This is a shocking figure, even to me, since my gaming career seems (from my perspective) to be a gradual but unbroken evolution. From the gates of Coneria to the plains of Pulse, games have grown up with me. I’ve sunk countless hours into games over the years, many of them into the Final Fantasy series (now approaching its fourteenth iteration, with many spin-offs and side games in between). I looked forward to each entry, and played each one vigorously, often multiple times.

But somewhere along the way, Final Fantasy quit being good. Fact is, Final Fantasy XIII sucks. Almost everything good about the series was removed and replaced with a shiny, hollow, self-referential shell of a game that represents in a  small way everything that is wrong with the game industry (and popular culture at large) in the second decade of the 21st century.

First, the music is terrible. Music has been a hallmark of Final Fantasy (composed until lately by the inestimable Nobuo Uematsu), yet here it is worthless.  Except for the tune that plays over the opening cinematic, every other track is forgettable pap. It’s so bland that I couldn’t even tell you if it was techno or orchestral or pop-like or what; yet you can spend thirty bucks and get a 4-CD set of the soundtrack. Useful I guess if you have an elevator business.

All but gone is the wonder of exploring a fantasy world – searching for the Airship or trekking to the Dark Elf’s cave or visiting the Golden Saucer are all replaced with a linear slog through what amounts to a forty-hour-long corridor filled with enemies. Gone are the unfashionable random encounters of earlier days of RPGs; instead, you can see all your foes ahead of you, which is ostensibly a better game mechanic but usually just fills me with a sense of dread. Cresting a hill and looking down on a long path filled with strange, jiggling creatures just served as a reminder that the entirety of the gameplay consisted of combat, broken only by stretches of holding the left analog stick forward to run to the next area.

The story struggles to be mysterious but just ends up being incoherent. Some people are on a train, getting exiled from their shell-like moon, and then escape the train by doing a lot of backflips and beating up a giant animal-robot with swords and bare hands. After that, the surfer guy in a trenchcoat drops somebody’s mom off a ledge and everyone turns out to be somehow related to someone’s sister who turned into a crystal. Then the whole crew (including a black guy with a baby bird living in his afro [really]) goes on the lam because they all got the same tattoos after getting electrocuted by a giant magic robot that’s evil but also provides the means of living for the whole planet. A bunch of other stuff happens, but I turned it off before I got to the crystal lesbian reincarnation subplot (really).

What happened to a nice good-versus-evil plot? I know that it’s passé to have good guys and bad guys, but when I kick back in front of the 50-inch with Final Fantasy, I don’t want shades of gray or a tale of moral complexity. I want to fight the big bad guy and summon Bahamut and yell, “fuck yeah, I just made a space dragon fry your face off!”

On top of all that, there are no towns, no leveling up (the 3-D crystal perfume grid doesn’t count and until late in the game is so linear that it might as well not exist at all), and hardly any equipment (you get weapons and accessories but the satisfaction of acquiring stuff is minimal). I didn’t buy a single item in 25 hours of game time!

I guess that was my last Final Fantasy game. I think it’s time to live up to the name and wrap up the series.

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

This doesn't usually end well

Demon’s Souls is a PS3-exclusive game that revolves around your death. Your first death comes about ten minutes into the game after a perfunctory tutorial level (in a Hopeless Boss Fight moment), after which you are revived in “Soul Form” to battle the demons infesting the unfortunately-named kingdom of Boletaria. Alternating between Soul Form and Living Body Form is the core mechanic of the game and sets the stage for much of the game’s tension, since while you are in Soul Form your hit points and attack power are both reduced, so you want to be a Living Body most of the time. However, you have to earn the right to your body in a number of ways: by killing a major demon, by helping somebody else kill a major demon, or by killing another player who is in Body Form.

Multiplayer in the game is handled seamlessly – there is no continuous multiplayer component (either cooperative or competitive), but you can see the ghostly forms of other players fading in and out of your world, reminders that you’re not the only poor bastard getting killed out there. Players can leave messages for each other in the form of glowing notes on the ground, which are selected from canned phrases like “The true Demon’s Souls starts here” and “I told you so.” Players also leave bloodstains on the ground when they die, which can be viewed by other players like a grisly highlight reel. The bloodstains serve a dual purpose: they serve both as a warning to upcoming threats, and also give a feeling of schadenfreude when you find a bloodstain at a difficult spot that you were able to clear without dying.

While in Soul Form, you can offer your assistance to living players, leaving a mark that allows the living to summon Soul Form players into their game. This assistance is often crucial for defeating bosses, and also benefits both parties – the Soul Form player gets his body back, and the living player gets help clearing a difficult stage.

The other way to recover your body is to invade a living players game, hunt him down, and kill him. This brings you into the living player’s game as a “black phantom,” which makes you hard to detect and also prevents enemies from reacting to you, since you’re effectively “one of them.” I haven’t invaded or been subject to invasion yet (since I’ve been dead most of the time), but I look forward to my first humiliation (or, less likely, victory).

That’s a lot of exposition about the game mechanics, but it’s necessary to set the stage for further commentary. The game is exceptional in many ways, especially for a game in 2009: its extraordinary difficulty, minimalistic narrative, and tight design.

I’ve already covered the difficulty aspect to some degree, but the amazing thing about it is that as the game progresses, you “level up” as a player as much as your character in the game does. Unlike many RPG’s, just buffing your stats and upgrading your equipment isn’t enough to win – even with the best gear and high stats, you can be killed in the blink of an eye if you do something stupid. Besting the game’s challenges is immensely satisfying in a way that few other games can match, especially considering that I’m not normally the type of gamer who loves obscene challenges (Ninja Gaiden Sigma made me want to punch my fucking TV).

In the tradition of old-school games of the NES era, the story of Demon’s Souls is minimal: bad king summoned demons, the kingdom is fucked, please help us out. Your character doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, and other characters don’t even react as if he does – the other characters in the world simply project their assumptions and desires onto you, which makes the game feel even more lonely and morbid than it already is. And as much as I like a good story in a game, I don’t miss it at all in Demon’s Souls – it’s all about the gameplay, and the endless struggle against dark forces and the desperate fight to maintain your living body or regain it.

All this punishing difficulty and lack of story would be worthless if the game design wasn’t tight, but luckily, it is. You’re dropped into a hub world (the Nexus) and, after beating the first level, you’re able to tackle the five stages in any order you desire. You collect Souls from the monsters you defeat, and these souls serve as both the game’s currency and the mechanism for leveling up. As always, there’s a catch: if you die, you lose all the souls you were carrying, and they’re left lying on the ground in the spot you died. You have to return to the place you died to recover them, and if you die again in the process, those souls are gone forever. It adds yet another layer of tension to an already nerve-wracking game. The controls are tight as well – despite the RPG elements, Demon’s Souls is an action game as well and you’ll need Devil May Cry-style chops to survive.

The game, while awesome, has several flaws. First, of course, is the difficulty: sometimes, the encounters are just too puzzle-like. Often, there is no way to determine an enemy’s weak point or patterns without just wading in and getting killed, and sometimes you’ll be set up for an ambush that is almost impossible to survive without foreknowledge. The enemy AI is fairly rudimentary, and many encounters are broken by the expedient of just using a bow or a spell to attack the enemy from outside its visual range. In fact, some bosses can be defeated simply by standing out of its attack range and plinking away with a bow (to the tune of 100-200 arrows). This takes away from the tension of the game, though it feels like you’re getting one over on the game, since the deck is usually stacked against you. Finally, there’s no way to sell items or even convert useless ones into something more useful – if your character is male and you pick up female-only equipment, for example, you can just keep if forever or throw it away. It’d be nice if there was something you could do with unwanted equipment.

Overall, Demon’s Souls is a fantastic game, if you can get past the first couple of hours (I died about 20 times on the first level). It’s one of the most unique games of this generation, and one of the finest action-RPGs I’ve ever played.

I’ve been playing various incarnations of the Street Fighter series for 17 years (!), since Street Fighter II: Champion Edition in 1992. There was an SFII machine in the Wal-Mart in Eagan, and my friend and I would hang around there and pretend we knew what the hell we were doing. It was pretty awesome when we figured out how to pull off a hadoken – it seemed like cheating! You can attack across the screen! No fair!

I love 2-D fighting games (as opposed to 3-D ones, like Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur), but the truth is, despite nearly two decades of experience, I’m terrible at them. The main reason is that despite fast-paced appearances, fighting games are, at their heart, strategy games. Street Fighter is closer to chess than to Call of Duty, and therein lies the problem. I have better than average reflexes, excellent ability to memorize things, and I’m a passable tactical thinker; these skills serve me well in first-person shooters, where superior reflexes and map memorization can paper over tactical or strategic deficiencies. Not so in a fighting game – reflexes play a part, certainly, but more important is strategy and mind games (also known as Yomi). I’m a more straightforward thinker, I guess, which limits my ability to play those kinds of mind games.

Maybe that’s also why I’ve chosen to remain an NCO instead of becoming an officer, despite everyone in the United States Army trying to convince me otherwise…