Addictive Fantasies

Lately I’ve been burned out. Between working insane hours and shows being back for the fall and being with my boyfriend I haven’t really had the will to play video games. I have been checking out the forums, but everything I’m interested in hasn’t had any updates. The one game I’d love to look more into is Dishonored, but I’m too damn broke for that. 

Lately I’ve been reading tons. I just finished Game of Thrones and I’m working on City of Fallen Angels, by Cassandra Clare (it finally came out in soft cover), before working on A Clash of Kings (second book in the GoT series.). I have also noticed that my tablet makes an incredible e-reader and in the last few weeks I’ve read through Hellsing, Cardcaptor Sakura and I’m about 1/3 the way through Fairy Tail. 

Also, I forgot how many TV shows I watch, plus I’ve started watching new ones this year. (I’m going to have a rant about The Walking Dead, kind of like I did with AT.)

I’m going to try my hardest to start reviewing and announcing more too. But an obstacle is I also don’t work in the video games section at my work anymore. Look at me making excuses. Either way, I’m going to try instead of just keeping this a “pretty pictures blog”. I want to bring it back to what I originally planned this blog would be.

I am allowed to have my own god damn opinions about a game. Just because you feel different about a ship than I do, doesn’t mean you are right. It doesn’t mean I’m right. It’s my opinions. I am a fan of Final Fantasy just as much as the next person, and I already knew this was going to happen, but are you fucking kidding me? Do you have nothing better to do with your life than to hide behind an anon face so I can’t even respond to you and quote sources saying things? I can quote things too. Final Fantasy VII fans are the worst. And I hope you take a good, long look at yourself and realize how much of a lifeless loser you really are. 

And P.S. I have read no lore or anything like that relating to the game. And nothing you quoted was in the game. It was in tie-ins. Sorry I don’t spend my life on reading and researching everything I can that isn’t in the game.

Until September 1st we won’t know for certain but rumour is circulating that FFXIII-3 is in production. Apparently it is being called “A Storm Gathers” and Square has decided to call this “The Lightning Saga”. How do I feel about this? I’m pissed. This is coming from someone who loved XIII. This is coming from someone who completed the game 3 times, and still picks it up. Why did I love FFXIII so much? Because Vanille was the main character.

Just because everyone liked Light better, and Square decided to change the main character from Vanille to Light, doesn’t mean Vanille wasn’t the true main character. There is a reason that she did the narration. FF hasn’t really ever had the “bubbly, optimistic girl” as the main character, and it didn’t go over well for certain people.

This is getting off topic. Anyways, I love FFXIII, then I played the garbage that was FFXIII-2, and got a “To Be Continued”. That made me livid, if you’ve been following my blog from the start you’ll know about this. To me, FFXIII had a perfect ending to begin with. Everything was wrapped up, and now suddenly you have this time travel crap thrown into the mix. The sequel took everything I loved about the first game and destroyed it. And now Square is going to do it again with FFXIII-3.

This is what happens when you make games for fan service. You push out shitty material that hypocrites like myself will buy until we find out it’s not worth it anymore, then you’ll lose us a fan forever. I love the Final Fantasy series, I grew up with it. It doesn’t mean I won’t stop supporting your company.

Get on with it and continue production on FFXV. Leave this shitty ass franchise behind. And yes, I understand the people behind “The Lightning Saga” aren’t the same people behind FF versus XIII, and they aren’t the same people behind FFXV, but seriously, I’m getting sick of this shitty “people hated FFXIII, but loved Light, let’s bank on that” attitude.

I have had the entire Dark Knight Rises ruined for me. I have stayed off of social networking, I am not following or reading anything about Batman on tumblr. Hell, for the most part it’s been my queue taking over and doing all of the work for me. So who ruined it for me? My fucking family. I am not impressed. I am the biggest Batman fan that any of my friends and family know. I only didn’t know 2 fucking things about the movie, things I wanted to call and watch play out. Mainly involving seeing if Bane broke Batman’s back, but more importantly, who Joseph Gordon-Levitt played. But noooo. I couldn’t have those two things. I even knew about the love interest (which I won’t ruin for people that haven’t seen the movie) months ago, and no one really knew she would be in the movie unless they had been following the interviews.

I’m pissed. People knew I couldn’t see it until this Wednesday, yet they decided to talk to me about it anyways. I’m still going to enjoy the movie, this is just the one movie I wanted to call. I normally don’t care about spoilers in movies… This was the exception.

Final Fantasy VII does not deserve a remake. *waits for the hate spam and flamers* Okay, done? Whoever’s left to read this, here’s why I feel this way.

First off, the game itself has sequels upon sequels upon prequels upon movies. There is already a huge amount of merchandise and games for people who want more. There isn’t just one story then it finishes and it’s over, unlike other games in the series (VIII, and IX specifically). There is countless hours combined in all of the games and the movie tied in together. It has already received the star treatment.

There are other more deserving titles of a remastering. For example, Final Fantasy X. Square Enix has decided to remaster X for a reason. It was a wonderful game with a coherent plot that deserved more love. Also, it’s not nearly as complicated to remaster something that’s already CG animated most of the way through. Final Fantasy VII on the other hand would be like rebuilding a game from the ground up. They would have to find voice actors and redo all of the dialogue, and they would have to put countless hours in just reanimating everything. Which, by the way, you VII fan boys out there have already seen what pretty graphics would look like on the game. Two words: Advent Children.

Also, if you’re sooooo in love with the game that you believe you should play it again, why not get a copy of the original and play it that way? It’s on the playstation network for $10, and you can get a hard copy off of ebay and play it on your PS3, because the system is backwards compatible with PS1 games. 

All I’m saying really is that Square has already done enough for the VII franchise as it is, and you should be happy with what you’ve got. IX was my favorite game, does that mean that I’m going to bitch about it deserving a remake? No. I’m either going to pop my PS1 discs in or play the copy I bought off of the PSN. It didn’t get prequels and it didn’t get a movie based off of the game. It was just a wonderful game as it was, it doesn’t need more.

When animes are dubbed over in English, why do the creators/voice actors shorten the names of the characters to sound more American? (ie: Yamato/Matt and Hikari/Kari in Digimon) I mean, they don’t change last names. Those still sound Japanese. You’re watching an anime. It’s a Japanese cartoon. The names should stay in tact. It’s not going to kill you to learn something about another culture. I know it’s supposed to relate more to the American audience but seriously. 

After all, most of the wording unless it’s important stays in Japanese. I dunno. Maybe I’m just not getting it.

I still have trophies to work on in Catherine, and I really do want to play through Final Fantasy VI, but I’m barely through the starting gate. (I finally got to pick my teams and I’m going after Terra.) Just blarg. I have no patience, and no attention span. And it makes me sad. I love gaming. Catherine’s probably my favorite game currently and Final Fantasy is my favorite franchise…. Why can’t I do this?

Earlier today developer Crystal Dynamics formally apologized for “misunderstood themes” and “threatening undertones” from their new E3 trailer for Tomb Raider titled “Crossroads”. The trailer allegedly shows Lara almost being raped, and underlying sexual assault.

Let me be the first (I’m late, so I won’t be the first) person to say the developer should not have to apologize for these scenes. It’s part of story telling. It’s part of character development. This game is rated “M” for a reason. You should expect some disturbing themes or some offensive material. And anything can offend anyone. You can never tell a persons triggers. 

Plus, what about the violence? Sure, I understand that this is more of an extreme case because it involves sexual abuse. However, how many people have you seen that rage over sexuality compared to violence? Maybe I’m just backwards, but I’d rather have my future child love his/her body and realize that sexuality is a beautiful thing, that they shouldn’t be ashamed of. I’d also want them to realize that violence shouldn’t be a widely accepted thing. Not like it is today at least. As a person that works in a video game store I see parents all the time buying their 13 year old sons Call of Duty and Battlefield which happen to both be “M” rated, but the second they see “sexual themes” on the “M” label they tell their child that they can’t touch that game. I feel like there is something very wrong about that. 

I understand that it is a touchy subject at best, however, I am very against censorship and I believe that people should be able to express themselves (which is what developers do with the creation of video games) fully, without consequence. Because again; never will 100% of people be happy with a creation. We all need to suck it the fuck up. There are things that should never be said, but everyone should have the right to say it. And guess what. While you’re off fighting the battle against sexual assault in video games (which isn’t going to do anything, face it. And if you start saying it’s promoting rape, she ends up killing the fucker.) there are worse things in the world, and other wars to fight. Maybe you should put your effort into that instead of raging over the internet about something you won’t even buy and children won’t be exposed to unless a parent or guardian approves it. 

TL;DR: The game is rated “M”, it’s going to have sexual themes (good or bad), you don’t care about the absurd amount of violence, and the development team shouldn’t have to apologize.

So for the people that haven’t heard Warner Bros. announced the company is bringing life to their dormant Justice League movie. And today, I found out that they might be already rebooting Green Lantern, as well as putting Christopher Nolan in charge of the entire franchise. Which I guess makes sense because he’s rebooting Superman now too in Man of Steel. 

I’m a DC fan, and I don’t like this idea. All Warner is doing is trying to piggy back off of the success of The Avengers. And if Warner rushes this, like I’m going to assume they will, it’s not going to turn out well. First, I love the Batman movies, but they aren’t Batman. If there is a Justice League movie, I would prefer if they kept the characters in tact. (In other words, like Joss Whedon did with the Avengers. Minor differences, but not completely different.)

I really wish that Warner saw the potential in really good super hero movies, and comic book adaptations, because now all that’s happening is the company realized how much money they could have made. And they’re playing the catch up game. I’d way rather wait for years and have quality movies. Just like I did for Avengers and all of the movies that led up to it.