks what is an RPG? How does an RPG present and deliver its ideas?

To play Final Fantasy VIII is to create questions and follow lines of thought. The game itself houses multiple choice tests (as the main characters are students) that help determine the salary level the player receives. Each of these tests is not only designed to test the player’s understanding of the game, but to give them ideas for things to experiment with, questions to follow up on and experiment within the game’s almost carelessly open and flexible system.

Each character is a momentary collection of spells that determine what they’re good at. Each spell a question of how to make a character either stronger or more resistant. And each potential of each spell is determined by what god-creatures you’ve pacted with or spotted and fished in each battle. But, the decisions you can make for what you want to be good at are also determined by what GFs you have found and what abilities you've invested in. For example, you might prioritize HP and junction cures to HP, but then you find that you're rarely doing limit breaks because limits are tied to low HP, and have their own kind of system for chaining limits by manipulating windows. You would be ignoring a system of the combat and never hitting your characters' true potential, not to mention having slow battles. But, then you get the spell Aura, which lets you do limits at higher HP. But you find that with that high HP, you don't really ever heal high enough to take advantage of it because your magic stat is low. And when you do heal, your max hp diminishes anyway. You have a specific idea about how HP and healing works, until you get an ability that instantly heals an ally to full without any resource limit, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of opportunity costs, statistical uses, and how spells can be used. There's many abilities in the game that offer (or threaten) to change the way the game can or should be played, and each stat has its own little functions worth discovering.

Even the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on how much time one spends digging into the game, with enemies leveling up with the player’s party and the speed of level-ups being on a linear scale, rather than exponential (1000 exp to level up at all times, regardless of current level), which puts a pressure on the player to keep their builds up against the speed of the game's power scale. You might think to avoid killing creatures and gaining experience and focus entirely on getting spells, which many do to "break" the game, but this prevents you from being able to draw higher level magic as your level (and magic ability) determine your capabilities with that. Without high enough levels, enemy monsters won't even have high level magic on them to take from at all, and without killing monsters and only ending battles in other ways, you'll never get the monster parts and drops to turn into either magic or new weapons, and neither will your GFs learn new abilities and stat relationships or develop summon compatibilities. Although you can bypass some of that by delving into the card game, another system of intricate and shifting rulesets, which leads me to my next point.

MECHANICS 2 - Neuroplasticity

All the (consolidated) parts of Final Fantasy VIII, although scattered and very missable, are not any of them necessary toward completing the game because the system is designed to work around missing components.

You can ignore triple triad and focus on drawing magic and making builds from monster drop items. You can make your GFs focus on summon damage and boosts over junctioned stats and play the game carefully using summons and summon items, or you might never use those items at all. You might prioritize disposable high damage items over high level magic and build characters around that.

You might have one character build defensive and manipulate them to stay in low health to get limit breaks off of them. Doing that implies that you have access to a defense boosting GF, which are missable. You can plan a party around anything given what stat junctions you have available. You might have a party that's weak or strong against various elements at random times depending on what the auto junction system chooses for you, or you might be in complete control of the elemental and status properties of everyone around you.

Even the pocket playstation peripheral, something I thought was a downside of the game as without it certain items and summons can't be obtained. But having a better understanding of the game let me realize that it's entirely in the spirit of the game since everything in the game is an optional, circumventable thing that helps you define what kind of rpg you're playing. It's not a complete, self-contained "final fantasy", I thought, if it has these things outside the game. But, it doesn't need to have it, and besides, what ambition to have a separate monocolor tiny game screen with the potential to bring game altering items into the game that you can acquire by adventuring while outside.

To add onto the chocobo pocketstation game point, what it is is a tiny little random dungeon navigator and battler with small events that can help you level up a small chocobo in the real game and grow a summon in real time, while it nets you items from all over the game, even when you wouldn't be able to get them normally. Sometimes these items can help you get lategame GFs early. But this doesn't break the difficulty curve as it would in a normal rpg, because the game is balanced not around standard difficulty but on a risk/reward system where danger is beneficial, all boons are expendable and disposable, and everything around you is on the same growth curve as you.

All this to say that, while I think Final Fantasy had been leaning toward this direction for some time with V's class change system, VI's magic learning system and VII's materia system, but VIII is the first to fully embrace a difficulty designed around broadness. Instead of a series of challenges that test you on your ability to use available resources, growth choices made, or special items and weapons found via exploration, VIII is all about improvisation and just seeing what you can do and how you can play with it. This is reinforced by both a growth structure based on impermanence and redefinability and a world and system structure of circumventable machinery, where the pleasure is in the rewiring. It's the emphasis on how, not on performing optimally but on enjoying the act and actually paying attention and recognizing the struts, rails, and artifice of the play. In that sense, the game might be the first and only truly mechanically Brechtian RPG.

NARRATIVE 2 - Characters Who Exist Between the Frames

Given the state of impermanence and redefinability of the game’s mechanical construction, in a world where everything is permitted to exist at once in one concentrated mass dilated over a stretch of bending time, characters live and breathe in the spaces between time. If timecode dictates the law of this world the way it does relationships, events, and reality, then it is between units of time that characters find their existence.

The key visual motif of this game is the fade. Locations, characters, and places in time are introduced by fading, cascading shots. It is a visual dilation between disparate moments, a morphing of person to place, the inner to outer and back again, and it is constant across this game’s narrative framing.

Yet the characters when introduced are always given these very specific, quiet moments. Beautifully rendered short, intimate cg, completely voiceless, pointmark each new character’s introduction to the story. It’s such a unique feeling watching these, like learning about somebody without hearing them say anything, an interview of gestures, small movements, and diegetic environmental sound. It’s these moments that stand out throughout the game as in the heat of narrative choice, climax, and expositions where characters are put through the wringer and make mistakes, change, remember things, forget things; characters have developments in this game so quickly sometimes or have stunning redefining moments and reevaluations that it sometimes does feel absurd, surreal, and many have criticized this style of narrative development, but it's entirely appropriate for this game’s theme and story, a story where young adult development is characterized by the existential speed of the present, the claustrophobia of the past and the future closing on you at both sides, the baggage of the parent, the realization of your own eminent death, the reconciliation or lackthereof of a society and history that feels alien and unmalleable, of time itself that seems hostile and alive. To live here is to have surrendered yourself to it, to be a participant of the self-annihilation of its very existence, so there is no self, really, to separate from the out-of-control plot spiraling across the drama of all ages, except for only those that can be captured by these tiny, seemingly trivial moments, these small things that carry so much meaning about a person. And isn’t that ultimately the way you’ll be remembered? When a person is gone and all their life is part of the lives of all the other people’s lives, we remember those small bits, right? The way they move their hair or gaze into the sky or stumble on some rocks. It’s the moments between that can breathe.

MECHANICS 3 - Bargaining with Time

Much has been said about the drawing system of Final Fantasy VIII. I stand by that it is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in all RPG history. The regurgitated complaint is that it's slow, it's a waste of time, it's repetitive, and lastly that it's a required exercise in tedium as a replacement for traditional experience based stat growth. Such complaints or that the idea that the game was unplayable before the option to speed up time in the remaster (or that it improves the game) are untrue, and can be dispelled easily with an idea that might explain the mechanic better.

Imagine if each enemy in the game had only a limited amount of spell stocks, for example, if the bats at the start of the game had just a limit of 15 fires, and perhaps the triwing miniboss had 50 fires, blizzards, and thunders each. The expectation of “grinding by drawing” would be dead, and by explicitly disallowing players the opportunity to ruin their own enjoyment of the game by abusing a mechanic for “optimal growth and spell stocking” the game would have a much better sense of natural pace. And I mean, when you think about, even with that limitation you STILL could grind endlessly and pick up as many spells as you want, because the enemies are still random encounters you can grind. So what’s the difference, why does allowing a player to get ~infinite spells from a single encounter make it any worse than allowing a player to get a limited amount of spells from an infinitely repeatable encounter? The difference is player psychology, and how players perceive the game is to be played based on pre-established conditions of the genre. I’ve never seen a player of an rpg complain that a game demands that they grind by allowing infinite enemy encounters to occur in a designated area, because it’s understood unless the player explicitly desires a statistical advantage through repetitive actions, they are not meant to walk around and battle endlessly for optimal growth and item/resource availability.

But that still leaves the question, why design the game that way, why design it so that each enemy is an endless dispenser of spells and that spell stock is the foremost determiner of character statistic ability?

To answer this, first, what is drawing spells? Why have a magic system set up like this at all? I think the main benefits of this mechanic in terms of player emotion are that:
1- It gives each individual battle the ability to permanently change, for better or worse, your character’s potential capabilities, weaknesses and strengths. In other terms, their invisible, implied ambiguous class. Of course, there are no character classes in Final Fantasy VIII, and they haven’t been in the series at this point since V, but there are still minute decisions to tool and retool every character in the game based on available resources that can instantly completely change how your characters act, fight, and interact in terms of battles. Every single battle in the game has the potential to change this, either by having the player spend lots of magic spell stocks during the fight for casting and thus losing their junctioned stat strengths, or by acquiring an unknown amount of new spells, or even discovering an unknown spell altogether that gives new potential both as an ability to cast during battle and as an ability that might redefine or change your strategies completely. One of my biggest problems with many JRPGs is there is too much inconsequential time spent in battle, and that time actually feels inconsequential. Sure, technically experience points are consequential since they can permanently change your characters for the better once you get enough, but gaining experience is always the same reward (the only variable being amount), and always in the upward direction, and is always applied the same way by the game system. Spell stocks all have different stat relationships based on the spell, which itself is a form of discovery that’s pretty fun.

2- It creates a decision-making point. In each battle, you have the option to spend a character turn being useless for the sake of acquiring resources, and doing this consecutively leaves you open for more attacks by the enemy. You cannot predict the exact quantity you’ll receive each turn, so there’s a bit of a gamble involved, and it creates a risk/reward system of staying longer or choosing not to end battles to get more out of them. Drawing is also a skill. It’s not an option available at all times; it costs a full menu slot of which there are only four available and this never changes during the game (a big change from VII’s everything-window resizing itself), and the game makes this point from the beginning by starting you off with 4 available command skills in addition to Draw.

Additionally, the outcome of a successful Draw is dependent on magic stats/junctions, so there is incentive to do things like specialize characters for drawing, have mages geared toward drawing, or even make your characters physical stats weaker so as not to end battles too quickly. There is also the fact that your character level determines Drawing success/failure, and a lot of spells have a minimum level to acquire, which also actually means if you want to take advantage of battle spell drawing you cannot keep yourself intentionally underlevel (though you don’t have to take advantage of it; there are other ways of playing the game), and that if you have a specialized draw character, you still want to keep their level up, and in this game experience is primarily determined by who gets the last hit in battle, which means you still want them to attack every once in a while…
At the same time though, Draw is still useful as a command for characters with weak magic stats. You could always cast a Drawn spell instead of stocking it, kind of excitingly using the enemy spell against themselves right away in the heat of battle, and the power of that spell isn’t determined by character magic stats since it’s not really being casted from that character. Instead spells casted this way are given random strength, which could be useful in fights where physical fighters can’t use their attacks, need to get an elemental weakness out, or do anything spur-of-the-moment.

At the same time though, there is a huge flaw with the implementation of this mechanic, and I think it’s responsible for the reason this mechanic is misunderstood as something expected to be abused to the point of “making the game boring”. And that’s that, for about half of the game, the enemies simply don’t do enough damage per turn to create a legitimate threat to the player’s risk of standing around, drawing. Because players don’t feel a risk or danger, the only real risk until enemies become stronger is the passage of time, which is where the concept of perceived intended grind comes from. The game is not difficult enough in general to necessitate wasting your time with excessive drawing anyway, yet players cannot know that when starting the game or anticipating the next challenge. To be frank, the root of this issue stems from the ATB system and Final Fantasy’s approach to enemy design at this stage in general: from VI on, FF games had battles that were more about performance, expression and a horizontal power system where you could defeat enemies in multiple ways, which would actually help define the characters and their journeys, as well as create the cinematic character-driven narrative layer to the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making the enemies too hard would limit player incentive to experiment, and would lower the potential ways to solve encounters, so lowering the minimum requirement for defeating enemies makes sense. When the ATB system gets involved, though, you get the situation where if the player doesn’t truly go for ending the fight quickly and just does the minimum physical attack, the battles can very easily stall, where nobody does much damage, and the thrill of engagement is all but gone. This unfortunate result, combined with Final Fantasy’s popularization of prioritizing lengthy/showy battle animations over quicker alternatives or text, and the fact that all battles open in completely separate scenes from the exploration scene, disorienting the player if the battle takes too long (upon which re-orientating yourself by moving around to get your bearings will likely create another battle with step-based encounters), ALL are kind of the reason 70% of post FFVII JRPGs can feel like a slog to play. But that digression aside, adding the Draw system onto that low-risk and time-(in)sensitive battle foundation makes the first half of the game not live up to the risk in the risk/reward system the game is setting up.

Later games do have this element in them actually, FFIX basically has the Draw command in the form of a Steal system. It used to be that enemies had only one item players could steal, but in IX enemies have a whole table of items with harder and rarer to steal things at the top, which are really enticing since items and equipment have lots of functions in that game, similar to the magic system of VIII. Although in both games you can forgo a turn for the risk of getting hit more for the chance of scoring something good that can permanently change or increase your abilities in the game, the difference is that in IX the things enemies hold are actually limited! Look at that!

Then, in XII, you have a somewhat different thing but still a battle risk/reward subsystem where you can fight consecutive enemies by aggroing them and increase your chances of getting items and equipments and drops the higher your enemy chain is, and the more you fight and get more enemies involved the higher the risk gets for aggroing a strong enemy or overwhelming yourself in numbers. Continuing to reason 3…

3-It’s sick as hell. I don’t know what it is, and normally I don’t even care much for battle animations and particle effects, but the Draw animation is just super cool to me, and just conceptually, the idea of extracting magic essence from enemies and using it yourself in myriad ways is dope.
And if we go back to my previous point of the lack of pressure in damage turning the main motivater of risk to time, as much as I dislike it, in a game about dealing with time, with a sense of time that’s simultaneously instantly fast and endlessly frozen, isn’t it kind of apt? The anxiety of the draw state, the gambler’s addiction of staying in place just to get more, the fact that moving forward with the game and finishing encounters is something the player has to decide and actively cause, not just passively wait for things to end, well it all kind of fits thematically, I think.

One last addendum I'm gonna add here is that the way money is made in the game is also based on time, since you get a salary based on the time spent moving around in the game. Since the salary amount is determined only partially, minimally by battling, and mostly on quizzes taken that test and encourage experimentation with the game systems, it creates another horizontally structured optional progression path.

NARRATIVE 3 - Space as Final Respite, or: The Scarcity of Quiet

With my view of this story being explicitly about teenagers coming to terms with a hostile world defined by the simultaneity of time, the climax of the story is its calmest point.

I don’t want to give away too much about it in case there are readers who haven’t experienced it. But I will say that it’s a sequence that seems to come out of nowhere, has several twists, and barely explains itself. Yet it absolutely works.
Everywhere on the surface of the world of this game, there is the feeling of restlessness. Like I said before, the story sequences are accelerations of what feel like events occurring miles apart in time, the moments between them, to me at least, feel like environments defined by a freeze-frame energy. Everything is either a calm-before-the-storm, or the fallout right after a catastrophe, and in most cases, both. At rest, there is no rest, except for in space.

That being said, the scene in space technically is neither peaceful nor calm in its context. It’s very tense. BUT, it’s the one chapter in the game where the two main characters can just exist, and live by their own volition, separate from the propellants of time. The motivating factors behind Squall and Rinoa are very pure, and in that sense, it’s a rebellion against the forms of logic that construct the space the narrative defines itself in. It’s a hug in the void, interrupted only by a dragon.

MECHANICS 4 - You Are Still Playing the Game When It’s Shut Off

Final Fantasy VIII is built for external discussions. The storytelling style being based around events and relationships hinted at, the proto FFXIII datalog, the way junctioning allows for different players to have completely different play styles and setups, the fact that the card game rules scatter around and spread in unique, random ways along the towns and areas you play it at, leading to completely different rules ecosystems across the world in each save file. But I think the most interesting parts to this fact are two things.

First, the sidequest design in this game, specifically the ones you find on the overworld, and the way they’re populated along the map feel way more “you read this on a forum or heard it from a friend” than anything in the series prior, like with the invisible monkey stuff or the lake (if you know, you know), but it has a certain flavor all its own. There’s surprisingly very few of them and they’re all sort of funky in the sense that they feel abruptly distinct and don’t make sense until you ‘get’ them. It feels very protogenic to the kinds of things that would spread in early 2000s game design and sensibilities (in my opinion).

Second, with the inclusion of money being determined by something distinctly outside of the gameplay loop (optional exams), to the point that they’re in a section of the menu labeled ‘Tutorial’, I think is the game kind of encouraging the player to engage the game outside of the game and to think on their own by burying sorts of layers within the game’s construction. I think this is the first Final Fantasy where I felt the systems of combat, exploration, and character growth were distinct among themselves within the game, and could feel where each one ended and started. It’s the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to hunt down specific type of enemies based on their habitats to find a specific item. It’s also the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to construct a specific type of weapon I read about in a magazine and where going to a store meant more than just spending the gold I had for what they had on offer.

NARRATIVE 4 - The End on Tape

Potential spoilers for this section if you have not seen the ending.

“Reflect on your...childhood…your sensation...your words...your emotions.......Time...it will not wait...no matter...how hard you hold on...it escapes you...and......."-Ultimecia’s final words

What place does mortality have in a world where everything exists at the same time; if in the Vonnegut sense, you only need to look in a certain direction to see someone gone still standing, still doing what they’ve always been doing?

I read the ending in a particular way that I’ll try to explain. Squall finds himself transmitted by some signal into a cracked endless desert. In the Baudrillardian sense, this is the desert of the real. The crossing of all time, the eradication of distance between discreteness, and the overbombardment of information and signal—the noise of their reality of life—has created in its diametric the frayed husk of an opposite reality. No sound can be heard, and no signal perceived; no truth distinguishable from a soup of signs, signifiers, and contexts, there is no context found here at all, it is the Desert.

The hero wanders alone, unable to hold on to what mattered to him most. Unable to hold on to himself. Without context, without other things to compare itself to, the self disintegrates. The land shrinks until there is nowhere left to wander, because the act of wandering itself loses context, loses meaning, loses discreteness in relation to other things.

The signal/noise dichotomy is best represented by the violent montage sequence, the meshing, cutting, liquifying, re-editing as the picture itself fails to hold on to memory, fails to filter memory, fails to understand memory. And with neither memory, context, or structured/discernable reality, death comes without life beginning, and life arrives without death completing it, intermittently and together.

And the only solution to the hero’s purgatory of time, mortality, and context, is, as completely corny and as silly as it sounds, it’s just love. It’s just what matters to people, to be held and accepted. That’s the signal. It’s a beautiful image, with the clouds parting and the flowers coming back, when the two find each other again despite all odds. Because even if this whole loop will start again, Edea will begin SeeD, will become the sorceress, time draws in on itself, the characters are divided without knowing each other, and everybody is lost and alone in a sea of anxiety and noise, and the war comes from every side of time again, this one moment will still be there, and the game is asking the player to recognize the importance of that feeling. It ends with acceptance of that feeling across time, even for Seifer, who finally feels at ease with himself without actually changing, and especially Laguna, who finally gets to express what he’s always wanted to. A lost kind of love that’s continued across generations connected by a song and unspoken feelings.

Finally the whole thing culminates in a video recording of a celebration where everyone is present. It’s almost as if this one piece of footage, this is all that is allowed to exist outside of the loop that the timeline of the game is predicated on. Unlike the other forms of information transmission and transportation the game is fixed on, I think this one final tape shows a reality where everybody is at ease, being themselves, in the moment (and the headmaster’s Robin Williams face has suddenly fully transformed into a Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an immortalization of the many lives that were there, granting them separation from the other many signals, noises, contexts, and realities of present, past, and future times. It ends only when the machine does, as the battery dies, the viewpoint is switched to Rinoa’s, and Squall is allowed to exist once more, present in the moment seen to Rinoa, flying toward a Lunar exit.

A send-off to 1999 and the entire millennium before it, as RPGs, rendering technology, and fiction storytelling on the digital medium won’t ever be quite the same.

My Own Timeline

I wanna take this part and talk a bit about my relationship with this game, and with games in general, over time.
I grew up at a time when PS1 games had just fully phased out and were unavailable in stores. I never had much money as a kid so getting games was a very infrequent thing, until the next gen consoles would come out and make the previous generations games discount and I could play catch-up.

Most of my relationship with games at that time was over the internet, watching videos of others older than I explaining about games and their relationships with them. Much can and has been said about the early years of YouTube and video game discussion, the immature humor, the overstretched personas, the ridiculous rants, embarrassing skits, and how generally mean spirited a lot of it was. But when I was a kid, that's all I had to go to to learn more and engage in what was absolutely the most fascinating topic out there, video games I cannot play.

Playstation 1 games, especially, felt like they were mystic artifacts, there was always an air of magic to them. I think my very first exposure to final fantasy was the FF8 intro cutscene. I thought the quick shots in that trailer-style intro were scenes from an actual movie, I remember googling for a place to watch the full thing. Then I remember finding Midgar and images depicting FF7's industrial black city and wondering how the hell it all fit together. The boxarts were always so intriguing and cinematic, but the resolution on my screen and old images and maybe just my dumb baby head would read into them the completely wrong way. I thought FF7s box was depicting a hero with a giant sword approaching a dark castle. I thought it was amazing. I could barely see or understand gameplay screenshots and just went off of text descriptions of it, and it always sounded more interesting and out there than the limited worlds being rendered in real time on my PS2. Besides 2000's Wikipedia and fan wikis I only had YouTubers to go off of for any context about these strange things that seemed so much better than the games I was playing then.

And who else to convince me of the superiority of the past than the growing number of men on the internet reminiscing about the games of their youth? And I fell for it, I just believed older games were better than anything next gen. I like to think of this now as a kind of big brother effect I experienced. I didn't have any older siblings and was an only child for a long time, so I sometimes feel jealous when I hear of others' experiences with older siblings passing down or sharing in video game experiences. Since I had no guide in the world of games, looking back now it kind of felt like I was relying on online video creators for a kind of parasocial game-themed relationship.

By allowing those kinds of people to be my guides in childhood escapist experiences, I had unknowingly allowed myself to swallow whole-sale all kinds of things, things that were not so good, and I just believed in the opinions others had for experiences I didn't have myself, for games I never played or movies I'd never watched. Most of my experience with Final Fantasy VIII for the longest time was with The Spoony One's review series on the game. It's funny to me now looking back and seeing how completely wrong most of his points about the game are, how he misreads its design choices and intentions, and kind of just complains.

Yet I can't really bring myself to hate it. I guess part of me just grew up in that culture, much as I disapprove of it now, and when I sit down and watch something like it from that time period I still find it kind of relaxing. Just to sit down, settle in, and listen to someone take me on a personal comedic journey that edits between gameplay footage, historical context, criticisms and anecdotes, and anything else that could happen on a screen. It's crazy, even if literally all of the content within that structure is horrible, it still feels comfortable somehow just through its format, its structure. I can't come to hate the things that taught me about all the games I wouldn't have been able to wonder and dream about, learn about, and eventually bring myself to try to experience on my own, even if I reject its message and outdated grossness.

That's the internet though, isn't it? The place where the past and future exist simultaneously, all directions to be experienced all at once. The turn of the millennium, the birth of the forum, the voices turning, all things must pass and all things must come, now at the same time.

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“We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil-something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today…new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times, we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinite large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’, that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.”

All quotations about speed/time by Paul Virilio.

Terrible appropriative studio copying other artists' work and claiming it as their own while wildly misinterpreting the meaning of its inspirations.
To further my anger towards this game, it does a poor, even harmful job at portraying mental illness, so far as to demonize victims of depression and anxiety as though they're "unfixable," and their demons are an inconvenience and impediment to those around them.
The emotional intellect is completely missing, and the storytelling is amateurish and immature, blatantly favoring style over actual substance and subliminality.

This game is unimaginably horrible and it's baffling it's the hill so many are willing to die on. There is no enemy variety, which is for sure a good idea for a modern open world game. There is no spell variety either (26), which again certainly was a great idea for a modern rpg based solely around it's magic set at a magic school, but hey Harry Potter has always had a terrible magic system so ¯\(ツ)/¯. For reference Final Fantasy (1987 NES) has triple as many spells (60), and Skyrim a more modern open world game for comparison has over 100 AND both those games have multiple combat classes besides magic. The game will let you use the "unforgivable curses" but it has no morality system to give any meaningful consequences to your actions because according to the devs it would be "too judgmental on the game maker's part". The world is empty, which is always a problem with open world games (not remotely a fan of the genre tbh) and every door is a loading screen. The game is also a buggy mess and anyone saying otherwise is just lying, the game literally has Denuvo lmao. But none of this is surprising, ignoring the original author for a moment, every trailer made it look lackluster and it's made by the developers infamous for Disney tie-in shovelware.

And now for the elephant in the room... The game doubles down on all the racism and antisemitism of its source material, anyone saying Terfling had nothing to do with this game is bending the truth. The official Q&A for the game on their site says they worked closely with her team so it perfectly fits her world, and that it does a little too perfectly. The main premise is squashing a goblin rebellion riddled with antisemitism. The goblin rebellions are not new to the franchise, they are a thing mentioned in the books and expanded material as something the students learn in history class. And what were all the rebellions about? The lack or basic rights like using wands, and checks notes wizards attempting to enslave them "as house elves" but we’re supposed to believe they’re still the villains throughout the franchise?
Which brings us to the next topic, the house elves... As in the source material Hogwarts is run by slave labor and the franchise doesn't want us to look deeper into what that means, waving it off with "well they like it". But if wizards can attempt to enslave goblins as “house elves” what does that actually mean, what exactly is a “house elf” and why doesn’t the series creator want us to examine it? The head house elf at Hogwarts becomes a companion, so you don't actually get to own a slave but you still get one by proxy. The game also lets you decorate the Room of Requirement with mounted house elf heads, with how controversial this aspect of the books has always been idk who on the dev team didn’t think “maybe we shouldn’t keep the mounted head of a sapient creature decoration item”. Again none of this is surprising given the source material where they decorate houses with elf heads and the kids put little hats on during christmas, oh isn’t it so cute and whimsical? And the fact that one of the lead devs was a gamer gate youtuber (them stepping down was never going to divorce the game from these elements). The game is also a prequel set in the 1800s so it can't actually effectively deconstruct the issues with the source material, the goblins are still the anti-semetic bankers, the house elves are still slaves, and the ("good") wizards are still the good guys that have every right to oppress them. Just like Terflings own politics and the politics of the source material the game's message is about preserving the status quo, nothing meaningful can change and it shouldn’t cause we have a continuity to uphold damnit!
The game also throws in the series "first trans character" who they named "Sirona Ryan", this is a name of a Celtic goddess (as many people will point out in an attempt to ignore criticism, despite the origin not being the issue with the name) but just like "Cho Chang", "Anthony Goldstein" and "Kingsley Shacklebolt" it's certainly a choice out of all the Irish names to deliberately use that one for your first trans women. Sirona was also very obviously thrown in last minute in an attempt to save face and say the game was divorced from Terflings and her raging transphobia, but as you can see the game is quite the opposite.
But you know despite all that 9/10 IGN-ostalgia am I right!

In conclusion this game is truly the “Legacy” of this franchise and I can see why fans say “this is everything I ever wanted in a Harry Potter game” because this is all the franchise really truly is. I certainly hope everyone who bought the deluxe edition for the sole reason to spite a minority the author is actively harming daily love their overpriced shovelware and fuck off. Remember yall were the same people in the 90s who hated and wanted to boycott the books for being “satanic” and "progressive". (spoiler alert they never were)

And for anyone who can’t let go of the franchise because of “childhood” and cause “it’s so magical”, let me recommend “Earthsea” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Discworld” by Terry Pratchett, and “Percy Jackson” by Rick Riordian. None of those series are perfect and have their fair share of problems, but they were written by authors who actually cared, who actually took criticism and grew from it. You can let go and grow too.