X-Box 360 #1: Sneak King

Not too long ago I was sick with the flu. I wasn't able to do much besides lay on the couch and complain to my equally sick wife about how awful I felt. During this time I had a really weird recurring dream. In this dream I was a guy dressed in a king costume delivering food to skinny construction workers dreaming of cheeseburgers. Their dead faces still haunt me but luckily it was just a dream. Wait, it's a real game you say? Are you sure, because that would be a really weird concept for a game. I'd better dust off the ol' 360 and make sure you're not just messing with me.

Sure enough Sneak King is a real game, and it is actually a fairly fun one if you can get past the pure commercialism of it. Back in 2006 Burger King released three games that you could buy with value meals. One is a racing game, one is "multi-genre action" and this one, the best of the bunch, is a stealth game. The whole concept is likely to turn people off, but for me it feels like a throwback to a simpler time in video game history when games were thought of as toys and marketed to kids. There wasn't the seriousness and over the top production value that there is today. Of course I have to remind myself that this game is now almost a decade old. This is an old game that makes me think of when I used to play even older games. How old am I? I probably need that cheeseburger now.

In this game you wander around delivering food to hungry skinny people. They are all skinny and beautiful. The trick is that you have to sneak up on them. If they see you they are suddenly not hungry anymore and you hang your head in shame. Also if you don't deliver the food in time they will pass out from shear hunger. Has this ever happened to you? And if so, did you get right back up after it happened and start chopping down trees again? It is an important question. The challenges are scattered throughout the levels, and they get harder as they go. I was actually a bit surprised by how difficult this game could get. It is almost as if the developers actually cared about making a decent game. The game is split up into five large levels. Sadly they decided to go with realism in level design so we don't get to deliver any food in space. Instead we get places like a street during the day and another street at night. Each level has 20 challenges, so this makes for a total of 100. That's not too bad for a game that came packaged with a whopper.

So is this game actually worth playing? I think it is, but I am really awful at stealth games. It was nice to have one that was actually in my skill level. I think it was interesting to take such a lighthearted approach to the genre. Are there any other stealth games that go for whimsey over throat slitting? I know that it is basically a commercial for burgers, but at least they don't try to hide it. They mostly tell it like it is. There are some hungry people and you give them some food. It's not like the Whoppers give you super powers. You don't eat chicken fries and suddenly turn into Super King. It is a game that plays pretty well and knows what it is. That's worth a playthrough in my book. I just hope it turns our all my hazy memories are actual gameplay and not fever dreams. Let me know if it was actually all in my head.

Playstation #1: Final Fantasy Tactics

There is something about my playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics that confuses me. There are actually a few things that confuse me about this game, but I will probably not dwell on those too much. The thing that I don't understand is how was I able to finish this game so fast? It seems like most people finish this game in the 40-50 hour range, but I got through it in a brisk 33 hours. I am not complaining or bragging about this. It just makes me wonder if I missed something. Was there something in the mechanics that I skipped over? I will say that I got very lucky with some of the bosses. The final boss I defeated on my first try with the last possible hit from a confused character who luckily attacked the right person. Still I did my share of leveling. It just confuses me a bit. Perhaps I was just hoping it would be longer.

The game is a tactical RPG in the purest form. The towns and overworld are stripped down in favor of fights and more fights. There are shops and taverns, but you don't get to move you character around in them. This always annoyed me a little. Every shopkeeper looks the same, and often they have the same equipment for sale as other nearby shopkeepers. Seems like they could've just let you push a button to go shopping if they didn't want you to explore the towns. The fights are slow paced but engaging. I loved the battles where I had to take out the whole enemy team, especially that moment where the tide turned and I finally felt like I was winning. I did hate how easy it was to put my character in the wrong spot and not be able to attack. So many times I would place my character in what looked like the right spot only to find out that I was one space away from attacking. By then it was too late to move my character back. I don't think this ever caused me to lose a fight though, and for the most part I had a great time battling my way across Ivalice.

This game also brings up some interesting observations about gaming spinoffs. I think at the time there were four main series Final Fantasy games released in America. We also had four games on Game Boy that had Final Fantasy in their titles. These games, however, were all parts of other series in Japan. The only spinoff that was made as a Final Fantasy game was Mystic Quest which was a simplified game made specifically for the US market. Tactics was the game where Square truly started to dip their feet in the franchise water and make different types of games using the FF title. There are many notable differences in tone between this game and the games in the main series. First of all it is very bloody. Just about every character that doesn't join your party ends up getting violently stabbed in the stomach with their blood splattering everywhere. Then the stabbed people sometimes get in one last stab before they die causing even more blood to splatter. It is a bit jarring for a series that never had much blood before. This game also seems more realistic than what the series is known for. The more sci-fi and supernatural elements are kept to a minimum, and the story mostly deals with nobles and priests having trouble knowing who to trust during a war. This is about as realistic as a Final Fantasy game gets, but it does still have magical stones that turn people into monsters. This could be seen as a metaphor about how power corrupts. I'm sorry, sometimes my English degree pops out when I don't mean for it to.

So was this game meant as a break in the regular series to give Square developers a chance to make a different kind of game, or a game that was slapped with a familiar title so that people would buy it? This is a difficult question to answer. It does have enough references to traditional Final Fantasy games to make it seem like a deliberate creative choice. There are chocobos and a Cid. You do also have an encounter with a certain flower girl which references one of the most famous scenes from FF7. I suppose I shouldn't worry about it with a game as fun as this one is. Even after one of the more lengthy and frustrating battles I felt like I wanted to keep going. One of my main themes on this blog is to not worry about series so much and just enjoy the games. Of course, I'm probably the only one thinking about this anyway. This is a great game that deserves to have the name Final Fantasy title attached to it. I'm glad I finally got around to playing through it after all these years.