Reviews: Some short comics, and FFIX

[roadrunnertwice]

Molly Ostertag — How the Best Hunter in the Village Met Her Death (comics)

July 31

gumroad link

So, I absorbed this as an allegorical but seriously raw meditation on what confronting your identity while wrestling internalized homophobia or transphobia feels like.

But maybe I'm over-reading.

It's also a tense and very well-executed adventure story. Recommended.

Isaac Robin — Baby Universe (comics)

July 31

gumroad link

A basically plotless short, in which a hot twink waiter gets fed up with his boss and stows away with a gruffly handsome bounty hunter. Later, they go shopping. The end!

I grabbed this wholly for the art, which combines a deliciously loose and disheveled approach to sci-fi scenery/architecture/setting-layering with a very cute and expressive girly-boy situation. I'd be real interested in seeing this cartoonist do something longer and meatier, but I also feel like I got what I paid for.

Joe Sparrow — Homunculus (comics)

Aug 14

Another book I bought loose from the Shortbox store. I was familiar with the author on this one because I've been following his tumblr for updates on the super rad tarot deck he's been making just finished. Seriously, look at these:

• Page of Swords
• Ace of Swords
• Nine of Coins
• Two of Coins
• Ace of Cups

Where was I. Oh, anyway, this comic is very good! The whole thing is drawn in the first-person viewpoint of an immobile entity with an odd approach to the passage of time, and the combined effect guides your attention to changes in the environment in a really engaging way. A simple story executed really well.

Bonus Level: Final Fantasy IX

Sep. 9

I was a major JRPG fiend all through the lifespan of the original PlayStation, but I somehow never managed to finish FFIX, and at some point around probably 2002 we loaned our copy to someone and never got the fourth disc back. So when they put out a remastered version on the PS4 last year, I went ahead and grabbed it in a weak moment of nostalgia and completionism.

And I actually finished it! \o/ After putting it down for months at a time more than once. (I think I started it before P5.)

Anyway, no regrets about finally carving that notch on my stick, but I don't think I can actually recommend playing this. The whole PSX era was a serious awkward stage for the FF franchise, really; unless you're a fairly special breed of retrogamer, you really had to have been there to appreciate what these games were trying to accomplish. And even if you recognize the reach, it's still kinda hard to give them credit for the fraction they were able to grasp.

The story of FFIX mostly fails to cohere. They're trying for this pivot from an early-game goofy fantasy setting (rich with callbacks to 16- and 8-bit entries in the FF series) to an eerie and bittersweet "revenant universe" plot with the superimposed worlds of Terra and Gaia. Now, I love a good revenant universe plot (IMO Martha Wells' mid-career output remains the state of the art, between Fall of Ile Rien, City of Bones, and Wheel of the Infinite), but FFIX makes the classic mistake of not integrating the parasite world far enough back into the story, and the result is that Terra and Garland are undeveloped and just completely boring. And the final boss is a meaningless cipher who is literally never mentioned before the start of the battle. (And Kuja kind of sucks for his own independent reasons; you can see exactly how they were trying and failing to re-bottle that Sephiroth lightning.)

Also, they tried to make the summon spells a big and exciting part of the story, and it just didn't work at all. (They tried that in FFVIII as well, and after two incoherent whiffs they finally got it right in FFX.)

Anyway, the death of Queen Brahne was pretty much the last interesting thing to happen in the game, and then you get to slog through another ten-plus hours of nonsense.

Here's what's still good about FFIX: Vivi, Steiner, the black mages, and the Tantalus theater/robbery troupe. I think if they had taken these same characters and tried to tell a smaller and less cosmic story, about greed and war and rebuilding and the struggle to find meaning in life when you were born for conflict and robbed of choices, this game might have had the makings of a classic. But that potential is never quite realized.

Well. If you DO want to play FFIX, the current remaster is really pretty decent! The upgraded character models look very good, although they make the low-rez prerendered backgrounds look like ass by comparison (did they lose the original source files? At least they dug up some higher-rez FMVs). The high-rez menu/text interface is also nice, and they added some quality-of-life hacks to compensate for the late '90s being a fairly dark time for the art of "being fun" in JRPGs. There's a fast-forward switch to apologize for the frankly concussed pace of the battle animations, a random-encounters-off switch (especially nice given how confusing and awkward the environments and controls are), and several different ways to get out of grinding, depending on how you want to balance the imperatives of "grinding is bullshit" and "the 5-10% of battles they put some thought into should be challenging and fun." (And the fact that you have to do that balancing yourself is kind of the ultimate indictment of this era of game design, but bless the remaster team for recognizing that and giving you the tools.)

Oh wait, I almost ended this review without even mentioning Tetra Master! Ok, here's the important thing to know: FUCK Tetra Master. Well, bye.