Chrono Trigger is one of those games that the masses are pretty fanatical about. I've said for a long time now that it's one of the most timeless (no pun intended... much) games ever. I can pick the game up today and it would still be amazing. In fact it's more amazing the more I grow up and the more I understand about game design. It's one of the few oldschool games that, were it released today, I would happily pay full price for. Anyways, the point to all this is the game was released on Android yesterday. As a result I got into an interesting discussion over on Reddit about the fate of Chrono Trigger and the Chrono Franchise as a whole. So since I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the matter here.
Today I want to talk a little bit about a topic that has been on my mind a lot of late. See, I'm a big player of World of Warcraft. Or at least, I used to be. Before I got bust with school and such, I was a pretty hardcore player. I was never in a serious raiding guild or anything, but I was always online and always doing whatever I could to be the best in my area. These days however my play is a lot less frequent, closer matching the average player. I still want to play hard when I'm online, but the issue is that I feel like Mists of Pandaria won't let me.
Over the last few days I've bee thinking a lot about what makes a good video game ending. As tends to happen, as a result I have come upon some realizations. I wanted to write an article about all the things I've decided about endings, but no matter how hard I try this article keeps ending up being about what makes a good hero. So screw it, I'm talking about heroes! The two are more connected than you may think, actually. I think my discoveries also speak a lot to the importance of good dialogue. I'll just have to get back to the whole talking about endings thing once I have this other stuff out of my system....
So as everyone surely already knows, Kickstarter is a "thing" these days. For a lot of people I know (including myself) it never really came onto the radar until earlier this year. A fellow by the name of Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, etc) started a Kickstarter to create an adventure game. This lit the industry on fire. Certainly smaller indie games had been funded through kickstarter before, but never had a major title gone that route. I think a lot of people (again, myself included) threw their money at Double Fine Adventure because of what it represented more than a desire to actually play the game. I'm sure a lot of people fall into the second camp as well, but that's sort of the beauty of what Kickstarter represents to the video game community.
So for whatever reason, I recently got to thinking about Final Fantasy IV. Reason being, the game has always been a bit of an enigma to me. That's not to say I Don't like it, by any means, but why I like it is a hard question to answer. If you were to look at the game with a critical eye, chances are you would find that it is pretty lacking in areas, even by 1991 areas. So why is it that the game is so celebrated? I can't speak for everyone, not can I claim to really know the answer, but I figured it was worth some thought anyways.
