13 Weeks: A Debriefing

General consensus is that folks want me to do another long-form project like 13 Weeks of Final Fantasy. It was fun! But a lot of work. Like, way way more work than I was expecting. Which… is characteristic of these little projects I inflict on myself. “Oh! I’ll do that! It’ll be easy! It’s only, like, thirteen paragraphs a week.” Next thing I now my Saturday nights and Sunday mornings have totally evaporated.

I like how it turned out, though. I’ll do more stuff like it, I suppose… just not sure I want to jump into it right away.

Anyway, I kept this little spreadsheet of how many “points” each FF title gained throughout the week. The one at the very bottom of the list earned one point, while the crown jewel of that week earned thirteen:

Yes, I make spreadsheets for everything. Shut up.

Anyway! Some interesting data emerges when you look at it like this.

1) Were these the only criteria by which we could judge an FF game, FF4 would be the best and FF2 would be the worst. Which is precisely how it pans out in my crazy head! The middle of the pack is a lot more muddled, but the two extremes are firmly in place. I wonder if this is a quirk of coincidence, or if my views on those games are so across-the-board that it would have happened this way no matter what topics I’d picked.

2) There were three games that never took the top spot: FF6, FF8 and FF11. FF11 is an odd duck, but the other two titles make sense. They’re technically sound games and I enjoy them a great deal, but neither of them excel so much in one area that they really distinguish themselves.

3) FF1 and FF2 both took the bottom slot three times. In FF2’s case it’s because it’s such a terrible game, but with FF1 I think it has more to do with the origin point being a bad place to look for trends and traditions. There were a lot of weeks where the topic kind of didn’t apply to FF1 at all.

4) FF10, on the other hand, placed a lot better than I thought I would! Can a game be much less than the sum of its parts? Tidus and Yuna say “Yes!” (Also, they say “HA HA HA HA HA.”)

I tried to split the difference between “serious” and “funny” topics. I think the “serious” ones were harder to write for… especially on the subject of music. I felt really far out of my element on those two weeks. Hopefully my ignorance didn’t shine through too terribly much.

The most fun was making the little images. I’m a little bummed I won’t be making any more of them.

…aaaand that’s the last I’ll be mentioning Final Fantasy for a while! Except probably not, considering I’m smack in the middle of an FF9 replay. In reality I’ll probably have something to say about endless strings of failed thefts and/or You’re Not Alone before the week is out. But hey, I talk about what I’m playing, and it just happens that I’m pretty much never not playing Final Fantasy.