Harumph

I sat down to play tonight grumpy.  The reasons for the grump are unimportant, but perhaps it will serve as some explanation for why I'm so down on the game today.

I set off across the bridge to the north with no real idea of where to go/what to do next.  No big deal; I'm good at wandering.  Wandered into a scary looking cave.  I probably don't want to be there.   Cool, more wandering.  Whoops, one guy dead and no sign of a city to revive him.  Oh dear, there goes another.  Good god I'm out of ways to heal and still don't know where I am.  Time to start running from fights (I don't generally do this because I see it as the game's way to make you level up so you hopefully don't ahve to grind later).  Just as a game over seemed inevitable (and somewhat welcome, honestly), I spied a new city.  In I go, pay exorbitant rates to revive my party and stay in the inn, answer a couple phone calls from family, and kill off nine pirates, no big deal.

At this point I'm ready to throw my husband through the window because the whole time he's been saying things like "not that way!"  "why don't you use a potion?"  and, most irritatingly, "can I show you the thing with the boat now?"  See, he liked the idea of this project so much, he started playing FFI, too. And because I was away at the conference all weekend, he's pretty much done with it (and cheating by using the interwebs, too!).  Usually I'm ok with a little advice or a nudge in the right direction, but this was ridiculous.  Also, I will admit that I'm a little hyper-competitive sometimes, and this is my project, and I'm not very good at video games, so if it weren't for the online-accountability factor, I'd probably have stopped by now all in a huff.

So, yes.  Another hour played.  Another city saved.  I'm going back and doing some more fighting to get money to buy good stuff before I leave this area.  I haven't decided if I'll go to the weird cave place next (which some old man asked me to save) or take the boat to the elf city some girl told me about.  I guess it depends on how accommodating I'm feeling.

Sorry for the rambly, grumpy post.  My brain is conference jelly, and my students have not been cooperating well recently, so I'm mentally not awesome at the moment.

An Apology, an Explanation, and a New Toy

Well I never thought I'd be apologizing this early into the project.  I did not play half an hour this weekend.  I'm terribly, terribly sorry.  I will tonight and there will be a lovely post to show for it.  In my other life I'm a German Studies grad student, and my department hosted a huge conference this weekend.  I was hosting a presenter, giving a paper, and ended up sleeping sixteen hours on Sunday because being around people that I have to be nice to wears me out (why yes, I am a charming person, why do you ask?).  That effectively ate up any time I hoped to have to game.  It was either play at 11PM, hate it, and be super tired today, or postpone for a day.  Clearly I chose the saner option.

In other news, my lovely husband procured a Nintendo DS for me over the weekend!  Final Fantasy III is apparently only available on the DS in the states, so he swapped some unused cables for an original DS, a copy of Brain Age 2, and Guitar hero for the XBox.  So that's cool.  I have a purple stylus and am super pumped about it.  Obviously I won't be playing FFIII for a while, but it's nice to know I have my ducks in a row.

Suggestions for other games I should get for the DS?  It seems silly to have a device just to play one game on...

Let's have a party!

I love changing the names of characters in games.  I know it can lead to confusion when you're looking things up online or discussing the game with other people, but I can't help it.  The good news is, Final Fantasy I doesn't name your characters for you at all!

My party is:
a warrior - Smash
a thief - Bobert
a white mage -  Blume
a black mage - S. Hat

Last night I played for roughly an hour (and admittedly I played slowly, talking to villagers, exploring the castle, etc.), and here's what happened.  The opening video was interesting.  Better graphics than I expected for a PS1 game (of course the in game graphics are precisely what I anticipated).  It sets up a pretty generic story line of "oh no evil has taken over the world, and you somehow are the only ones who can save it!"  Directly after that, it drops you into Cornelia, where the biggest problems seem to be the missing princess, Sarah, and the huge numbers of goblins lurking just outside the city walls.

My husband told me I probably wanted to be at least level 3 before I tried to save the princess, so I wandered through the woods, practicing using the fight engine.  I openly admit to playing on "easy" instead of the original difficulty.  This is supposed to be an exercise in discovering fun and exploring new worlds, not dying every other fight.  That said, when I did fight Garland (at level 3), it was almost laughably easy.

It's both interesting and frustrating how little direction you're given in this game.  It's up to you to accidentally bump into the old men in the inn who tell you about armor and magic, etc.  When Blume died, I bumped around for quite a while (and wasted a bit of money) trying to figure out how to revive her.  However, so far nothing has been terribly difficult to figure out, and the feeling of accomplishment when you do get something is pretty nice.  My biggest complaint to date is that MP is very limited and doesn't regenerate without resting.  What use are mages if they run out of magic all the time?

I'm curious and excited to play further.  I wonder if the plot will continue to be a chain of isolated missions, or if it will take on a more universal feel.  Next time, northward, across the new bridge!

A little history lesson (aka my background in gaming)

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not an avid gamer.  I was utterly enraptured by text-based adventure games on my dad's Apple II, played Crystal Quest compulsively on the Macintosh, then moved on to Chip's Challenge.  About that time, I started dancing competitively, and any free time I had been using for computer (and/or video games, but we never owned a console) was spent at the studio.

Over the years I played my share of Mario Kart and Soul Calibur, but I was never really that into it.  As video games became more difficult and gory, I was even more hesitant to get back into them.  Then I started dating gamers.  My high school boyfriend was a Call of Duty, Half-Life, Halo kind of guy who later got into WoW.  I spent a lot of time sitting around with my first college boyfriend during Everquest 2 LAN parties, and I ended up marrying a guy who's a level 75 Beastmaster on FFXI.

I'm still much more of a video game watcher than a video game player, but my husband convinced me to give Final Fantasy X a try.  I fell totally in love.  I got so attached to the characters, I got wrapped up in the story line, I wanted more!  Unfortunately, one of the things I loved about FFX was it's totally turn based fight engine, which few of the other Final Fantasies have.  After watching him play through a few of the other games, though, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and experience it for myself.

I love Final Fantasy games for their intricate story lines.  I appreciate the continuity between installments, yet each one re-imagines the familiar classes, spells, and items in its own way.  And because I'm more than a little anal-retentive, I must play them all in order.  Hopefully this experiment will help me rekindle my interest in video games and force me to get over some of my hesitancy to play anything faster paced than Myst.