I AM WHO?

Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?

Reno. Apparently I am Reno. I have no idea who this character is. Should I be happy to have this comparison with me? I like the playful part but not sure about the cocky description. I would have said of myself – playful and shy maybe.

In case it’s not painfully obvious yet, I don’t play FF games. I am a long time PC gamer. One of my favorite types of games are the RPGs. I’ve been playing them on my computer as long as I’ve been able to. Now, this means that I’ve been playing western style RPG games. My first exposure to the Eastern style came shortly after I started working at a company making PS1 games, Singletrac. I had never had a game console up to that point.

(Tangent: well that is not strictly true – my computer gaming development went like this: Intellivision -> Apple IIc -> IBM PC so technically I have had a game console before this point).

Anyway, shortly after starting work at this company I found myself with several PS1 games and nothing to play them on – so I got myself a play station. Our games were pretty darn cool but they weren’t really my favorite genre and after the novelty of playing things that I had contributed to (although in a minor way – I am infrastructure not production but my name IS in the credits and that is totally wicked cool). I started looking around for something else to play on this system.

FF7 had come out fairly recently and according to the marketing onslaught and the scuttlebutt at work it was the big daddy RPG of the PS1. So one day I came home with it. I loaded the game up and started trying to play it. I thought the movie sequence at the beginning was pretty darn cool but then came this train ride. Holy heck – would this thing never end? Read click x, read click x, read click x, oh no panic run to another car, read click x, read click x, read click x, oh no panic and jump out of the train.

The game felt…..weird. I had a hard time identifying with the characters and it was clearly something I was watching not something I was being. I’m not sure if it was the culture differences that did that to me or just the style of game play. I never felt that I was the hero, ummmmmm Ash? Rokuku? Reno? Whatever. I never felt that I was the hero, what’s his name.

The other thing that bothered me was the stylized combat. I think I could have managed to swallow that after a while. But during this learning curve when I was struggling with the strangeness of the game and trying to decide if I wanted to go where the designers wanted me to go I ran into the weirdest thing of all. I was attacked by a house.

Apparently, somewhere along the line I had angered the house gods and they sent a sentient angry house to get me. It shoot bombs out of its chimney and bounced around cheerfully trying to kill me, the hero Toshiba, errrr whatever my name was.

I could no longer take it. I never even tried to finish that battle. I turned the game right off and have never played any FF game again.

I was watching my son play Paper Mario this weekend and reflecting on how similar the style of the game was – especially during the combats and do you know what? I don’t regret walking away from FF at all. I guess I’m just not cut out for eastern style RPGs. I’ll stick with something more serious like the Fallouts, and Baldurs Gates and heck even stupid ones with auto leveled creatures like Oblivion over the option of following Fuji, errr, whatever his name was around the planet Surreal.