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Nothing to lose your head over...
Tonight, we continue our crossover with Tooncast Beyond, discussing the DC Animated original… Wonder Woman! A total palette cleanser after last week’s bomb.
Topics:
-Crap!
-Girls naked in a pond, splashing each other playfully
-Neil takes a long time to process the film
-Steve Trevor fapping in the bushes
-Tom Wilson is an awesome stand-up comedian
Bonus content topics:
-PC gaming
-Sega CDX: The battery muncher!
-Saturn and Neptune
-Yugi Naka’s head is up Uranus
In regards to your video game talk after the main show, I’d like to comment on Final Fantasy VIII.
Final Fantasy VIII is easily the most polarizing game in the FF series. Some people love it to death, everyone else hates it with a passion. There is no in-between. I personally fall on the love it side of the fence (It’s my personal favorite. Not just my favorite FF, my favorite video game period), but I can completely understand why other people hate it. It certainly was not without it’s faults and even a lot of the things I loved about the game could reasonably be hated by someone with different tastes.
However, there are two very common complaints people make about it that I feel are unfair, and both of them came up here.
First, a lot of people complain about being forced to use the tedious “Draw” mechanic to get their spells. Fair enough, using “Draw” to stock up is incredibly boring. However, the game also has a very good “Refine” system that lets you turn the cards you win from the Triple Triad minigame into items you can refine into spells. Which is far and away a much better method of stocking up on spells. There are a handful of summons that you have to use “Draw” to acquire, but aside from that using the Draw command is 100% optional.
Second, I don’t think it’s fair to rag on Squall for being emo considering he becomes progressively less emo as the story progresses and stops being emo by the end of the game (the last scene shows the guy with a big smile on his face, after all). It was a character flaw that got worked out as the character progressed over the course of the story. Hating on Squall for being an emo dick is like hating on Ebenezer Scrooge for being a Christmas-hating dick.
That said, I don’t expect any of that to change your minds about hating the game and that was not my intention. As I already stated, I understand why other people hate the game and respect their opinions. I just think some of the reasons people give for hating it are sometimes unfair. It’s fine if you hate it, but hate it for the right reasons.
With all that out of the way, I do love the show. I’ve been listening for quite some time now, and this is the only time I’ve really disagreed with what you guys have to say (again, this is mostly due to the game in question’s polarizing nature). Thanks for all the work in keeping up one of my favorite podcasts.
Glad you liked the show. First off, however, Ebenezer Scrooge is human. Scrooge McDuck is a duck. Second off, FF8 didn’t offer anything that helped the FF format and several things that were detrimental to the series. Really, who starts an RPG to play a card game? I hate mini games that break format in the game, and leveling systems that require flow charts. FF 8 had both.
Fair enough, disliking mini games and complex systems is a perfectly valid reasons to not like game (again, changing your mind is not my goal. I’m no masochist). While I enjoyed Triple Triad, I agree that it sometimes messed up the flow of the story, especially if you were trying to get all the rare cards; which required you to play the mini game at the most ridiculous of times. As for the Junction system, that was the main thing I had in mind when I said people with different tastes could reasonably hate some of the things I loved. It was a very complex system (although ‘requires a flow chat’ is over exaggerating), and whether or not you enjoy such complexity is entirely a matter of opinion.
Although I must say I fail to see how Triple Triad and the Junction system could be seen as detrimental to the series as a whole. IX and X were the only other FFs to prominently featured mini games and nether of them effected game play anywhere near as much as Triple Triad (IX’s game had no effect at all, Blitzball only mattered for getting Wakka’s best weapon). And nothing else in Final Fantasy has come close to the level complexity of the Junction system. In fact, all of the games after VIII featured very simple systems- in some cases, arguably, TOO simple (i.e. XII).