When Tactics Advance and X-2 arrived in North America in September and November of the same year, they were the second and third games the anglophone scene saw stamped with the new Square Enix logo.Īt the time, some Square fans in North America were apprehensive that the merger would change things for the worse. The last game, fittingly, was Final Fantasy X-2. It was the second-to-last game the studio published before it was dissolved two months later in its merger with Enix. In February 2003, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was released in Japan under the SquareSoft label. This will surely make for indispensable reading. A handheld! People used to carry Game Boys in their bookbags! Do they still do that? Or not so much now that everyone's walking around with a miniature computer in their pocket that doesn't need any cartridges or discs to play hundreds of games? Well-everyone but me, since I'm apparently committed to living in a personal bubble-world where the 1990s never ended. Maybe my self-imposed exile gives me the ever-valuable outsider's perspective-a precious thing, to be sure, when you're honor-bound to play and write a novella about a sixteen year-old video game for babies that came out on a three generations-ago Nintendo handheld. How can I talk about video games in 2019 when I don't know where or what video games are in 2019? Are we still worried that the kids are playing too much Minecraft or are we wringing our hands about Fortnite now? Have we forgiven Valve for mothballing Half-Life II: Episode 3? Are tower defense games still a thing? What of World of Warcraft? Did Angry Birds ever go away? Is anyone still having the "are video games art?" conversation? Have we arrived at a definition of "art" that satisfies everyone yet? If we're digging up and examining an old cultural artifact (and by dint of socio-technological time compression, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is old indeed) to discern its significance to the present, I am probably unfit for the task. I haven't owned an up-to-date console since 2010. Point is, I'm completely out of the loop where video games are concerned. Like rummaging through some trunk in my mother's attic, exhuming an old Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and some black pants covered in pointless zippers, and going back to goth night at QXT's to sway to Covenant and Funker Vogt in the gloom like it's 2003. Oh, and I played Riven: The Sequel to MYST when I was living on a tropical island and deeply depressed, but that's-that's how much has happened since I last contemplated Final Fantasy. Am I forgetting anything? I may have gotten drunk and tried out Cuphead at a friend's place. Full disclosure: the only games I've spent much time with since running through MOTHER 3 four years ago(?!) have been Pinball Arcade, Super Hydorah, Maldita Castilla EX, Thimbleweed Park, Lumo, and Polly&John's Her Lullaby and Afterward. ![]() Second question: why am I making fun of Kingdom Hearts III? I've never played it. Kingdom Hearts III, though purely theoretical, promised resolution and clarity instead of dissonance and disappointment.įirst question: why am I back to write about Final Fantasy after all this time? BioShock Infinite was coming and could surely do no wrong. "Gamergater" was a non-word that had no significance to anybody. Facebook was well-liked by people under thirty-five. was America's vulnerable comic sweetheart. ![]() The last time we confabulated about Final Fantasy, President Barack Obama was still in his first term of office.
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