Before the Fantasy Finalized
December 2, 2016 3:14 PM   Subscribe

An electric company, a college dropout, a DOG, a Bohemian musician, an up and coming artist, spies, robots, Aliens™ and "Erotic Space Adventures": The (Early) History of Squaresoft

Part 2: Final Fantasy

With Final Fantasy XV setting a new record as the fastest-selling entry in the bone-crushingly popular videogame series, perhaps it's time to look back on original developer Squaresoft's humbler, quirkier beginnings producing PC-88 adventure games, oddball knockoffs, PC ports and an MSX adaptation of James Cameron's Aliens.

The Strange Origins of Your Favorite Japanese Game Developers

Final Fantasy VI Developer Interviews (1994 - 1995)

The Death Trap [PC-88] Longplay

Will: The Death Trap 2 [PC-88] Longplay

Cruise Chaser Blassty [PC-88] Demonstration

Alpha [PC-88] Demonstration
posted by byanyothername (8 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's worth pointing out that they haven't forgotten those early releases - for example, a steampunk version of Cruise Chaser Blassty was recently added as a raid boss in FFXIV.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:42 PM on December 2, 2016


It's pretty annoying that over half of the second video is a recap of the first. If you're reading this before watching, just skip to the second part video.
posted by codacorolla at 4:05 PM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


I watched all of Part 1, agree Part 2's recap is tedious, but couldn't finish it because the writing is so poor and cursory in its business journal style with an emphasis on personalities versus the evolution of coding. It's important to explore the when, how, and who negotiated the inevitability of collaboration, but the creator's own fawning, conjectural prose about who revealed an ignorance of the technology. It's a thorough accounting of products and personalities written in 8th grade English and 11th grade production design. But it's free on YouTube and likely a labor of love, so I'm an ass.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 4:42 PM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


So, the video wasn't great, but it elaborated on some history of Square I never knew. Dragon Quest has never caught on in the west like Final Fantasy did, but it's cool to see how the mechanical form of the RPG expanded over the course of a few years. Especially when core concepts of RPGs (hit points as an expression of character health, character building, experience points as a form of actionable score, item drops) have subsumed so much of larger game design.
posted by codacorolla at 9:03 PM on December 2, 2016


God my eyes are rolling so hard at this. This guy's pretty much just a huge Square fanboy, and these videos are a three page article padded out to 43m by narrating it slowly over random pictures and game video, along with the most annoying backbeat.

"And through the ashes and through the years, many have come to know this symbol and the eloquent shape by which it bears its name." "Little did they know, this flame was about to drown them all." "Square exhibited a newly-found confidence in their ability to mark their name in stone." (sigh) Guy, maybe someday you'll be able to write, but it's not today. Please, take a class.

If you want to know something really interesting about Square from the time, check out the frankly astonishing number of bugs that the Final Fantasy series is infested with. Entire stats that do nothing! Game-breaking instakill bugs! Item duplication tricks! Glitches that could erase your save! Did you know that despite what that Player's Guide Nintendo sent out to Nintendo Power subscribers says, none of the "special weapons" in the first game perform their functions?
posted by JHarris at 6:20 AM on December 3, 2016


I haven't picked up FFXV yet, mostly because I'm not in the early adopter phase of videogames anymore and all the preorder bonuses eventually become add-ons. I'm also hesitant about an RPG in 2016 that stars 4 cis hetero same-race guys. (I haven't read much about the game but that's my impression from media I've seen). For those who have played it, what are your impressions?
posted by numaner at 12:08 PM on December 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I generally prefer text to video, so I wish the main links had been an essay instead. I also don't think the monotonous music or narration add much, but it's an amateur YouTube video, so judging it by the standards of a professional documentary seems needlessly fussy. I just thought it was neat to see a little more about Square's PC-88 games, since there isn't a whole lot of information about them online. Even Japanese sites don't seem to have much beyond, "They exist and you can play them."

Maybe I should've led with the FFVI interviews; there are a lot of fun tidbits in there, especially in how detailed Soraya Saga's answers are. That's something I sincerely loved about all the games she worked on; there would be a level of detail in characterization that was both entirely unnecessary and wholly charming because of that. No one else in the industry thinks about what kind of footwear videogame characters wear to bed.

Coding is boring as hell to me, so if there's an emphasis on the people who make games in most of the links, that's kind of the point. As JHarris notes, there are a whole bunch of bugs in the original Final Fantasy, but separating that kind of information from Nasir Gabelli's career is just uninteresting and point-missing to me. Sorry; just not a fan of videogames Platonism. There's plenty of that already.

(I am also hesitant about FFXV because of the all-dudes party which is a bummer because it reflects that female protagonists are considered risky now in a series that's always done them and kind of led the way there, but I'm still optimistic. I likely won't play the game for years anyway, so whatevs.)
posted by byanyothername at 12:25 PM on December 3, 2016


The original Final Fantasy is actually not the most bug-loaded, and anyway Nasir was capable of great technical feats like the checkerboard scrolling in Worldrunner and the raster-driven track in Rad Racer. The nature of coding is such that the existence of bugs is as much the fault of quality control, and thus the willingness of the organization to devote resources to it, as the programmers -- practically all code has bugs, after all. It could be taken as a sign of how quickly a studio is to to get the game out the door, except all the Final Fantasy games have them.

The one with the most bugs, sorry to say, is Final Fantasy VI, which has a major command (Sketch) that's so buggy that using it can wipe your save, and its item duplication bug actually made it to relatively common fan knowledge. And yet it was a fan favorite. I certainly know we loved it back in the day.

But then, over the years, I've come to the realization that the Final Fantasy games have always been more about showmanship than solid programming, design or gameplay. Every game ostentatiously changes up the formula in some way. Meanwhile former competitor Dragon Quest, realizing if it's not broken then nothing has to be fixed, has kept its play systems nearly unchanged since the earliest games, and they work just as well. FF has always chased the latest developments in tech, while DQ purposely settled on a cartoony look in line with the series' character illustrations, and that I like rather better these days.

As for FFXV's all-male cast, it does seem odd, but I really don't know much about the game. All the video I've seen make it look like Route 66 The Game.
posted by JHarris at 2:29 PM on December 3, 2016


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