Comics & RPGs

Final Fantasy IX was finally finished last night. Wow, that only took eight years…

I liked it, and enjoyed it, but not as much as other FF games in the series. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the series, called it his favorite in the series, and in some ways, it does feel like a nostalgia trip. The game, even by the RPG standards of the PS1 in 2000, feel very traditional, and the story runs the gamut of themes and character revelations that Sakaguchi had previously explored in almost every other FF game he’d ever made up until that point.

Where the game really lost me though was in the ending. After playing games like Konami’s criminally underrated Suikoden series, or the much darker–and much more intelligent–Shin Megami Tensei games of Atlus, the resolution of FFIX felt very artificial. Villains are cast away at the last minute to reveal new menaces, gigantic plot points that seem critical to the continued existence of the world are ignored, and completely implausible events (like surviving what amounts to apocalypse) have no explanation at all. On the the other hand, the game is easy to get into, the themes themselves of friendship and sacrifice can’t be criticized and it was fun. It just wasn’t as fun as other FF games or other RPGs by completely different companies that have come out in the last few years. Of the FF games I’ve played in the last several years, Final Fantasy X had a pretty good story and played solidly, coming off as a much worthier successor to the FF mantle than this. That’s not to say FFIX was bad game, but it covered almost no new ground, and when that happens, you’d better at least have a hell of a story to tell. FFIX didn’t.

On the comic front, now that Blogger is clearly working again, these are the goodies that were picked up. The first is volumes 1-3 of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. I read the first trade paperback back in Singapore and for some reason, it took me nearly two years to finally get my own copies. But I’m glad I did. The best way to describe this series is, in writer Kirkman’s own words, “a zombie movie that never ends.” Kirkman decided to do something decidedly crazy and tell the ENTIRE SAGA of one man’s attempts at survival in a world where the zombies have taken over. He starts with hoary cliche of waking up in a hospital from a coma with no awareness of what’s transpired, and eventually teams up with others, but aside from this archetypal beginning, he does what no movie or novel can attempt; he shows us the changes in his character as the weeks, then months, then years take their toll. A movie simply doesn’t have the duration to develop the character properly in that huge amount time, and a novel could do it, but without the horrifying visuals to accompany. Kirkman is already up to volume 8 in TPBs (with each volume representing six issues) and it just gets more and more painful, horrible and compelling to read. I’m REALLY getting into this one.

WE3 is another one of those bizarre, off-kilter gems for Grant Morrison. You really just never know whether the Morrison book you’re about to read is going to kick you in the intellectual groin, or make you feel uncomfortably emotional. WE3 struck me as the latter. Taking a fairly minimalist approach to dialog, Morrison tells the short tale of 3 cybernetically enhanced house-pets that have been engineered and trained to be lethal killing machines for the purpose of testing the viability of cyborg animal warriors. When they prove successful, they are, as prototypes, marked for disassembly. Of course, they don’t stand for it, and it’s hard to pin down what it is that’s so difficult to ignore about the plight of these animals. A dog, a cat and a rabbit with rudimentary communication skills, struggling to survive against the American military. It’s almost like Water Ship Down meets The Terminator. And it works brilliantly. It’s not a long story, but it manages to tell itself in an elegant way, and Morrison keeps the “realism” of the situation firmly at the fore. And of course, it really makes wonder who the animals are, the humans or these incredibly loyal, noble and hideously manipulated pets.

Seaguy on the other hand, is one of those intellectual groin kicks I was talking about. Bizarre, random, non-linear, and prone to driving you insane if you try to actually make sense of it, this is like a less directed version of other Morrison efforts such as The Filth or The Invisibles. The story, such as it is, centers on Seaguy, a man with no superpowers whatsoever, living in some creepy utopian version of our world where the heroes sacrificed themselves years ago to fight a final villain, and the world has been at peace ever since. His best friend is a floating, smoking, talking tuna that hates water, and his only goal in life is to become a hero so that he can gain the attention of an ample-figured amazonian warrior-ess sprouting a full, curly, Greek beard, known only as “she-beard.” There’s also a famous cartoon character and his massive theme-park empire known as “Mickey Eye,” a new kind of living artificial food source called “Xoo,” and don’t even get me started on the true origin of the moon.

It is bizarre. I like it. I don’t claim to understand it, but I like it.

And finally there’s this. But I can’t talk about it yet because I haven’t read it. Which I can’t do until the Wife is finished.