Posted

May 16th 2006

Mood

Angry

Music

Angra - The Temple of Hate

Well I did say that I'll fill my account with old stuff but a competition back at VGMusic.com grabbed my attention and I jumped straight in. So I'll have to get back at you with my submissions and updates later on when this is over.

There's two things that I'd like to rant about in this journal. I'll start off with FF7:AC.

Final Fantasy 7 : Advent Children, from what I saw, was one of the most looked forward to movie since ages. Near it's release date, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is talking about it and how god-damned great it will be. Some resorted to imports, fansubs, fandubs or even torrenting to get their FF7:AC fix. Everyone was crazy for FF7:AC and everyone LOVED FF7:AC, it was one big mass of drooling fanboys/fangirls beating off to it in an unholy congregation to the "greatness" of Final Fantasy 7.

I...am frankly completely underwhelmed by the whole hype. I could not see how a movie based on a game would generate such a hype. Months passed, years passed, and I still hear the fanboyish screams of orgasms to that damn movie. It was driving me nuts, I HAVE to find out what was so great about the movie, for the sake of my sanity. Only one way to find out...

I was window shopping when i found a VCD of FF7:AC real cheap. Only 44 HKD, so I bought it, went home and popped it in my DVD player. I pressed play and watched it.

After watching it, I still can't see what the hell all the hubbub was about. Sure it was enjoyable and all, but it's definitely NOT one of the better ones and definitely not the best damn thing ever. There's quite a few things in the movie that either doesn't make any sense from someone who never played FF7 before or looks just plain ridiculous. Allow me to outline (Spoilers):

- The beginning, there was a scene with Red XIII and some cubs running in a plain. A helicopter descending into a misty abyss, getting banged up, and then flying off. It just leaves me staring at the screen going WTF?

- In the first battle with Cloud and Kadaj's gang. Cloud took a bullet to the head and survived with nothing more than a scratch. Fans defend this by saying that the bullet was deflected by Cloud's sunglasses, which is even more ridiculous.

- There are multiple instances where building monuments get completely raped by attacks yet does little to no damage to the characters. The most notable instance of this is when Cloud plowed through Bahamut Sin's energy ball attack (Which completely destroyed a piece of Midgard lanscape)like hot knife through butter with no damage at all.

- Rude took a huge fucking piece of metal to his head and was only KO'ed for a couple of seconds.

- Gravity only affects the characters sometimes. Cloud was launched into the sky at Bahamut Sin by his party, who seemed to go from ground level to several storeys high in no time flat.

- Yazoo's gun is nothing more than a glorified BB gun and only does real damage at the end.

- The fight scenes are waaay too fast to be reasonably followed.

...and so on. Ironically, I like the Tifa vs Loz scene the best because it seemed much less over the top than the rest of the scenes and even then, there is a lot of instances where it looks like the landscape is made out of flimsy cardboard.

I argued these points to a fanboy who saw fit to barge in on a conversation and proclaim he had a 5 ft boner from watching AC. I told him that I didn't like most of the fight scenes because they are waaay too over the top. He asked why I should care, then I told him that it is really out of place to ignore physics completely in a movie with the pretense of being the most realistically rendered CGI movie ever. His intelligent rebuttal...."u only care becuz ur a fag"

In short, FF7:AC is overrated.

Now....Maple....oh how I loath thee so much that I wished that thou was never created.

Seriously, my reasons for hating that game is much more personal than one would think, but let me get into the technical aspects of it.

Okay, so for those who don't know, Maple is an MMORPG with a twist that seemed to attract a lot of MMORP Gamers ; Everything is in a side-scroller interface à la Summon Night : Craft Sword Monogatari and Ys 3. While this is a novelty that tempted me to try it out. I quickly learned how easily the downsides of it ruined it.

Firstly, the ridiculously steep exp curve means that you would end up fighting the same monsters over and over for several hours on end before you can level up. And no, you can't fight the better monsters in the next area because they can all too easily easily kill you.

Secondly, the lure of most MMORPG's are getting together and forming a raid party for a sucessful raid. I've heard people talking about that last awesome raid they were a part of in FFXI, Ragnarok Online, Everquest or even WoW. I have yet to hear of a sucessful raid story from MS gamers. Infact, all I ever hear about the MS community from MSers are complaints about KillStealers, item-thieves and defame-stalkers.

Thirdly, the quests suck. Even MSers admit to the quests being nothing more than 'find item x, get reward y' and more often than not, the trouble isn't worth it.

Finally, people defend it by stating how it does not fall into the repetitive and boring category ; The occasional find of an item that half the community is looking for. Okay, so you found an item that most are seeking, now what are you gonna do with it? There are items like that in EVERY MMORPGs, so this is nothing special. Moreover, what about the other 99.9% of the time where the monotony isn't broken? How do you account for that?

So yeah, here are my reasons for thinking that MS is synonymous with boring. You may agree or disagree, that's fine as long as you don;t shove it down my throat. So I'm gonna ask this question to those who so willingly abandoned their friends for the game.

Seriously, what the fuck is so damned good about the game that made you so damn comfortable about dumping your friends away in favour of it? Can you imagine that one day I logged in to a chatroom only to find that EVERYONE had gone to Maple? So I'm left with nobody to talk to for hours on end until someone who didn't fall into the Maple Story bandwagon came on. It went on for weeks before I said anything about it.

That was in the past I know, and almost everyone had grown out of it. Those that didn't were turned into bitter grouches, they kept complaining about the 'assholes' that plague MS but they keep playing it. Those who were once my friends, nice and friendly. I can't remember the last time they did anything but go on Maple and sow disparaging comments. It was pretty depressing for a while, but I learned to stop caring because it's no longer worth it.

To anyone who thinks I'm an asshole for saying this : Fuck you, at least I don't ditch my friends in favour of games!