The Stack

Final Fantasy V was released in 1992 in Japan, but didn’t get a North American release until 1999, when Final Fantasy VIII was already out. As such, Americans didn’t see it as a new release, or even as a nostalgia item. Its main audience may well have been completists like myself. Eventually the publishers would start pandering to completists even more, adding features to track what percentage of the treasures in the game you had collected and suchlike. (And really, without that 100% treasure-collection rate to aim for, very few of the treasure chests in the game are worth opening. Most of them yield things that you can buy from a shop with the proceeds from a single encounter.) Such things were included in the later remakes of the earlier games, but not in the version of FF5 that I’m playing.

So there are really two contexts for this game: Japan in 1992 and the West in 1999. In 1999, the big RPG titles in America were Baldur’s Gate and first wave of MMO’s, like Everquest and Asheron’s Call. Diablo was a couple of years old, and its influence was still strong: the emphasis in the RPGs of the day was on realtime action, with no hard separation between exploration and combat modes. Also, support for multiplayer play over the Internet was rapidly becoming a mandatory bullet point, even in games really not suited for it.

I haven’t played a lot of Japanese RPGs, but it seems to me that they were developing quite differently at that point. FF8 did a lot of experiments with gameplay (some of them unsuccessful), but still used essentially the same ATB system as FF5, modulo changing camera angles. Pokémon came out very close to this time, and has mechanics very similar to an early turn-based Final Fantasy. Pretty much the only thing separating FF5 from other Japanese RPGs circa 1999 was the SNESy graphics.

So it seems like FF5, at the time of its American release and Japanese re-release, would have seemed more retro in America than in Japan. Indeed, the trends I speak of in Western RPGs were already starting at the time of FF5‘s original release in 1992, the year that saw Ultima VII put combat and exploration in a unified realtime environment (which Dungeon Master did five years earlier).

But then, it kind of depends on how you define “RPG”. I noted before a bit in Metal Gear Solid 2 where the game refers to itself as “a kind of role-playing game”. I’ve seen the Zelda series classified as RPGs; if that counts, then they’ve been doing realtime integrated stuff since 1986, a year before Dungeon Master. I wouldn’t classify either of these things as an RPG — to me, the term basically means “imitates the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons“, which is to say, stats and experience points and levels and so forth, and everything determined by die rolls modified by these figures. Notably, my notion of “RPG” has nothing at all to do with playing a role. And to the Japanese, who speak an entirely different language — well, who can say?

Combat in Final Fantasy V is handled through a system called “Active Time Battle”, or ATB. Introduced in FF4, it’s somewhere between realtime and turn-based systems. It has a Wizardry-like abstractness, in that there’s no tactical movement on a battle grid or anything like that. The monsters and the party are displayed graphically (usually with the PC’s on the right side facing the monsters on the left, because that’s the direction that seems like forward to people who read Japanese), but this is basically just a more visually interesting way of presenting a list of creatures. That much was true of the FF combat interface before ATB. The distinctive part, the thing that makes it ATB, is the realtime bit, wherein each combatant has a timer that governs when they can take an action. Each player character’s timer is represented on-screen by a gauge that fills up at a rate governed by the character’s Speed rating. When it’s full, you get to select something from a small menu that pops up at the bottom of the screen, typically including the options “fight”, “item”, and, if relevant, “magic” (although the Job system adds complications to this). But while you’re making your selection, the clock is still ticking. If you’re not fast, the monsters can get in an attack while you’re making up your mind. (This is another reason why it can be good for your tanks to be berserk: that way the game doesn’t waste time asking you what they should do.)

The whole system is very strongly associated with Final Fantasy in my mind. Fight/Magic/Item is as emblematic of Final Fantasy combat as Name/Job/Bye is of Ultima conversations. And the only game I’ve ever seen that even tried to do something similar to ATB was Grandia 2, another Japanese console RPG, which places an ATB-like action timer (albeit with a different user interface) in a system with less abstraction and more running around the battlefield. Presumably the patent ¹Be sure to click on the “more” link where that page displays the diagrams. They’re really the best part. prevents a direct imitation, but given the popularity of the Final Fantasy games, you might expect more outfits to try to create similar gameplay.

But gameplay is not perceived as the Final Fantasy‘s strong point. Ask the fans what they like about the series, and they’ll talk about the stories, the characters, the worlds. It’s strange, then, that in FF5 I’m finding the gameplay (mastering the Jobs system) more engaging than the storyline (defeat the one-dimensional Bwa-ha-ha villain).

Let’s try something here. Let’s play a little game. As I said before, I’ll probably wrap up Final Fantasy V soon. I want to do Portal afterwards, but that shouldn’t take long. As I hinted, I’d like to give the readers of this blog the opportunity to choose what I play after that. I still don’t want to post the contents of the Stack just yet, though. Instead, I’d like to know what kind of game commentary you want in general. I’ll try to pick the best fit from the Stack, and also bear the results in mind in future choices.

First, let’s choose the genre. You can select more than one option in this one, and there’s a certain amount of overlap. I’ve listed them in order of how many there are on the Stack.
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Second, how old a game should I play?

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Do you want me to talk about something you’re likely to have heard of, or something likely to be new to you? (Note: None of the examples listed here are actually on the Stack.)

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Finally, what kind of soul do you have?

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There’s an item in Pokémon called “Full Heal”. You can buy it at several of the stores in the game. What would you guess it does? If you said “Restores all of a pokémon’s lost hit points”, then you think like me. You’re also wrong. That’s what “Max Potion” does. “Full Heal” is Pokémon‘s equivalent of the Final Fantasy “Esuna” spell: it removes all status effects (such as “poisoned” and “paralyzed”) from a single pokémon. And this made me realize something: I have a strong preference about the terminology for these things. Wounds are “healed”, status effects are “cured”. Doing it the other way around sounds wrong to me, even though the words are almost completely interchangeable in normal English usage.

Even in the context of games, my preferences aren’t completely industry-standard: consider the “Cure Light Wounds” family of spells in D&D, and all the games that have similarly-named spells in imitation. Are my terminological expectations completely groundless? I don’t think so; the various Pokémon FAQs and hint sheets I’ve been looking at tend to favor my usage, even if the game itself doesn’t. Still, this is something worth bearing in mind as I look at other games.

My pokédex ¹My in-game pokédex, that is, not the “pokédex” page on this site, which is just a list of my current pokémon inventory. currently lists 108 types as “owned”. This doesn’t mean I currently own them all, just that I’ve owned each of them at some point. Some have been traded away or evolved.

The 42 remaining ²Mew still doesn’t count. unowned types can be divided into four categories. First, there are those that I can only obtain by trading. There are 13 species like this (including one obtainable through NPC trade I haven’t been able to make yet), although 5 of them are evolved forms of other things I could trade for, so I could potentially obtain them all by trading with other players only 7 times. I have purchased a second GBA from a reader of this blog, who has my thanks and can take credit here if he wishes, so trading will be within the realm of possibility again once I have that in hand.

Second, there are those that I can catch, if I go to the right places. There are 9 species like this, including the elusive Kangaskhan and Tauros. The remaining types, I held off on catching because they’re evolved forms of things that I have, and a pokémon that has been evolved by hand is generally superior to one that’s caught in its evolved form.

Third, there are things that I can evolve from pokémon I have by using special stones on them. (The game does not specify how the stone is applied, and perhaps it’s better not to know.) There are 15 species like this, including the three evolutions of the Eevee, a unique pokémon. I’ve been putting off evolving the Eevee for flexibility in trading: I don’t want to turn it into a Flareon and then find out that someone else wants a Jolteon that I can no longer produce. I’ve been putting off evolving the rest of them because the evolved forms generally have limited opportunities for advancement: they have better stats than their unevolved forms, but they can’t learn all the attacks that their unevolved forms can. As long as there was a possibility that I’d keep using them, and thus levelling them up, it seemed a good idea to keep them unevolved. But I’ll probably abandon this by and by.

That means I currently have only 5 pokémon that I have any real reason to level up. The maximum party size is 6, so I could take all five of them out to the depths of the Unknown Dungeon at once, with Adrian in the lead. But in one case, I’m hesitant to evolve it, lest I repeat a mistake.

At the very start of the game, the player is given the choice between three pokémon: a Charmander, a Bulbasaur, or a Squirtle — basic fire, grass, and water types. This is the only point in the game where you have the opportunity to obtain any of these types. Assuming that all players want as complete a pokédex as they can get, the smart thing to do is for players to trade their initial choices with each other immediately, then level them up until they evolve and trade them again. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I did not do this. Evolution only goes one way. Consequently, my Squirtle (Godwin) is now in its final evolution, and an unfair trade for anyone with the Charmander and Bulbasaur I sorely need.

Later in the game, the player gets another similar choice between an Omanyte and a Kabuto, two fossilized pokémon that can be revived by the scientists on Cinnabar Island. As with the initial pokémon, both of these species can evolve through experience. If I evolve my Kabuto, what will I have that’s as valuable as an Omanyte?

Spending some time on a train, I realized that this was exactly the sort of situation that I’ve been saying that the Gameboy was designed for, and decided to take advantage of my semi-distracted state by pursuing the elusive Kangaskhan in its habitat, the Safari Zone. This is the most tedious and frustrating region of the game, and there are several pokémon that can be found nowhere else. I’m still missing two, the Kangaskhan and the even more elusive Tauros.

The thing that makes the Safari Zone so tedious and frustrating is the change in the rules. There’s no combat — presumably your pokéballs are confiscated at the entrance or something. Instead, you get to throw bait, rocks, and special safari pokéballs in an effort to capture the pokémon you encounter. No matter what you do, there’s a chance that it’ll run away — the Kangaskhan and Tauros are particularly skittish. Throwing bait tends to make pokémon stick around longer, but it’s no guarantee that they won’t immediately run away anyway. Throwing rocks allegedly weakens their resistance to the pokéballs, but there’s no way to gauge this. It all feels very random, with no sense of progress within an encounter.

Worse, there’s no sense of progress throughout encounters either. When you’re hunting for a specific pokémon, you tend to encounter a lot of other things first. That’s true anywhere in the game, but outside the Safari Zone, you can at least beat them up for XP. If you go into the Safari Zone and don’t come out with any new pokémon, you’ve made no progress in the game whatever.

To make things even worse, entering the Safari Zone costs a bundle of money, and you can only stay there so long before you have to pay another bundle of money. (You also get only so many safari balls per visit, but that’s not a serious limitation. I don’t think I’ve ever run out of balls.) At least you can save before entering so that you don’t actually have to pay for fruitless visits.

I suppose that the designers put in the Safari Zone to provide some variety, and at least it has more to do with the game than the teleporter mazes and the like that they used for variety elements elsewhere. But on the whole, I’m thinking that it’s not really part of the game I want to deal with much. I’m going to have to see if I can get someone to trade me a Kangaskhan and a Tauros.

Today is the first of January, 2008. I started this blog a year ago today. When I started, there were “just over 300” games on the Stack. Strangely, that’s still true. I removed 20 games from the Stack over the course of the year, but also purchased some new games (abiding by the terms of the Oath), not all of which I have played. Note that the point system of the Oath doesn’t necessarily shrink the stack very fast — indeed, when I buy games for $10 or less, it doesn’t shrink it at all. Purchasing an anthology can actually make the stack grow. Also, in the middle of the year, I moved from one apartment to another, and in the process of clearing out my possessions, found some discs that had escaped the initial count. Perhaps 2008 will see the Stack clearing faster — there were a couple of major interruptions in 2007, such as the aforementioned move, and I did tackle some pretty long games, such as GTA3. On the other hand, there can be interruptions anytime, and I have some pretty long games remaining (including one Elder Scrolls game), so who knows?

This blog has been the most complete record I’ve ever made of what I’ve been playing, but it’s not completely complete, as not everything I play is on the Stack. For example, I played quite a few fan-made DROD holds after completing The City Beneath. There’s a lot of really well-made DROD out there, but the best-designed ones tend to be the most difficult, probably because the people who care enough to put a lot of effort into design are the most experienced players. Other off-stack favorites of the year include Desktop Tower Defense, Trilby: The Art of Theft, Portal: The Flash Version, and Angband.

As for what’s next: I have a couple more days of Pokémon ahead of me before I head home, then I intend to finish up Final Fantasy V. After that, I have made a promise to play Portal. After that, I’m open to suggestions.

Years ago, when I was playing Pokémon for the first time, a friend of mine, another grown-up gamer, asked me if I thought that this game was a bad thing to give to children on the grounds that it promotes slavery. I’ve pointed out before how the practice of capturing pokémon is pretty abominable: you beat them up and lock them away, and in the process they become your friends.

It’s more of an issue in the cartoons, where pokémon seem to have human-like minds, and the relationship between Ash and Pikachu is indeed one of loyal friendship. In the game, pokémon are more like animals, and are treated no worse than many domesticated animals in real life, and better than some. (If there are any types of pokémon that are routinely slaughtered for their meat, the game makes no mention of it.) Still, the game anthropomorphizes them somewhat. Some are literally anthropomorphic — the Mr. Mime pokémon is basically human in appearance, and the psychic Kadabra is a caricature of Uri Geller, complete with spoon. There’s also a plot event concerning “the ghost of Cubone’s mother”, a pokémon murdered by Team Rocket. By calling it “murder”, the game implicitly grants Cubone’s mother human status.

Even so, I can’t agree that Pokémon can be blamed for introducing children to the idea of slavery, because the idea is already all around them. The model for the master/slave relationship is the parent/child relationship. Just look at the rhetoric used to justify slavery when it was legal: “It’s really for their benefit. They’re like children. They need a firm guiding hand.” Pokémon is at least far enough removed from reality, blatantly bizarre enough, that it’s hard to imagine taking an explicit “They’re like pokémon” seriously.