Square Wave: Killing with Cure

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest defines "below-average." In Japan, they called it Final Fantasy USA, and intended it as a kind of introductory lesson on RPGs, presumably aimed at particularly brain-damaged children who needed the corners cut off their toast for safety reasons. It is one of the blandest, most miserable exercises in monotony ever committed to a SNES cartridge, and as an educational experience for dolts it utterly fails. Mystic Quest doesn't go out of its way to impart tips on how to interpret character stats or how to manage an inventory of spells and equipment -- and more importantly, it falls completely flat in instilling any sense of how enthralling and personal the role-playing experience can be. It's not hard to imagine someone being forever turned off of RPGs as a concept after trying this one.

You play as a generic-looking, spiky-haired character sprite (default name: Benjamin) who literally has no origin at all. In the first minute, you're told by some nameless elder that four monsters sealed the doors of the Focus Tower, which links the four nations of the world -- and are draining the power of the four elemental crystals, which keep the balance of the seasons in check. For some reason, you and only you are tasked with the defeat of those monsters and the restoration of the world. It's like they took the most cliché bits of all the crappiest games they could find, and used that as the driving force of the plot. From there on, you explore sleepy towns, navigate dull dungeons, and grind yourself through hundreds of snore-inducing monster battles until ultimately you shut off the SNES console in shame.

Like a diamond in the rough, the best part of the game is actually the very end. The final battle against the Dark King is comparably impressive, and as you hack away at him he takes various sinister forms:

As cool as this fight was, with its multiple phases and swirling galaxies in the background, the best part was discovering that it could all be over in just a few rounds by casting your normally-restorative "Cure" spell on the Dark King -- dealing vicious damage like you'd never seen, rather than healing him.


Final Battle is the high point of what is admittedly quite a strong soundtrack, for so weak a game. It's a great example of a classic, old-school approach the "final boss" scenario -- rather than attempt to overwhelm you with the epic dread of a hopelessly-monstrous ordeal, the track energizes the game's climax with a sense of encouragement and excitement. "This is it!" the music seems to say. "Hang in there, hero -- you can do it!"

Track: Final Battle
Game: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
Composed by Ryuji Sasai and Yasushiro Kawakami

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

When Square Enix released Agni's Philosophy, a trailer claiming to be a "realtime tech demo" for... something... I had a rather unique reaction to it. While it was tempting for others to extol the quality of the visuals or descry what this change of setting could mean for the near future, I simply found it frustrating.



The video shows off scenes of generic urgency and very well-designed ambiguity, crafting a pseudo-story that never began and will never finish. We're not meant to believe that this hypothetical scenario is actually a vision of the next Final Fantasy game -- and thank goodness for that, as I'm not particularly enthused by the superficial faux-realism it aims for. I'm used to Final Fantasy having "guns" by now, but they've largely been fantastical firearms, like a sword that turns into a gun or an antiquated-looking blunderbuss -- not the full-on AK-47s you might see in so many modern shooters.

Still, it's not the content of the trailer that got to me. What I'm actually irked by is a lingering suspicion that this is what Square Enix has been diverting resources to, all this time. Don't they have better things to do -- like, oh, I don't know -- make the first proper Final Fantasy game of this generation? Last I checked, that was still their flagship brand, right?

I'm not one of those who claim the entire series has gone downhill, ever since < insert absolutely any FF title here, they've all been argued >. There are those games I love, those I like a little less, and those I find relatively unplayable. In the aggregate, I do still love the majority of them. Okay, so I may have once said that if it weren't for the job system and Gilgamesh's theme music, Final Fantasy V would be a miserable kusoge title on par with Quest 64. I still recognize that it's a matter of taste, and I do grant it its rightful place as an installment in the series, because it does more or less adhere to the fundamentals. No matter how one might criticize disparate elements of various installments in the series, no one can really argue that any of them aren't legit Final Fantasy.

Believe it or not, other game developers were once playing catch-up to Square, and wishing they had made Final Fantasy. I don't think they wish that anymore.


Final Fantasy XIII was first announced in early 2006, with the first trailer debuting in May -- almost half a year before the PS3 was released. The game didn't come out until March of 2010, though I'm convinced it was artificially delayed after it was more or less finished, so that the XBox 360 version could enjoy a simultaneous release. If it were another outstanding, deep RPG like any other main entry in the series up to that point, it would have been well worth the wait. What finally hit shelves, though, was barely a Final Fantasy game at all, save for some of the series' recurring proper nouns -- and barely an RPG, save for the fact that there are lots of fights and scenes where characters talk about things. Much of what gave the series its prestigious pedigree and loyal fan base went completely missing: towns, mini-games, side-quests, optional conversations and story scenes, secrets and hidden areas, absorbing level design, variety and contrast in gameplay, meaningful endgame content, maybe a few branching plot paths or an optional character, or even the ability to revisit most areas of the game. Nearly all you do in this game is hold the analog stick forward until your character gets into a fight or a dialogue scene triggers.

I don't bring this up just to take a dig at Square Enix, but rather to identify that there is a problem. I don't enjoy poking holes in FFXIII -- okay, maybe in a morbid kind of way I do, a little -- but mostly, I'm just an FF nut who wants to see the series return to its former glory. I could believe that some of FFXIII's omissions were conscious design decisions (there are some who are glad for the lack of towns, oddly enough). Still, I wonder how many of those decisions were made as a reaction to realizations of the skyrocketing costs of game development, rather than a natural preponderance for innovation. When they decided to reduce all shops to a single menu brought up at occasional computer terminals, part of that was a solution to how you justify the mechanics of purchasing supplies and gear in a depopulated wilderness -- but the fact that the game takes place in a depopulated wilderness is in itself a product of necessity, make no bones about it.

So, what does a responsible company do when faced with these complications? Does it spread itself as thinly as possible, continuously announcing new titles and spin-offs in rapid succession? It's become something of a running gag, that for every game Square Enix actually releases, they seem to announce development of three more. At the same time Final Fantasy XIII was announced, they also announced Final Fantasy Versus XIII. The first trailer appeared in December of 2006, and since then all we've seen are videos of establishing shots and story sequences, and recently a few quick cuts of some random battles. It's six years later, and I don't think there's a single person in the world who's actually seen this game in a playable state. I'm starting to wonder if it will ever see the light of day.

For reference, here are a few things that have happened entirely within the development period of Final Fantasy Versus XIII:
1) The entire Uncharted and Mass Effect trilogies have come and gone, as well as four Assassin's Creed titles.
2) 38 Studios acquired Big Huge Games, developed and released Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and two expansions, and recently collapsed into bankruptcy.
3) Square Enix themselves released both FFXIII and its direct sequel FFXIII-2, made the MMO FFXIV, and then made it again, and released six Kingdom Hearts games.


We're not talking about a young company who's just learning the ropes of the video game industry -- Square Enix is a behemoth that has been making all kinds of games, for decades. Final Fantasy has almost always been one of their most popular franchises, which is why we see so many remakes and spin-off games that borrow the name. Those spin-offs don't mean anything, though, if they can't maintain the integrity of their core titles.

It's really disheartening to see them trying to do everything but make a traditional Final Fantasy game -- not that I consider Versus one of those, but presumably it represents a similar scale, investment-wise. When the Agni's Philosophy video hit, it was the straw that broke the camel's back -- a slap in the face to that part of me that is still waiting for the next great RPG. The message I took away from that trailer was that not only are they revealing yet another pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream project of theirs before finishing what's already on the table, but that they spent undoubtedly a sizable amount of time and money on character design, motion capture, voicework, animation, model and environment rendering, writing, etc., for a new graphics demonstration that isn't even aimed at any game systems that currently exist.

A friend of mine suggested that perhaps this new next-gen graphics engine would help them streamline their development process. Okay, but if the engine is for next-gen systems, isn't that basically an admission that they've given up on improving their development process this generation?

Square Wave: SNESology

Before we get to the fun part, some minor business:

1) Music Monday is dead, at least in name. In retrospect, relegating the music section of the blog to a specific day of the week was as arbitrary as it was futile. I'll continue sharing gems from the wonderful world of video game music, but that ship will sail under a new banner: Square Wave. Updates will come on what one might generously call a "quasi-regular" basis.

2) What does Square Wave mean? For one, it means I'm completely unable to dream up an original title for a recurring feature on video game music. More importantly, it refers to one of the types of wave patterns prominently used in producing music by the sound chips of classic 8-bit game systems of yesteryear, like the NES and Gameboy.
In an ancillary sense, it could allude to the fact that video games appear to us via an arrangement of square pixels, or the lingering preponderance of game environment and object design to feature grids, boxes, crates, tiles, blocks, and cubes. It just seems to be part of the elementary grammar of games, born out of necessity once upon a time, yet still sewn into the fabric of today's virtual spaces.
Then again, considering that this blog represents what is undoubtedly one of the nerdiest pursuits of the modern age, "square" might refer to the unapologetic neurosis with which I'm apt to appraoch the hobby of gaming.

But enough talk -- have at you!

I've recently been exploring the chiptune music scene, which as it turns out is a lot more vast and varied than I ever imagined. It's not just the hacking of NES, Gameboy, or other vintage hardware to spit out quaint ditties, but rather a malleable and adaptable approach to music that takes electronics as an influence and can run with it across all genres in any conceivable direction.

For today's purposes we'll be sticking a little closer to home with something that is still very much wrapped in the instrumentation of games, but which does so in a novel and interesting way. SNESology bills itself as "New Original Music for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System," and is a project which has resulted in ripping sound files from a range of SNES games. It's not that the music itself is being edited or remixed, but rather that samples and instrument data have been extracted, creating a kind of "sound font" for artists to write and perform original music on keyboards, sequencers, and the like.

Across the Plains, an early composition for SNESology. As composer, programmer, and performer Shnabubula explains: "After many hours of hard work, I managed to completely rip and build an approximation of the Final Fantasy 6 (3 US) sound engine."


I've previously gushed over the amazing work put out by Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss), for both his piano & chiptune tribute album NES Jams and his Metroid series medley with Gabriel Terracciano. As adept as he is at rearranging and reinterpreting video game music, his original material is just as impressive. While a variety of skilled individuals have come together for this project, from what I can gather Shnabubula seems to be the principal contributor and composer so far. As of now, he's written over ten pieces, all of which can be listened to via the SNESology page, the YouTube playlist -- or, best of all, on his Bandcamp page where they can all be downloaded for free.

Infiltration, written using the soundset from Contra III: The Alien Wars.


There are a lot of chiptune artists who are good at crafting nostalgic tracks that approximate "8-bit," or reference common sounds of the NES or Gameboy in general. However, there is no default "sound" of the Super Nintendo. Each game has its own specific instruments and character. A variety of games have been represented within SNESology, including Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Contra III, Super Mario Kart, and Super Metroid. The result is adventurous, new music that doesn't necessarily match the style or tone of the original games, but nonetheless can fade into and out of a familiar atmosphere in ways I'm not sure other forms of music have accomplished in quite the same way.


Hands of Fate, a piece combining the soundsets of three different games: Final Fantasy VI, Terranigma, and Chrono Trigger.


Shnabubula himself is currently taking a break from the project (hopefully for not too long), but other talented contributors have stepped in and provided their own remarkable compositions. It was actually an accidental stumbling across Jeff Ball's imaginative Most Beautiful Seduction that alerted me to SNESology in the first place. He seems to have been inspired by the original game's story and characters during his creation process, and that definitely comes across to the listener in the way the tone shifts over the course of the track, although he doesn't reference motifs from the soundtrack directly.

Jeff Ball writes: "This piece was created using instruments from Final Fantasy 6. It’s a journey into the mind of Terra, a dark and brittle look into her past."


There are many more pieces than the handful I've linked to here, and if you're a fan of the SNES era at all, it will be worth your while to at least browse the playlist.