T w e n t y S i d e d

This week the Rocketeer takes us on the long journey through the Mosphoran Highwaste, across the Salikawood, over the Phon Coast, to the Tchita Uplands, into the Sochen Cave Palace, and to many other places I can’t be bothered to look up on the wiki now that they’ve all blurred together in my mind.

While we’re on this long journey, I’d like to ask you:

Remember the start of the game?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 11: The Dream Team”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This week The Rocketeer takes us through some cutscenes where that scamp Vayne murders his father the Emperor and mischievously dissolves the senate, thus making himself the autocratic ruler of an expansionist military empire. What a rascal. 

In this series I’ve been trying to make the case that this writer is maybe not as incompetent as they seem. This is hard to prove. Maybe impossible.Other people have pointed out that the author has done good work elsewhere. That’s nice, but that’s not really how we discuss “the author” around here. At some point we have to give the author the benefit of the doubt that the good parts are good on purpose, and the bad parts are bad due to problems other than the writing, like cut content that leaves holes in the story, shifting scope and direction that necessitates 11th hour rewrites, fluctuating team composition that pulls writers away from jobs before the work is done and polished, or large-scale coordination problems where individual ideas work in isolation but are incompatible with each other. But then a reasonable reader might ask me: What has this writer done to deserve this benefit of the doubt? Why don’t I just declare them incompetent and have done with it? It’s not like I’ve shied away from that sort of condemnation in the past.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 10: The Chess Match”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.