I’ve been playing the Final Fantasy games for a very very long time. The original Final Fantasy game for NES was the first game that I ever purchased with my own money. I vividly remember my parents not appreciating the fact that I told them that you could get experience points for killing “asses” in random fights. They were much more ok with the fact that it was actually “asps” that were being killed... I have maintained my aversion to snakes to this day. Having said that, I recently starting playing Square Enix’s nostalgiafest known as Final Fantasy: Record Keeper. I’ve been burned by Squeenix’s attempts at free-to-play games in the past (I’m looking at you Final Fantasy: All the Bravest...), but Record Keeper hits the all the right notes for me.
Let’s back this up just a bit so that I can explain... hrm, maybe I shall just sum it up. The point of Record Keeper is to use major characters from ALL of the Final Fantasy series playing the major story points & battles from the entire series. This is all presented 16-bit glory, right along with the music being revamped into glorious chip-tunes. It. Is. Magnificent. That is to say, it’s magnificent if you have any kind of nostalgia or investment in the series. It would probably mean next to nothing to someone who didn’t already have a connection to the series. What it HAS done is let my son start to take part in something that I have loved for over two decades. It really hit me when I started playing through the sections of Final Fantasy I this morning and reading him the storyline bits and telling him that, for more than a decade, I played that game at least once a year: a tradition that I continued through college... I don’t even know how many versions of that game that I’ve bought over the years. It’s really magnificent to share these things with my son. I love seeing him embrace things that I’ve loved for more than 2 decades. I’m sure that that’s really what they’re going for, especially with how low the paywall appears to be in the game. It does, after all, get new people interested in their products while making those of us who are already invested want to go back and replay old favorites. On that note, I really need to follow through on my plan to play through FF IV with my wife...
-Tom 4.24.2015
237 - Just Down the Road
