Final Fantasy VIII on Steam is a stupid broken wonderful mess, and it’s all Chocobo’s fault

When Final Fantasy VIII launched in Japan back in 1977, it included a mechanism to interface with a peripheral called the PocketStation. As far as I can tell this was a Tomagotchi-style device where you could play bleepy little dot matrix games, but also plugged into your PlayStation so you could import bonuses into whatever […]

FF5 Four Job Fiesta 2018: The Write-Up

Another Fiesta is in the can, and while I hope to get a decent clip reel of this year’s run up on YouTube, that project will likely take me a month or so to complete. In the meantime I thought you might enjoy a brief write-up detailing how the run went. But first, here’s a […]

FF4: Free Enterprise Character Breakdown

Final Fantasy IV: Free Enterprise is one of the best randos I’ve played yet. I adore every version of Final Fantasy IV I’ve ever played, even that cash-grab sequel starring Cecil Jr. and Poochie, so a new way to revisit the game has been very exciting. I have lots of thoughts about the rando, but […]

Final Fantasy II needs a remake. (And deserves one!)

I’ve put more hours into Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call this week than I’m comfortable admitting. It’s a fine game, and it would be reasonably fun to blog about all of its little quirks and nitpicks. I feel like the internet is about to be flooded with peevish “why this character and not that character!?” […]

Final Fantasy V: Four Job Fiesta

The rules of the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta are simple: each time one of the four crystals gives you a new set of jobs, you randomly pick one to keep. One job from each crystal: that’s it. You can mix and match however you like, but you can only use abilities from those […]

Why DQ4 is exempt from my “Dragon Quest Sucks” policy.

Part of it is nostalgia. I won’t lie. I learned the game around the same time in my development as Final Fantasy II, when a very deeply-rooted lifelong love of RPGs was forming. In fact, the whole reason I played Dragon Warrior IV in the first place had to do with my wanting to play […]

DQ vs. FF

I posted this rant on Talking Time today. It seemed relevant, considering that I’m smack in the middle of two Let’s Plays. On the topic of strategy in RPGs, a semi-common response is to favor DQ because “status effect spells actually work”. As a die-hard FF fanboy, this has always bothered me. For one thing, […]

LPFF2: We Have an Airship Now!

Hey yeah wow this crazy LP is back! Finally! Again!

Here’s the approximate forum page for this update. Don’t forget to flip back through the ten or so pages of glorious Photoshops preceding it!

FF12’s Awesome Cast: The Pirates

If the kids are the foundation of Final Fantasy XII, and the nobles are the driving force behind its plot, I think it’s certainly fair to say that the sky pirates are its heart and soul. Balthier and Fran are, unquestioningly, the most memorable PCs in the game.

Fantasy writing — and JRPGs in particular […]

FF12’s Awesome Cast: The Nobles

The first thing a fantasy story does is belch out a bunch of nonsense words at you. These nonsense words are supposedly the names of places, important characters, groups of people, concepts or ideas… but you won’t remember any of them because a stream of nonsense words doesn’t mean anything without context. So when the […]