Maybe 1 Person Will Find This Interesting (And That's Rounding Up)

When I was in 3rd grade, I got a very special birthday gift from a very special uncle. That uncle was Hulka, whom you may remember from, uh, like every other post on this blog. That gift was a Nintendo Game Boy. I remember it now: the olive green screen, the gray brick-like shape and weight, the mountains of batteries it killed... I loved that Game Boy. I loved it for years and years.

My cousin Sarah Thirty had gotten one about a year before me, and had a few games. So, naturally, we'd trade and try each others' games out. One game in particular that she had stood out to me. The label on the cartridge had a picture of a sword on it. And the gameplay... holy crap, it was like Zelda! It was like Zelda, but with more weapons besides swords, and with partners who followed you around! This game blew my mind. It was called Final Fantasy Adventure. Sarah didn't particularly care for it, she had too much trouble finding Bogard at the falls (the first objective). When I found ol' Bogard, she was impressed and offered to let me borrow the game for a while, since I seemed to be more into it than her. I played that game like an obsessed madman until I finally had to give it back. I needed more. I begged my parents for the next gift-giving holiday to include a copy of Final Fantasy for Game Boy. I got my wish on Christmas. I got double my wish.

Unbeknownst to me, there was more than one Final Fantasy for Game Boy. On that Christmas morning, I shredded wrapping paper to find not just Final Fantasy Adventure (the green box one), but Final Fantasy Legend II (the blue box one). Also Jeopardy! which I found difficult to type answers for using a D-Pad and two buttons, and played maybe 5 times. (Still, 2 out of 3 were and are all-time classic favorite games, so thanks Mom & Dad!) So Final Fantasy Adventure was a known quantity, and I focused my attentions on it first. And I played the hell out of it. I took a few minutes to try starting up Legend II, but it didn't play at all like Adventure. I couldn't use any weapons, and instead of enemies showing up on the screen, I'd walk around and the screen would flash and go to a "battle screen" where I'd have to choose my actions from menus. What the hell? Back to Adventure, the Zelda-style action-RPG. Eventually though, I found my way back to trying "the blue one" for real.

Reader, I married him. ... Yes, I just quoted the book I hate more than just about any book I was ever forced to read. I love(d) this game THAT MUCH.

This is the game that cut my teeth on RPG turn based battles, and what a long strange trip it's been since that point. But this game was SO NEAT in SO MANY WAYS. To start, you pick your character from a list of 8 character types: a male and female Human, a male and female Mutant, a Robot (a freaking robot!), and three different Monsters. Each type of character plays differently, and within moments you get to choose 3 characters from the same list to round out to a team of 4. You can double/triple/quadruple up, too. Lots of combinations to try!

So to run the types down, Humans are a basic character type. They use items and weapons and get stronger by participating in battles (I learned the hard way that this means running from as many battles as possible means you have weak-ass humans by not far into the game). Mutants also get stronger by battling, but more slowly than humans. This is offset by the fact that they randomly learn up to 4 special abilities, which are either innate (like preventing enemies from sneak attacking) or rechargeable (like fire magic). The rechargeable thing is important because weapons have finite uses before "breaking". So the male human's starting sword, for example, gets 50 uses before it's gone. That mutants have abilities that can recharge by staying at an Inn is a real economizer.

Robots (and can I just tell you how effing delighted I was at that age to have a robot on my team!?) grew in a really neat way. Equipping weapons and armor to robots increased their raw stats. They didn't need to battle to get strong, they just needed to hold your best stuff. And when they equipped weapons, the number of uses remaining got halved (ouch!) but they could recharge at an Inn, just like mutants' abilities. So instead of 50 shots from the basic gun of the game, I got infinite shots, but no more than 25 before needing to recharge. Again, this was a real economizer and made rare one-or-two-in-the-whole-game items stick around much longer.

Monsters grew in an even more interesting way. The monsters you could have on your team were the same as the enemy monsters of the game. Same stats, same abilities, everything. Basically whenever you fought a monster, there was a chance it would leave behind its meat (somehow, even skeletons, ghosts, flowers, and viruses [amongst others] left meat). Eating that meat transformed your monster into a new monster (through a complex table that is unexplained in the game and confused me to no end as a kid). It wasn't foolproof, but generally eating a stronger monster's meat made your monster transform into a better one. Learning certain patterns in this meant you could wind up with a monster on your team several worlds ahead of the ones you were fighting. This kicked an ass or twelve.

Uhhh, is it clear I was really into this game? The story was pretty awesome for a Game Boy game. Basically there was a network of worlds all connected to one larger "Celestial World" by giant pillar-like vines. You'd go from world to world solving crises and looking for shards of a statue of an ancient goddess, trying to track down your lost father. Various non-player characters would join your team temporarily (including that selfsame father!) as the story required. Usually they were awesome help in battles.

Here comes my favorite part about it all. I was a mythology nut as a kid, and I still love those stories. This game weaved several world mythologies into itself. You're not the only one looking for the pieces of the ancient goddess statue. New Gods, seeking to bolster their own growing power are on the hunt as well. I hadn't heard of Ashura before, but Venus? Yeah, I'd heard of her. Odin? Yeah. Apollo? Check. (I guess technically his pre-translation name was Apollyon, the Greek spelling of Abaddon, the demon of christian mythology, but as far as I knew, it was Apollo, Greek/Roman light god). This game required me to KILL GODS. Not just made-up, in-game gods. These were gods I'd heard of. Even the final-stage monsters were gods or epic legendary monsters. And the ones I hadn't heard of, I was so curious about! It gave me tons of leads to learn more about different mythologies.

Good lord did I love this game. At one point I was even working on the novelization of the game. OK, it was fan-fiction, but really, this was pre-internet and I didn't realize this would eventually be commonplace and ridiculed. So yeah, after my initial obsession with it, I'd still go back and replay it every few years. The advent of the internet shed light on all the hidden mechanics of the game for me to go back and retry. ("Ohhh, so this is how to know ahead of time what monster I'll transform to!") I've long lost the cartridge, and even if I hadn't, by now I don't have that old Game Boy, or any player compatible with it. But by George there are emulators now! And I'll be damned if FFLII wasn't one of the first ROMs I downloaded when I learned about emulators (and no, it's not even gray area illegal, since I owned the game legally before downloading. Well, THIS game anyway...).

Now, nostalgia put away, it wasn't a perfect game. There's a lot of game mechanics that really should be better explained in-game, but aren't. Some things are glitchy. I mean, it happens. Such is the nature of older games and their limited programming space. But there are other issues, such as gameplay balancing. There are too many abilities, particularly monster attacks, that are clones of other abilities, just with different names, leading to very little actual meaningful variety between early-game monsters. And a lot of the monsters are just plain useless compared to others. Rotate between the fairy, eye, medusa, ghost, and maybe slime classes and you're all set. It's nice to know how to power through the game, but it lacks variety. Human and mutant stat growth is random and slow. So yeah, flaws.

About a year or two ago, Square-Enix announced a Nintendo DS fully enhanced rebuild of this game. I was PSYCHED. I sifted through the internet for information, images, music from the new release. Seeing my old pixelated monochrome buddies in color and 3D filled me with oddly powerful nostalgia. The Japanese release came and went. Surely they'd announce the US release soon. Surely. ...surely?

... please?

Still no word on if that'll ever happen (I still hope it does). But two very interesting things have happened for me and this game recently. 1) I got an Evo 4G. It runs Android. Android has an app store. The app store has emulators. Miss Susie went to Heaven, the Steamboat went to... um, anyway. After years of having to play this game boy classic chained to a desk (WHAT IS THIS COMUNISTS RUSHIA AM I RITE?), I can take this game handheld, like it was meant to be played. 2) There are a few folks on the internet who apparently loved this game as much as me. Actually more. And they have programming skills. I just downloaded a hacked, patched version of the game that seems to fix most of the flaws, adds variety and difficulty, and even does cosmetic touches like allowing longer names (originally 4 characters max).

I am back on that Christmas morning, with my brand new Game Boy Final Fantasy. The other, blue one. A whole new, harder version of the game I've loved for years awaits me. It is new and old, mingled together. Nostalgia and novelty. ... Why yes, I am 27, chubby, and single, why do you ask?

I know I rambled on this one, guys. To those of you who read this blog for funny stories (80% of my readers, or 1.6 people, if you do the math out), I apologize. Actually, you probably stopped reading several walls of text ago and I can say awful terrible things about you, your mother, and other loved ones. But I wont. To the remaining 0.399 of you who stuck through this, thanks for bearing with me! And to the 0.001 of you who can relate, or maybe even loved this game yourself... let's hang out and be best buds forever.

Formative Years Fiction - Evil Robots

Sorry it took me so long to post the next one. There's a lot of scanning, etc. involved in doing these and I wasn't sure if it would be easier to try to make a .pdf, especially for one down the line that lacks illustrations and is long (for a kid's story). Anyway, at least for now we'll stick with the multiple images format.

So here is the next installment of my Formative Years Fiction feature. This story is from the 3rd grade (as will be the next one). It is an action-adventure story written in the first person. What kid doesn't dream about taking on hordes of evil foes and winning? Because each page is more self contained than in the previous story I'll be posting commentary after each page instead of just one block of text at the end. Without further ado, enjoy Evil Robots! (As always, you can click each image to see it full-sized)



As you can see, the cover sets the tone for what is sure to be an exciting romp in the world of robotics. Now, you may already be wondering how a robot, a mechanical construct without free will could possibly be considered "evil". Eat my butt.



Oh good, for those who somehow started reading this but somehow missed the cover with crazy robots all over it.



There was no particular reason why this book was dedicated to my cousin, Brett Pallos. I just thought he would enjoy a story about evil robots.



I didn't actually own a plunger dart gun as a kid. I desperately wanted one. So in my story, I got to have one. But it betrayed me! I liked using quoted speech and onomatopoeia in this story, apparently. Also, I would still find those fridge contents very disappointing today, except maybe some veggies. Meghan is my sister, Meghan Thirty, with whom I had a tumultuous relationship as a child. Yowsa? Really? I wrote "yowsa"?

Regarding the illustration, I like the random broken roller skate that has no purpose. I also like how badly 2D the fridge is, especially its bizarre face. And good lord, I hope nobody attempts to use those flimsy handles on the fridge doors.



Fridge, you dick! Those ice cubes look painful, and check out the massive flaming lump they left on my head! I was a big fan of the eye-pop-out effect for shocked cartoon characters at that point, it found its way into a lot of my drawings at that age.

"Too" not "to", young me. Also, poor Meghan, getting blamed for everything.



OK, so a steady diet of cartoons had taught me, by this point, that water is very bad for electronic devices, such as robots. Of course, if anything mechanical breaks, it must explode. That's just how those things work. I like the impossible angle on the dart shot in this picture. Also, it's weird but something about the face on this drawing of me reminds my of my cousin Sarah Thirty's long-term boyfriend Donnie Dunder. (He is much better looking than this drawing though, don't worry. He's also not a 3rd grader who fights evil robots.)



That first line is quite the rhyme. I like that the car needed no impetus to come to life, but turning the key will shut it off. Our house really was on a hillside, that angle is only a slight exaggeration of our driveway at the time. I like that I was so surprised by the car that I jumped two stories, had my Walkman fly off my head onto the roof, my eyes bugged out, my tongue went crazy, and I said "Aooga" with no exclamation point. As if I were calmly stating it. Also, I like that the car just has the word "Varoom" over it him.



Well, yeah, I'd say that's suspicious. I remember being super proud of Roboland's security system when I drew it. Thieves are brought to the roof and tied to a post. A robotic punching glove then punches them, post and all, onto the adjacent roof, into a cage that apparently has a poker game and a TV inside. Ray's Chopping Block was a real store in my town, and spelled their actual sign correctly. There was also a Citgo in the center of town, but the sign was not that big. Apparently in my story they borrowed the sign from near Fenway Park in Boston. And made it all lower-case.



Alright, shitty fiction trick #58: conveniently mention something had been true all along, right when it's necessary. However, this is really a borderline example. It wasn't as though I hadn't explained how I became soaking wet, I just hadn't explained it in a way that made any logical sense whatsoever. You see, the ice cubes that struck me in the back of the head when I was fighting the fridge were made of water. Clearly that brief contact with the ice cubes was enough for me to become soaking wet and remain that way for several minutes if not hours. I like the final robot ominously sitting in its display case, and I like that the case's upper left corner is shaped just perfectly to let the explosion not touch it.



And here it is, the big daddy of them all, the Spider-Snake-Dragon-Robot. I'd be a goner if that fancy water fountain didn't have a "Blast" option for just such an occasion.

And that's the end. No explanation of why the robots came to life. No explanation of what their purpose was. There are way too many questions left unanswered here... tell me this story continues!



Thank. God. If we read the whole series, everything will be explained! Also, there will be evil creatures, evil people, and... uhhh... evil minerals. Great. The evil people are the only ones who won't be in all caps, for some reason. Unfortunately, I never actually wrote these sequels. The unanswered questions will remain unanswered for all time. But here's what those sequels might have looked like in a parallel universe where I made them.



Evil Creatures is full of shout-outs to a favorite recurring conversation I have with my friends Josh Stryker and Marco Agrocrag about deadly animal hybrids. There's a Snawk, a Bat o' War Jellyfish (a thing of NIGHTMARES), an Alligator Snapping Tulverine, a Wolfornet, and a starfish holding an assault rifle (not a hybrid). I went with the JRR Tolkien "In a bind? Giant eagles, for the win!" idea too.

One of the shadowy figures in Evil People should be instantly recognizable to folks who have known me long enough. Enjoy!