Let's Play Final Fantasy VII (Part 2): Dropping the bomb

There is a lot of exposition in the early game. You really have to enjoy this kind of JRPG storytelling in order to enjoy the game. There's tons of dialogue and not a lot of interactivity. For the most part, JRPGs would be better as films or TV series, and FFVII is honestly no exception. The gameplay isn't bad, but it isn't really meaningful. Thus far, the game's been pretty easy. I could just mash the confirm button over and over in battles and not have to worry about getting hurt.

That being said, let's continue. We enter the bowels of the reactor, where big pipes seem to be drawing out some kind of liquid. Is this Mako? The liquid is dark, but the place where the pipes meet it is producing this blue-white light. Some kind of chemical reaction? I have no idea.

We arrive at what appears to be the core of the reactor, and we find an odd green object in the middle of the path. We have to pick it up to advance. It's a "Restore" Materia, and the game must punctuate the fact that I picked it up with an exclamation point. Honestly it did the same with a phoenix down I found earlier, so maybe this Materia isn't so exciting.

However, I can't seem to use it for anything. It doesn't appear in my inventory, so I'm not sure what it is for. I just have to pick it up and continue on. It's kind of dumb that the game gives me an item and then doesn't show me how to use it or what it is for. If this Materia thing has some special use, it should at least give me a tutorial to show me how to use it.

We go to set us up the bomb, and Barret shows that he still doesn't trust Cloud. After all, a former member of SOLDIER might be...

Okay, seriously, Barret? If Cloud wanted to, he probably could have just chucked you in the Mako by now.

If he's actually a mercenary, he's less likely to betray you than any one of your other teammates. He's a professional, and he's in this to get paid. So let's get paid!

Of course, this is when Cloud decides to prove me wrong.

He grabs his head, the screen goes red. A voice in his head tells him, "Watch out! This isn't just a reactor!!"

At this point, my gut feeling says that the voice in his head is the girl in the pink dress. We know she's nearby, and maybe there's some thing that makes this reactor special. Maybe these Mako Reactors actually help the planet somehow, and AVALANCHE has the wrong idea?

I'll be honest, I'm sure AVALANCHE has the wrong idea. We're blowing up a reactor instead of shutting it down. At this point I'm not sure whether the guys I'm fighting are military or civilian authorities either. I could be killing cops!

They are using submachine guns, though...

Anyway, Barret notices that Cloud is tripping out and tells him to hurry his white ass up. He can snort some coke later. Cloud sets the bomb, and we get on our way.

Actually, we're attacked by a giant robot scorpion as soon as Cloud sets the bomb. He warns Barret that it's incoming, and we get to fighting.

Although the game's visuals are dated by modern standards, the re-rendering helped the game a lot. This boss actually looks pretty good.

Its attacks are a lot stronger. His tail attacks are doing 50+ points of damage, which is pretty painful. Fortunately, Cloud's Bolt spell can strike back for 90 or so damage. Barret's basic attacks only hit for about 35, but Big Shot manages to deal about 100 and he gets another one this fight. I also get Cloud's first limit break in this battle, but the huge boss managed to completely block Cloud while he used it.

We get pretty beat up, so I use some Potions to heal. They restore a pretty hefty 100 HP. I've been getting a few here and there from regular encounters, and they offset the boss' damage pretty nicely.

It would really be nice if I could use a "Restore" Materia or something to heal me, but I still have no idea how it works. It might heal abnormal statuses or something instead of HP. Previous games' healing spells are called "Cure," so I have no idea what this Restore thing is.

Then the boss pulls out the big guns. He raises up his tail, and Cloud tells Barret that if he attacks, the boss will counter-attack with its laser. This is a scene that I feel isn't translated well; it comes across like Cloud is being sarcastic, but I'm fairly certain that it was supposed to be interpreted as a warning.

Either way, Barret already had an attack queued when the boss raised its tail, so I eat laser to the face. It does a lot of damage to both characters.

We keep fighing, and the boss goes down. Both Cloud and Barret get another full limit gauge by the end of the fight.

The next sequence is timed, and the clock counts down even when the game is in Wait time or in the menu.

Either way, here's a scene of Cloud's first limit break, Braver. It's stronger than Big Shot, probably mostly because Cloud hits harder than Barret does naturally.

It's a panicked run out of the reactor, where Wedge is hopefully waiting at the escape point.

Along the way, we find Jessie, who has gotten herself stuck. It isn't really surprising, considering these girders and pathways we are walking on are an enormous safety hazard. Has anyone ever heard of railings? Or maybe even solid floors where your feet can't get stuck in them?

Cloud helps her out, and Jessie is surprised. However, Cloud is a true white knight, so he has to help a lady when she's in distress.

Milady.

The crew all make it out safely, and we're treated to a FMV of the fruits of our labor.

Did I mention that we're terrorists?

That explosion is pretty odd, to be honest. Our characters took an elevator down into the reactor from the ground level, and set the bomb well below the city. Then the reactor blows up from the top!

A totally reasonable justification is that the explosion blew out some key control equipment, and the reactor is designed to overload and vent overloaded power and/or fuel upwards in the event of control failure. At least, that's the best explanation I have. It does mean that, in spite of the huge explosion, the civilians in the area are probably safe. It would be amusing if we killed the pink girl and then her spirit followed us around and haunted us for what we did, though.

After Jessie's big rescue, it seems like the other AVALANCHE members have gained a lot of respect for Cloud. Jessie even seems to have a crush on him. Also, she seems to have her mouth open in every scene.

Either way, the team is ordered to split up and find their way to the Sector 8 train station.

Cloud tries to stop Barret to ask him a question, but Barret just stops him and says it can wait until they're back if it's about his money. What Cloud actually wanted to say is anybody's guess. He's been pretty quiet about stuff that has nothing to do with getting the job done. Perhaps he wanted to apologize for his cold attitude?

Traveling into what appears to be Sector 8 (west of of the North Mako Reactor, at any rate), we see that the area has not been untouched. We see most of the skyline that we saw in this area earlier, except that the explosion has caused a large amount of property damage. Unfortunately, that probably means we killed innocent people.

Cloud meets the flower girl in person, and she seems unhurt by the explosion.

She was selling flowers when the bomb went off, and while she was knocked down, she wasn't seriously hurt. Cloud tells her that it's strange that she has flowers, and she says that she's selling them for a gil each. We have a few hundred, so we can afford to buy one. She's pretty happy about that, but then Cloud takes off to meet up with his crew.

Although most of the people are panicking, at least one person notices some graffiti or a poster or something. It's some anti-Shinra, pro-AVALANCHE propaganda.

It seems like AVALANCHE is far-reaching. Back in the reactor, Jessie mentioned that many people within AVALANCHE risked their lives to get the access codes to enter the reactor. 

It's clear that the people Cloud is working with are just the operational arm of AVALANCHE. This actually is disturbingly similar to many eco-terrorist groups that exist in the real world. They have a "clean" front that participates in protests and community outreach, and other elements that participate in direct action. I'm not suggesting that real-world Greenpeace specifically did anything like blowing up a power station, of course, but they do protest real-world nuclear power.

Cloud is discovered by a group of Shinra soldiers. Judging by the quick response time, I think it's safe to say that these guys are actually civil authorities and not military.

Cloud fights them, but they get too numerous.

We actually get to fight a new kind of battle here, where soldiers attack us from both front and rear. If you get hit in the back, it does a fair bit of extra damage; I took a hit in the back for about 17HP instead of the usual single digits.

Oddly, Cloud also fully healed from the battles in the reactor, so he was full on both HP and MP for the fights with the cops.

The cops finally surround Cloud despite him killing like 10 of them, so he leaps off the bridge and onto the train below. 

Clearly this was his train, but I don't see why he was pinned down at all by these cops. Their guns deal pitiful damage, and we still have a lot of potions. We could have done this all night.

We did need to catch this train, though. It's the last one out of town, and we need to get paid.

Back on the train, the other members of AVALANCHE are wondering what happened to Cloud.

Biggs suggests that Cloud might have been killed, which Barret flat-out rejects. Jessie seems upset at that prospect, too (it's pretty obvious that she's hot for him). 

The next part is oddly translated. It seems to read as though Biggs is asking whether they think that Cloud will stick with AVALANCHE, but then Barret blames the rest of his team randomly. When I read it the first time, it seemed as though Biggs was suggesting that Cloud would fight to the bitter end for AVALANCHE's cause, just due to the context of what other characters were saying. It's clear that this part wasn't translated together, as the lines don't mesh up well.

Oh you, Cloud.

The team is surprised and happy to see him, in spite of his callousness. Barret is pissed and threatens to take it out of Cloud's pay, but it's pretty clear he's happy to see that Cloud is OK. Even though the dialogue is all text, the scene is well-scripted, so the intent of the lines is easy to see.

Wedge thinks Cloud did a great job back in the reactor, and Biggs is happy to have Cloud back on the team. Jessie wipes some of the soot off Cloud's face (probably from the explosion) and thanks him for saving her in the reactor. Everyone heads into the main part of the train, which I find kind of odd. Shouldn't they be hiding out?

We find out that the train is headed for its last stop, the Sector 7 Train Graveyard. Actually, I'm not sure whether the Train Graveyard in Sector 7 is the last stop, or if Sector 7 is simply called the Train Graveyard. Either way, we're on our way there. Also, we learn that the city we're in is called Midgar.

Jessie offers to show us the map of the rail system, which is a convenient way to give exposition on the city itself. Cloud, as a former member of SOLDIER, probably knows all of this already.

The name Midgar is an obvious reference to Midgard, which is the name of the world of men (our world) in Norse mythology.

We can draw some symbolic conclusions from this, too. Midgar might be the entirety of the game world from the perspective of the player, meaning that we might never leave the city, but I don't think this is the case, mostly due to the starfield panorama we saw in the game's introduction. It might be that Midgar covers the entire planet, but this also seems unlikely based on the information we get in this scene. It might be the only place on this planet where humans dwell, or perhaps it's supposed to be symbolic, the only part of the world that actually matters, so to speak.

There's a lot of expository dialogue here, so I'll summarize. Midgar's actually a pretty small city. The upper city, called the Plate (which appears to be a slang term), is raised about 50 meters above the ground. There's a city below that, considered to be the slums. Based on the 50 meters up statement, Midgar seems really, really small. I don't think it's more than a few square kilometers.

There are eight Mako Reactors, one in each sector of the city. When we blew up the No. 1 reactor, we escaped to Sector 8 in the west, so we can assume that Sector 1 was to our east. At some point, the towns used to have names, but people just refer to them by numbers now.

There's an ID check device at each rail checkpoint, When a train passes through a checkpoint, a bunch of red lights turn on and scan everyone in the train. Fortunately, our team is using fake IDs to avoid suspicion. The red lights effect looks identical to the red screen we had earlier, when a voice in our head warned us that "This isn't just a reactor!!" I blame the game's VFX budget.

Cloud and Barret have a talk about the people of Midgar, and how the people in the slums suffer because of the city on the Plate. Apparently, Barret feels strongly about this.

The upper city seems to pollute the lower city, and only artificial light is available in the lower city, since the plate blocks out the sky. It's a pretty bleak existence, and even Cloud says as such. He asks why people don't just move onto the Plate, and Barret suggests that, while it might be because their poverty prevents it, it might also be because the people love their homes, even if they are polluted.

Cloud replies with a rather profound statement. One rule of literature: if someone says something metaphorical, it's usually important to the work.

It's a long ride back to Sector 7.

Let's Play Final Fantasy VII (Part 1): The Beginning

First, we're treated to SquareEnix's ridiculous DRM. Irritating. I should have just played the PSX version on emulator. I have no idea what the controller mappings are, so I will probably have to mess with them during the game. I'm using an XBox 360 controller to play the game. I could borrow a PSX controller adapter for the true 'authentic' feel, but it's not that big of a deal.

We're treated to a view of a field of stars. At this point, we have no context for what this means. It could just be pretty imagery, but it could mean that the game will have a galactic scope, or perhaps it will involve looking beyond our world. Generally in film, if the work has any sort of "greater meaning," these early abstractions mean something. We'll hopefully find the context later.

Next, we're shown an image of a girl. There are little green fireflies sparking all around her, or perhaps they are some kind of magical energy. The music and the tone of the scene leads me to think that there is some kind of spiritual connection here.

The odd part is that she isn't part of the group we'll be meeting first, which means that, along with her simple introduction (she's clearly not an evil mastermind), she's important to the story.

If I were to guess at her value to the plot, I suspect that she's a plot device, or a damsel in distress type of character.

The camera zooms out and we see that the girl is actually looking at some sort of mechanical device that is producing sparks. The sparkles in the scene with the girl's face are a bit too gentle to be electricity, though, and my guess is that they are magical. Perhaps this world's technology is based on magic?

Next the world zooms out more and we see more of the city; a theater, a bar, cars and motorcycles zooming by, and this girl in pink is carrying a flower basket as she walks across the street.

This imagery is almost certainly a duality meant to show contrast. We have a girl dressed in pink and red amidst the gloomy city colors. We have the modern nature of the city, with its lights and loudness contrasted with the soft click of this girl's heels as she walks on the pavement. Her flowers represent a connection with nature, meant to contrast with the decidedly urban feel of the environment she is in. The way she walks and her facial expressions seem confident and natural, as though she's used to this place. I would guess that she's an advocate for the natural world amidst the industrial sprawl of the city. Perhaps those sparkles she saw earlier (and her clasped-together hands) were some sort of nature spirit she was praying to? Regardless, I can say with almost 100% certainty that this girl is meant to oppose the city's nature.

This scale of things seems off, though. We just saw a starfield earlier, hinting at a galactic scope of a game (rather than the typical planetary scale of a Final Fantasy game). This apparent conflict between this girl and the city might be symbolic rather than literal, or it might be meant to show that the urban development might be a form of nature, and she (as the representative of nature in this city) has learned to live and commune even in this place which seems to have no natural connection at all.

We get a full zoom-out of the city, followed by the game's title screen. The city seems to be surrounded by a ring of factories on the outside, with greenish-white smoke spewing out. These factories appear to be connected to a massive, bright central tower.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that those connecting beams are probably related to power or electricity, and connect the central structure to the outer factories. Either the central structure is a power distribution center and the "factories" are actually power plants, or the central structure is a power plant, which provides power to the "factories." I would actually guess the former (which we'll see is the more correct answer) just because I would suspect that a city with this kind of urban sprawl actually would have factories and production elsewhere. At this point though, we can't really be sure that the city design is all that important - it's actually more important to say that it's clearly industrial or modern age technology, and that this city (which is all we know of at this point) is far beyond the technology of any Final Fantasy we've seen thus far. It feels like a mashup of industrial and modern styles, but is very different from any sort of technology that we know. Since when do factories produce bright white-green smoke?

The camera does a really neat trick here. When we first see the girl in pink and then have the zoom out to the city view and the title, the camera zooms out from the left side of the huge tower in the middle. When it zooms back in to show this scene, it zooms around the right side of the tower, showing the image on the right: a train zooming up just a small distance from where we first saw the girl.

A man and a woman jump out of the train and attack the two station attendants before they can react. Another three characters leap out of the train afterwards: a fat guy with a red hat, a large, oversized black man who is probably missing a hand (but has a metal-looking box on his missing right hand), and a "newcomer" with spiky blonde hair.

This "newcomer" is obviously our character. The camera, which has remained fixed the entire scene, suddenly locks to the newcomer as he leaps out of the train.

Accessing the menu screen, we see that his name is listed as Ex-SOLDIER. That's clearly his occupation; a former soldier of some government or another. In this context, being an ex-soldier is clearly relevant. He has some kind of miltary training, and is tougher than average. The guess would be that since he's an ex-soldier, he is probably a member of a revolution, and that he was only recently separated from military service. The concept of a former military member joining a rebellion is so common that even real life uses the trope, so I'm making that guess now.

Why would I jump to that conclusion? Well, in Final Fantasy IV, Cecil discovers that he is working for an awful government, and deserts, forming a revolution to fight back. In Final Fantasy VI, Celes deserts the Empire to join the Returners, a revolutionary group. What else should we expect from a title of "ex-soldier?"

We get into our first battle and it's mostly a laugh. Oddly, the two enemy soldiers run past the big black guy and attack us instead. This is probably because the game doesn't expect us to know how to "run" yet, so the big guy was supposed to be off screen when we were attacked.

Ex-SOLDIER is barely even damaged by the enemy attacks, and he defeats them with a single hit.

His huge sword is more than a match for these guys, even though they are armed with "machine guns."

Clearly this guy is no ordinary soldier. He uses a sword, they use assault rifles (or submachine guns), and yet his sword is much, much more powerful and he is nigh-invulnerable, only taking 3 HP from their guns when he has 302 HP. This is definitely still a Final Fantasy game.

The first guy to exit the train, Biggs (who looks a bit like a pirate or a guerilla with his bright red Rambo headband and olive drab tanktop) comments on our hero's exceptional fighting prowess.

Jessie, the lady opening the door, mentions that people in SOLDIER are the enemy. It's also here where we get that our main character's job is not merely "soldier" in the traditional sense, but rather that he is a former member of SOLDIER, which is probably an elite military unit.

We also find out our character's name (or rather, we get to name him). His name is Cloud Strife, and now we know a little more about him. He's the equivalent of a former SEAL (more or less), and that he used to be aligned with the people we are now fighting. As both a newcomer and a former enemy, his team seems to be torn on whether or not to trust him. For his part, he doesn't seem to care about any of his teammates.

At this point, we're clear now on who he is. The people he is working with (AVALANCHE) are the revolutionaries, while he is a paid mercenary.

I feel like the distrust is not warranted; in real life, a mercenary is far more reliable than people fighting for a cause. Mercenaries depend on good reputations, so if he is paid to do a job, he isn't going to be a danger to operational security. He's going to do the job, and the only way he would fail is if he becomes unable to complete the mission due to complications (including injury or death). However, these guys seem to be typical rebels, and don't know how mercenaries really operate. We also get to name the big guy, Barret Wallace. He tells us that our target is the North Mako Reactor. In the earlier scene where we saw the train drive up, we saw one of those big "factories" from the intro right in front, with a big "01" painted on the side. Somehow I think that's our North Mako Reactor. So it is a power plant of some kind. The camera pulls down to show the reactor as we run towards it.

More battles occur and we explore Cloud's magic spells. They're even more powerful than his attacks, and destroy enemies in a single hit. He has two spells available.

The first one shown here is Bolt, which is especially good against mechanical foes. Against some of the more powerful robots we'll see later, it deals well over 100 damage.

We also have a second spell, Ice. It's not as good as Bolt, but it's still plenty strong and it still one-shots most foes. Then again, so does Cloud's sword; although it sometimes falls a bit short and takes two hits instead of one.

We get to the bridge in front of the reactor where Barret told us to meet up, and we learn the name of our fourth AVALANCHE member, Of course, because we knew the Rambo-wannabe was Biggs, that had to mean that chubby red-hatted guy has to be Wedge. Also, I think his red hat is actually a bandanna.

Also, he states that our objective is to blow up the reactor.

Wait a minute.

We just saw the flower girl in the intro scene. She was in the vicinity of where we are right now. We saw bars and theaters and stuff. There is no way that this city is a military base, and even this part of the city isn't a military base. We're blowing up a civilian power station.

So we're fucking terrorists. I'm working with terrorists. I'm not working for the FARC, I'm working for Al-Qaeda. No wonder Cloud doesn't care about these guys. I would even wager a guess at this point that Cloud might be infiltrating the terrorists and that he isn't actually an "ex-SOLDIER." However, the game spoiled that for me because Barret is a character that I get to name. I'm probably going to end up believing in this terrorist message.

It's a pretty novel thing, really. Remember that this game came out in 1997. We're basically the Final Fantasy equivalent of Unabombers right now. Playing as an actual terrorist, targeting civilian infrastructure? That's pretty crazy from a video game made in the '90s. It doesn't even matter if this act is justified in some way. We're blowing up a civilian power plant. It's not justified but makes for a really interesting twist. Hopefully the game covers the ethics of this in a realistic way.

Barret asks Cloud if he's ever been in a reactor, and Cloud hesitates before saying that of course he has, as he used to work for Shinra. Shinra could be a person or a government, most likely the latter. Shinra runs the reactors and has a military force, including a special operations unit, called SOLDIER.

Barret also explains to Cloud that the reactors are powered by Mako, which he claims is the life's blood of the planet. He further claims that the use of Mako is killing the planet; thus justifying to him the destruction of the reactor.

Let me just say that this doesn't make perfect sense. In real life, power doesn't "go away" when it is used. Living beings consume food as a sort of fuel, and the leftover energy is given off as waste heat. Even if people stopped using fossil fuels and other fuel sources, the planet would eventually die without an influx of energy from the sun to feed plant life.

I'm sure that this Mako power is a thing, but isn't life solar powered anyway? Or is the planet's energy the actual source of life, and things like the sun and kinetic energy have nothing to do with the natural life cycle? Barret isn't a scientist, and I don't see any reason to believe his simplistic reasoning any more than I have to believe that "sustainable" businesses actually help sustain the environment.

Also, I'm not working for Al-Qaeda, I'm working for Greenpeace now.

Fortunately, Cloud doesn't give a shit about the issues with the environment. Also, as shown in this screenshot, Jessie has a pretty big chest.

Barret joins up with Cloud after he shows his dismissive attitude in order to keep an eye on this cold-blooded mercenary.

Also we see that Barret's block arm is actually a gun. A minigun at that.

This of course doesn't make any sense, as Barret's gun arm has no ammo container, feed tray, or anything else that a minigun might need to actually load rounds into the gun. The rate of fire also seems more consistent with an automatic rifle; I'd guess that he is shooting maybe 300-400 rpm, which begs the question as to why he would need multiple barrels.

Yeah, I know, because it's cool. I'm just saying, it makes no sense. Barret also doesn't have any magic. I'm guessing that's because as a terrorist leader he never learned how, or maybe it's a special training for members of SOLDIER (as it was with Celes). Barret is also a bit more fragile than Cloud despite having more HP. He gets banged up pretty bad, but there is an upside.

When a character takes damage, the Limit gauge fills up, and when the gauge reaches maximum, he can use a powerful special attack, called a Limit Break. Barret's limit break is called Big Shot, and it attacks a single enemy with about the damage of a magic spell. You can see in this image, Cloud's limit gauge is only about 3/4ths full even though he's fought several battles on his own. He's definitely made of tougher stuff than Barret is, but the difference isn't as big as the difference between either Cloud or Barret and one of these enemy soldiers. And since taking more damage means getting more limit breaks, it's not so bad as long as the damage isn't that dangerous.

Either way, we get to our first save point, so I'm going to stop for now. That was a lot of exposition, and a lot of speculating on stuff. Next time, we'll head into the reactor and hopefully end the mission.

Let's Play Final Fantasy VII: Introduction

Final Fantasy VII is one of the most influential JRPGs of all time. It's credited with being the game that brought JRPGs beyond their original demographic and into a more mainstream audience. It has memorable characters, interesting gameplay, and a very complex plot that has provoked arguments and discussions on the Internet for years after its original release.

Final Fantasy VII remained so popular that even after 5 years there was enough demand for a sequel that Square released a follow-up film, Advent Children, which enjoyed significant financial success. After Advent Children, Square milked the FFVII cow for all it was worth, releasing mobile game Before Crisis, third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus, and prequel RPG Crisis Core.

I really loved FFVII as a kid, and when it came out in 1997 I played it for at least 3 days straight (with minor breaks for eating). However, it wasn't until a year or two later when people started to really dissect the plot that I really began to appreciate the game's story. I did my own analysis and came to my own conclusions, but I came to find that the popular belief was completely flawed and based on false reasoning. I have never read a plot summary for FFVII that looked at it was written by any sort of qualified literary or film critic.

I'm not the most qualified person, of course. I have a meager two years of literature studies and one year of media studies, but most plot guides for this game are just so bad that I have to put something out there that has some actual thought put into it. So let's get started.

FFVII is a JRPG, and it's impossible to talk about the gameplay without talking about JRPG gameplay in general. JRPGs usually have linear storylines and repetitive battles, with an emphasis on pre-battle strategy instead of during-battle tactics. Early JRPGs had gameplay focused on wearing the player down after a large number of battles rather than making those battles tactically interesting, and that influence is definitely present in Final Fantasy VII.

However, instead of grindy battles, FFVII's battles are fairly quick and honestly don't wear you down much, if at all. The end result is that FFVII is really easy. Many people consider JRPGs a grind, and I'll be grinding minimally (if at all) in order to really bring that point home. FFVII is super easy, and the lack of difficulty and faster battles probably contributed to the success of the game.

FFVII's story is also fairly linear and offers few choices. There's only one really meaningful choice in the whole game. If you're familiar with the game, you're probably wondering what I'm talking about. I'm actually referring to the date sequence, which reveals a fair bit about the character you date. Because I want the full experience for my first time through, I'll be picking my choices carefully to date the girl that will give me the most meaningful plot exposition.

Other than those choices, I'll be playing the game as a thorough first-time player who is familiar with other games in the series. Obviously I've beaten this game at least 20 times before, but I will endeavor in this first run to not jump to conclusions about things I haven't seen yet and let the plot do its work.

Weapons in fiction: More about guns in fantasy

Balancing guns -- or really any weapon in a fantasy setting is largely a case of expressing the weapon's values. As we saw previously action economy has a lot to do with whether a weapon is good or bad. A lot of this has to do with the action cost of the medieval weapons in question. If a longbow shot only costs 1 action, then a gun really can't do better which is actually pretty good for balance.

Once you discuss action economy we can also discuss damage or special qualities. You can dial those up or down to make guns more or less attractive.

But that's all gameplay. How viable are guns in a fantasy setting, really? The answer is pretty viable. Fantasy settings are actually more likely to develop guns than real life. This is both from a societal development standpoint and a mechanical science standpoint.

Black powder is one of the easiest compounds in the world to make. It's all made from stuff that is easily obtainable in a fantasy setting. The hardest thing to discover would be sulfur, but if we're talking about a setting that has steel weapons (a pretty safe bet) and gold piece currency, sulfur is almost certainly going to be mined too. It's only a matter of time before people figure out uses for it. Black powder and steelworking is all that's required to make a gun. If a sword can be forged and a crossbow can be built, a gun's parts are considerably simple to make. We can go quite a ways (up to flintlock guns) without anything except steel, wood, flint, black powder, and lead (for the bullet). If lead is rare, other material like bismuth could be used (though lead is more common in the real world).

All of those components can be created -- possibly even mass-produced -- by various types of magic in most fantasy settings. Most fantasy settings put restrictions that keep players from making precious metals or magic components, but wood or steel or lead? Unheard of. Black powder, again, is a simple compound that was discovered before Jesus was born in our world. If steel forging has been invented and black powder hasn't, sulfur doesn't exist in your world or something crazy like that. Either way, conjuring gun parts is a possible, even likely way for guns to work.

Alchemy is another big deal in the fantasy world. Magic in general is pretty crazy but alchemy takes it to a much smaller, more easily managed level. How likely is it in a world where you can make magic flashbangs or magic glue that you can't make magic gun propellant? I'm sure that in any fantasy world, alchemy makes the discovery of new chemicals even better than black powder more likely. Their invention of smokeless powder might be nothing like our nitrocellulose but it might be even more effective. In the real world it only takes a few grains of smokeless powder to fire a pistol bullet. Even if it cost some magical materials, it would probably be not as costly as a big flask of alchemist's fire that makes a big explosion just because the resulting magical propellant would likely be pretty efficient. Alchemy could also allow skipping steps that took our science a long time, like the discovery of percussion caps. It took our science centuries of using black powder guns as a regular infantry tool before we discovered fulminate of mercury for our caplock guns. Alchemy gives a fast track since it's not as limited as chemistry.

Alchemy is in a really good spot too due to the position magic holds in a fantasy setting. Quite frankly, magic is OP as hell. Warfare in a fantasy setting should be utterly dominated by magicians. They can heal, raise the dead, rain flaming death, teleport, mind control, turn invisible, shapeshift etc. etc. If alchemy is a normal science that anyone can learn, it means that these scientists are likely working to deal with ways to give common people some kind of equalization in a world utterly dominated by spellcasters. This is even more so if people are born with magic or at least some kind of magical talent. This is why crossbows and guns were invented in the first place; it took years and years of training to learn the sword, the bow, and fighting on horseback. It takes a week to train a crossbowman or musketeer. Huge difference! Now imagine the same situation, but instead it's years and years to learn magic or only people born with magic can use it. How do people compete? They develop sciences like alchemy to even the playing field.

This isn't due to envy or anything like that. In a big military you can't rely on the 5+ year veterans of swordplay or wizardry. Your have a finite amount of time to train your soldiers and sailors, typically a month or two. Spending more time on that costs more! You want to get your soldiers to be the most combat-effective in the least time. Manufacturing tools like alchemy flashbangs or firearms is a way of reducing that gap. There might even be alchemy breaching charges or anti-fortification rocket launchers -- anything to make your army less dependent on the 1% of your population that have magical talent. Wizards might even help with research in order to lessen the amount of burden on them.

To a lesser degree this is also true of society as a whole. We develop sciences to allow our less-skilled people to do more skilled things. Think about computers in the 1980s, then in the 1990s, and finally today. In the 1980s you needed a ton of experience to handle a computer at all. You needed to memorize commands and had to be resourceful to get documentation for things you didn't know. In the 90s, things were easier, especially after Windows and Mac computers were released, but you still needed a CCNA to set up a router until late in the decade. Today, an untrained person can bridge his laptop with his cellphone in order to get internet. Win8 even defrags your hard drive for you now. Touchscreens and GUI interfaces have made computers tons easier. IT professionals have it a lot harder because the end user has it easier.

Still not convinced? Consider white rice. It's a pretty simple thing. Without anything more advanced than a pot, water and some firewood, you can cook it. It takes some skill to start the fire without matches or flint, though. You have to know what you're doing on that front. Fortunately, we have firemaking tools to help with that. Then we have to stoke the fire and keep it stoked. Fortunately, we can just dump the fire altogether because we invented the stove. Then you have to watch your water level and time when you want to uncover the rice. Undercooking it is pretty bad, overcooking it is slightly better but still bad. We invented glass lids to help with that, but in the end we invented a rice cooker so you don't even have to think about it. The machine takes literally 100% of the skills out of cooking rice, after multiple other inventions made it easier and easier and easier. That's science!

In a fantasy world, science is going to advance in a fantastical way that tries to make magic obsolete. Because magic exists and alchemy exists and real science exists, there's going to be constant pressure to create magical effects by other means, whether that's mechanical or alchemical or through some other science. Firearms are just one possibility of scientific evolution but in terms of military advancement they're far from the least likely. Because they existed without any sort of magic to speed their development, it's pretty likely that in a magical setting, they're pretty likely to be a really big deal.

This is assuming that fantasy society is half as violent as our society is. If it's anything like most fantasy settings, it's probably way more violent.

Weapons in fiction: Guns in fantasy settings

From a purely historical point of view, guns are completely imbalanced. They combine very long range, high stopping power, and in many cases a ridiculously high rate of fire. Compared to even the crossbow, the armor-piercing power of firearms destroys the viability of most other battlefield armaments and changes the way people think about combat.

Melee weapons are only viable inside the close distance that a firearm wielder can be attacked before he can ready his weapon and fire. Even inside that distance, if the gun is already readied, no close combat weapon is viable. Guns are just so deadly that they obsolete melee weapons at any distance except melee distance, and even at that range, many firearms are viable weapons. A handgun can be maneuvered at close range even if the enemy has a knife, and the firearm wielder can retreat backwards to evade a swing and is deadly at any distance.

But in fiction and fantasy this doesn't have to be the case. Many of our fictional worlds have relatively high technology levels. We like to think of our worlds as Renaissance-level in terms of cultural advancement, or perhaps we have a magi-steampunk setting similar to Eberron. Even in a setting with tech comparable to feudal Japan, guns can fit right in. They can even be OK in this kind of environment, because in our fantasy settings, we don't have the same rules as IRL.

In real life, a high caliber rifle bullet can get through steel plate armor but it's not actually a guarantee. Plate armor is actually reasonably OK at deflecting bullets. It's heavier than modern body armor, but we use steel plates in our body armor even today (though we are phasing them out for composite plates that are lighter). Against a modern handgun bullet, it should do alright. Against a lower-velocity black powder round like a musket ball or even a "modern" black powder cartridge like a 30-30, it should work just fine. It might not be as effective at stopping a bullet as it would be at stopping an arrow, but we generally don't make any differences in the armor penetrating capabilities of a rapier versus a falchion even though the difference in that case is enormous.

Even if there is a bit of a discrepancy we can easily grant magic armor or spells "equal" protection against all kinds of weapons. Fantasy is great like that.

In game mechanics terms, there really isn't that much difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a bow. It generally takes 1 action to fire a bow, and 1 action to fire a semi-automatic gun. This is somewhat unrealistic IRL; accurate aimed fire from a bow might get you 10 or so shots per minute for a skilled archer, while a skilled revolver shooter can (with moon clip or speed loader) easily fire 12 shots accurately from a single-action revolver in a minute, with a reload in the middle. A skilled handgun shooter can accurately shoot a full 18 rounds out of a Glock magazine in 1 minute. This is not a special skill held by the fastest handgun shooters. Those people can probably empty 3 Glock magazines accurately into targets with reloads in a minute. Guns are a lot faster IRL than bows. Fortunately, a single shot is a single action. It's possible a bow takes an extra partial action to draw the arrow or something, but many systems don't require this.

Single action revolvers are probably the highest-end of the technological spectrum that we would ever expect in a fantasy setting, and if we compare them to a hand crossbow, they're not that much different. A single-action revolver technically doesn't require both hands to ready for a second shot, but it's easy enough to say that the "cocking" takes both hands to do quickly. Similarly, a hand crossbow only requires you to draw a round of ammunition (generally a free action), cock the crossbow (a light pull), and the crossbow is ready for firing. In real life terms drawing the ammo is definitely slower, but the cocking is roughly the same speed and in many game systems drawing the ammo is "free" in terms of action speed. The revolver has to take an action every so often to reload the shots, too. It's definitely not superior in a game mechanics environment.

Everything else is a long gun (can be balanced around a longbow), is crew-served (not appropriate for players), or is single-shot, and thus not that significant compared to throwing weapons.

What about long guns? Well, readying a bolt action rifle to fire is a comparable amount of effort compared to a bow, and a bolt action rifle is really advanced compared to the time periods we're talking about. The first bolt action rifles came about in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Renaissance ended long before that. Most guns in those days took minutes to reload. An extremely skilled musketeer might be able to reload as quickly as 15 seconds. Go watch a YouTube video of someone reloading a black powder gun. It typically takes 15 seconds just to measure the powder in the main charge and put it in the barrel for even someone with a lot of training and practice.

Lever and pump action guns came before that but we're still looking at the 1800s. Technically revolvers did too, but that's fine. Either way, a lever or pump action gun should be roughly the same as a longbow.

This post is super late -- so late it's tomorrow's post. Blame Top Shot marathons, lol.

Science fiction weapons: how much fiction?

Sorry for very few posts. Unfortunately I had a brief case of author burnout where I didn't have anything really pressing to write about. A few times this has happened before and I forced something out, but I am not so sure that's good. I'll try to force more of it out, and the "no posts on Saturday" rule was sort of meant as a way to unwind.

Today I want to talk about science fiction and specifically weapons in science fiction. Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I really like to talk about guns. I like shooting them, too. I have written lot about guns in the past, present, and future and how they impact a fictional world, and some of that is available elsewhere on the internets.

One thing that is usually true is how science fiction gets weapons wrong. This is virtually guaranteed. Some science fiction gets it mostly right (the UNSC weapons in the Halo series are surprisingly realistic, with a small number of exceptions), but most science fiction just screws it up.

First up is energy weapons. Energy weapons make no sense in most contexts. It is possible that somewhere in the future, electrical energy is so free and disposable that we can use it for guns. Unfortunately most sci-fi settings don't depict this as being the case. In Star Wars, the same energy used to power a blaster that can fire lethal bolts could be used to run Luke's moisture farm for days. It could run a wheeled vehicle for years. It could power your house for months. It could probably run a vehicle like a speeder or swoop for months or more of regular use. It could fly a spaceship on low impulse thrust for virtually forever. Oh, also if we converted the energy in the pack into kinetic energy, it could blow up a pretty good-sized house.

In order for energy weapons to be plausible, they need to deliver recoilless destruction greater than an existing projectile weapon. Now we're talking about enough energy to power your house for years. Maybe decades. These energy batteries would carry so much power that they could juice a whole city. It's not impossible, of course, but there would need to be no such thing as fuel anymore, or fuel would have to be so efficient and powerful that there would not be any shortages of it. Why would you use that much power on a weapon when there were better natural sources of chemical propellant?

Also, in case you're wondering, firearms propellant generally isn't made from any kind of fossil fuel, except possibly in its production -- but if you had free electricity you wouldn't need fossil fuels.

So there's some other options. Portable mass drivers are a thing. I'm not even going to refute it, the technology is plausible and if you have a lot of electrical energy for weapons, mass drivers become possible. They're still more costly than making firearms propellant but there are some advantages.

The problem with mass drivers as infantry weapons is mainly that chemical propellants are cheaper and easier to make. The main draw of mass drivers is that if you can miniaturize the firing system enough, it actually makes carrying ammunition much easier. You still need to feed the rounds into a magazine or belt, but they can be much smaller so a soldier can carry much more ammunition. A rifle mag would be slimmer and could hold 50 or more rounds. Very convenient.

What about Mass Effect where computers shard off a miniature piece of metal? That isn't realistic. The problem with shooting living things (human, animal, or alien) is that stopping power isn't just a function of kinetic energy. You could shoot someone with a 1/10th gram projectile at hypersonic speeds, but all it would do is bore through him and leave a very treatable wound. Not all of the kinetic energy would be transferred into the target, which is really undesirable.

In order for a bullet to stop a target, you want as much of the kinetic energy of the bullet to be transferred into the target as possible. Ideally, that means you need some surface area. You also probably need your bullet going slow enough that it will stop in the target before it goes all the way through, or at least do a lot of damage and exit going pretty slowly. Modern guns, especially handguns, do a really good job of this. Stopping power as a science isn't really known fully yet, but what we do know is that we have a lot of really effective cartridges that are capable of reliably stopping a human. The kinetic energy, velocity, and size of those bullets are known factors, so if we're talking about bullets that are used against people (military or police), they should have similar masses and move at similar speeds.

Another problem with mass drivers is surface area. Ha, I said it twice, right? I'm referring to expansion rather than actual physical surface area. Modern military bullets don't expand (Hague Convention, blah blah) but the most advanced modern bullets used in police and self-defense do. Yeah, you can buy better handgun rounds as a civillian than you can get issued as a soldier. Mind-blowing. Anyway, mass drivers generally use steel or some other hard, ferromagnetic alloy while modern bullets use lead. Lead is denser than steel, so you can get more mass in less space. Lead is also softer, so it deforms better. It expands when it hits something, creating more of that surface area. It's also toxic to most life on Earth, but that's really a secondary concern. You'll die of bullet trauma (shock), organ failure or blood loss long before you die of lead poisoning.

Of course if you use some other non-magnetic mass-throwing technology (like Mass Effect, or gravity, or whatever) you can throw better bullets and negate that problem. It doesn't have to be lead, of course. Lead is just convenient because it's pretty common on Earth. However, an ideal bullet would have similar properties like high density, high plasticity and low hardness.

What about explosive rounds? Well, explosive rounds used against personnel are kind of stupid. How do we make bullets better? I KNOW, WE'LL MAKE THEM EXPLODE! Protip: we already thought of that. The problem is that we already kill people in one shot with bullets. If we were fighting against aliens, we'd make bullets that could kill or disable them in one shot. I mean, 10mm Auto JHP (a pistol bullet) will put you down and probably kill you with a single shot. We have guns and bullets right now that are even more effective at killing fleshy things that aren't humans. .30 caliber/7mm rifle bullets (of all kinds) are extremely capable at killing people at really long range, and can kill tougher things than people like elk, caribou, or big wildcats. We have bigger or higher velocity bullets used to kill buffalo, rhino, hippo, elephant.

Making bullets explode is like saying that we have all this technology right now that we use to shoot bigger animals than people, but we're gonna ignore it because exploding bullets are TEH KEWLZ. In general, if it's the size of a human, .30 caliber rifle bullets are slightly overkill except at long ranges. In fact, we switched to .223 bullets because we realized that .30 caliber bullets were overkill. And then we invented .300 BLK (and 6.8 Remington and a bunch of other rounds) when we found that .223 wasn't quite enough to reliably take out a human. We have exploding rounds right now and they're used for shooting at stuff. Typically stuff made of metal, like vehicles or equipment. A lot of these exploding rounds are much bigger than the rounds we use to shoot at people (like 20mm or 30mm autocannon bullets).

Exploding bullets are fine but they should have a purpose. They shouldn't be just stuck into Space Marine bolters just because they're cool (not that anything in 40k makes sense). Exploding bullets are also bad because if they hit something and explode without penetrating, they usually end up being worse than a bullet that had penetrated a little without exploding. This isn't always the case especially with concrete fortifications (a great choice for explosive bullets), but it's true of most other targets.

So let's go way back to mass drivers again and talk about making bullets faster than real bullets, bigger than real bullets, or both. Let me also say that anyone who made something like a bolt pistol has clearly never shot a real gun before, or at least not any gun with real recoil. A lot of fiction makes mass drivers better or more powerful than real guns, typically by making bullets faster but sometimes by making them bigger. Unfortunately, whenever you shoot a bullet from a gun, the exact same force in that bullet is also applied on you. As the bullet's energy increases, so does its recoil force. And we know that mass times velocity equals energy, so adding more of either makes things worse on us.

And again I want to point out that our science of creating bullets is really good. We've made tons of very effective ways of killing different things for different reasons. You don't need to make a bullet bigger or faster than it needs to be.

What about body armor? Well, humorously mass drivers are pretty good at dealing with it. I really like mass drivers in that role because you can hypothetically flick a switch and go from 800fps to 1500fps. The first setting is light-recoiling, doesn't penetrate walls (great for urban), doesn't ricochet as badly and will reliably stop a person depending on the bullet. 1500fps can shoot through drywall, wood, car doors, and some body armor too, but it'll recoil a lot more and might ricochet on hard objects at close range. That's a real, interesting advantage of mass drivers, that you can take the same 120 grain bullet and go from a pistol caliber carbine type bullet to a medium-powered rifle bullet with the flick of a button. That's pretty attractive, but is sadly never mentioned in science fiction.

What should weapons be like in sci-fi? Well a quick summary for the tl;dr people:

• Energy weapons aren't viable except in extremely super-advanced society, where energy is not a problem at all. Think Star Trek levels of advanced.
• Chemically propelled cartridges are not made with fossil fuels and are unlikely to ever be completely obsolete.
• Mass drivers (electromagnetic or otherwise) are feasible, but the main advantages (lighter ammo weight, adjustable velocity) are rarely discussed in fiction.
• Weapons and ammunition will be tailored to adequately kill or stop appropriate targets. In a universe without aliens dramatically different than humans, the weapons will resemble current man-stopper weapons. With aliens that are different, specialized weapons (or possibly just velocity settings) will be designed to combat them.

The Summoner's Guidebook: I'm not a fan of URF

I didn't post yesterday, whoops. Sorry for anyone waiting on a post.

This week, I'm talking about URF again. More accurately, I'm talking about why I dislike it, why I think it's a waste of time. Okay, maybe waste of time is the wrong word (I play Borderlands after all). It has no real value.

URF doesn't really test any useful skills that will help you win in real League of Legends games. Of course, the game mode is for fun. Whatever, we'll get to that. You can't count cooldowns or pressure your opponent when he's low on mana because obviously there is no mana. You can throw all the skillshots ever and be extremely oppressive. There's a clear dominant playstyle and I find it incredibly amusing that a character like Sona could even get herself banned from the mode. Apparently throwing 1s cooldown shock blasts through a perma gate isn't as "good" as slowly healing anything that doesn't kill you. URF doesn't teach you to juke skillshots better because there's no sense of timing. The sense of timing in URF is "always."

But I digress. This is mostly about fun. Fun is a pretty subjective thing. It's not something you can measure, right? I disagree.

Let's think about the base game, about League of Legends for a moment. If you play URF and like it, you probably like League of Legends. You probably like the Classic gametype the most and you probably play most of your games on Summoner's Rift. Generally the people who prefer Dominion or TT tend to be much more serious about those modes, in my experience.

Why don't you play other games? Well objectively, I would assume that you find League of Legends more fun. That seems a pretty reasonable thing to guess. Of course we all play lots of games, but I specifically mean more action-packed MOBA type games. There are quite a few MOBAs that have fewer cooldowns and more energetic play. These MOBAs are great games and if you actually enjoy URF more than LoL Classic, you should try them out. I'm a huge fan of Smashmuck Champions for instance, which isn't quite the same, but it has a lot more energy than LoL Classic and is a way better game than URF.

The answer why is obvious. LoL isn't balanced or designed around URF, but other games are balanced around their more high-energy gameplay. I'm pretty sure none of us would even consider for a moment that URF is well balanced or designed. It's mostly a thought problem than anything else. What's the most broken thing in URF? Is this pick broken? Let's try it out and see! If it became a permanent mode, it'd stagnate, which is why they're not keeping it around.

Now let's think more on this. Think back to your last series of URF games. The chances are pretty good that they were similar to your last series of Classic games. Some wins, some losses. You probably had a similar amount of fun in URF. Possibly less if your opponent picked something really OP or someone on the enemy team snowballed hard. It's a lot easier to come back in Classic than it is in URF. Your bad games are generally worse in URF. This is exacerbated by the higher volume of deaths. If someone is dead more often, he or she has more time to trashtalk. This is pushed even worse by the "just for fun" kids who feel that it's okay to troll because "it's just URF."

If it's more fun to hit more buttons, you probably should be playing a different game than League that emphasizes hitting buttons more. It does nothing good for LoL, and on the path of self-improvement, even ARAM is a better choice.