Final Fantasy XIII & A Better RPG

I've been playing a fair amount of Final Fantasy XIII since I fixed my blu-ray drive, and it has got me thinking about a couple of things:

1) People need to stop complaining about Final Fantasy.

Any time there is a new installment or even an announcement regarding the series, there's a collective moan from the gaming community that the series needs to take a break, or that Square Enix need to go back to making "good" Final Fantasy games.  This is ludicrous.

Neil Gaiman may have been talking about a game of thrones when he said: "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch," but this sentiment applies equally well to Square Enix and their Final Fantasy games.  Square Enix does not owe anyone a Final Fantasy game that lives up to their expectations of what the series should be. I think that Final Fantasy VI was the best one followed by IV and then Tactics, but I don't need them to make those games again the way that some people think it would be the best thing ever if they made VII again.  Did I like Yoshitaka Amano's character designs better than Tetsuya Nomura's? Of course I did, Nomura's designs are mostly terrible. Does whining like a spoiled baby about it on the internet solve anything? No.  Grant Morrison said it well in his design manifesto printed in the back of the New X-Men hardcover: "Longtime fans will read the book and bitch about it no matter what."  What he's saying here, is that fanboys are irrelevant.

Internet, you are ludicrous! Stop it!

Yes some of the criticisms that have been leveled at this game are accurate. It's incredibly linear. You don't interact directly with random NPCs the way you do in many JRPGs. It's extremely slow in introducing gameplay concepts.  All of those things are true, but you know what's also true? It looks great. The voice acting and cinematics are very well done. The combat system is very interesting. The story is actually kind of cool and not just crazy unintelligible JRPG nonsense.  This game has a lot of really cool stuff going on, which probably explains why it wound up with generally good review scores (metacritic of 83 on the PS3) and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.  That doesn't sound like a series that's in dire shape to me.

FF-XIII is a game about Kurt Cobain and two pink haired girls.

2) Final Fantasy, along with other video games, can help us make better pen and paper RPGs.

I've been playing a lot of pen & paper RPGs lately, mostly D&D 3.5 and also the occasional Rogue Trader when I can get my group together.  D&D 3.5 is a good game; it's a better game than 4.0 really.  However, it suffers from a lot of the same problems that 4.0 suffers from.  One of these problems is that hit points are a terrible abstraction of how wounded a character is.  In D&D, a character can be hacked apart by double handed swords with no ill effect until he drops below 0 hit points.  Really then, only that last hack of the great sword really does anything to change the dynamics of the game.  Rogue Trader solves some of this problem by giving characfters an extra 7 or 8 points of critical damage beyond 0 hit points where they suffer progressively worse and sometimes permanent injuries.  Still that doesn't solve the major problems that hit points cause for games.

Most of the time, the adventure will proceed until characters become sufficiently wounded and the risks of carrying on outweigh the rewards of going back to town and resupplying their healing items or regenerating whatever restorative abilities they might have. This puts DMs in a terrible (possibly impossible) spot where they have to carefully design adventures that will just exhuast the party's supply of abilities, otherwise they risk creating a narrative that makes no sense.  If the party only makes it through half of the bandit cave before having to turn back to town, do the rest of the bandits just sit around and wait for them to come back when half of their comrades have been slain? If they do - it's crazy. If they don't - all that carefully designed bandit cave has gone to waste and the DM must quickly come up with some convenient resolution to the adventure.

I will sleep until the party finds me, or maybe go to another cave. Whatever.

So, we have a situation where players are healing wounds (most of which don't matter anyway) at the expense of manageable games and stories that make sense.  In older Final Fantasy games I remember carrying around loads of cheap potions so that I could heal up between fights or save spots in dungeons, preserving my precious magic points for combat rather than healing.  Final Fantasy XIII does something to solve all of this by making hit points automatically regenerate between combats and not having any kind of magic points or limits on the number of times class abilities might be used.  On In a way, it's similar to the way health, magic and abilities regenerate in other modern games like Skyrim or even non-RPGs like Call of Duty.  This system is itself an abstraction.  After all it seems silly that you could get shot in a game like Gears of War and that ducking briefly behind a broken piece of chest-high masonry could somehow make that go away.  Still, it's what allows those games to maintain a sense of forward momentum and constant excitement. There must be some middle ground to be found for pen and paper RPGs. That's the game I want to play.

On the other side of this chest-high wall there are good ideas.

Maybe someone has made that game already and I don't know that it exists. A game where each encounter is a self contained challenge where the players don't have to worry about how many more times their wizards can cast fireball.  A game where being wounded is not a binary condition (that's the tricky part).  Let's find that game, and if it doesn't exist, let's make it.

I Just Blu Myself - Replacing My PS3 Slim BluRay Drive

Cocktail, semolina cake,tools: Check!

About a year ago I decided to purchase a blu-ray copy of Ghost in the Shell, my DVD copy having got lost somewhere or lent out and never returned.  I wound up buying Ghost in the Shell 2.0, which seemed to me a sad indication that the true sequel Ghost in the Shell: Innocence was being disowned by Manga entertainment or whoever puts those films out.  I was sad to see that they had chosen to make some alterations to the original film in this reissue, including but not limited to re-voicing the Puppet Master (scandalous!), but the disc contained the theatrical version of the movie so it was basically a two for one. The disc arrived, and upon placing it into my PS3 I discovered that it would not read.  Instead, I got a series of clicks and a sound like the disc drive wanted to throw up the disc before finally just quitting any and all attempts to read the movie. My PS3 still read games fine, so I just figured it was some random issue with this one disc, you know, as opposed to a problem that would require me to bust open my PS3.

Fast forward to a few months ago.  I had rented the terrible Captain America from the Redbox at Wegmans only to find that it too would not read in my PS3. Perhaps this issue was one that affected all blu-ray movies and not just Ghost in the Shell 2.0?  After putting the disc in many times, turning the PS3 on and off, and much cursing, the disc finally spun up properly and I was able to fall asleep during Captain America.  I had resigned myself to just not watching anymore blu-rays until I bought Final Fantasy XIII after listening to some lively discussion about the series on Giant Bombcast and decided that I needed to see what that game was all about. When that game didn't load, displaying the same routine that those blu-ray movies had, I realized I had a serious (not really) problem.  

Best $22 I ever spent!

A few days of research suggested that I had one of two problems: either my blu-ray laser was dirty, or it was failing and needed to be replaced.  I decided to crack open my ps3 to try and clean the laser first.  This was simple enough after ordering the required tools on Amazon.  Cleaning the laser did not solve my issue, though it did reveal the true nature of my problem.  My blu-ray laser was failing and would no longer read dual layered blu-rays, which it turns out includes most movies and some games, Final Fantasy XIII included.  I ordered a replacement blu-ray laser from some factory in Hong Kong the next day.  

Blu-ray drive removed.

Replacing the laser was a bit more harrowing than just cleaning the defective one had been. There were so many screws.... so many screws.  Also, removing the main board and spindle motor from the drive took a little more bending and forcefulness than I was comfortable with. When that final screw finally comes out of the mount that keeps the laser attached to the little drive that moves it back and forth, and everything just falls apart, one begins to wonder whether or not they've made a huge mistake by voiding the warranty, as well as the option of post warranty service by Sony, of a mostly functional PS3 to implement a fix that'll allow them to play a game they weren't even terribly excited to play in the first place.  

The guts of the blu-ray drive.

In the end, after some finagling, I did manage to get the new laser installed and I was able to boot up Final Fantasy XIII.  Even more surprising was the fact that it turns out that I did really want to play Final Fantasy XIII, but that I just didn't know it until after I spent a little time with the game. That's a story for next time, though. Lastly, it's my understanding that all PS3 slims use the same dual laser setup for the blu-ray drive, so if you run up against a similar problem I highly recommend purchasing a replacement laser (part# KES-450A), a torx t-8 sercurity driver, and a reasonably small phillips head screwdriver set.  You can save yourself a couple of hundred dollars not having to replace your out of warranty PS3.