9/15 - 3:48 PM CST

I'm late! I'm late! I'm sorry!

Mmmm, Wendy's. Good stuff. If you have never eaten at Wendys, then you have yet to experience fast-food at its best. If you have eaten at Wendy's, then you know what I'm talking about. So the message today is this: for those who have never done so, run to your nearest Wendys and order a burger. For those of you who have, go do so again. You know you want to.

Finally broke the 10-hour mark in Vesperia. I'm on a whopping 14 now. (Sigh.) I've come to realize that my weekends are entirely too crazy to include gaming. But the weekend is past, so I'm hoping to get an hour in tonight. But, uh... now that I think about it, I probably can't. GROOOOOAAAAN.

On to the letters!

Hello, Meta.

Here to write my first letter to QnA. I was wondering if you know if there's any chance of Mistwalker's Blue Dragon Plus DS game coming to the states. I may be in the minority, but i, for one, greatly enjoyed the original Blue Dragon. Sure, it was unoriginal, with a fairly uninteresting story, and of course, the job system was ripped straight from FF5, but it had that...That undeniable charm to it.

And it was a novel idea... Playing that game, i just kept thinking "Now how amazing could a sequel to this be?" improve the story and translation, and that would have been enough for me. With the sales, however, it seems rather unlikely.

Fortunately, Lost Odyssey fared significantly better, selling roughly 800,000 units according to VGChartz, so we should be able to expect a sequel there, then, right?

Now, on to the hot topics! An FFVII remake? DAMN YEAH! Even if it was just the exact original playwise, i'd definitely buy it just for orchestrated music, voice acting, perfected translation, and of course, hugely amped up graphics. As for the art style, Though i liked the more realistic art style of Advent Children, I think i would like to see the original Tetsuya Nomura heavy anime art style for the character models in the game.

The game could benefit from a more fleshed-out story also, however, as there were a few holes in the original. I think personally the battle system could use an update though...It was quite boring even in the original version. I believe that characterizing party members more would be a good thing...As it is, you never had to change characters, and aside from leveling up, they never changed except for the Materia you stuffed into them. Really, you could make Aerith your heavy hitter and Cloud a healer...Which just seems sort of wrong.

I believe if certain members leaned more towards certain materia types, or learned a few skills on their own, as well as if they added the ability to switch characters during battle, then there might have been some more strategy to it...On the other hand, changing it too much runs the risk of turning the game into an entirely different experience, which wouldn't be a good thing.

At any rate, there is one thing they definitely need to add, which is a Materia swap option, like the Junction Swap in FF8. That definitely discouraged changing members for people who wanted to give everyone their chance to shine. When you wanted to bring in a new member in the original, you had to manually take it all off the one you were getting rid of, memorize what you took off, then slap it back on the new member, a tedious process to say the least.

Well, this letter has been quite long. In closing, what would your most anticipated games for the rest of the year be? for me, definitely Persona 4, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and(if Virtual Console re-releases count) Super Mario RPG.

See ya for now,
StormofSwords

Dear Oliver,
I've been reading RPGamer.com for a while and enjoy your column. But please keep Lusipurr away from it. Tell him there's a pie up on top of a shelf he can't reach or something.

OR ELSE.

Anyway, what is with all the "omg guys I want a FF7 remake!"? While it is certainly possible for Square-Enix to do and will probably be done eventually as many other people have mentioned, it will be a much larger project than any Final Fantasy from FF6 (evilpaul does not believe in your Roman numerals) or earlier. The tile-based 2D sprite graphics in the 8-bit and 16-bit FFs can be readily converted to a 3D grid with some simply textured 3D environments. They're practically a map for the 3D level designers. FF7's use of prerendered backdrops will require SE to either re-use them which isn't really an accepted presentation style today, or make fully 3D environments from scratch. The things like battles (and 10 minute summoning magic animations) are entirely 3D already of course and still would "work". With some texture filtering and whatnot, of course. But, to me at least an FF7 remake looks like a huge undertaking.

But all this FF7 loving misses the point really. If you want to play FF7 you can still get it. It's not *that* horribly dated. Do people really need some mediocre voice acting thrown in that badly? You know they aren't actually going to get Mr. T. to voice Barrett. The things people love FF7 for aren't going to improved much by remaking it.

The FF title that really is in need of a remake is FF6. There's been a decent GBA port of it already. But no true DS-style fixer upper. FF6 has what I consider to be a more engaging (and less ridiculous) story than FF4. And the primary criticism of people who never played RPGs until SE splattered the ending cut scene of FF7 all over their TVs for six months is that FF6 and earlier games don't have the detailed graphics to convey the same level of emotion and storytelling that FF7 did. I'm reminded of a reviewer who pointed out that Celes looking down, Celes mourning General Leo, and Celes looking for her lucky Sprint Shoes is all the same animation. A sprite shuffling around and having his eyes bulge can convey the idea of what is going on, but the 16-bit era simply didn't have the hardware horsepower to actually show what was happening. But move the graphics into three dimensions and have better-animated, 3D models of the characters and it would really open the game up to the newer generation of gamers.

You could point to Chrono Trigger DS which is being released virtually identical to the SNES release and say, "Suck it up! Enjoy the GBA port!", but there are some pretty significant differences with how the Chrono used its 2D environment and how any of the 16-bit FF titles did. Whether it's just lack of random encounters aspect or that the storytelling didn't seem constrained by the SNES's capabilities compared to the FF6. I don't think a 3D Chrono Trigger would be the same game.

As for a FF5 remake, which following FF3 and FF4 remakes would seem to be a logical progression, I'm kind of ambivalent. FF5 was a fun game. I first played it as a fan-translated version on an SNES emulator and later replayed it when it was released on the PSX. The job system was very well fleshed out and if you knew what you were doing your characters could be completely broken they were so powerful. Unfortunately, I thought the story was very lacking. The characters weren't as developed as they were in FF4 and the plot was so straightforward it could have been yanked out of FF1 or FF3. It really was the jobs and battle system that made it a fun game. Because of that I think it would probably be well suited for a handheld remake. Afterall, I know I didn't play FF:Tactics Advance for its story.

So, while a FF5 DS release with 3D graphics would be cool and all, I'd much rather see FF6 DS and some worthwhile improvements to an already solid game.

Cheers,
evilpaul

Hey Oliver,

Glad to hear your endorsement of Tales of Vesperia. Needless to say, the game will be consuming untold hours of my life as soon as it hits my mailbox.

Today I thought I'd talk about my shiny new Xbox 360 and the games I bought for it. I suppose you’ve heard of a little game called Mass Effect? What did you think of the game, and if you have no firsthand experience, then what have you heard about it? Personally, I only bought it because I was two years late to the 360 party, and so many games were marked down significantly in price, which is awesome. (Maybe I should buy all my consoles two years late?) But I was completely blown away by how much I liked it, especially since I had no such feelings for the KOTOR games. It’s a little grating to realize that most of the "dialogue options" end up leading to the exact same response, but the process of deciding what 9 Cyour Shepard would do in that circumstance is still very engaging. Before long, I found myself becoming more emotionally attached to my Shepard (whose appearance adheres as closely to my own as possible -- except for a wicked scar over one eye) than even Bioware themselves must have anticipated. Surely this insane brand of attachment is what gaming is all about?

Now, on to Bioshock. I'm currently at that place where the crazy theater fellow has me running errands for him. And... am I just an easily-disturbed person, or is Bioshock a genuinely scary game? I suppose it's necessary to mention that I am, I admit, very delicate when it comes to creepy games. Heck, even Resident Evil 4 scared the pants off of me at a few points, and it’s my understanding that it was universally regarded as the least scary RE in the main series (though still a spectacular game, mind you). So I suppose my question here is: Did Bioshock scare you?

I also purchased Lost Odyssey, and I must say, though I am only in the early parts of Disc 2, I am impressed with the quality of this game. One gripe that stands out is a part near the conclusion of Disc 1. I thought the funeral procession cutscenes were very emotional, and I must admit that I teared up a little as Cooke and Macke sought out Kaim to solve the mystery of human mortality for them, leaving him to struggle with the fact that he could supply them no answers. But then they totally ruin the tone with a bunch of asinine fetch quests ("Go find 10 white flowers, Cooke!", "Go find 10 combustible sticks, Kaim!"), followed by the most tedious minigame of all time ("Light all these torches, Mack!"). Why? Dear God why?!

Lastly, I had planned on discussing how much I’ve fallen in love with The Orange Box, but I’ve already slipped one first-person shooter into an RPGamer column, and I doubt I’d be able to get away with it twice.

I can’t sign off without a passing comment about FFXIII’s multiplatform status: I am inexpressibly glad that I have been freed of my previous desire to own a PS3. Ironically, I have been looking forwar d to FF Versus XIII quite a lot more, which is currently a PS3 exclusive, but I suppose part of being a gamer is accepting that you can’t play every (presumably) great game out there. That’s what YouTube was made for.

“Go find 10 tone-nullifying fetch quests, Oliver!” Cornman89