#a minute before supposed rerelease lol

[julkasims]

The Sims 1 Easy Careers

Here's a mod I made for personal usage some time ago, rerelease news motivated me to finally finish it. Installation instructions included in the .txt file. Doesn't affect Fame career (there's only this).

There are four versions; two include replacement Art career, two with original Entertainment. You can choose how you want 'Slacker' career to be renamed. More details under the cut.

Note about different languages: This mod was build for USEnglish, but it should work with others as well. Things that won't work include: modifications to level titles (and numbers), descriptions and career names. Art career isn't localized, so choose one of two Entertainment versions. This note also applies to UKEnglish. See note about chance cards under the cut.

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READ MORE ABOUT FEATURES BELOW

Less drastic needs/motives drain

Removed friendship requirements

Tweaked skill requirements

Small changes and fixes to level titles and descriptions. Numbered level titles (similar to my Numbered Levels mod for TS2)

Some careers renamed to make it more consistent (similar to my More Consistent Titles mod for TS2). Two versions; Slacker career renamed to "Freelance" or "Slackerism"

Optional replacement for Entertainment career: Art career (because Fame career makes it look obsolete). Icons are from TS2, titles and descriptions from many different TS2 (and 3?) ports

Chance cards that promote to different careers replaced with new, regular chance cards. New cards descriptions for USEnglish only - feature itself works for all languages, but outcomes won't make sense with card descriptions

"Standardized" salary and working hours. All sims now work from 8AM to 3PM, children now come home an hour later at 4PM. Each level now adds §100 to overall salary, because I was lazy with that one I wanted equality. Level 10 now pays only §1000, so this whole mod isn't too overpowered

[thebreakfastgenie]

ik i already said chianti was my favorite, but please talk abt writing emergency room!!!

thank you for indulging my obvious fishing you're a real one <3 I did not expect this to get this long I'm so sorry I'm gonna put it under a cut

The Emergency Room is the only one of my "renaissance" fics I spent a lot of time on or really... worked at. Chianti, The Apple, and Campfire all came easily and unexpectedly. Normally I think I do some of my best writing that way and I am pleased with the writing on all of those but I do think The Emergency Room benefitted from the amount of time and attention it got.

I started writing Emergency Room on Christmas. It might have been Christmas Eve or the day after but I'm pretty sure it was Christmas itself, because I was trying very hard to finish a new draft of a Christmas themed WIP six years in the making (I failed. I'll try again this year.) and this other thing kept wanting to be written instead. So I was like, fine. So technically Emergency Room predates Chianti, at least everything up through the waiting room scene because those were all written first and then edited only a little later. I was on a role and I was so excited to get to the scene with the doctor and then when I got there it became impossible to write. I still don't know why this happened, but it did, so I had to stop writing it for a while.

But I never really stopped because I was thinking about that scene all the time and working on phrases and sentences. The way I write, a lot of the process is invisible. I work out full sentences and sometimes paragraphs in my head and then I write them down. (Most of the first half of Campfire was written in my head while I was in the woods and I was so anxious I would forget it before I got to my phone to write it down.) I do make changes at this point, but it's rare for them to be significant. I basically use my WIPs as my daydream scenarios for any time I need something to think about. I also write in chronological order, so this scene I was stuck on became my mental backdrop for months. I really wasn't planning to pick it back up when I did, I was supposed to be working on a different WIP, but it happened.

The conversation with the doctor is one of my favorite parts, but the farthest I had gotten during these months of rumination was this part:

“I thought your name sounded familiar,” she sounded apologetic, almost embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I need to pick my metaphors more carefully.”

“Don’t be,” Josh shook his head. “You’re the first doctor I’ve seen in months that hasn’t opened with it. It’s... kind of nice.”

The next line, where she talks about the patient's role in surgery, was unplanned, but it ended up being pivotal to my understanding of this scene. The subtext of

“But there’s something else, something intangible, that comes from the patient. For all our scientific advancements, there’s still a lot we don’t understand about the body,” she paused, then added, “and the mind.”

is you lived because you wanted to live.

I actually worked out this subtext and I had a sentence that I thought sounded nice, but I didn't write it down because I knew I wasn't going to use it, and what I recall doesn't sound quite as nice, but it was basically "You were teetering on the brink of life and death. Dying had never been easier. If you wanted to die you would have done it then."

It's supposed to be a counterpoint to "He could have died happy," from the previous scene.

So, I hope someone picked up on that.

One of the things I knew about that scene all along is that when Josh tells the doctor what happened to his hand he's really telling Donna. Hopefully saying it to her shoes got that across adequately, lol. That moment was painful to write because I had already way, way committed to past tense but that one little line sounded so much better in present tense and there was nothing I could do about it. I still like the sound of:

"I broke a window," he tells Donna's shoes.

but there's nothing I can do about it!!! I'm not going to rerelease the Special Present Tense Edition although that sounds kinda fun, I have no desire to rewrite the rest of it in present tense.

Also I forgot about this when I was being annoying about wanting people to pick up on my favorite parts, but the thing about comparing the innards of the chair in the waiting room to organs is something I (surprise, surprise) thought of while looking at a cracked chair and I still adore the concept but I'm satisfied but not thrilled with the execution.

It's worth noting that even during the literal months I was stewing over the doctor scene, everything that comes after that was planned in excruciating detail. I even had specific phrases; the hug and

"I'll be right here when you get back." "Promise?" "I promise."

were one of the first scenes I thought of and anchored this fic the whole time I was writing it. That moment is the companion to

"I am very glad that you're alive." "Me too." "You are?"

in Fortune Cookie Wisdom.

Because that's the other thing about this fic. From the beginning, I was envisioning it as the night before Fortune Cookie Wisdom. This caused me a few minor wrinkles, like the space heater. I was writing along assuming it was already there, when I went back and checked and realized that I established that Donna was the one who put it in the bedroom, so I came up with a compromise. I also deliberately avoided saying what time it was throughout Emergency Room so we can all convince ourselves Josh got a few hours of sleep before already being awake at 7:30 AM in Fortune Cookie Wisdom.

But the biggest influence from Fortune Cookie Wisdom is the phone call in K-Mart. I had established that Donna got a last-minute flight home for Christmas and that Josh arranged it with Leo's help, and I knew I wanted the scene where he convinces her to go. But I had to figure out when and how he actually managed to pull it off and so the mysterious K-Mart phone call was born. I got a kick out of an AO3 comment that highlighted finding out who Josh was on the phone with because it meant that part actually worked.

And then there was the ending. At this point it was 2 AM, I had been agonizing over this fic nonstop for the last couple days and intermittently for months, and I wanted it to be done so I could post it. The ending was torture. I kept writing and deleting things. I kept staring at it trying to get the perfect last line, trying to convey the same general vibe as the end of Noël itself. I'm still not sure I didn't need one more sentence of buildup before putting the button on it, but everyone seemed to really like and respond to it, so I'm happy!

If you actually read this whole post congratulations we're friends now.

Also if you've read both I'd be very curious to hear how anyone thinks Emergency Room and Fortune Cookie Wisdom work together because I wrote them three years apart and the style is very different.

[lacquerware]

Hellblade's Language Problem

::WARNING: MANY HELLBLADE SPOILERS WITHIN::

I think I went into Hellblade with particularly well-balanced expectations. On the one hand, I had a vested interest in Ninja Theory’s success, having devoted several (rather grueling) years of my life to promoting their controversial last two titles, DmC Devil May Cry and its rerelease, DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition as a community manager at Capcom. In my view, Ninja Theory greatly exceeded Capcom's and my own expectations for DmC, but they walked away from the experience dripping with rotten tomatoes from irate fans who wouldn't have been happy with any reboot of their beloved series, no matter what it did. With Hellblade, I'd wanted to see Ninja Theory get the credit I knew they'd long deserved.

On the other hand, I was also quite disappointed when NT revealed Hellblade to be a more narrative-driven piece, and I was downright worried when they still hadn’t highlighted the combat system after three or four PR beats. They were selling this game on its fancy performance capture technology and its treatment of mental psychosis, not its Smokin’ Slick Style and Just Guard mechanics. I’m fine with narrative-driven games, but there are tons of them nowadays, and NT is essentially the only Western developer to have sipped from Capcom's forbidden font of combat wisdom. NT walked away from DmC with a world-class mastery of combat design, honed under the direct tutelage of Capcom’s own Hideaki Itsuno (DMC series director and veteran fighting game dev) and his team of designers. It seemed a shame to let that mastery go underutilized.  

I eventually concluded that Hellblade probably wouldn’t be the DmC-without-the-baggage follow-up I’d dreamed of, but it’d probably still excel on its own merits. In other words, I went in expecting a good game, but not expecting it to top DmC.

It pains me, then, to conclude that my experience with Hellblade was mostly just bad.

Early on in my time with Hellblade, I asked myself, “So is it ‘SEH-noo-ah’ or ‘SEN-yoo-ah’?” referring to the protagonist's name. Then one of the voices in Senua’s head called her “SEH-noo-ah.” A little later, one of the other characters calls her “SEN-yoo-ah.” Later still, Senua says her own name, pronouncing it "SEH-noo-ah." Much later, Senua’s own mother calls her “SEN-yoo-ah.” Is this inconsistent pronunciation a symptom of Senua's psychosis, or merely an oversight in the game’s voice direction? I don’t know, but I see it as symbolic of the overarching issue with Hellblade: it has a language problem.

When I say language, I’m talking about the visual, auditory, and tactile language that the game uses to guide its player. Ninja Theory took on a lofty challenge with Hellblade: to convey the experience of mental psychosis, using a video game. To be clear, psychosis is a severe mental disorder which presents the mind with vivid delusions—false sensory inputs. Video games, by definition, use sensory feedback—namely, graphics and sound—to communicate a consistent, predictable set of rules and parameters to a player. How do you simulate psychosis and make a functional game at the same time? How do you present meaningful feedback to the player while also inundating them with erroneous imagery and sound?

Ninja Theory actually found a variety of ways to do this. As they explain in the documentary included with the game, many sufferers of mental psychosis display a tendency to draw patterns and connections where none are apparent (to normoids). So essentially, they're ascribing their own rules and logic to the world. Arguably, this is what all game designers do anyway, so in that regard this premise might be surprisingly fertile ground. Indeed, we mostly see Senua’s hallucinations take recurring, systematic forms: glyphs which she must overlay with seemingly arbitrary sights in the environment; “portals” which, once passed through, reveal new avenues; and horrible humanoid demons, with whom Senua must do battle. Theoretically, these elements successfully convey Senua’s mental condition while still offering the player a “game” rather than just a series of crazy, unpredictable occurrences.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is a simple matter of execution; the game is technically flawed. Tutorial-less and HUD-less, it relies solely on subtle, in-world feedback to communicate its rules of engagement to the player, but then breaks those rules either through technical failure or conscious design choices. In a different game, I might have picked up on each bug or design issue much quicker, but because of the psychosis premise and the subtlety of the issues I faced, I found it abnormally difficult to distinguish between intended weirdness and simple video game flaws. In other words, the game isn’t just about being crazy—it is crazy.

Here are some examples:

-Early on, the game establishes that you can use the R2 button to “Focus” on certain objects in the environment to activate puzzles or audio logs. A little later, the game introduces a new type of "Focusable" object--an icon of a flame--but for some reason these objects don't respond to your Focus until you're much closer. The game betrays its established rule for how Focus works, without clearly reestablishing the new rule. I probably passed by that first flame icon five times, attempting to Focus each time but receiving no feedback. By the time I realized it was a distance issue, I’d wasted maybe thirty minutes searching for a way to progress.

-Focusing on each flame icon activates a sequence in which the environment is engulfed in an inferno, leaving you with mere seconds to run away before dying horribly. When I activated the first one, I instinctively started running in one direction, only to have the voices in Senua’s head started frantically crying, “No, not that way!” So I stopped and frantically searched for another path. Before I could find one, I died horribly. It seemed so unavoidable that for a moment I thought the death was scripted. When I realized it wasn’t and I respawned, I examined the surrounding area at my leisure and determined that, actually, there was no other path and I was running the right way. Was this a bug? Or was I now to understand that sometimes the voices in Senua’s head actively try to get her killed? I’ve since cleared the game and still don’t know….

-I encountered a bug which prevented one of the first puzzle-locked doors in the game from opening. It wasn’t totally clear that solving the puzzle was supposed to unlock that specific door, so I found myself wandering back and forth across the vast section of the map available to me at the time. Additionally, there were music cues which played upbeat, intense music within a specific radius (which didn’t even contain the door in question), and cut off abruptly the instant I stepped outside that radius. I scoured every inch again and again. After close to an hour of wandering and scouring, I googled it in exasperation and discovered it was simply a door bug. The music was just completely arbitrary. Unforgivable in a game that demands you take unexplainable sights and sounds at face value.

-One section of the game introduces a light/darkness mechanic. You must stand in the light at all times—either by carrying a torch or standing in designated illuminated areas—or you will die horribly within seconds. In one such instance, a fight sequence breaks out while you're carrying a torch. Senua subtly drops the torch on the ground as the fight begins, and a grueling battle ensues. When it ends, darkness floods your surroundings, and if you don’t think to retrieve the dropped torch, you die horribly within seconds. But what was illuminating us during the fight sequence, and why did it stop after I won? When the darkness came, my instinct was to run, which of course got me killed. I had to repeat the entire fight.

-The boss which follows the darkness segments has the ability to spew darkness (shoutout to DmC’s Hunter). Visually, this darkness looks just like the darkness which causes you to die horribly within seconds elsewhere, so the natural assumption is that you must scramble to find the light. This proved not to be true; rather, the darkness simply makes it dark, which sucks because it’s hard to see. Lol. 

-The glyph puzzles, which I felt the game leaned on way too much, were extremely finicky. I often found myself desperately trying to line up the overlay with its apparent environmental counterpart, only to be denied feedback. “Guess I’m barking up the wrong tree,” I’d say, and search elsewhere. Eventually I’d circle back and retry for lack of any better ideas, and finally I would land upon the precise footing that triggered the game’s acknowledgement of my solution. Because of this finicky detection, it frequently took me upwards of thirty minutes to execute a solution I’d figured out in five. These moments deeply hurt the game’s immersion—it’s hard to believe someone tormented by voices and haunted by hellspawn would spend this long lining up glyphs with such surgical precision. I felt neither crazy nor like a warrior; I felt like a child with a defective issue of Highlights Magazine. 

Weirdly, in other cases the game would give me credit just for glancing in the general direction of a solution I hadn’t actually noticed yet.

By the time the credits rolled, I’d experienced so many baffling inconsistencies in the game’s communication that the whole thing just felt like a misfire.

Now look--I’ve been known to both overthink things and not be very smart, so I don’t imagine everyone will have the experience I had. In fact, I googled “hellblade frustrating” just to see, and was shocked to find that all of the results were about how frustrating the combat was. I actually found the combat to be Hellblade’s saving grace—satisfying, consistent, and almost perfectly balanced thanks to a God Hand-style difficulty auto-balancing feature. The camera worked against me in a few situations, but most fights left me feeling like I’d beaten dire odds, and certainly made me sympathize more with Senua’s plight than the mundane action of lining up Viking runes with wooden scaffolding.

The moral of Hellblade’s tale seems to be that Senua won’t “cure” her psychosis, but that she can heal by learning to accept it as a part of who she is and coexisting with it. After finishing the game, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly have a  better time with Hellblade on a second playthrough. Those bugs and flaws would still be there, but I’d know about them and be able to anticipate them. There’s an obvious parallel here. I don’t think it’s intentional (though the idea of “bad design by design” does intrigue me), but I think there’s some poetry in the notion that we can apply Hellblade’s lessons to itself.

All that aside, I appreciate what Ninja Theory has done to advance the conversation on mental health and develop a template for their "AAA indie" model. Hats off.  

[matayu-sometimes-writes-stuff]

On Final Fantasy XIII

          I have to admit that I went into this game expecting to be disappointed. While I have intended for a while now to play through every non-MMO Final Fantasy game, at the time I started playing it I had only completed the original and FFII, and was around halfway through FFIII. The only reason I decided to play it now was availability; my brother had a copy, so I didn’t need to purchase it for myself.

           I hadn’t really heard much about the game other than “It’s bad�� and “It’s Final Hallway XIII lol”. And while there is certainly an argument to be made that FFXIII is objectively a bad game, and the “hallway” criticism (that most of the game’s areas are linear, with barely any deviation in route) is valid, I absolutely loved this game. I would not recommended it to anyone who isn’t determined to play it through, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later, but this is currently my favourite Final Fantasy game, beating out the original, II, III, and now IV (which I am at the final dungeon of as of this writing).

           I’ll address the criticisms first. Beginning with the “hallway” criticism. Yes, of the game’s 13 chapters, only the area in chapter 11 (which can be revisited during chapter 13) offers any sort of exploration. It’s also where the game’s version of side quests are introduced. Note that although it’s labeled as chapter 11, almost two thirds of the game take place in this open area. I understand that this isn’t worth ten chapters of linearity to some people, but I actually found the linearity of the game to be quite enjoyable. Some people make the argument that the linearity is necessary for story purposes, as our six protagonists are fugitives from their government, and don’t have the time to be running around looking for twenty bear asses with the army breathing down their necks. This is a valid defense, but I have a much simpler one.

           Of all the Final Fantasy games I’ve played, Final Fantasy XIII was the first and thus far only one where I didn’t need an internet walkthrough to figure out where the fuck I was supposed to fucking GO.

           Maybe it’s because I’ve only played NES and SNES-era Final Fantasy games for comparison, but FFXII was so much more enjoyable simply because I didn’t need to constantly be checking a mile-long GameFAQs walkthough every twenty minutes or so, searching for place names or proper nouns just for some hint of where I needed to be. Now, this changed when I started doing the aforementioned side quests, if only because there’s no indication on the in-game map where the questgivers are unless the quest is active, but until that point I had no need for cross-checking a walkthrough. Hopefully this will get better when I finally get through the 16-bit era, but until then the linearity that I’ve heard so many people complain about is one of Final Fantasy XIII’s biggest draws for me. The linearity made the game more fun.

           As mentioned earlier, the game only really opens up in chapter 11, which is where the majority of the game’s runtime is. This is because chapters 1 through 9, and most of 10, are the game’s tutorial.

           These segments are roughly 20 hours long.

           Final Fantasy XIII has a 20-hour-long tutorial. There’s really no way to spin that as a positive. The game uses that time to its advantage, introducing five of the six protagonists from the get-go and developing them in a way that I quite enjoyed, and will say more on later. The fact of the matter is, though, that 20 hours is a ridiculous time to spend teaching the player how to use your combat system. I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse that it does legitimately take 20 hours to master Final Fantasy XIII’s version of the Active Time Battle system.

           Again, full disclosure, I wound up loving the combat system in FFXIII. But I didn’t understand how it worked until around chapter five. To explain, you have a party of at most three characters. You control one character directly, and the other two are controlled by the game’s AI, which takes its cues from you. Each character has a combination of three of six possible roles. You create what the game calls “paradigms”, six sets of any three of the available roles that you can freely switch between during combat. This allows for a party in trouble to switch on the fly from offensive classes to (for example) a tank and two healers. Once you get a handle on it, it’s very intuitive. The problem is, of course, how long it takes to get a handle on it. Twenty hours is still ridiculous.

           Ultimately, a video game succeeds or fails on its gameplay. You can have the most gorgeous backgrounds, beautiful music, and memorable characters, but if the game is hard to play, all that falls by the wayside. Looking at you, Skyward Sword. But that’s a discussion for another time.

           I’m sure the twenty-hour long tutorial turned people off of FFXIII when it first came out. I do agree that it’s ridiculous, and it’s most of the reason why I wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone who wanted something just to pick up and play. My brother, who you’ll remember is the one who actually owns the copy I played, never actually finished the game, nor has any desire to. I likely would have put it down myself if I hadn’t resolved myself to playing it all the way through. I’m glad I did. But if you aren’t approaching it with that mindset, I wouldn’t expect you to enjoy it.

           Speaking of enjoying things, let’s move on to what I actually liked about this game, which is the story and characters. I don’t know how it stacks up against more contemporary Final Fantasy games, but I personally was glad to not be playing yet another Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The story is mostly driven by its characters.

           Claire “Lightning” Farron is the face of Final Fantasy XIII, and the only character I knew about heading in. What I knew, or rather had heard, was that her character was “Cloud Strife but as a woman.” I’ll be the first to admit that, since I haven’t played Final Fantasy VII yet, I don’t know how firsthand how true this assessment is. However, from what I’ve been able to gather from pop-cultural osmosis, this is almost completely untrue. Lightning was designed with “female Cloud” in mind, but for the most part this is where the similarities end.

           Lightning is essentially the single parent of her little sister Serah, and is overprotective of her to a fault.  This has caused an estrangement between the two of them, exacerbated by Lightning’s disapproval of Serah’s fiancé, who will be discussed when we get to him. When Serah is cursed by what are essentially minor gods in this setting with a task that will either transform her into a mindless monster if she fails or put her in stasis potentially forever if she succeeds, Lighting sets out on a quest to rescue her from her fate, to the extent of defying her own gods-given task, and heaven help anyone who gets in her way.

          One of the weaknesses of Final Fantasy XIII, in my opinion, is that the game’s engine doesn’t give its characters the most expressive of faces. Lightning is a very reserved person, but you are able to figure out how she’s feeling from careful consideration and inference based on what she says versus what she’s been through. This could be made much easier if the engine was capable of rendering microexpressions. I do kind of hope FFXIII will get a high-definition rerelease, if only so that this sort of thing could be added.

          Lightning’s arc in this game (it continues slightly in Final Fantasy XII-2, and completes in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII) involves her learning that even if Serah is getting married, it doesn’t mean she’s going to be alone in the world. She forges friendships that will last literal lifetimes with her fellow companions, one of whom is her future brother-in-law she despises so much.

          Time to talk about him. Snow Villiers is a dumbass. A moron. An idiot. An airhead.

          I love him so much.

          I didn’t always. I actually started out hating him just as much as Lightning did. Snow wants to be a hero. Sorry, make that a Hero™. He’s the leader of a citizen’s militia in his and the Farron sisters’ hometown, and he believes that a true hero never needs a plan, because of the laws of narrative causality or some such bullshit. Naturally his arc involves him realizing that that’s a really, REALLY stupid way to live your life. It’s actually better than I’m making it sound: he goes through a gradual realization that his philosophy is hindering others more than helping them, and goes through some low points before he learns how to temper his enthusiasm with careful planning and coordination. Part of this is coming to the conclusion that he can still be heroic, even if he (or anyone, really) can’t live up to the platonic ideal of heroism he has constructed for himself. I began by hating him, by the end of FFXIII I loved hating him, and by the end of the trilogy I actually genuinely grew to love him. But that’s a story for another time. Snow’s motivation is actually the same as Lightning’s: to rescue Serah Farron from her fate, regardless of who or what gets in the way.

          One of the people hurt by Snow’s general idiocy is another of our protagonists: a young boy of fourteen named Hope Estheim, whose mother volunteers to fight alongside Snow to defend her son. Her death isn’t COMPLETELY Snow’s fault, but both Snow and Hope act as if it is. It doesn’t help that she shares a name, Nora, with Snow’s militia. (No Obligations, Rules, or Authority. No, seriously.) Hope’s initial motivation is revenge against Snow. To the point of murder. Naturally this doesn’t play out, but Hope’s interactions with Lightning and Snow are a guiding factor in their own arcs, giving Lightning the familiar ground of a big-sister role as she teaches him how to survive on the run, and showing Snow that heroism is still possible even if you don’t match Snow’s ideal. (To elaborate, when given the opportunity to take revenge for his mother, Hope not only can’t go through with it, but shortly after that actually defends an unconscious Snow after the two survive a several-story fall.)

          Hope comes into his own after reuniting with his father, whom he was afraid would shun him both for not being able to save his mother, and for becoming one of the gods-cursed beings that the general public are being made to fear. Bartholomew Estheim not only reassures him that he would never feel that way about his own son, but gives Hope the confidence he needs to stand up and take action of his own accord, rather than reacting to what’s happening to him as he had been doing. Hope’s a good kid.

          To contrast, Sazh Katzroy is a good father. He’s the oldest member of the main cast, old enough to have a young son, Dajh. Dajh is cursed in a similar way to Serah, and Sazh’s journey is about trying to get him back from the government, who in a cruel twist are using the powers the curse gave him to hunt our protagonists. Sazh is effectively the team dad, and honestly his arc can be summed up with a single GIF of Marlin from Finding Nemo. “Have you seen my son?!”

          Kidding aside, what Sazh has to go through are probably the most realistically terrifying events of the game. He’s a single father whose preschool-aged son is not just missing, but has been taken from him. And like everyone else under the curse, Dajh is on a ticking clock to decide which fate worse than death awaits him. There’s actual, realistic fear there, and I did really care about seeing the two reunited.

          Sazh also got the chance to act as a surrogate father to Oerba Dia Vanille, the fifth and final character who’s introduced from the get-go. For initially unexplained reasons, she’s the only member of the main cast (that we’ve met) with an Australian accent. She’s bubbly, peppy, and dealing with a trainload of internalized guilt over events that happened 500 years before the game even began.

          Vanille, along with our sixth and later introduced really final party member, are the last survivors of a civilization that fought and lost a war against the floating colony the rest of the cast lives in 500 years ago. The two of them were cursed way back then, and entered stasis until the present day. Vanille is a gentle soul, and was horrified both at the number of innocent people she had killed way back when to complete her task, and at what her awakening had brought: both Serah and Dajh were cursed, by different gods, directly because of it. There’s actually a very touching scene shown as a flashback of Vanille meeting Serah a day or two before the events of the game proper, in which she essentially apologizes for what she’s done, and Serah forgives her despite not really understanding the extent of what Vanille was apologizing for. There’s also an even more powerful scene when Sazh finds out that what happened to Dajh was Vanille’s fault, after spending roughly a full day trying to keep the young woman alive. Sazh has a tough decision to make, but it ultimately results in Vanille realizing that she is worthy of forgiveness, which she can achieve by joining with the other characters to save the people she was tasked with destroying.

          The sixth and final party member is Oerba Yun Fang, introduced about a chapter or so after the rest as a “mysterious woman” before swooping in with an appropriately named renegade army faction (the Cavalry) to save the other characters from a tight spot. She also has an Australian accent, marking her and Vanille as native to the surface of the planet. (The difference is that Vanille’s VA is actually Australian. Fang’s is not.)

          Fang is in many ways a foil to Lightning. She has the same sort of big sister relationship to Vanille that Lightning has with Serah; although where Lightning is overprotective because she doesn’t want to lose her only family, Fang is overprotective because she and Vanille are literally the only members of their people left alive (to their and our knowledge), and they are actively being hunted down by a hostile nation. Fang’s motivation is to keep Vanille safe, at any cost, even her own humanity. There’s an often-quoted line: “I’ll tear down the sky if it’ll save her.” There are some people who view Fang and Vanille’s relationship as romantic, and while I understand where they’re coming from, I prefer the parity it gives the narrative if Fang and Vanille’s relationship is incredibly similar to that of Lightning and Serah’s. While Lightning learns to overcome her unfounded distrust of others, Fang is overcoming her very well founded distrust of others. Both women learn to open up to their companions; that they aren’t as alone in the world as they feel they have to be.

          I also really loved the ending of this game, so spoilers follow. The heroes win; what kind of Final Fantasy game would it be if the villain wins, eh? Though the floating colony does get dropped on the planet, our heroes were able to convince the army to evacuate the colony instead of fighting to the death, which means most of the civilians survived. Fang and Vanille, however, sacrificed themselves to stasis in crystal for an unknown amount of time to create a support pillar for the colony; it forms into the logo for the game, which I thought was a clever touch. Lightning, Snow, Sazh, and Hope are all rocketed to the surface of the planet, but survive via also being turned to crystal; they are freed from the stasis and the brands indicating them as cursed have mysteriously vanished. Out of the wreckage walks Serah and Dajh, also freed from the curse, to reunite with their families. Bartholomew Estheim is nowhere to be seen, but a codex entry in XIII-2 confirms that he survived and reunited with Hope after the fact. I would have liked for him to be there, but I understand that showing the reunion with Serah (and Dajh) was more important. It was a bit jarring hearing Leona Lewis in 2017, as I had forgotten she even existed, but apparently there was no way to translate the Japanese theme into English and have it still be lyrical AND make sense, so they substituted an English song with the same thematic elements. It’s a nice song, and it works. This was a good ending to a good story in a maybe-okay-at-best game.

          Beautiful music, lovely visuals, fantastic characters that play off each other, stacked up against a control system that takes almost a full day to learn, a slightly sluggish camera, and a linear, story-driven game world (which apparently counts as a bad thing for some reason). I love this game. I’ve heard very good things about VI, and everyone always gushes over VII and IX, but until I get to those, I have my favourite Final Fantasy, and it’s XIII.

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I saw:

 Star Wars- If you don’t know the story you won’t care. Why bother summerizing when you can rant!

Yep, I still call the first film “Star Wars” or “the original Star Wars”. Look, I’m old enough that as a little girl I saw it more than once in it’s original release back in 1977, and it was just called Star Wars then. It was called that for a long time. Wanna see how much history I had with Star Wars before the rebranding?

When I saw my first academy awards (or actually fell asleep a few minutes in...I was little!) hoping to see it win Best Picture. Halloween and me in a Princess Leia costume Mom made me and then R2D2 on my birthday cake. I saw The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi at their releases, each at least twice. My family had the 8mm cut down film version, then I worked my ass off one summer to buy the films at rental price,  then eventually upgrading to a VHS widescreen set. I’d seen the movies 100 times each before the 20th anniversary, and I know because I counted! The Star Wars Holiday Special (yes, it’s original airing), the fun animated Droids and Ewoks, the so bad I never wanted to see them again Ewok tv movies, tons of making of specials and guest appearances of people from the films. The entire run of the original Marvel comics. I fell asleep to the  music on 8track every night and then during the day I’d play my drums and cymbals to the vinyl soundtrack. (My parents were very understanding! LOL) I’d also listen  to the “Story of Star Wars”record (flip as the tractor beam pulls them in), that Meco disco album, and upgraded  the soundtracks, first to tape and then CD...more than once. I had lightsaber battles so feirce with my brother we had to get new ones to replace the smashed up old ones. My room had several posters and I wore Star Wars tee shirts.  I collected tons of action figures, dolls, plushes, model ships, blasters and the like, right up until the figures went on clearance post Jedi (just found an old package yesterday between books). Too much merchandise to count. I wore my Han Solo vest every day one year in high school, purchased through the fan club I’d been a member of since it started. I read every single book or magazine to do with the movie or spun off it I could find. And through all of it back then Star Wars was still the default title of the first film....

So, as you can tell, I had a long history of just knowing it as Star Wars. Childhood. Teen. Young adult. While the “A New Hope” subtitle was added to the crawl in one of the rereleases, it was just Star Wars when anyone talked about it. I can’t remember now exactly when the rebranding got aggressive, with the anniversary in 1997 or the release of the prequels, but for at least 20 years I only ever heard anyone call it Star Wars.  

When Lucasfilms started to try to make “A New Hope” a thing I kind of rolled my eyes. No one was confused by the film series for Planet of the Apes, The Thin Man or The Pink Panther sharing a name with their first films, so why bother? Now, I can get that after the subtitle got added to the opening crawl that it would make sense technically to make the titling of the films uniform. But I also knew it didn’t matter. It isn’t like it was a person asking you to use another name. The only people that cared were the more obsessive fans that liked to be smug about knowing the “real” title and George BLOODY Lucas. I rolled my eyes and doubted people would rewrite their memories just to make them happy. 

I was wrong.

And so here we are at a time where people mock you if you call it “Star Wars” insteas of “A New Hope” So why do I still defiantly cling to the original title? Because it’s part of the mutilation and rewriting Lucas started doing. I’d been bothered reading interviews when I was a girl where he would contradict himself on the stories behind the stories, going so far as to claim things were “always” intended that reading early drafts showed no mention of. But ok, I knew creation is a process and some people want everyone to think it’s actually just a miraculous whoosh springing out fully formed. And despite the fact I knew full well that other people worked on the films, in the case of Empire and Jedi other directors and writers, I still shrugged it off and gave him the ultimate credit for everything. He was flawed and human, with an ego under that mild exterior, some of what he said was total BS and maybe my brother was right after watching an interview when he said the god of the Star Wars universe had no one anymore to question him...but still I trusted Lucas.

I was wrong.

 Never mind the mind blowingly huge problems with the prequels, my disilusioning started right here, with the Special Editions. Most of the changes were pointless but some actually seemed to damage the films. Take my top three grumbles:

1) Tatoonie should NOT be a rosy pink! Before it was bright clear sunlight, unrelenting hot, parching and desolate, unforgiving...now it’s all pretty, colorful and warm. It reduces the sunbaked heat, but more important the dry barren sense of a colorless place Luke would ache to leave.

2) Han’s conversation with Jabba should not be in this film. I know it was filmed originally and cut for technical reasons, I’ve had a bootleg of it since my first convention, but loosing it was a good thing. Jabba should remain a shadowy unseen threat, someone that wants Han’s hide enough it looms over our scoundrel until the third film. The reveal of Jabba gains power in Jedi because you don’t know the extent of his powers but he’s supposed to be scary and we see him up in a position or authority over the room. Here Jabba looses power by not only being on the same level as Han and seeming smaller, but for crying out loud there is the gag of Han stepping on his tail while seeming completely unconcerned! And speaking of people being reduced...Boba Fett is this mysterious bounty hunter not just some damn henchman to Jabba. What part of mysterious don’t they get!

3) Mos Eisley does not need to me so cluttered up with CGI characters! This is a middle of nowhere planet with a scattered population and a climate many people wouldn’t enjoy. Sure it’s a spaceport but with buildings, many of which are at least partly underground as relief from the environment. The streets actually gain a sense of unease by being underpopulated, giving a sense that people (of whatever sort) could be watching from doorways. Like you could be attacked and no one would notice. But nope, now it’s bustling, so full of effects life that they actually wreck the look of shots by having gratitous critters and droids moving to block us seeing our characters.

Yes, I didn’t mention the Greedo thing. It doesn’t bother me as much as the rest, but you all know that if Lucas HAD wanted to film it that way originally it would have been just as easy as what we got.

Still, I wouldn’t be bothered at all if this was just an alternate version. Blade Runner, E.T. and others have given you a choice of which version to watch in DVD sets. I was sure both versions would stay easily available.

I was wrong. 

Lucas decided that whatever version was his current take should be the only one out there. The DVDs with the original (close enough) cuts long ago went out of print (and in my case the DVDs failed!) so if you want to see Star Wars not going to look at all like my first 100 times seeing it. 

And that’s my problem. Rejiggered versions have become the only version. If out of preference, curiosity or nostalgia you want to see something from before the monkeying around you have to look to illegal means. As far as Lucas is concerned he would like everyone to pretend any prior versions existed. History is rewritten and we aren’t supposed to grumble. All hail the genius of Lucas or some rot and forget anything you saw on screen and anything he said before. And it bugs me because I resent being told to forget

 Retitling the movie, not subtitle but what we are supposed to call it, is just a tiny part of the emperor’s dictates. And my refusal to use that name is symbollic. In fact this insignificant gesture is a bit like something....Now what’s the word?

Ah yes.

Rebellion.

LOL 

But not to worry. My generation will die off eventually. Those that grew up without special editions, prequels, and so forth will die out. In 100 years everyone will call it “A New Hope” and will not even realize anything was ever changed. But for now some of us still remember another Star Wars.......

One last note: I think the double whammy of the SEs and the prequels did something I thought impossible....I fell out of love with Star Wars. I rarely watch it since I only have the SE and when I do I spend some of the time grumpy at alterations I don’t like  and all of it a bit empty. It’s the only time in my life that I’d ever stopped loving anyone or anything. For me usually live cools but the warmth remains to quickly rekindle. When the Force Awakens came out I felt my affection return a bit to the franchise for the first time this century and I thought my love could be reborn. But tonight, rewatching Star Wars, I realized something has been permanently lost. It no longer hurts to watch but the heart has gone out of it for me........