Friday 8 March 2024

Frezno's Comics Challenge: February 2024 (Pulp)

Hello again, and welcome back to Frezno's Comics Challenge! In case you missed last time, and also to bolster my intro out to a nice and solid paragraph before I actually begin my work here, I am doing monthly comics criticism as curated by my pal and professional comics critic Sean Dillon. Last month was in my wheelhouse, a story about battling magical girls who tried to kill each other while in love for the good of their corporate masters. It was a very good book, and if you click that link in this paragraph you can read all about how I turned it into one corner of a Bermuda Triangle which began to define my 2024. Having completed that, it's time to talk about the book I read in February. Saddle up, partner, because we are entering the world of the Western, sort of. Let's talk about Pulp.


Thursday 15 February 2024

This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 4]



This mirror unlocks a Wyvern which gets you into
the Cyclone, and I can't not include this screencap.
So, last time we climbed a tower and came back to half the world having been killed by a giant tornado. You know, lovely misery and setbacks. That being said, the Emperor's cyclone was cleared without relative incident. I do love that the dungeon map for it has the swirl of a cyclone which gets larger as you ascend, a great visual detail of you climbing a funnel. The Emperor himself, the self-absorbed vain fascist that he is, is a pushover. A dragon guarding a sword outside his chambers was a bigger threat. Of course, now we have to raid his castle and stop the new Emperor, and it's here with the penultimate dungeon that the claws really come out.


At this point you get that Final Fantasy staple, an airship, but it's worth noting the odd tone of this. In the previous game, you got an airship at about the halfway mark or so and it opened up so many new avenues of exploration for you. In Final Fantasy II you get it bequeathed to you by the very first Cid in a Final Fantasy game, who dies from cyclone-related injuries. It opens up no new freedom or exploration, only mild convenience and a key to the penultimate dungeon in Palamecia Castle. You can explore the world, alright, a hellish place where half the population has been crushed by the oppressive boot of fascism. Isn't this game just a joy? Lest you think the downer is contained only to the fledgling plot, watch the fuck out. Final Fantasy II is about to get real mean, and Palamecia Castle has a double whammy of a mean streak ahead.

Wednesday 14 February 2024

This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 3]



A Discord pal linked this in response to the posts
going live, and goddamn if this isn't the FFII vibe.
So here I am, pushing beyond the boundaries of where I got in the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy II, finding interesting new challenges and a masochistic streak awakening in me as I plunge into the depraved depths of the abyss that is this Famicom game. The game has been kicking my ass, giving me friction and the sharp stings of adversity and I have been liking it. In the name of God and man, I have been liking Final Fantasy II. A very curious thing happens to me at this point of the game, and to tell you about it I have to tell you about the open nature of this game's world.


At this point of the game, I had a ship and could sail basically anywhere with only minor hassle. There aren't actually that many places to sequence break to for any benefit, given that most of the towns are on the northern side of the map and are ones you explore during the first few quest loops. The exception, then, is the magical town of Mysidia. I was not meant to go here yet, and the encounters around it were still lethal to me. As you can save on the world map, however, I could just save every few steps and make my way there without dying. There were some helpful magic spells, but what really appealed to me was a powerful new axe for my main heavy hitter. It was so strong, in fact, that in one of the next dungeons I could get an axe that was one level below this one. The boy was a physical powerhouse, and anything he hit with that thing at this point of the game melted.

Tuesday 13 February 2024

This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 2]



Having spent last time setting up my backstory and prior battles with this game, we now have found ourselves in early January 2024. I've got the Famicom original set up on my Raspberry Pi, and for now I am just stepping into it out of curiosity and wonder. Will the damn thing actually be hard for once? The answer is yes. What follows is my trip report, putting on the record the dark and terrible things this game did to me and how I enjoyed every one of them. I confess. I confess, friends and lovers, to a litany of debaucherous sins and vices I did indulge in over the course of this journey. It changed me, darkened me, and by God I liked it. Before I truly launch into what happened to me, I want more on the record. On the off chance you do not know the idiosyncratic nature of the infamous Final Fantasy II, I want to explain just how its systems work on paper.


Final Fantasy II eschews the usual experience point-based character progression system for something I've been calling the Stat Experience System. Basically, it's not your character who levels up, but their skills at various things based on their actions in battle. Attack with your sword 100 times? You get better at using swords. Cast a magic spell 100 times? It hits a new level. It sounds simple at first, but some of the progression is esoteric and stuff that I don't really understand. Worse yet, due to various oversights, the system is exploitable. The game doesn't care that you performed an action, only that you selected it. You could fight 100 battles and swing your sword one time each fight, sure. Alternatively, you could select attack, cancel your attack, and then re-input it. Every one of these menu selections is a point of stat experience, so you can in theory cancel your attack 100 times in a row for a "quick" boost. I use "quick" very loosely because this takes its time and is also monotonous as shit. You can do the same for your magic spells as well, and that's even more time consuming because you have extra button presses to select those, and adding 300 extra button presses adds up.


The other exploit, and the infamous one everyone likes to trot out as to why this game is a stinker, has to deal with raising HP. If you get hit in battle, such that you end the fight with a fraction of your max HP, there is a chance that your max HP total will raise. The key here is that the game doesn't care who dealt that damage, just that you were damaged. As such, if you deliberately enter an easy battle and beat up your own characters, at the end of the battle they have lower HP than their max and earn an HP up. This clearly must be the only way to do well at the game, what a silly thing! You hit yourself in the head for optimal HP gains, who would make something so braindead? Except... You don't have to. That was the point of the video essay I watched which started this journey, and I can confirm it. I have played through and beaten Final Fantasy II on the Famicom, and I only did that little chestnut once. I might have gotten away with not doing it at all if I let myself level up by fighting some weaker enemies, but it's not like I supercharged myself to game-ending stats: I just gave myself a little buffer to survive the hard game.


Because Final Fantasy II is a hard fucking game, let me stress. With all that accessibility and lessening of the game's challenge removed, this was a harrowing fucking battle of life and death between me and the game. Let me give you a comparison, as we launch into the trip report proper. When I entered Semitt Falls, the first dungeon, in the Pixel Remaster? I had loads of HP and I was actually so strong just from fighting everything on the way through the game that my weapon levels actually stagnated. That is to say, the dungeon enemies were now so weak as to give me no stat experience for my attacking. (Indeed, if I were to want to get mad, I could note that just giving out stat and weapon level ups every few battles out of generosity somewhat hammers the structure of the level up system into a shape resembling a traditional experience point system, but I don't have time to get mad about square peg round holing of black sheep sequels right now.) For comparison, when I went into Semitt Falls on the Famicom? My weapon levels were only at 2, nobody's HP was past 100, my main guy hadn't even gotten an HP gain yet, and I felt underpowered for the crawl ahead which I would have to make multiple attempts at, clawing a little more progress each time.


This was what I wanted, everyone. There is a unique friction present, not just in Final Fantasy II but in its other siblings on the Famicom. Later Final Fantasy games would become cinematic set pieces in their own rights, awash with intricate and exploitable character progression systems as well as engaging stories and melodramas. The Famicom trilogy has a different flavor. These are dungeon crawlers, albeit dungeon crawlers which justify the in-universe versions for their crawls with more context and plot with each subsequent game. This game in particular is a series of hellish dungeons you are expected to run through, carefully using your resources and praying that some bullshit doesn't end your trek. Your reward for doing so is some new equipment and a plot beat justification for you to plunge yourself into an even deeper and darker dungeon to do it all over again. This friction, this difficulty, it is not a weakness. It is a strength, and because of the Stat Experience System every single moment of adversity is making you stronger.


The adversity at play here led to an interesting revelation, and an intriguing set of feelings building up within me. As I played Final Fantasy II, Kawazu and I (and please forgive my use of auteur theory here) were locked in a tantalizing tango together. His game, a mean little piece of friction that grinds against you as you try to survive the devilish design. Every bit of it made me stronger in the game, but the fucked up thing is I was getting enjoyment out of it. I have a reputation as a Hard Game Beater, yes, but never before had I felt such a dark thrill out of a hard game hurting me like this. Being hurt, being hit hard or uncovering a new trap to keep note of, was giving me the same dopamine as levelling up in a traditional RPG system would. The lurid truth of it was that I was locking myself into an electronic cycle of consensual sadomasochism, and loving it. There was a deep and fundamental intimacy to the way this game delivered pain, and it was giving me pleasure. That's my thousand words-long confession, everyone. Final Fantasy II made me hurt, and I not only consented to this but I liked it.


Let me illustrate just one of the ways this game delivered that sharp sting to me, with one of its more insidious moments. It first cropped up when dungeon crawling a snowy cave. It was, in fact, the same cave I was travelling to in my first memory of Final Fantasy II from 2004. I got so deep into the cave and was low on health, so I decided to use my Teleport spell to get out of there. When I did, I was met with this message.





You see, this cave has you travel with a temporary party member named Josef. Not to spoil too much of the video game, but on the way out of this dungeon Josef is crushed by a boulder and killed. He is, in fact, the first party character in a Final Fantasy game to die. If you were able to warp out of the cave after getting the key item at the bottom, Josef would not be killed and the careful plotting of the game would be ruined. Therefore, Kawazu has decreed that any dungeon involving some sort of story progress in the act of clearing it (which we will hereafter call a "plot dungeon") will have warping disabled. If I were to want to leave, I would have to walk all the way back out. I attempted this. I died, and lost all my progress and had to go back in but more cautious this time. That sudden sharp sting tingling across your psyche, which lights up pain receptors but also gives a sudden rush? That is Final Fantasy II. 


Let me tell you of a similar scenario. I was in another dungeon, searching for a key item at the end. Unlike the previous example, this was not a plot dungeon and I could freely warp out of it. Unfortunately, in a difficult battle some floors deep down I miscalculated my MP costs. I was 1 MP off from being able to cast Teleport and get out of there. I had to try and walk out once again, and this time one of my guys got poisoned with no way to cure it. What followed was an absolutely desperate and tense crawl back out, constantly at the brink of death, every step a potential encounter that could be my last and wipe out all of that progress. I made it out, just barely, but I held on to that feeling. That desperate tension and worry over this monster infested space, where each step was a possible run-ender? I felt alive. It was what I came to the Famicom for, and I never would have felt it in one of the subsequent ports. I'd have just walked through the maze with no friction, wiping out all the enemies in one turn by mashing A and would never have gotten close to that desperate situation. I can say that for sure because I did this dungeon on the Pixel Remaster and that's exactly what happened.


The next dungeon, the Imperial warship known as the Dreadnought, is where things officially got too hard for me. I was caught in this insidious loop where every encounter could be my last and I was being hit hard, but not hard enough that I could get HP gains out of it to slowly build strength and make it more survivable. I think there was also a mechanic at play where I was healing in battle to survive the fights, which is a no no because you have to end the fight at low HP to get a gain. Worse yet, you have to save some comrades from a prison cell in this ship, and if you do that you can't leave the dungeon: you have to do the whole thing in one shot, and it's a plot dungeon again so no warping for you. This, by the way, is the point where I took advantage of hitting myself for HP gains. That made the dungeon survivable, but it wasn't a cakewalk just yet.


(A brief aside to mention this: many people talking about Final Fantasy II and its plotline will compare it to the original 1977 Star Wars. Both feature a rebellion against an empire, a rebel princess who is captured by said empire, and a massive imperial weapon which must have its main engine blown up by subterfuge in order to give the rebellion any hope. People like to compare the two works, but the similarities between Final Fantasy II and Star Wars end once the Dreadnought is blown up. In a shocker of shockers, not everything is about the space movie.)


Nemesis.
At this point in the story, another story in miniature begins to play out. I would like to introduce you to the first part of what I am calling the Hill Gigas Ordeal. The Hill Gigas is a deadly giant enemy, and it guards one of the treasure chests deep in the Dreadnought. One of my attempts at surviving the dungeon ended right here, as the Hill Gigas was way too fucking strong for me. Nevertheless, I was resolute and tried again immediately. With a careful use of healing, magic, and just plain luck I managed to defeat the Hill Gigas and get the shield it was guarding. I then walked back out of the Dreadnought, healed up, and walked right back in for the third time that morning to rescue the princess, crawl down to the engine room, and blow this accursed dungeon to smithereens. It should be noted that, while Final Fantasy II is a bold step forward for RPG storytelling circa 1988, it's still very early days. It's not until Final Fantasy IV or so that your reward for making it through a dungeon is another page unfolding in a gripping story with plot twists and deep character-based introspection. Your reward for beating the Dreadnought is whatever you managed to loot out of it, a story-based pat on the back, and your rebel leader pointing in the direction of the next monster-infested labyrinth that needs to be crawled through.



It's here that Final Fantasy II hits a somewhat contradictory set of twin beats. It is simultaneously very friendly in its design here, and very unfriendly at the same time. Remember the Hill Gigas, the basically boss of the Dreadnought which I barely survived? It's a regular encounter in the next dungeon. And there can be two of them in one encounter. And you can't run from them. Now how in the hell am I going to manage this? The game gave me exactly the tool I needed to deal with it, in the castle just south of the dungeon. You're given many fun treasures, but the key here is a magic spell called Curse. Curse is a debuff spell, and using it halves an enemy's attack and defense. A Hill Gigas goes from hitting like a truck to hitting like a baseball bat. It still hurts, but it's not going to knock you on your ass and break every bone in your body. Halving defense means you actually have a good shot at doing decent damage to one as well. I really want to sit and praise this design choice. You are given this spell just before delving into the dungeon where it can be used to great effect, and that's not the only thing you're given. The end of the dungeon is a boss fight against some chimeras, and one of the castle treasures is a sword that does extra damage against winged beasts such as chimeras. This is genuinely very nice, and makes you feel cool and good for using the tools you're given to cut through the difficulty and make real progress.


Unfortunately, the hidden intricacies of the number crunching at play behind the code are where the unfriendliness enters the scene. I had my fancy new Curse spell, and I was even levelling it up with every cast... but I could never actually get the thing to land, even on the most basic of enemies. Surely the spell could not be so useless as to not work on a fucking goblin at level 3? Why wasn't this working? It all has to do with character choice. I was playing the game with some basic roles in mind, but I had my main character decked out with armor and a sword while also using black magic. I gave him the Curse spell, and he was failing to use it well. I had to resort to the Internet to figure out why, and it's insidious. The best way I can describe it is as such: Wielding any weapon that isn't a staff or knife, or wearing any heavy armor, incurs a magic effectiveness penalty. Unless some NPC somewhere mentions it, this is never clearly communicated in the game. As such, I had to strip my boy of his armor and slap him with something lighter, and then Curse had a reasonable success rate. There was, of course, the wrinkle of him being a swordfighter. There was a way around that, however. If I wanted to cast Curse in a fight, I could unequip him of his sword and shield in battle, cast the spell until it hit, then reequip his weaponry so he could strike. It's an absolutely silly exploit, and the thought of Firion dropping his sword so he could cast his magic spell amused me. Still, though, Curse was working. I could beat those Hill Gigases with a little work now. I was beginning to get better at taking the game's mix of pleasure and pain.


What happens, then, when I go too far and break the game?


Monday 12 February 2024

This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 1]

(Thanks to Sean, Alina, and John for letting me vent about this experience as I endured it.)


Art by @bykillt on Twitter
Friends, pals, loves, readers, I must confess. I am not the same person I was when this year began. Something has happened to me, a chance encounter that has changed me in ways that will take me thousands of words to describe. I'm doing my best to describe it now. The simple truth of the matter is this. I have played and beaten Final Fantasy II on the Famicom, and the deadly dance I am the game engaged in has done terrible and wonderful things to me. This has happened to me but once before in my life. It was in the year 2012, when on a whim I played Battletoads and managed to beat the legendary Turbo Tunnel of my own power. I wondered how far I could get through the game past that, and what followed was a week long journey into the darkest parts of the human video game playing soul. That is what Final Fantasy II on the Famicom did to me, only it had me in that waltz of war for two weeks. I want you to understand what I went through, and in order to get you to understand I must describe my enemy to you. I must regale you of the antagonistic relationship I have had with this video game for the past 20 years, and how I came to this waltz. Let me take you back in time to the skirmishes we have had, and the buildup to this final battle which haunted my sanity and harrowed my soul.

Saturday 27 January 2024

Frezno's Comics Challenge: January 2024 (Of Thunder And Lightning)

Welcome to 2024 on Frezno's Raving Rants! I hope your new year has been fun and interesting so far. We're only three weeks in and mine has been quite productive. If nothing else, a theme for the early stages of the blog is starting to form. The media I've been engaging with has its own strengths and themes, and those strengths and themes are coalescing into their own synchronicities. There are even small tangible connections to what I'm going to talk about right now, but for now we must plant the flag and explain: What in the hell are we doing here with this, for the inaugural Frezno post of 2024? Allow me to explain.


Last year on the blog, my pal Joe inspired me to go on a cinematic journey of broadening horizons, to clear my head of the noxious fumes of genre fiction. The resulting journey, Frezno's Criterion Challenge, lasted ten months and was successful. I didn't finish the year out, but I got what I wanted out of the project. Horizons successfully broadened, some standout films watched that I would not have otherwise, and my edge as a writer honed just that little bit more. I successfully played around in a wheelhouse I would not have otherwise, and it was a good experience. I'm quite thankful to my pal Joe for giving me that, and they got me another year's worth of Criterion subscription so that I can truly spread my wings and watch whatever intrigues me that isn't restricted to a challenge watchlist. That's lovely, and once things calm down a little with the media (in a way, they have as of today, but that's a story for next time) I will dive into some more films on my list that I want to see. We're not here to talk films, though. We're here to talk comics. But why?


Among the folks who I am lucky to call friends is one Sean Dillon. Sean is an author and comics critic who's quite talented, and also a good mentor who helps to keep this meandering blog on the straight and narrow with their feedback on my words. Something spurred it on, and I'm still not quite sure what, but Sean lay down the gauntlet for me late last year. Since I had so much fun broadening my horizons and critical voice with fine cinema, why not do the same with their favorite medium? Challenge accepted. Over 2024, I will be talking about An Amount of comics, and talking about them to the best of my ability with the hopes of not just reading interesting stories, but honing that critical edge and becoming an adequate comics critic in my own right. Sean has given me comic suggestions for the annual Halloween marathons before, and I have read and enjoyed them... but the writeups are not exactly up to my usual standard. I'll be the first to admit that, and in one infamous case I just threw up my hands and went "I don't get it." 


Let us hope it does not come to that this time around. I have a general idea of how to start doing comics criticism better, a good enough jumping off point. From there, we shall see how Sean reacts and what advice they give on doing this thing better for next time. There's always room for improvement, after all. It's a nice bit of preamble, this, but it's delaying from the actual point. I have a comic to review, a graphic novel that I have held in my hands and read. Now I get to talk about it, no more stalling. Wish me luck, everyone, in your hopefully warm and cozy spots as you ride out the winter. We're about to dive into the wonderful world of comics criticism. Deep breath, leap... and plunge right on in. Let us begin... Frezno's Comics Challenge.

Friday 29 December 2023

Frezno's Games Of The 2023 Thing!

Oh my god. We did it again. We somehow made it through another one of those pesky years. And it was the 10th anniversary of this blog, too! What a time we had, you and I. Now we're going to cap off 2023 by talking about some good computer video games I played. It's kind of funny how this started as a video game blog, but I only ever talk about them on here a handful of times now. I guess I save all the talking for this big thing I do at the end of the year. 2024's going to start with some game talking, and you'll even see a bit of that subject matter here. Why don't we just get into it, then? Let the end of year festivities begin, with this here game I played almost a year ago...