Book Review- The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study Of Puella Magi Madoka Magica

(And here it is, the very special thing! Many moons ago, a very nice person suggested that I do a collaboration with a fellow called Froborr. What became of that was some tandem waffling about Mega Pony, a My Little Pony/Mega Man fangame. It turned out very well, and you can read the second half here.  The first part of it is hosted on his blogspace, and you can hit that up as well. Anyway, while I must confess that I'm indifferent on the subject of ponies, what really grabbed my interest when it came to Froborr was his Very Soil series, which was a critical look at a favorite anime of mine; Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I love that show to death and I was super stoked to read about it. Which I did. Now Froborr, otherwise known as Jed Blue, has put out an entire book of his insights into the inner workings of Madoka Magica, and what follows is me talking about it for a bit. Thank you very much for the review copy, sir, and for anyone else interested in his work, check out his new and spiffy-looking webspace. He's currently just started a project that's going to look at the DC animated universe. All of it. It's good enough for me to be giving him two bucks a month for it on Patreon.

...If that ain't enough full disclosure for all y'all, I don't know what is. On with the show.)

If there ever were a poster child for brevity, Puella Magi Madoka Magica might be it. Twelve 22-minute episodes and three feature films, and yet the entire thing is packed with everything a growing anime fan could want out of a show. Colorful and imaginative imagery. Characters you give a crap about. Things spiraling out of control down into a deep and dark pit of despair. I watched this show in 2012 or so, and deliberately limited myself to only one episode a night. It's fantastic, and it's fantastic in ways I find difficult to describe with just broad strokes. More than that, however, is the fact that deeper meanings glimmer beneath the surface of the Madoka pond. There are madmen thematic divers who delve into these depths, searching for the lost treasure of the postmodern armadas. Fresh from his bathysphere right now is Jed Blue, and this is the gold he unearthed within the sunken ship. This is The Very Soil.

On paper (which is one of the ways you can get it!), The Very Soil is an unauthorized critical study of Madoka Magica, originally posted over on Jed Blue's blogspace. As Madoka Magica is in my top 5 of Japanese cartoons, I readily absorbed every word, and delightfully did so again for this new version. Beyond the analysis of the twelve main episodes, there's also several chapters that poke and prod in various directions at the third feature film, Rebellion. (The previous two being more recaps of the television series.) In addition to that, the book's got a handful of extra essays, most of them dealing with spinoff manga. There is an extra chapter about Rebellion, and more analysis of that is always good as it's a very... challenging film, I found.

What gets analyzed here, precisely? Anything and everything. Madoka Magica is already a very rich series, and the book dives right in, unveiling every hidden theme it can. Things you might not have thought of, but get explored in great detail. The Buddhist nature of cycles, and how the show's time travelling character deals with this. Faustian analysis, and issues of bodily consent involving the magical girls and Kyubey. The show's third episode and third-to-last episode being mirrors of each other, which fundamentally change the show by way of miniature narrative collapse. Themes of putrefaction and decay. At its heart, it is a book that enriches the experience of Madoka Magica, and makes one think about it in new and exciting ways. If nothing else, it helped me to make sense of what the hell might be happening in Rebellion.

This is the treasure pulled from the depths; the critical analysis gold. If you are at all fond of Madoka Magica, then you definitely should give this book the old read-through. It is a mighty fine companion piece that delves deep into what makes this masterpiece of a Japanese cartoon tick, and then delves deeper than that into things one might not even consider. Most of all though, it's a book about people. Because, as Jed Blue reminds us in the introduction, all stories are about people. If you have never seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica, then you really had ought to view it at some point. It's fantastic and well worth your time. If you have seen Madoka Magica, then you'd find this book to be well worth your time also.

(The Very Soil can be purchased from Smashwords in e-book form here, or from Createspace in paperback here. 

Oops.

Yeah. I neglected this for over three months. Oops. My sincere apologies to anyone who was really stoked about esoteric views based on 15 minute experiences with old Nintendo games. I'm not going to say that the Nintendo Project Resumed is dead, but I need to regain interest in it. Really, I should have posted an official thing like two months ago, but here we are.

There will be a post in the next day or two about something really cool I experienced, but until then here are a few things I wrote and took part in in the last little while:

-The absolutely massive finale to Phil Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum. I wrote a brief interlude for it; CTRL+F "Cynthia" to find it.

-The best games I played in 2014. A lot of interesting waffling about a bunch of rad experiences.

-"A Brief Treatise On The Rules Of Dungeon Crawling", in which I wax nostalgic about old RPGs before praising the wild and wondrous world of 3DS dungeon crawlers by Atlus.

-The Let's Play Summer School II, a Let's Play competition I technically won. I played some of my favorite games, got nostalgic, and bitched about the AVGN Adventures one last time.

-Sockscast, Episode 14. A three-hour podcast with my good pals Polly, Rhete, and Crono Maniac. I say naughty words that get bleeped and talk about video games I played.

-A thing I literally just wrote about Mega Man X5.

See you in a day or two for the special thing.

The End Of The 2014 Mess

This will be quick. Oops, I neglected this again. There's only 15 minutes until 2014 is done here, so I have to hurry. I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year and also post this nice list I did of games I played in 2014. Some of them I've written about here in greater detail. Here you go.

It's been a wild year. Book writing and general disillusionment with video games led to some long absences, and I apologize for that. Video gaming really seemed like the absolute worst cesspool this fall. You know why. Still, let's have hope. I give you this hope via a stupid dumb anime game I played. Observe.

This is Chiaki Nanami. She's a character from Dangan Ronpa 2, which I gave the Game Of The Year nod to. The conceit of the Dangan Ronpa games involve high school students of a prestigious school called Hope's Peak, who are the best of the best at what they do; "Ultimates". So you have stuff like Ultimate Musician, Ultimate Gymnast, Ultimate Mechanic, as well as more oddball ones. Chiaki Nanami is the Ultimate Gamer. I played this game at the peak of the putrid "scandal" that made everyone hate everything, and it was Chiaki here that gave me hope. The mere idea that, in the Dangan Ronpa world, that the best of the best, the Ultimate Video Game Player was a lady? That kept me going. Not to mention that her English VA is also the English VA for Madoka Kaname from Madoka Magica... a direct inspiration for the concept of the Valya on this blog.

So what I'm saying is, Dangan Ronpa 2 is the most important game I've played in respect to this blog. We can all believe in Chiaki. We can all keep hope. Let this narcoleptic anime girl guide us to the golden age of the future. I'm going to go watch the New Year's Eve countdown. See you on the other side.

Big Money, Big Prizes, I Love It! (Nintendo Campus Challenge, Nintendo World Championships)

We've jumped ahead just slightly now. It's 1990. Nintendo Power has become a success, chugging along into the brave new 90's. The Wizard survived Video Armageddon, but its hype fled the silver screen like a demon, spreading like wildfire. By now it had been fully unleashed in cartridge form, and Mario mania had gripped us all. This is not that story. This is the story of the brave maniacs who decided that it wasn't enough for Video Armageddon's harbinger to become reality. By God, they were going to harness its full power and bring it forth into our realm. Ancient tomes were consulted, seals were drawn, prayers were chanted and planted among us. In a summoning ritual involving blood and microchips, it came to us. Video Armageddon exploded across America in a wave, and we Disciples Of The Grey Box still feel the effects of the summons today. In 1990, they called it... the Nintendo World Championships.

I hear they were very good. I was also four years old, and on another island entirely while they occured. This, more than anything, is a reconstruction lost to time. The Nintendo World Championships are dead and gone along with 1990, just like all those missing Doctor Who tapes that got burned. They were an event, but what really happened? The real answer is something mundane like "a bunch of kids who were good at Nintendo games competed with one another", but when have we let that stop us? No, this was a clash of titans. Hard Game Beater against Hard Game Beater, the strong surviving and the weak faltering. Here, in this gladiator arena of the Gods, the barriers between America and Japan were weakened. Things could bleed over and be called "sneak previews". Video Armageddon had been summoned to darken the skies. Anything could happen in this arena of divinity. The competition continued to rage, gods and devils battling alike with their controllers. Destruction rained from the heavens as heavenly light radiated from square grey boxes, the alchemy at hand here beyond the grasp of mere mortals. The heavens shook and trembled. The power of Valya, even here, surged through the competition... until finally it was Thor, God of Thunder, who surmised victory. He had survived Lady Capitalism's challenge, and ventured into the heart of the Plumber's rip through time to collect 50 golden coins. He had taken Endless Adventure's unorthodox driving challenge, and steered himself across the coast at 250 miles per hour. He did these tasks quickly for the true prize, Captain Communism's test of reflex and quadratic thinking... for this was where the points really mattered. With mastery of them all, Thor was crowned Supreme Champion of Video Ragnarok. All hail Thor, our alchemical Destructor.

As for the rest? Lady Capitalism took pity on them, and her sadness brought her to tears. 116 of them fell like rain into our realm, with the first 26 being the most powerful among them. This is the continued legacy of the Nintendo World Championships; the rarity of its cartridges. Most can simply be a teenage ROM fiend, or move up to a reproduction cartridge. For the true madmen, there is shelling out thousands of dollars for one of Capitalism's Tears, an actual divine portion of Video Armageddon used in the battle of the gods. I played the games tonight. To talk about them here is to give away the future, but suffice it to say that my score was nowhere near that of mighty Thor's. The Angry Video Game Nerd had a run-in with the thing as well. Tempted by its greed at first, he plays in competition for the Golden Tear of Lady Capitalism, only to realize that it consists of games he already owns. He rejects the siren song of the Big Time, and... Well, I won't give away the end of that. There was also a Nintendo Campus Challenge in 1991. College students taking breaks from finals to partake in their own little Video Armageddon. Unlike the World Championships, this file is not available for a teenage ROM fiend. The reconstruction cannot happen. It lacks the popularity that the first competition had, and this would be the last on the NES. 1992's Campus Challenge was in 16 bits, which are a place we cannot go.

What we can do is play football or something.

California (The Wizard)

Still not ready to talk about the Nintendo games yet. The entire point of the Nintendo Project is looking back, and I find myself looking back to December of 2013. There, I postulated that the end of the NES was a thing of beauty. To be fair, this was mostly brought on by me being mushy about my friends getting engaged, but I'm going to stick with it. 1994 and 2012 were both about Nintendo partying in the face of oblivion, and doing it with a vibrant celebration of the life that the NES and Nintendo Power had led. Today we go to 1989, where both were riding high. Millions of children were getting the Power every month, and the end of the 80's signalled Nintendo's arguably highest heights with the NES. 1989's silver anniversary is waning, set to be subsumed by a future in which we make the same tired fucking joke about hoverboards and Pepsi Perfect for 365 days. How depressing. Now playing at the Holomax of Infinity, where time is a construct and we flit through it like antsy and esoteric little hummingbirds, it's The Wizard in 5.1-D totally schway vision.

God help us, what are we doing here? A movie starring that Wonder Years kid about road trips and Nintendo games. Dear god in heaven, have we sunk to these meteoric lows? Still, there are things to be said about this movie. It's little more than a historical relic at this point, an artifact of 1989. Is it a very good film? Not really. I don't even know if one could call it a cult classic. It is riddled with problems and things that people on the Internet mock it for... like its video game inaccuracies. Roger Ebert called them out on this. The mental image of Roger Ebert in 1989, playing the first Ninja Turtles game on the NES, speaks to me on so many levels. Part of it is the "secret history" Phil mentioned ages ago, but with me being used to the main reason people call the first Ninja Turtles one of the hardest NES games being the dam level... I want to know if Roger Ebert ever beat it. Short of a seance, I will never know the answer to that question and it fucking haunts me. Just like the NES and Nintendo haunt this film, the spectral force of Nintendo's influence being the fabric that binds it all. Here we sit, at the tail end of the Dance Apocalyptic, and yet in the cinemasphere we have a looming Destructor to rival Peko. It is Video Armageddon that blazes in the skies over Universal Studios in California, and the secret harbored beneath its gates will send the world into chaos and frenzy. But let it sleep for now.

Then you have the weird moments. Jenny Lewis screaming about breasts, for instance. Ah, Jenny Lewis. Looking back again, it was this time nine years ago that I first became acquainted with her voice. Imagine my surprise when I learned that she was in this. How about that. Of course, the Power Glove shows up as well, Nintendo and Mattel's joint gauntlet of doom in these dark times. The camera trickery led us to believe that this would assist our alchemy. We were wrong. Oh god, were we wrong. The muddled power of control was not in our hands. We were fooled into creating a monster... but this is only one of the monsters birthed by our Wizard. The next lies buried within Universal Studios, the harbinger that is the final test of Video Armageddon. Video Armageddon, you see, is a test of the best. The children who have mastered the video games flock, pitted against each other in glorious 8-bit alchemical combat. We come down to three in the final round. A girl that the movie does not care for. Lucas, wielder of the Glove of Deception. Jimmy, our protagonist and Wizard of California. The final test is unleashed upon these three Hard Game Beaters, and it is nothing they could comprehend. They know only the games that have existed. Now, as Video Armageddon strikes their hearts, comes the world of anti-matter, screaming at them in chiptunes. As the gate is raised, the full fury is placed upon them. In this unknown land, they must beat their rivals and become the champion of all video games, both existant and non-existant. As for us, we witness something amazing. Something that set the world on fire in 1989, when we knew naught about it.

Holy fucking shit. Super Mario Brothers Three.

To speak more is to risk being sucked into the open wound that Mario unleashed upon time in this period. Already, I fear the winds are gale force. Still, this is the monster set loose upon the world in 1989, the bringer of Video Armageddon and the vanguard who let Nintendo rule the world. Only a beast altered with superior alchemy could possibly take it on... but that story is not ours to tell. The Wizard probably made money. It probably cemented the hype for Super Mario Brothers Three in the minds of every child of the time. What I know for sure is that this film created several monsters. The Power Glove was one. Super Mario Brothers Three is another. The third came about when Nintendo sought to bring the film to life. That story comes later. God help us all.

Get The Clues That You Can Use (Nintendo Power)

That was fun. As promised, I'm back at this space again. The highly elaborate post about the Ninja Gaiden games will happen someday, but like I said; in the interest of chugging along, we will do just that. Right away, we hit a roadblock. Chugging along, according to my Wikipedian roadmap, gives us a duo of games with some importance. Therefore, a little context is in order. We are firmly in the world of the letter N, and now we are far enough along that we must talk about the Big N. This is the Nintendo Project, after all, but it is time to turn our gaze to the creators themselves; to Nintendo. We know the alchemical machine already, the grey box. We know that its game cartridges are bigger on the inside. Hell, we even know what power words can hold. I am nothing less than an amateur alchemist of the keyboard, firing words off into the aether. Nintendo seized upon that and created an entire magazine about it. Today, I fear, we must talk about Nintendo Power.

Here is where this all gets morbid. Nintendo Power is dead and dusted. Two years ago, its final issue shipped, a loving tribute and celebration. 24 years of fun and profit, going out with a grandiose fiesta of print in the face of oblivion. All returned to nothing, but Nintendo Power embraced it with a smile as it looked back. Peko The Destructor partook in punch before purpose took the Power. This entry, I am afraid, is all after that fact. It's December 1st, 2014, and we are visiting the memorial of Nintendo Power. What do we hope to gain here? Perhaps it is just understanding. The era of Nintendo Power is remembered fondly by some. I was not around for it. I grew up in small-town Newfoundland. Magazines were a rare commodity, and the only subscription I had was to Disney Adventures. Another dead magazine, incidentally. The information rags of our youth die tragically young. Hell, I don't think I bought an issue until 2000, and that was for the Pokemon Gold and Silver strategies. A few years later, though, during my days as a teenage ROM fiend, I bought an old issue from a used bookstore. Mega Man 4. Monster In My Pocket. Super strats for Super Castlevania 4. A thing of incredibility.

What can I say, really? I mean, this is of course a part of the song of the NES. Phil talked about it when he came back for Mega Man 3. The games featured in Nintendo Power, and on its cover, were Important. In a Dark Age with no Internet and only the word of friends to guide you, the book launched all sorts of games into fame. Mega Man thrived. Ninja Gaiden cut through the competition. You had guides for the games, and an entire cabal of secret agent children submitting their codes and cheats to the magazine, electronic espionage hard at work. High scores were on full display, showcasing the madness of the young Hard Game Beaters. Howard Phillips and that smarmy kid with the spiky hair ran around video game worlds, their antics entertaining and educational. When Nintendo Power was on, it was really fucking on. It had its moments of accidental brilliance, like the moment when it almost let Mother exist in our realm officially. Its previews teased and enticed, of course, breaking down that impenetrable curtain between nonexistant lands. As the Wall crumbled and Captain Communism began to crumble with it, so too did Japan and its army of ghosts secretly take over. Nintendo ruled the goddamn world, and Nintendo Power was one of its vanguards. Now it is gone, reaped two years ago after its final party. Its legacy lives on. Nintendo Force is a fan magazine that has fired up the dormant engine and continued the work abandoned by the brilliant official creators. Sound familiar, much? The magazines themselves exist, or scans can be found. The days, however, are gone along with it. I was a subscriber of Nintendo Power, if only briefly. I registered some DS games in 2007 and earned a three-month subscription. Part of my ritual when travelling to visit my grandparents, around that same timeframe, was purchasing Nintendo Power magazines and poring over them during my times without Internet. I longed for the Final Fantasy III remake. I was dazzled at Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. Super Smash Bros. Brawl looked incredible.

It came 20 years late, but Nintendo Power enriched my world and I can't thank it enough for that. Here and now, two years after it has left us... I eulogize it. Celebrate its life, friends. Watch the AVGN wax nostalgic about it. Read about the legendary Captain Nintendo. Enjoy some Howard and Nester comics. Let us remember Nintendo Power, and create our own magic with our memories. Rest well, you silly little book. Rest well.

Mad Science (How The Final Fantasy Legend Is A Work Of Genius)

(Oops, been away for a month without comment again. Sorry about that. Nanowrimo is in full swing now as well, so that is getting most of my attention. Gonzo Secret Project is somewhat stalled, so let's make a promise. We've played with time here before, throwing entries from the future into our present. I'll do the reverse. If Gonzo Secret Project is not finished by the time I complete my Nanowrimo work, we'll hop over it and I'll make progress on the lesser-knowns of the NES library. Then one day it will come screaming at us, a missile fired from the past. Now that that's said and done, here is something I've wanted to write for a week or so about a game I beat. Enjoy.)

Four days before November, I watched a video made by another video game psychochronographer, Jeremy Parish. He's doing something called Game Boy World, which is a look at every Game Boy game ever made. God help him, as he's doing the Japanese releases as well. Anyway, his video was the 18th game ever made for the Game Boy: December 1989's Makai Toshi SaGa, or as it became known when it crossed dimensions, The Final Fantasy Legend. I can't remember what drove me to want to play it upon seeing the video, but I was. Despite the obvious fact glaring me in the face. SaGa, you see, is an Akitoshi Kawazu creation. I've liked to describe video game creators as alchemists on this blog. If that's true, then Akitoshi Kawazu is nothing less than a mad scientist. He got his start fiddling with the original Final Fantasy, and if I'm to believe what The World Wide Web tells me, he took strides to make it a lot like Dungeons and Dragons. Elemental weaknesses and character classes and stuff like that. Final Fantasy was of course a hit, and for whatever reason the powers that be gave Kawazu the keys to the kingdom for Final Fantasy 2.

That's when he showed his true colors. 

Final Fantasy 2 is seen as the black sheep of the Final Fantasy series, and that's a term that always makes me grimace. Whenever I hear it, I can't help but picture a child turning up his nose at a new vegetable. "Black sheep" is codeword for WAH WAH TOO DIFFERENT WAH. Black sheep is the phrase people use to dismiss Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2. Black sheep is the phrase people use when talking about Final Fantasy 2. Kawazu, ever the mad scientist, used his newfound power to influence the game design. Experience points were done away with, and now what you did in battle determined how good you were at it. Swinging a sword 100 times would make you Level 2 Good At Swords. Casting a magic spell a lot would make it more powerful for that character. Taking a lot of damage would increase your constitution and maximum HP. It wasn't a bad idea, but the problem (for me, anyway, when I beat it) was that the game was too damn brutal unless you gamed the system. Confirm an attack on an enemy and then cancel it, and your Good At Swords counter went up to 1/100. Now sit there for five minutes attacking and cancelling 99 more times to get your Good At Swords stat to level up. Do the same for your magic. As for HP? Hit yourself over the head to knock your own health to critical levels and earn the gains. It is tedium, and if you do it incorrectly you can mess up the entire game. When I beat Final Fantasy 2, it had taken part of my soul away from me. It was a new sensation at the time. I whispered "never again" and bore a grudge against the cackling mad scientist who had concocted this creature, a Kawazu's monster that shambled around Japan for 15 years before finally breaking through and terrorizing us.

A year or so later, development on Final Fantasy 3 began, and now I'm going to quote Pitchfork Pat regarding Kawazu and that game because it's one of the best comparisons of a thing I've ever read:

"Using a long piece of string tied to a 10,000-yen note, Masafumi Miyamoto (SquareSoft's founder and top dog) managed to lure Kawazu away from the Final Fantasy division of the Square building and set him up elsewhere, giving him the SaGa series to mess around with -- much like that Simpsons bit in which Marge bakes a separate birthday cake for Homer to ruin."

So here we are. December 1989. Makai Toshi SaGa, hereafter referred to as Final Fantasy Legend because I'm a stickler. I saw the video, and despite knowing what I knew about Kawazu, I wanted to try this odd concoction he had created. I decided to not go it alone, so I put the call out there. Crono, Jetstorm, Zeloz, and anyone else... thanks for going into this madness with me. What we have discovered is something special. The Final Fantasy Legend is brimming with potential and wonder. It has Kawazu's stamp of unpredictability and madness, but this time he's eliminated the tedium of it. This time, it's compact and charged with the janky and unpolished simplicity that only early Game Boy can bring. In short, it's a work of genius from a madman who dares to go against the grain. That doesn't even take into account the really weird shit that happens in the latter half of the game.

Okay, this is your spoiler warning. Warning: There are spoilers. If you're curious about this game, I'd say give it a shot. If you're one of my pals still going through the game, I'm about to yell at everything cool it did in the latter half. This includes the ending, so be wary. I mean, it's a 25 year-old Game Boy RPG so it's not going to have any really big scary twists, but the way I talk about it might influence your own reactions to these bits. Hence the warning.

Alright, so right away the thing that sets Final Fantasy Legend apart from Final Fantasy 2 is choice. This is Choose Your Own Obtuseness. Kawazu's madness can and will swirl you up if you so choose, but you can mitigate that. With a party of four humans, you get a somewhat normal game mechanics-wise. Granted, humans buy all their stat upgrades in stores instead of fighting X amount of battles, but you still build them how you want. Take a mutant, too, if you like. They gain stats as they go along, and learn and un-learn special abilities depending on... something that I don't know. Then there are monsters, who eat meat dropped by monsters at the end of battle to change into other monsters. There are rules to the transformations, of course. They are never explained in-game. That's Kawazu for you. Instead of a Frankenstein-like Kawazu's monster, he creates a swirling storm composed of pure chaos. The KAWAZU VORTEX grows in strength as he makes more SaGa games, but you don't have to worry about that. Only I do.

Now let's look at a GameFAQS review of Final Fantasy Legend. I should note that this game has the most varied scores of anything I've ever seen. With an X/10 scale, it has gotten every number. I'm about to quote from the only 1/10 review on the site, a review which also rates every aspect of the game on an X/10 scale. This annoys me, but that's a whole other entry. Let's look.

"Control 5/10- The controls are somewhat responsive yet really simplistic. The controls also play a big role in the battles, your weapons break after a while so its a real downer.

Gameplay 1/10- Wow, this really sucks!!! This whole game is a big mess of frustration and annoyance. You start fighting and your weapons only last for so long so when you need to upgrade to some better armor, you save up for it and by the time your ready to but it you need to buy another weapon so you play for hours through boring battles and stupid music until you FINALLY save up enough to get your armor! This is the biggest flaw in the game!

Story 1/10- Simplistic, crappy..... A whole bunch of people find a tower go inside expecting to find paradise, but, none of them come out! Sou you go in and.....
Its really stupid! You get one character at the beginning and you go to the guild and buy three more. There I've mainly summed up why the game sucks."

The weapons have durability? Someone had better tell Fire Emblem that it's actually a 5/10 and "a real downer". Also you fight monsters to earn gold and get new equipment. In a Japanese RPG made in 1989. The grinding in this game isn't even that bad, trust me. I've beaten Mother. I've beaten Dragon Warrior. The grinding in this game is Not That Bad. As for the story... they didn't have room for any complex 80 hour sprawling epic with anime cutscenes. It's Game Boy. It's simple. You want to climb to the top of a tower to find Paradise. Along the way you fight monsters, enter strange new worlds, and try to solve people's problems by killing the Four Symbols of Chinese mythology.

The game's divided into four "worlds", with floors of Tower ascent in between. I don't have much to say about the first and second worlds. They're cute in their own way, and involve simple tasks. The first world has you collecting armor, a shield, and a sword from three kings. The only real eyebrow-raising moment is getting the shield. A traitor kills the king before you can get it, and you then kill the traitor as he begs you not to hack him to death with swords. Once you do so, one of your party members will speak for you. "You're scum. You make me sick.". That's the first clue that something is amiss. Then you use the equipment and find a Chinese myth turtle wants to kill you, so you kill him first with swords. World 2 has nothing really like that. It's an ocean world with islands and a palace under the sea ruled by a Chinese myth dragon who you kill with swords. World 3 is where the fun sort of begins. There's a resistance against Byak-Ko, the Chinese myth tiger oppressing the people from his flying fortress. You infiltrate and try to save the sister of one of the resistance members, only to find that she's sided with Byak-Ko for power. You bust out of jail and find Byak-Ko ready to kill them both... but the resistance sister sacrifices herself to save her sibling, and then you kill Byak-Ko with swords. Welcome to your first taste of grimness. It's about to go into overdrive.

World 4 is a post-apocalyptic ruin of Japan, something straight out of Shin Megami Tensei. You move underground through subway tunnels, and have to collect old circuitry. Eventually you get some sort of jet scooter to zip around the overworld quickly, and you need it. Because a Chinese myth bird named Su-Zaku is constantly pursuing you on the overworld. Every encounter you get into will be with him, and he is invincible. You can only run away. Let's stop and take stock of this. By now, if you've made it this far in Final Fantasy Legend, you have a handle of how things work. You've got a super mutant, or a great monster form, or some humans with 99 strength. It was at world 3 or so where I felt like I could take on anything and everything with my superpowered team, and world 4 shatters that confidence with something you can't kill. It's more than that, though. It's a monster that forever comes after you, wanting to make you dead, that you can't kill. Forget Pyramid Head. shrug off Nemesis. Hell, even cast aside your memories of Scissorman. Akitoshi Kawazu invented the survival horror monster, in December 1989, on the fucking Game Boy.

Now let's talk about ambiguity. I love ambiguity. I've been looking at the newest series of Doctor Who critically for the past few weeks, both in text form by myself and in audio form as co-host for a friend of mine. What we keep coming back to are elements of the story that aren't explained in the story itself. I can shrug this off easily in a narrative, either not caring in favor of the exciting things happening or papering over any "plot holes" with little effort. Some of the other guests don't like doing this and see it as a shortcoming of the writer for Not Explaining Shit. Whether this is valid in a Doctor Who sense is irrelevant. It's valid here because early janky Game Boy physically had no room to explain things beyond the simplest of lines. We never learn what cataclysm wrecked Japan in the World Of Ruin. Was it the final result of the Cold War? Did a god disguise himself as the President and launch ICBMs to cleanse Japan of the demonic? We don't know. My personal thoughts? Suzaku did it. An invincible firebird burst forth one day, and no weaponry could break its shields. 1999. The Day of Suzaku. Well, in any case, you combine broken machine parts with plutonium to create ERASE-99, and then you go through a skyscraper and a subway before fighting Su-Zaku on top of the train and beating him.... but not before its wrath descends upon a town and kills every inhabitant. You can investigate the bodies, and the prompt tells you "This man is dead.". Remember that.

With the four Chinese direction bosses done, we ascend more Tower. Hidden away in a side room is the most grim moment of the game, more grim than an entire town dying to Chinese fire bird. Once again we find a room full of corpses. Examining them, however, doesn't tell us that "this man is dead.". Instead we get the far more chilling "This child looks dead.". Further examining the bodies will yield a diary where the children state that they're running out of food before praying to the "Creator". If you do this, the game doesn't tell you the item you get; a nuke. Holy shit. That's dark as hell, and again it's brimming with ambiguity. It's like a horror movie where you don't see the monster; any scenario we can come up with to how and why these kids died is more horrific than the scenario writer jotting something down and making it canon. But no, guys, the story's a 1/10. It's a simplistic and crappy story about climbing a dumb tower, right?

A final gauntlet awaits you, with a boss named Ashura and a return to the beginning of the game before climbing way way up and fighting the Chinese myth monsters again in more powerful forms. Final Fantasy Legend has one save slot and you can save anywhere. I saved during this ascent and found myself at very low HP. I could have made the game unwinnable in this way. That's another trap set by the KAWAZU VORTEX, but you reach the top and find healing. You also find the Creator. He explains that the entire tower ascent was a fun game he created because he was bored. The party reacts in abject horror, and as became customary in RPGs to follow in the PS1 era, you kill God with swords. Except... it's not God. Give it a quick think. His name is the Creator, he talks about everything being a game... it's Kawazu. Akitoshi Kawazu is the final boss of his own goddamned game, the characters are horrified at the concept of their fictionality... and what are you to do but hack away at him with swords? That's what you do to the last guy. You fight him and you win. The entire thing was a metafiction, and the party approaches a door behind the Creator. Where does it lead? We don't know. They reject it, and go back to the base of the tower. I think the door is Kawazu's entry point back into our universe. He can cross over because he is creator, and this is his charged emboited space. Our protagonists are but code. They cannot leap out of the screen, so they remain in the world they know. It's comfortable, and they can kill monsters with swords any time. As they stand at the entrance to the tower, they proclaim "See you again!".

Fucking. Genius. 10/10. Hundred out of a hundred, best game. It's a janky early mess of a game but it does so many neat things and makes you think that... I love it. By god, I love one of mad scientist Akitoshi Kawazu's hot messes of alchemical chaos. He made more SaGa games, and some of us are playing them now. Some of us are planning to play more. God help us all as we brave the KAWAZU VORTEX. We may not survive, but I've learned things about going against the norm. Things that will stick with me. Including the lead of my party, who personally struck the final blow on the Creator Kawazu. It's appropriate for this blog, and there's only one way to close this massive bit of rambling.

All hail Peko The Destructor.