I spent a lot of time trying to write a long and smart intro to this kind of tying things into the current state of corporate IP crossover stuff but Final Fantasy is more of an anthology series crossing over with itself constantly so it doesn't totally work. I wanted to do a bit where I call Multiversus a knockoff of Eirgeiz: God Bless the Ring. So I'm putting that there because really that was the main reason I wanted to write it.

Seriously though, there are so many 'all the finals fantasy mashed up' games. They remade a bunch of them on GBA and added crossovers. They did Dissidia and then Theathrythm as a spinoff of Dissidia. They made FF4 the After Years and gave it like a whole plot that tries to put all of the mainline games into a shared universe. I haven't even gotten to Kingdom Hearts.

Stranger of Paradise is so many things. It's the Dark Souls ripoff Final Fantasy game. It's another attempt at putting all the mainline games in a shared universe. It's the unofficial sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi. For as svelte as the game is, there's a ton of just, SHIT in here. Ideas. You've got turning enemy attacks back at them, and hitting the button to power up your pals, and the fake devil trigger, the job system, command abilities, setting up your combo enders like mini God Hand, all kinds of stuff. I was always forgetting two or three basic mechanics and having a hard time, and I'm sure the couple of actually hard parts could have been easier if I knew something about one of the systems I didn't care to engage much with. The loot, in particular, is like come on. Fuck off with that shit I'm just hitting the auto-equip button periodically.

But other than that! Other than the loot numbers, SoP feels like a throwback to the lost days of B games. It's even in the little things, like everybody saying "Hey look, cubes" whenever you see save cubes. Or the fact that the characters seem to decide if they thought you did well or poorly in a fight based on a die roll. Or the many, many cutscenes that end with everyone walking off only to fade back into another cutscene in a slightly different location where they all resume talking about the same thing. It's so good. We should never have given them budgets to do more than this.

I basically haven't said a thing about the actual game or story or anything yet, and that's all fine. It lets you keep everything when you die so it's breezier than real Dark Souls. There's a ton of jobs to level which is always fun because I like unlocking a new one and finding out it has Runic or whatever as its ability. I was pretty firmly in team Sage by the end but there's plenty of customization even within that framework. The plot is not particularly profound but the cast is charismatic and enjoyable, with Jack fully deserving his meme status. There are scenes and bits I'm going to fondly remember for a long time to come. I'd say two bosses were a giant difficulty spike for me but that's fine. They were pretty fun. There's a bunch of DLC I have but you can only access on mega super duper secret CHAOS difficulty which is so absurdly evil I kind of respect it. So maybe I'll try it and maybe I won't I dunno. They put a Frank Sinatra song in the game for some reason.

I haven't played FF16 but I bet this is better. I bet it'll piss me off when I do play it because the FF14 people wrote it. I'm all in on Team Jack and that's that. Raises paw to the fistbump position

Very few things are as much my jam as Atari 50. I love old game compilations and I love weird multimedia archaeology where there's just tons of little bits and pieces to sift through, and this is just those two things together, plus a few weird little games made for the collection attempting to draw a line between these old games and the current day. Like, Haunted Houses is in many ways just really honing in on the point that the original Haunted House is the prototype of every single Slenderman game.

On one hand, it's not quite the same as an actual documentary. There's not so much of an overarching narrative here. On the other, the fact that you actually get to play the games for yourself is a huge advantage over what a traditional documentary could offer. It's not really the "story" of Atari but, as the title suggests, a celebration of all this stuff. All the games and the people they could pull in to interview about the drugs they did in the 70s. It put me in the right mindset to appreciate the fact that Missile Command is a bleak political statement on top of being an arcade quarter-muncher. That Yars Revenge is a pile of very strange, oblique mechanics justified by a super cool comic in the manual. That current box art sucks in comparison to the shit they were commissioning back then because the only real way to build a context for the gameplay was to put a picture of a space ship on the box.

Naturally, you can never really recreate the context. My home is not an arcade and my controller is not a track ball. Oh my god the track ball games are basically unplayable in any other form. Those aren't really problems anybody could fix though.

The "reimagined" series is interesting to me because each one is coming at the task from a very different angle. You've got a version of Haunted House that turns it into a very modern indie game type of thing. You've got a version of Yars Revenge that just puts a fancier coat of paint. You've got a hypothetical fourth Sword Quest game made to the specs it would have originally had to follow. The Vector Games combo was probably the most interesting to me, even if it's mostly spectacle. It was a nice spectacle!

I want to rate the collection as a whole and maybe drill into some of these games in the future because the collection is sort of separate from the individual games and rating it on the fact that I find most of them to be uncompelling would be missing the point. But I do want to dig more into some of these games. I've been rotating them in my mind since I passed by them in the collection. Missile Command, Sword Quest, Star Raiders... honestly, I've seen all of these games before and not left with that impulse until Atari 50. I don't think I could possibly come up with higher praise than that.