One of my good friends is a Persona freak. He loves the games and owns every single PlayStation release of the series. A few days ago he’d got himself a copy of Persona 4. He was opening it as I was talking to him on the phone. “Oh, it comes with the soundtrack!” He put it on and as he skipped through the tracks, I caught a whiff of some J-Pop. “Stop. What song was that? Go back!” “My affection”. I have a soft spot for easy breezy J-Pop that are so sickly sweet and happy-go-lucky that it’s enough to make you sick and vomit an ice cream cone with a side of rainbow. And “My affection” has buckets of sweetness. All it took was the “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeaaah”’s and I was on the song like a fly on shit. It’s just a really nice song. It isn’t a main theme or a major centerpiece song or anything. It just plays when you’re wandering around a town! I love it. I’ll probably get too sick of it eventually. But for now, it’s my pleasure that I’m not even guilty about. The entire Persona 4 soundtrack is pretty spiffy. In the realm of RPG’s, many tend to forget there are other hot composers other than Nobuo Uematsu.
Now if you’d excuse me whilst I go sing my shit. “Your affectioooooooon! Your affectioooooooon! Take it for coffeeeeeeee!”
Wednesday 30 September 2009 @ 5:33 pm | By Random J
Square Enix released their latest trailer for Final Fantasy XIII at this year’s Tokyo game show. And it’s bloody epic. We’ve got love, heart attack, conflict, pain, talks of death, mecha’s, magic and a warblicious Japanese ballad plying all the while. If you didn’t want this game up until this point, you will after having watched this.
Wednesday 19 August 2009 @ 8:45 pm | By Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
In an apparent bid to challenge Square-Enix for the coveted title of ‘most remakes of the very same game ever’, Atlus announced that it plans to re-release Persona 3… again, this time for the PSP. But wait, there’s more! In this re-hash of the game you get to choose a female lead character and your first persona is now a cow, making it shamelessly obvious to the fans that they are just milking them with fan service.
Well, the part about the cow isn’t real but the female character is. There will of course be some other changes to the story and social interactions if you choose a female lead but for the most part, yeah, its the same game as before. Actually its even less game than the PS2 FES edition, as this version contains only the main storyline and none of that ‘the answer’ goodness. There’s yet no release date for the world outside Japan but don’t doubt for a minute that Atlus wont peddle its recycled title to the western audiences, its free money after all.
Final Fantasy X-2’s soundtrack got slated by pretty much everybody, their Grandma and their unborn child. And let’s not get started on the game itself. Despite having a love / hate relationship with Final Fantasy ever since VIII and really loathing X something chronic – I rather enjoyed X-2 for what it was. Soundtrack and all. Sure, the compositions were not anywhere near as memorable of some of Uematsu’s works on a bad day. But the soundtrack served its purpose and matched the new tone and direction of the game perfectly. But whilst most of the soundtrack was being tossed in the crapper by the masses, the game’s main instrumental theme “Eternity” got shown a lot of love. Probably because it was the only composition in X-2 that sounded like it was actually from a Final Fantasy game.
An alternate version of “Eternity” which has more instrumentations and an R&B vibe going on for it also featured in the game and on its soundtrack. If you aim for the 100% completion and get ‘the band’ back together, they treat you to a performance of this song in Guadaosalam, and you can hear it every time you go back there.
Friday 17 July 2009 @ 10:47 pm | By Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
It used to be that RPGs were exclusively for those at the fringes of society, the geeks, the outcasts. The terminally awkward. Those who would end up living on their parent’s basement forever or becoming overachieving lawyers, engineers and silicon valley tycoons.
I was pretty shocked when I first checked out the playable demo of this game. Because what I had previously thought was the main theme to the game, turned out to be the battle theme!
It’s definitely a departure for the Final Fantasy series in terms of it’s sound. You’d never have thought when you first heard the piece play in the trailer a couple of years back that it’d get chucked into the game as a battle theme.
I love the composition. I did from day one. It’s grand. It’s catchy and brilliantly arranged. It really does convey the feeling of being part of a big epic adventure. But as a battle theme!? I’m not too sure. It has a sound about it that I wouldn’t necessarily associate with a battle theme. It’s sound fits, yet doesn’t at the same time: in a good and bad way. Plus, hearing it every single time you fight a battle throughout the game – it would get annoying and wear thin after a while. I’m hoping Square Enix either re-arrange it to keep it in line with other Final Fantasy battle themes and feature more of a kick, or that they’ll have different battle themes for different locations and situations.
But I do love it though. It’s a great piece of music. The sound, the sweeping strings, the mix of edgy guitars with operatic style strings and brass sections. It’s hard not to like it for what it is: a stunning bit of music. Although for a game that Square Enix claimed would not be your typical, pigeon holed J-RPG, they gave the game a very Japanesey style battle theme. All its missing is a koto and a shakuhachi.
Another month, another Final Fantasy game on the cards. Square Enix’s latest chronic milking of the series is tentatively titled Four warriors of light: Final Fantasy Gaiden. Not a great deal is known about this game. But it’s Final Fantasy. So there’s not a great deal to know really. It’ll probably play like all the rest, with a couple of changes.
The characters are designed by Akihiko Yoshida, who is also responsible for the games’ official artwork. And the setting will be an old school setting. Dragons, witches, castles, kingdoms and all that good fairy tale shit. We can also expect Final Fantasy Gaiden to be a new off-shoot of the franchise, as with Crystal chronicles and Tactics.
If Square didn’t roll out so many FF games that looked the same, I’d care more. I’m sure at least one of these non-main-entries-into-the-series Final Fantasy games are really good and worth the time. But when you click on gaming websites and see a Famitsu scan of a new game every other month, you feel like losing the will to even bother with half of ‘em.
It took 2 years, a batch of trailers, finally getting an Xbox 360 and finding out more about the story to finally get excited about Final Fantasy XIII. So it’s gonna take more than just a magazine scan to peak my interest in an FF game. A lot more.
It’s cool that the DS is still getting major third party support though, especially in the way of RPG’s. Of all the systems and consoles out right now, the DS probably has the best library of RPG’s to choose from.
You can check out the official website for the game here: complete with a cool piece of artwork, and a hot piece of retro, 8-bit, muffled and compressed to hell music.
Square Enix have gone on the record to say that Final Fantasy XIII will not be a typical J-RPG and that it will straddle genre’s. Game producer Yoshinori Kitase said…
“There’s a trend these days to strictly categorize games as western RPGs or Japanese RPGs, but Final Fantasy is something that we don’t try to categorize as either, or. For us, the game straddles genre’s”.
If Final Fantasy XIII isn’t a J-RPG, then Princess Peach is black and from Kijuju. We all know full well Final Fantasy XIII will feature a theme song sung by a female J-Pop artist, complete with warbilicious vocals. That there will be magic. There will be a love interest that will never fully come to fruition. There will be a kakkoii boy or two. There’ll be a girl with big eyes, pig tails, mini skirts and boots. Some Mecha’s. A couple dozen beasts. Bahamut. And shit loads of FMV. Shoot, with seen 90% of this stuff in trailers! Of course it’s a J-RPG!! Final Fantasy had continued to pretty much define a J-RPG all by itself.
I know games developers in Japan are currently feeling the crunch to lob loads of western appeal into their games. But there’s nothing wrong with a full on, unashamed Japanesey title. I just hope Square don’t bastardize Final Fantasy further than they have up until now. Although given the hash job they’ve made of the series so far, there’s not much more Square can do to make things any worse. (Although I wouldn’t put it past them!) And no matter what they do, whether the end results are good or bad – Square Enix will rack a shit loads of sales, a broken record or two and commercial success. With XIII releasing on 2 successful platforms this is already guaranteed. Square’s so called straddling genre’s and injection of western influences is probably making the lead main character a white female and chucking in a black guy with a gun and an afro. I hope it ends there. The last thing I want is for Square to try and deviate too much and ruin the game as a result.
The problem with Final Fantasy has never been it’s never been western enough. It’s been that Square seem to have lost sight of what made the games so good originally. I just hope that Final Fantasy fans do not end up greatly disappointed. This could easily go the Resident evil 5 route: a game which sells loads, gets decent reviews across the board, but ultimately ends up a game that falls really short. Although XIII has something in its favour and one less burden that Capcom had: the game that came before it wasn’t all that brilliant, and can easily be bettered.
With Final Fantasy: Advent children complete now out in Japan, the first playable demo of Final Fantasy XIII is also out and about. As is the way in this new age of embeddable videos – Japanese gamers, importers and owners of hacked PS3’s and bit torrent software have done us a favour and uploaded videos of the demo being played through! You can peep a sneak peak at a section of the demo below…
The game is looking great! But it always did and was always going to. I mean, c’mon: It’s Square Enix! You can always rely on them to push some stunning visuals out of a console when it comes to their big releases. Whilst the differences between the FMV and in-game engine graphics is easily distinguishable. There’s no denying how good the graphics are. Although after the graphical marvels that are Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident evil 5, Final Fantasy XIII isn’t looking leaps and bounds above what we’ve seen on platforms already. Although I’m sure there are some visual marvels to be witnessed, particularly where summons and magic spells are concerned.
The official websites for Square Enix’s forthcoming Final Fantasy epic’s (I shall use the term ‘epic’ lightly until I see and know more about the game) have gone live! There’s not much to look at, but there are a few high resolution screenshots of the game and main character art to check out.
Most interesting is that the Final Fantasy XIII site features a previously un-heard piece of music! The name of the song and its composer is not disclosed anywhere on the site. And whether the piece is the theme of XIII, simply a piece that’ll play on the title screen or if it’ll appear in the game at all is unknown. But what is certain is that it’s a stunning piece and a sole reason to check out the site – seeing as there’s sod all else to get caught up in.
Final Fantasy Versus XIII also has itself a website, but there is nothing on it as I write this.
Square finally seem to be taking baby steps in getting the Final Fantasy promo train running. Although it could be a good few months until we get anything new on the game. I cannot wait for the system comparisons to make their way onto the Internets. I’m already scared at the potential can of worms that could open – especially if the 360 version ends up on only 2 discs and looks better…
Another month, another Final Fantasy game on the cards. Square Enix’s latest chronic milking of the series is tentatively titled Four warriors of light: Final Fantasy Gaiden. Not a great deal is known about this game. But it’s Final Fantasy. So there’s not a great deal to know really. It’ll probably play like all the rest, with a couple of changes.
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Abraham 'Velcor' Duarte
David 'KidKobun' Bruno
Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
Random J
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