This made me laugh

http://dustinfaber.blogspot.com/2010/08/giving-penance-to-video-game-villains.html

In other news, I have Xbox LIVE gold again, and am eager to play Rock Band 2 with any and all takers. Gamertag: Ando Commando 4.

See y'all in cyberspace!

Review of FFX

Final Fantasy X was one of the most successful in the Final Fantasy series, the first for playstation 2, the first to feature voice acting, the first to do away with the much loved world map and the first of countless other things I suppose. Is it however, most importantly, the first of the FFs to support a Catholic worldview or morality? One Catholic minded review praises the fact that the opening quest of the game is that of making a pilgrimage to all the temples across the fantasy world of Spira in obedience to the received religion, is this then the game to give to your younger bro to try and inspire him to come to the next WYD or something? Let's see, let's analyse the game according to sound criteria and discover whether it is the kind of thing that will fuel a Catholic worldview and morality or whether it will mock basic morality and present false, inadequate responses to the most important questions of life. (Spoilers contained more or less throughout)

Reality of Objective Moral laws.

The first section of the game could be themed "Relativist Tidus in the religious land of Spira". Tidus essentially sees the world in the same way as your average young worldling out in Croydon on a Saturday afternoon. Spira the land to which Tidus is pulled into, at least to being with, seems to have rules, objective morality, hierarchical authority and religious rituals. Tidus, the protagonist, that is, the voice of you, responds to all this with cynicism and derision.

He joins a band of guardians protecting Lady Yuna, a summoner, on her quest to perform a pilgrimage culminating in her self- sacrifice to temporarily destroy the wicked monster "Sin".
The obvious baddy, Seymour, one of the religious authorities, from quite early on shows how the whole religious system and morality is in fact totally arbitrary as he is willing to tolerate the use of illicit weapons in the fight against Sin- there is a sickening moment when he says something like "after all, using this wicked weaponry is for the greater good and so it is fine". Tidus agrees with his thinking and even supposedly pious Yuna sees some sense in it. Surely if something is intrinsically evil, it is evil regardless of the supposed good that will come from it? Indeed, ultimately no good can come of it because you offend Almighty God, the infinite Good and reference point to all that is good. The philosophy is preached loud and clear though, apparently objectively evil acts can be performed intentionally to achieve a supposed "greater good".

Of course over time it becomes clear that the acts were not in fact evil but rather indifferent because, guess what, Tidus and Seymour are both in fact correct- things are neither good nor bad in Spira, the only certainty is death.


Interior Struggle to pursue the good.

Many of the characters, even within the team are thoroughly nihilist- they don't accept that there is a good let alone that one needs to conquer himself in order to attain it. Before the shock revelations that the whole religion is a sham and that Yuna has been wasting her whole life and that her supposed vocation is a sham she really embodies a noble conquest of self- the weaker side of her nature wants to cling to romance with Tidus but the greater side overcomes and doggedly insists that she must continue to her vocation.


Divine Providence working through free will.

Free will is taken as a given through the game. There is some sense of providence. Tidus knows the game is "his story". and that he is going to end the cycle of sin in Spira. Is Tidus free? Is Tidus a one off? Could other characters have been dreamed into existence to destroy Sin? The last section of the game seems to be one of Tidus resigned to his necessary fate rather than freely being an agent in a grand story beyond him but requiring him.


Self Sacrifice for others

The initial religious plot is quite noble. The evil monster sin can be checked for a period of time by a summoner, after having made a pilgrimage across the world, sacrificing him or herself in a one on one show down. Yuna, the summoner in the party is undertaking this quest and is quite willing to give of her life for the people. This is wonderful and I found myself egging her on. She has a clear sense of vocation, a higher calling, that her life must be given up for the sake of others. Some of the others also seem to embody self-sacrifice- Kihmari for example, who is clearly dedicated to his role as Yuna's guardian and totally willing to die to allow her to fulfil her vocation. Tidus is opposed to Yuna's sacrifice as is Rikku. Yuna ought to say "get behind me Satan!" but she allows them to continue with her! Eventually the plot spins around as Tidus realises that he is in fact some kind of character being dreamed into existence and with the death of sin the dreamer ceases to dream and he will disappear. Tidus accepts this and ceases to exist as sin dies. There is wonderful Orpheus and Eurydice moment as Yuna clasps in vain at the dissolving phantasm of Tidus!


Basic Christian Theodicy- Monotheism, Goodness of creation, understanding of eternal reward/punishment based on moral behaviour.

This is where the game suffers big time, typical Square 'eh? It seems that people have souls and when they die and have a ritual performed over them their souls go off into a spiritual world. If the ritual is not performed the individual can remain in an undead state or gradually turn into a monster. The whole problem with all this is the absolute indifference of the whole thing. Seymour the wicked baddy dies, so does Auron, apparently good, so does Ject, another baddy, so do a few other good characters and what happens to them all? They all float of neutrally into some kind of existence- What then is the whole point of anything?! There has to be a judgement! The existence of evil, if we are able to name such a thing (and the game does name evil) demands that evil must be punished. The good and evil character cannot indifferently drift off into eternity. Furthermore there seems to be continued existence but there is no God sustaining all of this! It is all very soccinianist, the "soul" isn't so much immaterial as subtle matter that seems to just float off.
There is no God to whom the souls are presented before, there is no God at all. For a while we think "Yevon" is a kind of deity who is utterly indifferent to the cries of his people but over time it becomes clear that Yevon is not the creator at all but simply a powerful human being living inside of Sin. How can any positive worldview contemplate existence without a creator? What fools!

Conclusion

FFX is in many ways technically very good. It is probably the first in a run of new "interactive movie" FFs where the game is made up of linearly progressing cut scenes with lots of optional side quests at the end. I have to admit that I do prefer the old style where you have the world map, the ability to jump a little ahead and the alternative of deviating into side quests at every step of the game. The towns have very little character which is a great pity, there seems no reason to return to them after they have been visited and the NPCs are, excepting 'Cid', all pretty dull.

I really liked the battle system, totally turn based with some really tactic-based battles. I think the difficulty level was just right, the game isn't a walk over and some random encounters can cause trouble- I like that though, sometimes it is refreshing to have an enemy successfully cast death on your whole party ;) I'm was not all that keen on the "sphere system", after a while I started wishing the game would just do all the levelling up automatically rather than giving the option of which stat to increase. It was a little tedious really.

The beauty of the graphics opens up the issue of pornography and I think at a few points the game edges close to the mark. Some characters are absolutely and ridiculously immodest even more than Tifa in her dumb cowgirl outfit in FFVII ;) At one point it is suggested that Sin is a punishment for the vanity of the people. This seems totally ridiculous though as the religious authorities seem to be doing nothing to get people covered up!

Fundamentally FFx carries a worldview that is relativistic, materialist and ultimately nihilist. The game concludes with Yuna proclaiming that the wonderful people of Spira can now build a wonderful peaceful world now that they have redeemed themselves from Sin. Religion was a farce and man has saved himself. It seemed very Rousseauian, that naturally benign man was now going to have paradise on earth now that the religion has been cast aside and the external foe defeated. The real truth about sin though is that it is not some external creature that can be eradicated from the earth in a puff of smoke, no, sin is reproduced by our own wills and to some extent its seat will remain within our hearts until our wicked nature has been made anew in Christ. May the Blessed Mother form Him inside of us through grace here and now that even before the final resurrection we may live free from sin grafted totally into Christ.

I am glad that I played FFX, hopefully writing this review has engraced the act in some way ;) I wouldn't recommend it to anything more than a mature Christian who is capable of mocking the plot for what it is. There are some poisonous ideas more poisonous that Sin's toxin that can easily infect even the aveThe gameplay is really something and there are some great music tracks. Square-Enix have got some really talented guys on their staff, it is a pity, a crying pity that ultimately their games seem to be one after the next supporting godless empty philosophies that leave their depressed teenage audience utterly uninspired.

FFXIII

Alright.

I just finished the 2nd of the 3 discs of the xbox 360 edition of Final Fantasy XIII.

Apparently, scenario and script writers in Japanese Role-playing game land have run the proverbial narrative well dry, so to speak. FFXIII has the usual "let's stop the evil God/empire/ubermench conglomerate-conspiracy" plotline, complete with the usual cast of cookie-cutter character archetypes to illustrate the anti-authoritarian allegory (with one noticeable exceptions, on which I will hopefully elaborate on in a future posting). However, the end of the second disc (about 23 hours into the game, FWIW), commences with the *ahem* "totally unexpected" awful truth trope - that is, the point in a JRPG where the main characters/"band of heroes" discover that what they THOUGHT was the bad guy really isn't the pernicious villian they presumed he/she/it was, but something else. In most games, this enemy is usually revealed (upon its defeat, of course) to be servant/pawn of the REALLY bad guy, the good guy in disguise, or the unwitting interlocuter in some grandiose scheme of some other entity yet to be fully revealed within the narrative. In the case of FFXIII, however...(SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!)

...

The "final boss"/king of the animist deities that acts as the catalyst to this major plot twist IS, in fact, the "bad guy" after all - but after you "defeat him," he just laughs you off and says that you can't kill him - AT LEAST NOT YET! Apparently, the animist deities in this game want their subservient human "tools" to kill them off - but on their terms, not the humans', so they still "win" at the end of the day.

WHAT?!?!?!?!

Nietzche, eat your heart out. Ugh. Thanks be to God for the resevoir of theological and theodical coherence in Catholicism. Beats JRPG nonsense anyday :)

E3!!!

Ok, so we've seen all the press conferences. Zelda. Killzone 3. Golden Sun DS. A Gears of War rip-off...blah, blah, blah. I'll be honest: nothing too interesting so far, and at this point, the only revelations we can expect are impressions from the show floor. Ah well... I'm too busy playing Pokemon right now to care! Maybe if they announce FFXIII Versus for the 360...or an new F-Zero game...

Anything noteworthy from my fellow gamers? That new Xbox 360 slim looks pretty nifty...

In Case You Missed It (Because I Sure Did!): Dragon Quest IX release date is official

...as per neoGAF, portable old-school role-playing heads stateside July 11.

Interesting to note that Nintendo, not Square-Enix, is the publisher this time around. The ESRB rating is E10+ (DQ VIII on the ps2 was rated "T for Teen," as have most other mainline entries in the Dragon Quest series). Hopefully Nintendo doesn't bungle the transliterations - I'm all for family-friendly games, but this is a game series where the dialogue contributes a great deal to the overall enjoyment of the game, and I'd hate to see a diluted translation of an excellent script just to maintain more accessibility amongst the younger gaming set.

Nintendo's got a pretty impressive teaser up on their official website, FWIW:

http://dragonquest.nintendo.com./

Revising for exams

I haven't been posting as I have been wrapped up in exams and revision for them. Still getting a bit of gaming in though. I'm working through the old Zelda II for the NES (unfinished business from when I was very young ;) ) and also FFX. I'm sure I'll have posts on both soon enough. I'm not sure why I had never got round to playing FFX in the past but am glad that I am now, I think I am pretty close to the end and am working out exactly where the game stands in terms of complementing or detracting from a Catholic worldview. Purely in terms of graphics/ gameplay/ sound/ battle it rates very highly- the battle system in particular, as with thought and tactics fights can be brushed aside quickly. Obviously, in terms of gameplay, things are too linear for my liking... that seems to be the way of a lot of RPGs. There has to be balance because too much freedom normally seems to devalue the story and characterisation.

Ridin' the Alan Wake Hype Train

Alan Wake is a self-described "psychological thriller" (read: survival horror) game first announced over five years ago. It is finally set for release on May 18.

Despite my general proclivity towards role-playing games and my aversion to "blood n'guts" (that I managed to play through Resident Evil 5 without vomiting is, to quote Ben Franklin's aphorism, "proof that God loves me and wants me to happy") that such "survival horror" games tend to possess in spades, Alan Wake's emphasis on narrative development and puzzle-solving gameplay is certainly palpable to a role-playing gamer like me, and the "T for teen" rating would seem to indicate that the carnage will be kept to a minimum.

Many in the gaming community are already extolling Alan Wake as a "game-of-the-year" contender. There's even an online webisode series prequel to promote the game before its release in the coming weeks.

The metacritic average is in the 80th percentile, which would seem to indicate its not quite the foretaste of heaven some gamers apparently think it is. Still, if I ever manage to finish FFXIII and Pokemon Heartgold, I'm convinced Alan Wake can give me a good jolt of summer fun.