SNES #4: Final Fantasy 3

I am having so much trouble writing about this game. I've deleted and started over several times. I even had a high quality post, but somehow accidentally deleted it. Now that I'm writing this for the 50th time I'll try to do it right. One thing I've learned about gaming is that it's much easier to write about a bad game than it is a good one. Bad games are funny and insightful. If you ever want to learn about what makes a game great than go play some awful ones. With great games all you want to do is sit back and say "aw yeah, this is the good stuff." In fact, I think that's what I'm going to do.

I think this would be a good time to make some ridiculous comparisons. Of course everybody knows that FF3 is the greatest game ever made. It kicks Ocarina of Time's ass. It makes Super Metroid look like regular Metroid. It's as good as Duck Tales and Bionic Commando put together. FF7 has to bow down to it when they walk past each other in the hallway. It even makes Mario a bit nervous. Of course, the crazy thing about all these comparisons is that they are all true but one. Also, you either agree with me or you are wrong. Like a politician I have no middle ground on this issue.

So I played through this game again after about 10 years and I discovered that it is still the Citizen Kane of gaming. Playing it for even five minutes make me happy that I was born in the 80s. Screw you 1960s. All you had was The Beatles. Today I am much more acclimated to modern RPGs, so the slower story parts are much easier to sit through. When I was 9 and playing through this game I wanted to fight monsters and walk around town more. I found the first half to be a little too slow. I always hated going through the opera house back then, but now it only takes like five minutes. Why did that bother me so much? I must've been a jerk back then. That's the only explanation.

Of course the first half is great, but the game's true bread and butter is the remarkable second half. Every RPG before this one would've ended on the floating island in the World of Balance. However, once the world is torn asunder the bleak and dying World of Ruin opens up many new possibilities and freedoms. It's the most open ended RPG I've ever played that doesn't lose track of itself. There is truly only one thing on the agenda in the World of Ruin, and that is fighting Kefka in his fortress. Before that all you need to do is gather your companions, collect magicite, build up your character's abilities, gain levels, and do side quests. The best part about this is that it's mostly up to the player to decide what to do next. I remember finding it very liberating to do something in a different order than what the strategy guide told me. I didn't have much to rebel against back then. It seems like today's games have two templates. They either tell you exactly what to do and you move in a straight path to complete them, or they are completely open ended and have no ultimate goal. FF3 allowed you to explore and solve mysteries while making you feel like you were playing towards something. They sure don't make them like that anymore.

Heck, this is such an great game that even the flaws are engaging. I'm not sure that the game would be as good if we ever found out what was up with Siegfried or what happened to Bannon. Or how about the bugs and glitches? I fought the dragons legit this time, but as a kid I x-zoned like crazy. How about the one in the Veldt that when you sketch Gau you get like a million dirks? Love that one. These are all things that add color to the game and I'm truly glad they are there. I mean, if games didn't have bugs than what would people make all their youtube videos about? I just wish it didn't take me 15 years to find out the evade stat is meaningless.

So this is a game that has left an inedible impression on me. I know that I have been gushing in this review, and greatest game of all time is always a debatable topic. However, sometimes all a writer has is his hyperbole. What else is there to do when a game has been talked about so much? Of course, with this game hyperbole is quite easy. The sky's the limit.

Game Boy #2: Donkey Kong

I don't know if you remember this, but back in the mid 90s playing old games was not something that people would easily admit. When the SNES and Genesis were in their prime most people would get made fun of for still playing the old 8 bit Nintendo, and the Atari was just a strange old curiosity that everybody's uncle had hidden away in his closet.

Of course the kids of the mid 90s are now the adults of today, and there's no end to the amount of nostalgia they will take in. Because of this, practically every old game franchise has gotten a modern adaptation. Maybe modern day versions of Rygar or Toejam and Earl weren't really necessary, but we've got 'em. Prince of Persia got so popular during its modern day run that it even got made into a movie with Jake Gyllenhaal doing his best Persian guy. Trust me, you don't want to see his worst. There are even some modern day revivals that keep the classic style graphics. The mere thought of this would've made a 1994 kid throw up. It was in this climate that Nintendo released Donkey Kong on Game Boy.

Even over 15 years later I think that this is a very special and important game. I was one of the last kids in the world to give up on the NES. My parents didn't make us sell off our old systems like so many others did, so I had a hard time saying goodbye to the old games. I still thought they were great. At the same time I could see the world changing around me, and I thought that in the near future people wouldn't even know of games like Berzerk, Q Bert, and Donkey Kong. Thankfully Nintendo showed us that not only were the old games still fun, but they could be expanded into whole new concepts that worked great.

So the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong shares the same name, but it is only the same as the arcade classic for the first four levels. After this Mario has to pursue Donkey Kong over 9 large worlds. There are a total of 101 levels in this game which would've been impressive on the more powerful SNES let alone the puny Game Boy. This game is an action/puzzle game where in each level Mario has to find a key and unlock the door. Sometimes this is more about outrunning monsters and sometimes it is more about puzzle solving.It has many elements of the old DK games. Mario has hammers, dodges barrels, and collects Pauline's accessories for bonus points. He also has moves that make it feel more like a Mario game. It is a great mix of styles and genres.

I had this game for years before I actually beat it. The first time was when my brother got in a car accident and we had to drive to the hospital to be with him. I think he was happy that something productive came out of his accident. This time through I had less trouble overall, but I'm happy to report that it was still quite a challenge. I died plenty of times, but I always wanted to try the particular level one more time. It has a high replay value for an action game because there are so many levels that you're likely to forget a bunch of them.

So a few months after this game Nintendo released the highly successful Donkey Kong Country on the SNES. Suddenly Donkey Kong started appearing in all the Mario spin off games as well. Then, other obsolete characters started returning. Today the classics have a place in just about every gamer's heart, and they will likely never disappear. When this game came out, though, just admitting that you knew who Donkey Kong was could get you beat up on the playground. Everyone always wants to grow up as fast as possible and throw away everything from their pasts. DK's creator Shigeru Miyamoto has done many great things in his life, but I think that the greatest may be never letting us forget how much fun we had as kids.

NES #30: Zoda's Revenge: Star Tropics 2

So last time I was on here I was talking about the somewhat fun but ultimately lazy Rescue Rangers 2. In that post I was talking about how many of the late releases showed what the NES could do both in terms of graphics and gameplay. Well Zoda's revenge is the perfect example of this. Zoda's Revenge came out about a month after RR2, and it's one of the last three games Nintendo released for the NES. It's such a late release that they could've done a lousy job on it and nobody would have even noticed. Luckily they put a lot of time into it so that the NES could go out in style.

I feel slightly weird about the fact that this game came out right around my tenth birthday. The NES has always been such a part of my life that it's hard to believe that by the time I was 10 it was all over. They would start clearing out all the NES stock from stores, and rental places would get rid of them in favor of the 16 bits. This was something that I had a hard time dealing with way back in '94. Every kid has trouble dealing with change, and this is one that I just couldn't tolerate. I felt like my whole world was crumbling away. It caused me to be bitter at the SNES for years to come. That's probably why I have 260 NES games and about 30 SNES ones.

The commercials for this game did give me a little bit of hope however. It was advertised in the same commercial as the top loading NES. By then the price of the NES had dropped to 49.95 which just about any collector would be happy to pay today. If only we had known. The same commercial also advertised Mega Man 6, so I thought that the system was making a comeback. Little did I know that it was more of a last gasp.

Thankfully this was quite a last gasp. Zoda's Revenge is one of the best action RPGs that I've played on the NES. By this point most of the ambiguity and slow pacing that plagued earlier RPGs is gone. This game moves at a very quick, action packed pace. It has an entertaining story where Mikey is time traveling while looking for magic Tetris pieces, and it's able to unfold well while never slowing down the pace. This is something I wish modern games would be able to do. Also, unlike some games that will remain nameless, you get to go to Egypt and fight Sphinxes that shoot lasers out of their eyes.

They also tried to fix the problems from the first game. I appreciate them for trying, but some of the fixes are better than others. You get two weapons at a time in this one, and only one of them has strength based on your heart level. No matter how weak you are you will still have a good weapon to use. There also seem to be more opportunities to save your progress which is helpful in a game full of difficult dungeons. Most notably this game does away with all those green boxes. They are still there, but you can simply walk over them instead of jumping one space at a time. This is a welcome change, but it does make the jumping a little odd in this one. It was far too easy to jump to your death which was usually not a problem in the first game. You still move like you're walking on ice as well. At least they tried to fix the motion problem.

This game still has very difficult dungeons and bosses, but unlike the first game I never got overly frustrated. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the bosses on this one, but some of them were difficult. A few of them felt like mini bosses, but I didn't really mind that so much because they came after difficult dungeon stages. The final stage is set up Mega Man style where you fight many of the old bosses over again. Zoda isn't as difficult as he was the first time around, but he's got about 8 bosses in front of him so it all balances out.

This game really feels like it was made by a group of people that were going to miss the NES as much as I did. As a result they put much more into this game than was probably required and I do appreciate that. The Nintendo suffered a long, painful death where it had to watch its younger brother rise to power. I'm happy that even in its last moments there were still people out there that cared about it.