Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise, but mostly the attention span–to–garbage ratio
I swear this is secretly one for the book people even though I talk about zero books in this one
My Retroid Pocket 2’s battery died while I was on a trip out of town, causing two issues. First, it turns out it’s not the easiest thing to do to find replacement batteries for cheap Android-based emulation handhelds, and I had to scroll through Reddit and YouTube to find (an unnerving number of) people with a similar problem, find a battery that’s compatible if not offering as good battery life or even quite the right dimensions to, say, fit in the case without some work, and I’m just waiting on this random eBay battery to get mailed to me now. Second, I’m now just totally stalled out on being able to play Tokimeki Memorial or Majora’s Mask while waiting, and hoping the device does work again so I don’t lose said progress.
It’s one of those weird problems that other mediums don’t have. If you lose a copy of a book, you could just get another copy of the book and find your plan again. But if you have a hardware issue and lose progress on a video game? You can’t just flip through the pages until you’re where you were at – this is an investment of hours you will have to re-do. It’s cool to reflect on how the technology has changed throughout my life (eg, cloud saves, backing things up onto external drives, general improvements in game design and its structure-function relationship with quality of life improvements), but no other medium functions like this at the reader-level.
It’s also a medium with different problems in that, on the one hand, I can’t help but feel a little ridiculous complaining that this one device is in limbo when my apartment also has six other systems purposed for playing video games, it’s just that none of them have the game I’m most interested in playing right now. Although this problem, at least, has come for the humble book as well.
One game I can play at the moment – and sure have been playing – is the real double-A–ass Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise. It’s a very fun game to play, which is 0% the thing I write about here and what basically everyone else who writes about video games writes about, so, that’s all I have to say about playing the game. “Reading” the game, though? There’s extremely little worth saying about the quality of the writing, as it were, in Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise. Because it’s bad.
I could – and will – say more about that anyway, but make no mistake: it’s bad. It’s the kind of game where the story and the writing are so bad that I’m almost mad that I keep playing it simply because the combat is really fun, I’m almost mad that I’m mad that I’m having fun, and then I get mad because I scroll through my archive on this blog on realize I haven’t touched Disco Elysium – a game I am constantly thinking about despite having spent years not finishing it – in months, again.
If you don’t play video games you might get more out of this video game–heavy ReadOnly than the video game–playing crowd, because… yeah, maybe you have this problem with book-ass books (ie, books), in which case I would love to hear from you about what you’re doing, but I don’t? My problem with books tends to be more of a “well, I didn’t really like that one!” rather than the “ugh but it’s easier to spend time on mindless garbage” problem I get with video games. And the problem is that writing in video games is almost always every single time in every single game… bad.
Stranger of Paradise sometimes has fun with how bad it is:
…but the game barely ever meets this level of campy self-awareness. It is drowning in emotions that fall flat from undeveloped characters, ridiculously overwritten, and has a plot that multiple sentences of the wikipedia page cite someone describing it as “incomprehensible”. That’s a wild, specific word for multiple people to come up with working independently!
It also has a really good example that I can’t stop thinking about of a thing that video games could be uniquely good at (environmental storytelling, things happening based on context the player has had some agency – intentionally or not – in arriving at) that they are instead often really bad at: characters will have conversations wholly inappropriate for their situations and current actions. Like this dialogue trigger here (at 16:28) that happens right as you encounter an enemy that can one-shot kill you.
WHY WOULD YOU BE CALMLY TALKING ABOUT REGIONAL HISTORY IN THIS SITUATION?
It’s so weird that brain-off entertainment – while obviously more frictionless than engaging with something that’s difficult and makes you think – doesn’t necessarily have to merely be mediocre, but can be utter dogshit. And still can be easy to sink time into because of how soothing that frictionlessness gets. Somehow more garbage equals a higher-capacity attention span. Maybe that’s what Stranger of Paradise – with its “all I care about is killing Chaos” main character, Jack – is about, if it’s about literally anything. All Jack knows is kill Chaos and be mad. Witnessing this game’s story and writing makes me mad that this is how I’m spending my time, but the answer is right in front of me. Jack doesn’t give a fuck that he’s mad.
But it’s sure a stretch to say that’s actually what this story is about, because, with that, goddammit I did end up writing about the affective fallacy.
Standard plugs zone:
I have a new review up at Kissing Dynamite of Ashley Cline’s two new chapbooks of 2023: electric infinities and cowabungaly yours at the end of the world. I liked them! You should, uh, still read the whole review though, there’s more than that.
Speaking of Kissing Dynamite, did you know I am Book Reviews Editor there? I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books, but I also will edit your reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write! Surely everyone’s dream is writing poetry reviews under the mentorship of one half of the team behind Bad Books, Good Times. Who could ask for more
Over on Trash Garbage, a playlists and vibes blog thing I’m part of, we posted a new free jazz, jazz fusion, & avant garde jazz playlist jokingly titled THIS JAZZ KILLS FASCISTS and a background noise video playlist that is more and/or not at all exactly what it sounds like titled Weather Channel Playback for Mentally Ill Girls