Customization

I've logged 5 hours so far in the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV (known as Final Fantasy 2 in the United States when we were kids). As was true for the Final Fantasies I played before it, I find the story in FF4 to be excellent but the gameplay to be monotonous and a big stinking waste of time. There's never any real danger of losing a battle -- my main character has not once been KO'd, ever -- and though I know that won't last, it's still something to have gone through roughly 3 major boss battles (dragon, squid, and antlion) without ever having had to glumly turn off my DS and turn it back on to try again. You might say this is a good thing, but the problem is that the monotonous battles are all mandatory and are quite excessive. Because Final Fantasy has a timer bar that makes you wait roughly 5 real world seconds before you can launch your attacks, and because each magical attack (the only ones I currently have capable of dispelling 4-6 enemies from the screen all at once) all feature a 5-second cinematic, the battles last roughly 20-30 seconds even if I get in the first hit and kill 6 bad guys all at the same time. The real issue is the compounding of this minor one, i.e. when the game makes you encounter these random battles every 2 seconds you walk on the mapscreen. It's fucking ridiculous. FF4's (and FF6's, and FF7's) only means of allowing you to not fight is to run away, but even that takes as much time to accomplish (roughly 10-20 seconds) as the fight itself would, so you resign yourself to fighting anyway just to get item drops and money. But yes, you advance 2 seconds' worth of mappage and then lose 20 seconds to fighting. Not a very consumer-friendly setup.

My beef with the game -- summed up as "great story, wretched gameplay" -- reminds me that I long for a world where stories can be enjoyed in many different formats suiting the individual's needs or desires. For example, I could play Final Fantasy IV the video game or instead I could read the novel, watch the film, watch the anime, or read the comics. (For the record, I would purchase the novel or watch the television series. A film would be too abridged and a comic series not cost-effective.)

I am then reminded that the future is here today because everywhere I look I see things like this. Indeed, we already live in a world -- and have for some time now -- where a successful novel may spawn a Japanese comic and later a Japanese television series. "To each his own," let him pick amongst the book, the comic, the TV. It's the exact same story but presented in different ways. And because people demand this sort of customization (or perhaps we ought call it as they see it, an optimization?), and because these demands are accompanied by dollar-votes, the companies of the world have been only too happy to oblige.

It all hearkens back to Yogurt's joke about "moichandising", even if the motivation isn't exactly the same. It also reminds me of the laughably desperate fight against Fate that American elementary, middle, and high school educators wage: the fight against students abandoning (as they see it) high literature for base cinema. "Don't watch Moby Dick the four-hour movie!" they holler. "Read Moby Dick the 700-page book!" Educators traditionally, it seems to me, had this notion in their heads that any story a movie hoped to tell a book could do better. I don't disagree that this may be true for some people, but for others it is infinitely more difficult to wrap one's brain around words describing visual scenery than to see it; or to read between the lines and decode tone than to be clued in to it by background music; etc. I also think that it depends on the material itself. Taking the attitude that time is most important, we might say that action novels are better than action films because you can tell a reader "this hand-to-hand fight went on for 2 grueling hours" and they can believe it and fast-forward imagine it in their heads while the same can't be said for the action film; on the other hand, a novel that is heavily visually-descriptive (take Lord of the Rings, for instance) is far inferior to a movie which can actually show the very visualizations in question and do so in 0.5 seconds while the book takes 5 pages, e.g. "Welcome to Rivendell."

I welcome a world of choices, but at the same time, I do ask myself if we've gone laughably overboard with it. Especially when I see more and more movies on sale that advertise alternate endings or deleted scenes which when watched will change the entire perspective of the film (this second problem most recently occurred with Good Bye Lenin!). How will literary scholars reach a consensus if the books of tomorrow have three, possibly four different endings to choose from? How will people's minds be challenged, be made to critically think for themselves, if we provide people with both good and bad endings to everything? Controversial endings (as seen in Fatal Frame 2, Final Fantasy VII, or Neon Genesis Evangelion) are the manner by which artists can pose challenges to mankind. Aren't these challenges effectively neutered if every bad ending can simply be ignored by the reader as "not the real ending :p" ? if he can simply turn the page and begin to read Ending #2 and decide that this Happily Ever After better suits his desires?