Harry Potter and the Emblem of Fire

I'm not sure why turn-based strategy games so frequently lack a difficulty setting between "Harlem Globetrotters" and "battle of Stalingrad," but it's something I've come to accept from the genre, and Fire Emblem certainly follows suit. My dawning awareness of this fact is the main thing I remember about my first experience with the series: alternating between easy, which felt less like a strategy game than an unusually long and condescending tutorial, and normal, which felt like playing chess when you never learned how to play, and also you're drunk, and someone keeps punching you in the face. I was reading Lord of the Flies at the time, working on an article about Bully and school shooting narratives--thank goodness THOSE aren't topical anymore--at my sister-in-law's place. Life was better, then. It had regular soda, and cigarettes.

The Sacred Stones was the my entry point into the Fire Emblem series, and the last game I remember purchasing for the Game Boy Advance. I'd spent more than fifteen years with the Game Boy and its variants, before the DS came along and perfected game consoles, so I suppose it's fitting that my final purchase was so memorable, but I don't remember what prompted me to buy it. I only know that right as I was starting to "get" it, I lost the damn thing somewhere in transit, and found it astonishingly difficult to replace without going to rather alarming expense. Fortunately, after a year or so of searching, a DS remake was released--Shadow Dragon, a remake of the series' premiere that I had missed--about which I wrote a mediocre and poorly proofed entry here.

I wasn't great at Shadow Dragon, but I feel like I understood it: learning to love the characters who'd be cruelly taken away from you for the simplest of mistakes, and learning to discard the worthless little shits who filled out the roster so the ones you cared about could survive. It wasn't built for long-term play, and even the hidden levels, while technically making the game longer (and exposing your characters to additional risk), were useful primarily because there simply weren't enough enemies in the game to sufficiently level everyone up. You couldn't play Shadow Dragon as an ongoing, infinite process. Everyone would die.

Awakening, of course, offers a choice on that front. Sort of. Sure it offers you the option to have "dead" characters taken away from you, as has traditionally been the series' wont, but they aren't dead. They're "retired." Not in the cool way, like in Blade Runner: their role in the story, if there is one, is unaffected. It kind of takes the piss out of permadeath when you can see the dead milling about at the craft services table between levels.

Nonetheless, losing soldiers to imaginary-death is uniquely galling, since Awakening goes on for-fucking-ever. The number of battles you can get into is literally infinite, and Nintendo will happily sell you additional ones in the e-Shop.

I find I miss the limitations more than anything. The reclass function never made any fucking sense--turn your deadly swordsman into a shitty, awkward knight!--but at least its existence pointed to a fundamental scarcity, that you weren't going to get many chances for a given class of combatant, and you'd goddamn better learn to appreciate them. The weapons followed suit. Sure, you could find an anti-cavalry axe somewhere, but anti-cavalry lances were plentiful, and delineated the superiority of armor over cavalry. (Even cavalry bearing anti-armor swords came at you from a point of statistical weakness.) Cavalry units were particularly limited and valued; in Awakening, nearly every class has a mounted variant, even the nerds, and while reclassing is more limited, it's also a hell of a lot more useful, and allows your characters to be leveled up infinitely.

Where scarcity remains, it's met with surfeit. "Rare" weapons present themselves with surprising consistency, to the point that it becomes hard to keep track. Due to the crucial finitude of nearly all weaponry, inventory management has always been annoyingly complicated in Fire Emblem; there's something perfectly compelling, and eternally frustrating, about a game that would be improved by removing one of the series' oldest and most consistent features. Then again, I guess that's how we got to Casual mode in the first place.

Fire Emblem is dead. Long live Fire Emblem. Just maybe don't make it quite so monogamy-oriented next time. In Shadow Dragon's multiplayer mode, I had an unstoppable squad of low-tier fighters with amazing stats, and do you know why? Because they supported each other emotionally, goddammit. To the tune of 45% hit and evasion bonuses. Awakening restricts relationship bonuses to one at a time, and an S-rank requires all-out hetero banging to achieve, so good luck forging an epic relationship between Virion and Kellam. Sure, you can do it, but you'll always be thinking, "this is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if I could make these two fuck."

Which I guess is how it feels to be a shipper, huh?

A black fly in your chardonnay

I was called upon to remark, recently, that I have played and finished Final Fantasys I, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, and X-2. Some observations arise with which to be dealt:

• First, how does one pluralize the proper noun Final Fantasy? Final Fantasies seems wrong, since the "ies" isn't part of the title. Final Fantasies looks a bit better, but still loses the y in the process of pluralization. I dunno, kids. I don't have all the answers.
• At 20 to 50 hours apiece, my total time playing these games--even excluding possible replays or restarts--would come to between 140 and 350 hours, with a median time of 245 hours, or about ten days. To put that into perspective, that's enough time to watch the Tenth Doctor's death scene nearly three times.

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Suffice to say, my commitment to this series is not insubstantial. So why have I not played Lightning Returns, or its two weird prequels? How did I fall out of the series that defined Serious Gamerdom in the 16-bit era?

That would fall on Final Fantasy XII. I've probably put as many hours into FFXII as I have in more than one of the ones I've finished. Partially, this is because the influence of Final Fantasy Tactics encourages diversions and grinding to a degree that's extremely unusual for the fairly linear JRPG genre Final Fantasy epitomizes. Partially, it's because my life has been too chaotic for the sustained focus of a console JRPG for a while, and the complexity of the Tactics influences make it a difficult game to pick up in the middle.

But mostly, it's those damned licenses.

These fuckin' things.

FFXII gives the player a wide degree of latitude in terms of character design, and the characters' hardwired stat growth doesn't meaningfully bias them in any particular direction. On that basis, I let narrative be my guide, and built my team the way I interpreted them as having been written:

• Light armor, green magic, knives, crossbows, and ninjato for Vaan
• Magic armor, black magic, staves, rods, and measures for Penelo
• Heavy armor, spears, and axes for Basch
• Light armor, time magic, guns, bo, and bombs for Balthier
• Magic armor, arcane magic, bows, and katana for Fran
• Heavy armor, white magic, swords, and greatswords for Ashe
• with a bit of white magic for everybody, because a little goes a long way

There's a logic to these choices, and you can follow them on the license board. (Not the one I've posted, probably, but, you know. Try to stay with me here.) The weapon and armor choices seem to follow fairly straight lines, without a lot of wasted points. There's also some overlap in terms of weapon types: high damage with high damage, magic with magic, and high combo/critical with high-combo/critical.

Here's where it gets tricky. FFXII bears a strong influence from MMORPGs. It would be sensible to divide the characters into tanks, nukers/healers, and DPS, and the models described above fit that. Magic armor boosts max MP, so that's simple. Heavy armor, in addition to providing better raw defense stats, also boosts strength. Ok, that makes some sense, I suppose. Agility's usually more important for lightly armored high-damage classes, maybe light armor has a speed or critical bonus? No, light armor boosts HP.

1. If I may take a brief aside from this otherwise laser-focused post, I can see why having both HP and defense stats would make sense from a design perspective, but making them both variable by player action drives me mad, since they both do more or less the same thing. The differences--sometimes subtle, sometimes less so--can only be inferred by looking directly at the math. Fire Emblem, frustrating though it is on other issues, is admirably clear on how this works. X-Men Legends, a game with character growth that is elegant and delightful in every other way, is infuriatingly vague. The math gets a bit more complicated in FFXII, and since light armor and heavy armor provide defensive boosts through different stats, it's not particularly intuitive to weigh them against each other.
2. Light weapons benefit greatly from combos and criticals, which are enhanced as a character's HP % drops, which the HP bonuses influence...not at all, really? I suppose it makes the margin for a given enhancement slightly wider, but not terribly noticeably.
3. In practice, my fast characters never feel as effective as the rest of the team. I've tried putting heavy armor on them, in defiance of my beloved narrative tropes, and while I do appreciate the extra offensive capabilities, I quickly find myself missing the defensive properties of the lighter armor. This is weird.

It probably wouldn't meaningfully affect my play experience if I hadn't noticed it, but dammit, I can't stop noticing it, and every move on the lower half of the license board quickly becomes an exercise in self-doubt. Since self-doubt is roughly the opposite of why I play RPGs, I usually end up taking a break, and the rest is history.

The horrible, horrible irony of it--the rain on my wedding day, so to speak--is that writing this brought back a torrent of memories, and now part of my wants to boot the PS and start this monster of a game again.

The X-Men Theory of Human Relations

It's hard to imagine how homo sapiens managed to do “myth” without the benefit of cross-media promotional tie-ins, but they managed. We have our modern myths, we are told—big, sprawling projects by fat, bearded white dudes. We have films people want to live in, and worlds people want to play in, and behave like jerks. Myth is four letters long and a mile wide, and it's one of the things we're pretty great at. Give yourselves a hand, people.

My metaphysical ideas are confusing, but if I were to settle on a particular myth or mythic structure for our present day—not so much a religious pantheon as a collection of symbols we all agreed to behave as if our anscestors used as a religious pantheon—it would be the X-Men. Not so much for the inherent cleverness of the concept, or the writers who've ably employed it over the decades, but because it's flexible, renewable, and strong. In the sense that, with a cast that big, it has to hold an awful lot of fuckin' weight.

In the most famous of the various stories that circle through the various media of the franchise, such as the Mutant Registration Act, the Weapon Plus project, the Cure, the rise of the sentinels, etc., there's invariably one particular villain who anchors the action, and a bigger, vaguer villain painting the scenery. The government, the army, men in black. Frightened teenagers all over the world, many of them with hilariously silly names and fashion choices, cowering in fear that some unstoppable entity is going to take them out of their homes and away from their families, to be put in a cage where...

...where what, exactly? What exactly is the concern with any large-scale investigation into these loveable superbeings? Why does Sanctuary need to operate in secret? Why do the diamond-realdoll vampires of Twilight give a shit if people find out they exist? Why all the hiding?

Sure, people want to kill them. But that's not the fear. Plenty of our supernatural heroes face the prospect of violent death every day; so do plenty of people here in the really real world, and the supernatural heroes are a hell of a lot better equipped to deal with that fact. Cassandra Nova's inspirations aside, the sentinels aren't interested in genocide. There's no profit in it. Whereas there's quite a bit of profit in a prison full of properly licensed, corporate-owned mutants? Now that's something special. Not in the sense of being interesting to read about, as it ends the story. But there's money to be made.

The common element of all of our fabled supernatural warriors--the reason we like reading about them, dress up as them for Halloween, etc.--is that they're unique and useful. They can do things we wish we could do. Which means they can do things we wish we could have done for us. Often, there are things we'd like to do to/with them. Many of the people in their diegetic worlds feel the same way. People want them. And when people want something, there's an awful lot of money to be made in procuring it for them.

At risk of going in way over my head, things aren't valuable because of inherent qualities, or because they're useful, or because they're rare. Market theory holds that things are valuable because someone's willing to pay for them, i.e. make a sacrifice proportional to the assigned value. I need not have an opinion on the theory, which is fortunate, because I am untrained and it wouldn't matter anyway. For my purposes here, however, I will amend it to say that what ultimately makes things valuable is want. People sacrifice for things they want, and you can make a very nice helping to assuage that want.

There was another plagiarism scandal today, so I'm going to have to link to the generally execrable article I'm going to be quoting:

Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don't dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you. [...]

All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this -- historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?
It's all about you. All of it. All of civilization.

How one gets from the first paragraph to the second without noticing a rather disturbing analogy, I can only presume. Suffice to say, the car isn't about women. It wasn't designed to impress women. It was designed to be sold at a profit. In this case, sold to men, who tend to have more money. And who tend to want women.


The second paragraph demonstrates a purer form. Property comes from a prior agreement to honor the concept of property with violence. In its absence, it amounts to whatever you can seize, whatever you can hold. Whatever you can carry off. The word in Latin is raptus. Historically, the opportunity for mass rape is part of how mercenaries are paid. The prospect of owning a woman motivates car-buying and mercenary warfare, in these examples, but neither of these things is about women, unless you've already accepted the idea that the defining characteristic of women is that men want them.


It applies for basically any group that can be seized, carried off, exploited, enslaved, or generally exploited by another, but X-Men seems to dramatize it in a way we're all comfortable with, so that's the label I go with. The X-Men theory of human relations is this: if your value as a thing that is wanted exceeds your value as a thing that acts--if what you are is seen as more important than what you can think or do--you're fucked.