A Short Shining Force Post

So I've started up Shining Force a couple of times over the last few days, but I keep noticing that I don't actually have enough time to play much when I do. But I had some time today, and so I played for a little while.



It was weird seeing that weird little girl again. Familiar, but distant, you know? But what's weird is that shortly after I started playing, I realized something: I have no idea what I'm doing in this game right now, story-wise.

Luckily, I was reminded quickly enough.



This fight was pretty standard, honestly, and I'm surprised at how easy most of it was. I was sort of excited to fight Elliot, because I remember him seeming like a pretty cool bad guy.



But I would like to know why he had artillery. At least it's not a giant laser eye thing though, right? By the way, when I got to Elliot himself, he had a good 60 HP and a healer standing right next to him. Also, he's pretty scary looking.



Like much scarier than the sprite and portrait would have me believe. Also, he hits like a truck, so I'll need to be really careful. The one attack he pulled off before I egressed out of there almost dropped my MC. I plan to grind the fight a little because with a number of my characters, I'm either very close to promotion, or I just did it.

Oh, also I got yet another centaur knight thing in the group. So, there's that, then. More to come.

Like Some Sort of Pixelated Phoenix

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Can you imagine? Just reading that breaks my heart a little. We're coming up on a year since the last post. I came to the blog, and I read a couple of the last entries we made. They made me laugh. Not because I thought, oh man, what a bunch of jackasses, and not in that way that really just means I'm trying not to be depressed about another little project falling by the wayside. I laughed because they were funny to me, and I really liked reading them. And you know something? I loved writing them, too.

I really enjoyed this blog last year. Recently Sean, Mike, Brendan and myself were talking about Zuul Arcade, but it was a regrettably short conversation. My sincere hope is that I won't be the only one wanting to push back into things.

Since April, we've certainly gamed a lot. Like a LOT. Mostly more current games, and we haven't really seen fit to attach that to this website. However, it occurs to me that we should have been doing that, even if it was unrelated to the project at hand. Like I said in the very first post, this is our arcade. That means if we aren't working on our high score in Pac-Man, we should feel free to go and spend some time playing Gauntlet or some shit, because it's our place to game, and laugh, and share it with each other.

So. That said, I'm picking up the controller. Last time, I put it down because of the same reason I always do. I missed out on getting a character, and was so annoyed every time I played after that, I didn't feel like continuing, so I decided to give it some time. Stupid. And since everyone else was falling into their own little pits with their games, I had no one to look to. We all got stuck simultaneously.

Well you know what, boys and girls? There's someone out there who wouldn't let that happen. There's someone out there who would say get up out of that hole and keep playing, damn it. That's right. Jeff Motherfuckin' Benson. That dude had 17 games under his belt.

The point is, this was too much fun to just let it die outright. So I want to try again and I hope you'll come along with me.

UNCOOL, GAME.

Okay... So, here's the deal. I've been playing Shining Force a lot lately. Just ask my roommates, who I think are now officially sick of the battle music.

I entered Chapter 3. I ended up in Bustoke, and solved everyone's problems with serious violence, properly applied. I also got a new archer, PLUS my awesome werewolf dude I've heard so much about. I have promoted a bunch of my team members, which is pretty cool. I might very well post what they all look like some time. But for now, I need to briefly discuss something with you guys. I knew the Runefaust dudes were after a secret weapon.

Here are my thoughts about that.



WHAT. THE EVERLOVING. FUCK

To Battle!

WARNING: THIS POST IS GONNA GET REALLY LONG!

Last night I decided to play some Shining Force, because I had recently decided to move past the fight I've been grinding for a while and see what was waiting for me. Part of the reason for my over preparation was the veritable host of horror stories and warnings I had received about the fight I was coming up to, in which I am forced to face The Marionette. I have been dreading this fight, to some degree. However, I'm getting ahead of myself here.



Hell yeah I am. We begin here. The spirit of this lake has been summoned by the Orb of Light, which I've just received after defeating the monsters of the Cave of Darkness. What a naming scheme. She tells me a bit about Darksol's plans, and insists that I have to stop him. I concur. Then I head upstairs to talk to Otrant, who someone has recently referred to as a "He" and I take issue with that. Mainly because of the purple lipstick.



Just saying. So I'm officially the Chosen One or whatever, and now we're going to be known as the Shining Force to everyone, not just the few people in this story who aren't trying to kill me. Otrant tells me I have to cross the sea, and I know just how to do it. The only boat around belongs to the mayor of the last town, whose son, as I find out upon arriving, has gone missing. I have a hunch as to where he is. As I come to the circus tent, I have to take a second. This may be about to go horribly wrong.



Into the breach! The tent is housing one of the big players for the bad guys, who sics her "pets" on me. These mostly include a lot of puppets and Dire Clowns, and other unsavory such things, including this one. The man himself, the Marionette.



Seriously, look at that. He has potentially unlimited MP, and Freeze 3 to throw at me, which I am certain is going to hurt BADLY. The fight went pretty well at first, though. I was mopping the floor with the puppets and things, minus one bit where I screwed up, and lost Anri, my second mage. Damn. Then I got up to Marionette. He had a good chunk of hit points, but my first hit on him went pretty well, and everybody moved in. I had to be careful, because my main character has been getting pretty badass lately, doing the most damage in the party, and having some of the highest health in the party. But if I screw up and he goes down, it's all over for me.

However, after losing not one, not two, not even three, but four party members total, I managed to take down Marionette. On my first try! I was pretty pleased with myself here. Marionette was less so.



He explodes, like baddies usually do, and I picked up all the neat items lying around in chests for me. Heading back to the mayor, he's incredibly grateful for his son being alive.



Awesome. I was kind of excited to jump on the boat and see where it goes. BUT YOU CAN'T EVEN LET ME HAVE THAT, CAN YOU GAME?!



Of course you can't-OH FUCK BLUE FIRE.




...Well. On the plus side, I managed to get that screenshot right before the ship disappeared under the water. Luckily, a nearby man was able to give me some good advice.



Or rather, advice that basically amounted to "DAYUMN. You're screwed." The mayor really wasn't much help though. He basically said, alright, well go to Shade Abbey and talk to my nephew. He can probably help you. People have been mentioning Shade Abbey a lot in the game, so I knew I would eventually end up there, but I didn't think they were going to play it up to be... you know, a good thing. When I got there though, things were immediately weird.



So if I remembered the list of characters correctly, this was one of the guys who would be joining my party. Also, he had a character portrait, so that basically confirmed it. The thing about Shade Abbey is that everything is VERY CLEARLY WRONG.



That's just one example. Check out all of those dug up graves. There was even a zombie in one of the rooms with the Abbot. The bitch is, I couldn't seem to do anything about whatever was up. I knew it was going to get all explained, but then when I went inside the chapel finally, I noticed every character from around the building was now following me, and when I tried to talk to them, they said the exact same thing that they said when they had been outside as well. It all sorta came together in my head after that.



OH SHIT. Luckily, as I was completely surrounded by undead, the game made the mistake of letting my mage go first.




This fight was fun, though. Darksol had showed up for just a second to taunt me, right before I beat his minions senseless. AGAIN. After that, I got one of the bird guys on my team. On the way out I got the other one. The first one had been stone, apparently, which does raise the question of why he was able to yell out some Admiral Akbar shit at me.




After that, I reached the end of Chapter 2, which seemed like a good place to stop since it was late last night. I thought these little bubbles of NEXT CHAPTER ON SHINING FORCE! dialogue were funny, so I put them in the same picture for your convenience.




This chapter was a lot of fun, and stuff feels like it's rolling along a bit more now! I'll do a bit more later on, because I have some characters up for promotion now and I'm in a new spot. Keep playing!

A Game Haiku or two to bring us into chapter 3:

I have been chosen
To defeat Runefaust's armies
Let the fight begin!

They have a weapon
To stop me from saving Rune.
Let's see them try, then.




P.S. - This video is awesome.

Whoa Now.

Okay. I know this isn't really what we want to be doing, I realize this isn't related to The Project, and I realize most of my posts have been off topic lately. But this 40th post is kind of just to keep us active, and because I think you guys should see this, as it's really awesome.

Enjoy.



On an actually related note, I'll be home for the weekend. We might get some stuff done in that time.

EDIT: Youtube is stupid, so it won't fit the video to the page. Either right click and hit Show All to be able to see the full screen window, or just click it to go to the Youtube page.

A Very Special Message

Hullo, Zuul Arcade. We haven't forgotten you, honest! But we have all been busy, what with school, work, being lazy, a BIG convention (that we might have stuff about later on) and all the other stuff that keeps us away for too long.

So on one hand, I mostly just wanted to make a post because there hasn't been one in a little while. So the thing I wanted to bring to your attention was a rather neat post made by the always-excellent Wil Wheaton in which he talks about the games of his youth a bit.

Wil Wheaton - The Fountain of Youth

Of course, this is all just a thinly-veiled excuse to wish a very Happy Birthday to our friend and ALWAYS enthusiastic Zuul Arcade author, Sean.



What? No! Not Irish-born womanizing former-mechanic-turned-Nazi-killing-sabotage-artist of the resistance in Nazi-occupied WWII France from the game Saboteur, Sean Devlin! I meant OUR Sean!

...So, yeah, to make sense of that, I'll just point out that Devlin was the first video game character named Sean I found, and even though I've never heard of or played the game, the character seems appropriately badass.

In all seriousness, Sean is a great guy who is always trying to do awesome things for the rest of us, and even though we always call him a dick for it, I can only hope he knows just how much we really do appreciate it all. And since I can't go up to visit and hang out, here's your present.





I hope it's a good birthday, man.

Some Thoughts

WARNING: The following post could potentially be a little long and a little rambly. What it will definitely be is a little link-heavy, (No, no a Hyrulian hero in the Iron Boots) with a couple of pictures.

Recently, Sara, Brendan, Laughing Mike, Sean and I were all hanging out and experiencing something of a failure of a night. Don't get me wrong, though. It was still fun as hell. While we were there, I started talking to the guys about this web series I had recently watched, partly with Sara. It's called There Will Be Brawl. (Links will be at the bottom of the post.) Basically, There Will Be Brawl is a parody of the Super Smash Bros. world, and so by extension, the Nintendo Universe we all know and love. Now, TWBB can be funny at times, in an absurd sort of way, but it is by no means a funny sort of parody. Instead, the makers of it wanted to take a broken, dark, noir-esque dystopian Mushroom Kingdom, years after a golden age of heroes.

Here's the thing. It sounds a bit silly, I'm sure. And it is silly. The acting is pretty wobbly in a lot of parts, the writing could use a little fine-tuning, and let's face it. At first glance it's really hard to accept Luigi freaking Mario as a hard-bitten PI trying to save a place that's no longer worth saving. But what you find, if you get to watching it, is that it is actually a lot of fun to watch, and it's a very interesting concept, and for me personally, it made me think, and from time to time, it got real emotional response out of me.

I think I know why that is, actually. I didn't want to make this post as a review of TWBB, but in fact I wanted to talk about what I got out of it. These characters from these games are not real. They have never been real people, and they never will be. Yet, for many of us who grew up with their adventures, they are our sort of heroes. Let's take a look at Link and Mario, specifically.

What do these two do? I mean, yeah, jump on Goombas, and smash pots, and get power-ups, but at the core of the characters, what is it they truly do? The answer is, they beat the bad guy, and they save the princess. It's as simple as that. Every single time, no matter how many times it's happened before, they save their princesses. TWBB asks us a question; what happens if the hero doesn't save the princess anymore?

We make jokes about it, of course. We say that sometimes, Mario just gets sick of rescuing Peach over and over and over. Why the hell is she so good at being captured, anyway? In the series, we see what happens to the Mushroom Kingdom when its heroes no longer act heroically. But what about our world, the real world? I begin to think very seriously that if our answer to the question, "what do these heroes do?" was something other than "save the princess," this place would be very different, and far darker indeed.

Throughout TWBB, you keep thinking to yourself, alright, so which character is it that's going to still be like he used to be? Where's the character who's stayed true to themselves after all this? Where's the last hero? You want it, and you expect it to come, and it never does. Luigi is by far the closest thing you get, and while he does decide to act heroically, he seems to beaten and broken at times that it still feels like you just want someone to come and make it all better. I imagine that's what the makers wanted you to feel like the characters had been feeling for years, and I think they succeeded.

That's why TWBB managed to get to me. It challenged not just years of storytelling, and took a different look at some of the most widely recognizable and established stories told in the modern day, but it also challenged the things that were important to me from my very childhood. It challenged, to some degree, my silly ideals.

Now, I realize this post has been awfully serious-face, which is not generally the tone we take here at Zuul Arcade, so to transition back to having a good time and playing games, I've got some neat stuff to show you guys. If any of you read the blog Geekologie, you've probably already seen this, but it's awesome, and it felt like it fit in with what I was talking about.



That's right. It's a Mario and Peach version of Michaelangelo's La Pietà. I happen to think La Pietà is a pretty damned amazing piece of art, personally, so I thought this was incredibly cool. Best part is, this Mario and Peach version is a massive sculpture. I expected it to be tiny. Granted, this is in polystyrene, not marble, but still. How cool is that?

Let's face it, Video games have become their own art form, much like how film making has been for some time. Now, as incredible as the gaming experience can be at times, it's still making a transition from silly frivolity just made for having fun to a full blown art form, but it really is getting there, and for me, that's exciting. The other thing I love is that video games can have such a fantastic visual and aural quality to them, that even after some artist has made something that becomes the video game's visuals and music, it can still inspire other artists to do amazing things based on the originals. Just look at the Video Game Orchestra, and that sculpture there.

From that, I also found this other really cool thing where this artist has been making these very pretty digital paintings of what updated old games could look like. Some of them are fantastic. The Altered Beast one, the Metroid ones, they're just fantastic. I wish I could post all of them, but there are a LOT, so I figured I would post one and then a link to the gallery. The one I picked is because it's got some relevance to some of our people here!



Click the picture for full-sized, by the way. Oh yes, it's for Final Fantasy 6. You have to love that he made the characters look as Amano originally designed them there. Anyway, that's about enough for me. I'm happy to report that it seems like most of us have been playing their games, and are just waiting for a good spot to make a post. Me, I'm still grinding. One of my characters just hit level 9, so I'm almost to where I decided I want to be before I try to take on The Marionette.

Links!



Okay, fine. I know, I made the same joke twice in this post.

-There Will Be Brawl -The series has 10 episodes ranging from 10 minutes to 35.
-TWBB costume photography -The costume photo gallery that alerted me to this thing thing's existence before I ever saw the series. These photos are fantastic.

-Orioto's Gallery -The gallery of video game remakes. There are two pages!

-Mario Sculpture -Geekologie's post about the Mario sculpture. Includes a picture of the artist next to the piece, and a picture of the original Michaelangelo sculpture for comparison.
Kordiana Lewandowskiego -The artist's portfolio. The Geekologie post links to it too, but I thought I would anyway if you want to go straight to the source. The piece, which is called "Game Over," by the way, is easy to find on his site, and includes more pictures, a 360 degree turning image, PLUS a description of how he made the sculpture. It's in Polish, but Google Translator actually does a decent job of translating it for you.

The Video Game Orchestra -Because I mentioned them, and they're awesome.

An Update

WARNING: This post is a little long. And full of great pictures. And awesomeness.

So I've been playing Shining Force most days, which is feeling pretty good. I've been grinding the same fight over and over to level a little, which feels less good. It should be noted that I hate grinding. I would rather run right through the story any day, but that doesn't always work real well. But anyway, the fight I was working on over and over was the last one I played the first time around; that is to say, when I beat it before, the town right after was the one where the game died. So, with some trepidation, I entered the town, having decided to grind on the next fight for a while. This is what I was met with.



A really sketchy dude in a cloak. Awesome. Every city should have a guy like that. If you go to Boston, there should be a guy in a cloak waiting for you, and if you talk to him, he says, "Welcome to Boston, a land of history, culture, and silly accents. Also we have chowdah."

I went around talking to people a bit, and was a little surprised by what I found:



The first couple guys I talked to were very apologetic about attacking me outside the town. That begs the question, why the hell did they have zombies and giant bats in their employ? And why don't they care that I killed so many of their guys? Oh well. I went on to find the King's daughter.





God damn right I am.

She was, of course, less than thrilled about the news regarding her father and our home. Considering how the LAST fucking town I was in was FULL of people, and even a PLAY devoted to taunting my destroyed home, I was sympathetic. She ran off, and the... um... blue dog guy who follows us around... I dunno what the fuck that guy is. He's like the Shining Force Band Manager or something. Anyway, he told me to run after her and reassure her, or whatever. But since I thought doing so might trigger an event or something, I decided to explore a little first. Doing so got me that egg I was so strongly advised to find and hatch, as well! Now, how to hatch it? Anyway. I quickly discovered something about Manarina. This place is fuckin' weird.



I also found this three-eyed lady, who started giving me all this advice out of the blue. I felt like my main character was saying to the rest of the party, "Listen guys. I know everyone we meet tries to kill us, but looking at this woman, with her three glowing eyes and her shadowed face under that hood, while she instructs us to all go into some sort of cave full of monsters, I think we can all agree that she seems pretty much legit."



So before talking to the princess, and before going into some sort of cave of evil, I wanted to keep looking around. I got that egg, like I said, and then I found this totally awesome machine, and this woman said she could use it to turn people into animals. She asked if I would like a try. Now, the rational part of my mind was like, "well, maybe we should figure out if the procedure can be undone first..."

Sadly, my impetuous side is very loud, and Reason only got out "well," before Impluse screamed "DUDE BEING A FUCKING ANIMAL WOULD BE THE TITS!" This is the result.



So I ran around like... Well, like a chicken for a while, trying to figure out how to change back. Fuck. I even ran into the Princess, who was like, "Oh, hey... thanks for trying to cheer me up and stuff, but I don't really like hens..." Everyone was like hey, it's a chicken! Or what the hell is a chicken doing in here? I mean, that's not an unreasonable question, but why aren't they worried about me being a TALKING chicken screaming "TURN ME THE FUCK BACK!" I ran all the way to the priest, who I hoped could help. This was the helpful response I got from him:



Great. Fucking thank you. Luckily, going down to HQ made me all better. I talked to the Princess after that, who promptly sacked up and joined the team. Awesome. I have two mages now. I also found this guy who seriously said to me, "Sorry, you can't come in here. I only let cute animals pass." Sigh. I went, got turned into a chicken again, found some lady who turned me back, and got to explore a little more. I got a little info out of the place, which was nice. The cool thing was that I found this totally sweet slide on the top floor.



It was then that I made a decision about Manarina. That place is bat shit crazy, but it's also the best damn place I've been in this game thus far. It has it all! Books, surly mages EVERYWHERE, a machine that turns people into chickens, some sort of evil cave which is full of stuff, AND a giant slide? How badass can one town get? Even that guy who wouldn't let me pass until I was a chicken agreed.



Anyway. After all that fun, I went down into the cave to kick some monster ass. The place is full of chests and zombies and evil mages and stuff, so it's gonna be my new grinding spot for a while. It's a much less annoying fight than the last one. I'll update you again when I've moved past that fight!

Betrayal at Themasa (spoiler alert on ff6!)

Sean here. So Teague brought up a great point that we kinda need to bring this around and get back on track. So I've also hopped back on the band wagon and have continued my adventures in the world of FF 6.

So last night, General Leo attempted to negotiate peace with some esper's at the town of Themasa, and then that DOUCHE BAG Kefka showed up and practically killed EVERYONE. First he knocked everyone out and began turning espers into magicite for his nefarious purposes, and then Leo got up and tried to stop him. Now, Leo is a total BADASS. After thinking he's put some hurt on Kefka, the little fuck sneaks up behind Leo, knocks him over, and STABS HIM TO DEATH. Fucking Kefka, I hate him so damn much. I'm actually looking forward to completing the game so I can give him some payback that's been put off for way to long.

After surviving that little debacle, I then returned to my airship and ran some errands and ascended to the now floating continent. (As Kefka and the Emperor found some statues of DOOM, through a sealed gate in the esper world)

Question: why are floating islands such a common theme in JRPG's? (Lufia and the fortress of doom also featured a "floating fortress"). I'm guessing there is something ominous about a floating peace of real estate.

"General Leo"
"Honorable warrior"
"Killed with dishonor"

More episodic content to follow - Sean

We Kinda Suck

So, let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't going so well. The last post that was actually about a game someone was playing for the project was a while ago, and it was when Eternal Sonata decided to be SUCH a dick, that even Mike said to hell with it.

Since going to school, I have hardly touched Shining Force, and I hate that. So since I'm on spring break, and staying with the lovely Sara for the duration, and I have very little homework to do, I will be trying to get back on the wagon, and hopefully it will help you guys get back on with me.

I might be going to bed in a few minutes though, and won't have quite the time to make a full post right this second, but I did want to share this tidbit, because it's true, and important.



Of fucking course it does. Giant bats are assholes.

And I just thought of a game haiku:

Stupid giant bats.
They all go for your main guy,
And then they evade.

With that, I bid you all happy gaming and a good night, and let's try to get ourselves back on track!