There are So Many Fucking Roman Numerals In This Post

So I had a nice little update schedule going for a while there, huh? Then it kind of died. The reason? Fucking Final Fantasy XIII of course. However, given that these games are always REALLY long, I thought it prudent to wait past the OMG OMG FINAL FANTASY phase until I had settled into the general flow of the game. After over 30 hours of gameplay (which would have been more if I wasn't xbox-less for a week) I am still getting tutorials on new stuff to do, so I just thought "fuck it, I get it, let's do this thing".

First, allow me to provide you with a little background: This game was a deal make/breaker for me with Square Enix and the Final Fantasy series because, let's face it, they have spent the last 8 years with their heads so firmly up their asses that, in defiance of all biological and physical laws, they emerged through their own mouths, resuming their human form, but now stained in a sticky coating of bile and shit. 2002 was a good year. Remember Final Fantasy X (or as my friends and I call it, "baby's first final fantasy") Yeah, it was easy, and yeah the plot was weird even by FF standards, and yeah the voice acting for every character except Auron and Lulu bordered on Saturday morning carton levels of embarrassing, but you know what? If you played it, I bet you enjoyed the hell out of it. After that came the dark years. We got FFXI, which was an MMO, so I never entertained the notion of entering that fucking ponzi scheme for a second. There was "Final Fantasy X-2" (not XII, mind you, but Ten - two) which was essentially a dress up game with FFX's least interesting characters with a whole bunch of jackoffs no one cared about. Then there was FINALLY FFXII and I thought to myself "not an MMO: check. New world and characters: check. Let's get some". My friend Mike pointed out to me that "if you didn't look at it as an FF game, then it was fun", which is a lot like saying "try to pretend this spinach is ice-cream and then it'll be just like a dessert". I could rattle off the list of things that made FFXII such an embarrassment that I lackadaisically played for about 5 hours before turning off my PS2 in disgust, but that's an entirely separate post, so I'll just wrap up and move on.

Final Fantasy XIII, from the get go, set off every happy nerve in my body that first fired when I was introduced to the series at the tender age of 12. The plot and world(s) really feel like a grab bag of elements from VII thru X, but you know what? THOSE GAMES KICKED ASS. Across those 4 titles I invested roughly 450 hours of my time (this probably also explains why I had no friends in middle school, but I digress). My point is, yeah it ain't original, but for chrissake, this series has had 13 main franchise titles alone. Making each installment last for, on average, 70 hours or so, you're bound to run into a little overlap from title to title.

So far, however, I've just been comparing. How is FFXIII as a game? The combat has once again been tweaked from the golden standard set by VII through IX, but rather than turning into the abortion that was the combat mechanic in XII (pseudo-real time but not really, and you never really knew what the fuck was going on anyway because of all the lines on the fucking screen branching from your character to every fucking object on the goddamn map) they decided to streamline the combat, keep it pseudo-real time, but crank that shit up to 11. As a result you only control one character for any given battle, assigning other characters roles that you level up in a very FFX manner (ie, big ol' grid with skills and arbitrary points required to attain said skills) and you swap between different combinations of combat roles called paradigms. However, the frantic speed means that assigning out even one character's strategy move by move is a good way to get everyone killed. To that end, the game has included an "auto-battle" command, which will stock your character with the most useful set of commands for the targeted enemy (provided you've scanned them or fought them enough, otherwise the commands are a random, exploratory hodgepodge until auto-battle hones down what works). As Greg Dean put it, this can make the game feel overly simple for a large portion of the first 2 discs. And he's right. Actually executing your moves is little more than repeatedly mashing A.

But unlike other installments, winning battles is no longer determined by stringing together the best sequence of moves, but rather utilizing the best combinations of character roles at the right time. For example, I like to start out a fight with a commando (striker type) and two ravagers (black mage/support types) so I can immediately start wailing on whatever I encounter and maybe drop their ranks by one before they even get close. Were I to do that all the time for every battle though, I would die in about 15 seconds because there is no one to heal any of my party members, so you have to have other paradigms set up involving medics, defenders, saboteurs, and white mages. And let me tell you, during some fights you find yourself swapping paradigms with such frantic intensity that you thank god above that you are only responsible for one actor in this cavalcade of chaos (a feature I was worried about prior to the game's release). So while the actual act of hitting stuff is just pressing A, I pose you this question: isn't that what all the Final Fantasy games have been like? Think about it. Most normal encounters in any FF are really easy and you basically win by selecting attack until it dies. Then you get to the bosses and die about 8 hojillion times trying to figure the fuckers out. So yeah, plenty of people piss and moan about how the combat is "too easy" and A is the magic "I Win" button, and to them I say: fuck off. If you're looking for a genuinely challenging RPG, play a REAL fucking RPG. Final Fantasy has never been about meticulous character control, and anyone who says otherwise is a fucking idiot. XII made the game about meticulous character control and as I said, that game was so un-fun that it killed my love of the series for 3 years.

So what the hell do you play FF games for? For a ridiculous 70 hour story of course! Did I play X because I really enjoyed scrounging for mcguffins to level my characters' abilities up, or thought the process of swapping every fucking party member in to every battle just so they could all get AP was super fun? Fuck no, I played it in spite of that shit. I'll be the first to cop that the FF games are often tangled up messes when it comes to the plotting, and 10 years after my introduction to the series, I do not take it quite as seriously as I did back in the day and am more willing to acknowledge any absurdity or outright stupidity. That being said though, my inner 12 year old squeals with delight at every cheesy ass cut-scene featuring girly-looking men and dark, feisty women. The first time I got an Eidolon I felt joy like only a child could have, even as I watched the Shiva twins scissor each other to form a bitchin' motorcycle, which I then used to run over and ramp off of enemies before shattering them into ice. None of that was an exaggeration. And that scissoring cut scene happens EVERY time you summon Shiva. I have yet to find it even a little less awesomely hilarious than I did the first time. And it's the little touches like this which prove that someone at Square Enix still knows what a Final Fantasy game should play like.

That said, I will point out one gaping flaw that was allllllmost a deal breaker for me. The first 20 hours of the game give you no control over who is in your party, are completely linear with literally no option to explore. Just oppressive corridor after oppressive corridor. However, as the plot of the game makes itself clear, I chose to view this from a literary perspective in that while you are on cocoon (the first of the game's two worlds) you have no choice in what to do or where to go because of the military state nature of the entire society and the fact that it is revealed that you have been being guided to a special culmination moment by an otherworldly being. The game is linear because the plot ALLOWS no character freedom. When you leave cocoon and travel to pulse, however, the world opens up in such a staggering way that you almost don't even know what to do with all this freedom, which is again, expressed through the aimless wandering of the characters wondering what the next step is. I might be choosing to view these issues with TOO much literary credit being given to the folks at SE, but fuck it, it's my game and I'll enjoy it how I want to.

The point is, they're finally back on track in making FF games. Is this going to be the VII killer that ushers in the next generation? Keep fucking dreaming on that point. But they finally made a game that I have played for over 30 hours and still want to keep going, and that makes it a success in my book. Maybe they can keep that going with XIV... oh wait, that's gonna be a fucking MMO. Fucking Square Enix.

We Are Humongous Suckers

Those of you who know me know that I am someone who, on occasion, can appreciate some absolutely, completely, utterly shitty music simply because it is that special combination of hilarious and catchy. 3OH!3, Lady Gaga, "Right Round" by Flo Rida, these are all examples of such a phenomenon. And of course I would be remiss if I failed to mention Ke$ha.

Ke$ha is, in fact, probably the worst offender on the list. I mean, this girl is just awful. "Zip your lips like a padlock"? Fucking excuse me? And what precisely does it mean to wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy? Is this a phrase the kids are using now? Am I approaching cultural obsolescence? And of course, let us not forget the moment that she requests that the listener "put a little love in her glove box". Awful. This does not preclude her, however, from dominating my most played tracks on iTunes for the last month.

Anyway, I've had this theory for a while now that maybe Ke$ha is some kind of stardom super genius and is deliberately trying to see how much money she can make with as little effort or talent as possible, but simply by pushing every "trashy party" button in your brain at once. Last night's appearance on American Idol has finally given me the evidence I need. This girl MUST be fucking with us.

OK, so anyone who knows the real lyrics knows precisely how neutered that version was (which really doesn't help with making her sound less juvenile). Still though: OH MY GOD DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? First off, the girl never actually fucking dances for a second of the video. Second, what in god's name was going on with those TV men? And the headress... the fucking HEADRESS! This girl must be playing the greatest practical joke in the history of the music industry, and we are all the suckers that just fell for it. At least that's what I have to tell myself.

An Immediate Follow-up

As I was typing out my rant about Avatar, some of my co-workers started discussing it. I took a break to explain to them why it is the cinematic equivalent of a root canal, after which one of my co-workers turned to me and said "are there any movies you DO like?" This is, of course, a very silly question, but it is one that I feel deserves addressing. Why do I forgive some movies being shitty while others are given a much more hard line stance? So here is a run-down of what makes a movie in a genre GOOD.

Action Movies

The Good: The Die Hard Series (All 4), The Matrix, Desperado (or just about anything by Robert Rodriguez for that matter), Aliens, Terminator 2, Taken

The Bad: The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions, Alien 3/Resurrection, Terminator 3 etc.

The Difference: I watch action movies for mindless bullshit. Now this may make me sound like a hypocrite in the post below, but fuck you, keep reading. I watch them for self-aware mindless bullshit. What makes the Die Hard movies great is their awareness that they are simply vehicles for pure testosterone. You don't name a sequel Die Hard 2: Die Harder without absolute certainty that what you are producing should be taken at face value and not a degree beneath. There is no depth, but they acknowledge that, thus removing my expectation of depth and making it OK. Where these movies falter is when the first film succeeds and the makers mistake that success for appreciation of nonexistent depth and make more. Almost every action movie I hate is a sequel where they try to take a simple and fun idea and try to puff it up to contain both ball shattering action and depth (nowhere is this clearer than The Matrix sequels). The result is generally a mish-mash of pseudo-philosophical bullshit peppered with explosions, making the movies neither all fun, nor all thought provoking, and leaving the viewer annoyed and confused as to what the hell the filmmaker is looking to get out of them.

Comedies

The Good: Anything by Judd Apatow with the exception of Knocked Up, Anchorman, Zoolander, Dr Strangelove, most Kevin Smith movies, Super Troopers.

The Bad: Knocked Up, The (Adjective) Movie movies, Napoleon Dynamite, The Girl Next Door, Talladega Nights, Any romantic comedy except Down With Love.

The Difference: Honestly, the way I view comedies is very similar to how I view action movies in that I am looking for an opportunity to not have to think too hard and just be amused. What makes or breaks it for me is whether or not the jokes have staying power. Napoleon Dynamite had about 3 funny lines, all of which were immediately driven into the ground in weeks and lingered like the last guy at a party who won't take the fucking hint for YEARS. The (Adjective) Movie formula seems to have finally petered out, but they are another example. Congratulations, you mocked every media darling of the current year in your movie, but forgot to make it about anything. Family Guy does this all the time, sure, but given that it is a half-hour weekly show that I can see for free, my standards are lower. If I'm going to pay to laugh, I want them to be LASTING laughs. Every movie on my good list is something that has held up to sometimes dozens of viewings (Anchorman, Super Troopers, Clerks) and while they lose some of the initial riotous hilarity of the first viewing, they always make me chuckle. What's not OK is taking the same formula, same actors, and repeatedly changing the backdrop. This is why Will Ferrell movies after Anchorman fell apart so quickly and why romantic comedies will always suck. Hell Down With Love only made the list because it is an indictment of everything that is wrong with the genre.

Science Fiction

The Good: Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Star Trek: First Contact, Anything by Andrey Tarkovsky

The Bad: Avatar, Avatar, Avatar, Fucking Avatar, Equilibrium, The Battlefield: Earth (of course), and also Avatar.

The Difference: Notice anything about my "good" list? That's right, all but one (Alien) are based on books, and are about as faithful renditions as one can get to the source material. And actually, with the exception of 2001 and Tarkovsky movies, they're all Phillip K. Dick books. My sci-fi absolutely positively MUST make me think. That's why I count things like Terminator and AlienS as action movies. The point is, the characters must be believable, have clear motivations, and it must be clear how we got from the present to the circumstances of the film. Even if there are flying cars or deus ex machinae that magically predict a future that doesn't technically happen, I will forgive it as long as what is being examined is a relevant and relatively constant facet of human nature. It also has to be something I haven't seen the exact plot of elsewhere (which come on, should not be difficult since your setting is literally any fucking thing you can think of). If the characters are too future-y, I can't relate to their problems, stop caring, and it goes in the Avatar file. The exception to my stringent requirements is First Contact, because fuck you that movie is too good, and in spite of standard Star Trek camp, comes way closer to meeting all of my criteria than fucking Shmavafuck (I can't even type it's stupid, shitty, now apparently meaningless name).

Horror

The Good: Nightmare on Elm St 1 and 3, The Exorcist, Dawn of the Dead (both versions), Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days/Weeks Later

The Bad: Every other horror movie in existence

The Difference: The above movies have a few special features: I find the concept behind the Nightmare on Elm St. movies fucking terrifying, as I am not prone to having or remembering dreams, and when I do, they always freak me the fuck out, so they play to my personal fears. I can laugh at the camp and stuff, but when it's time for shuteye, I really hate myself for ever watching those movies, which is the sign of successful application of horror. Exorcist gets points because the first time I saw it it scared me shitless and I have never been able to extricate myself from that association with me as a frightened kid. Again, effective. The Dead and 28 (blanks) later movies are judged on different criteria. George Romero started the trend of, well zombies, but also the trend of using zombies as social or political commentary. So while there are many zombie movies in existence that I didn't mention (some by Romero himself) these are the ones that utilize the awesome power of the undead to convey the better points one can make with such a medium. Every other movie relies on cheap shocks, overuse of gore, or "tributes" to B-movies that fall flat on their asses (Rob Zombie, I am looking squarely, decidedly, and eternally at you). Generally though, fuck horror.

There is a whole swath of movies I have failed to mention here, and that is because they are less distinctly categorizable, and therefore tougher to make broad generalizations about what makes them great or terrible (A prime example of a missing film is my all time favorite, American Psycho). But I feel that this is a respectable summation.

So in conclusion, yes, there are PLENTY of movies I like.

A Less Than Timely Rant

I am way behind the times in committing these thoughts to words, but the fact that I am stuck in this office for about 3 more hours with nothing to do gives me some time to get some good old fashioned vitriol going.

You know what movie is a stupid piece of shit? Avatar. Seriously. Fuck that movie and fuck James Cameron. I had been doing a pretty good job not thinking about this abortion of a film for the last month, but with the Academy Awards coming up this Sunday, it's been slowly coming back into my life like a herpes breakout. Although I don't know if herpes would be less obnoxious than listening to people justify why this movie is worthy of anything other than a straight to DVD release.

So Avatar is the most expensive movie ever, using state-of-the-art brand new equipment, and if you're the type who thinks movies aren't ALREADY way too fucking expensive, you can offer to throw even more of your hard earned dollars at James Cameron's feet to see it in 3D (read: see it with a huge fucking headache). Though this doesn't need to be reiterated at this point. If you hadn't already heard all this bullshit before then can I move into the cave you inhabit with you? It must be peaceful there. My point is that any time you ask someone to justify their opinion of this movie, they will immediately start talking about the special effects and/or 3D. One thing that is conspicuously absent from most people's positive assessment is any attempt to address the plot. If you push most Avatar fans on the issue, their response will be "yeah, the plot wasn't too original, but the effects/world/"immersive" 3D are so impressive that it makes up for it." Are... are you fucking kidding me? That's like saying you have the most unique house on the block that is built from material that can withstand a nuclear strike, but melts when exposed to rain.

First, to address the plot: Have you seen "Dances With Wolves" or "The Last Samurai"? Then you know what this movie is about. If you haven't, skim Wikipedia. Both of those movies are fucking awful too, so it won't take long to get the idea. Just throw in some nonsense about a rare mineral called (I fucking kid you not) "Unobtanium" and you have Avatar. If you just felt some bile rise in your throat reading that, don't worry, that's just proof that your brain functions. But you have the usual checklist: formerly unquestioning marine exposed to indigenous people of another planet who takes up their cause, the heartless corporation and army that oppose said indigenous peoples and marine (plus marine's posse), scientist type who "always kind of but not really" understood the people she studies, and a whole cavalcade of expendable dipshits who prance on and off screen contributing fucking nothing except spouting the most embarrassingly awful dialogue I have ever fucking heard.

Now, I will say that the Visual effects are good. That's undeniable and really, after 315 million goddamn dollars, there would be no excuse for the visuals to not make me shit myself in awe. And that's the problem, they're good, but most expensive movie EVER good? HELL no. Hell. Fucking. No. It's all very obvious CG work and the speed at which it ceases to be jaw-dropping and starts to be par-for-the-course and commonplace is maddening. After all, special effects cease to be any kind of special when they comprise the entire fucking film. Those are just effects then. And I'm sorry, but Mr. Cameron should really be looking to get his money back, because they're really no better than anything else from the last 5 years or so.

Of course, I would be remiss in my assessment if I didn't mention the whole 3D... thing. I did not see this movie in 3D because I resent the existence of that format. It makes me fucking nauseated, and because there is no way to provide any kind of feedback to the audience, provides all the immersion of a pop-up book. Plus you have to pay extra money for those stupid fucking glasses. The point is that if you need to have objects (I'd say characters too, but let's face it, they're more like objects than ACTUAL objects) flying into the face of the audience every 10 seconds to keep their attention, then either your movie needs one fuck of a rewrite or you're Michael Bay. A lot of people tell me I'm so sour about this movie because I didn't see it in 3D and thusly "don't get it". My response is this: If a movie is reliant on a gimmick that makes me physically ill to convey whatever fucking point it's trying to make, then it is a failure as a movie. Why not just make this a vehicle to display "things that would be cool if they existed" then just give a rundown on Pandora, sans the awful characters and plot, if they're really that unimportant to my "getting" of the movie? I can't goddamn believe some people.

I will remain immovable on this issue. If you think Avatar was a good movie, you are wrong. If you think that it is excusable to make a movie that has been done countless times before (all fairly badly) for the sake of "durfff I just made something pretty and who cares about original ideas or interesting characters?" then congratulations, not only are you wrong, you also have the same standards for entertainment as most household pets. This is all well and good, but I would request that like most household pets, you remain indoors until you undoubtedly die prematurely from eating something you shouldn't have, simply so filmmakers will stop pandering to your moronic tastes.