Those spoony bards!

So Final Fantasy X is getting an HD remake and I have an issue with this which I'll explain, but first a warning for people with lives: I'm about to get a little (ok, a lot) nerdy here so if you need to, bail out now. Anyway, seriously? Final Fantasy X?

If this reference is lost on you, congratulations. Chances are you didn't waste your childhood sitting
indoors playing poorly translated JRPG's, or your young adulthood trying to get them to work on emulators.

Psscht...What is this, Colecovison?

If you know what I'm talking about you're probably joining me in saying 'remake?' in that sort of rising tone we geeks use to express incredulity. The game only came out 10 years ago and the graphics have held up pretty damn well. Maybe in another ten or twenty years they can do a holodeck version or something, but in the meantime why not give us the Final Fantasy VII remake they totally teased us with a few years back? Sure, when it came out it looked amazing, but time has not been kind to FFVII.

Holy crap, realistic FFVII cosplay
is the stuff of nightmares.

In fact, the earlier games have held up much better if only for their quaint retro-look. Back in the NES and SNES days they weren't really going for accuracy, just consistency. The characters in Final Fantasy IV for example were kind of short, squat anime kids. They didn't really look especially realistic but neither did the 2D 16-bit world in which they lived, so it worked. FFVII on the other hand used almost photo realistic pre-rendered backgrounds and then dropped these creepy, mouth-less, polygonal Popeye dolls into them. The result, to our sophisticated HD-spoiled minds, is unnerving at best (see right).



Well, I guess it's only a matter of time before they crank out a FFVII re-make. I mean it's not like Square-Enix has ever missed a chance to sell us some nostalgia-laden piece of our childhood. They're the Hot Topic of gaming. They've done ports, re-releases and re-makes for every game in the series, sometimes several times over. I think I have like 4 versions of FFIV alone.

Final Fantasy VII: Special Chronicles Hyper Turbo Anniversary Edition
This time, Aerith shoots first!

And another thing...

Behold Vaan, the Yoko of Final Fantasy.

On a side note, I'd like to mention that I'm a little biased against the latter day Finals Fantasy (Final Fantasies?). Maybe it's just me, but the series kinda feels like a band that went all experimental and left its older fans behind. Most of the games past part VII lost me. It wasn't the emo-heavy character rosters, confusing story lines or complicated card-games although these things really didn't help. For me it was the the level-ups.

No, for real, what the hell Square?

Crap like Junctioning, Sphere Grids and the License Board ruined Final Fantasy forever. What the hell is wrong with a straightforward leveling system? Do they really have to dress it up with bizarro flow-charts full of crystals and orbs and shit? What ever happened to 'Level Up! Learned Lit2"? I'm all for trying new things, but why does each new game in the series require us to learn some crazy skill-set Ouija-board thing every time we hit a new level?

"Every time you win a fight, you'll receive XP, AP, JP and Gil. You can then Junction AP and JP to your GF thereby allowing you to...Squall? Squall are you listening to me? Are...are your ears bleeding?"