A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater

Source: Wizard comics did stuff like this all of the time.

And I’m sure brands wish they could do it without fear of being misinterpreted and causing a litany of issues for what amounted to a well meaning joke. No one wants to be the social media person that causes trouble for the company (and thus themselves) for being a bit too friendly to an unreasonable entitled prick.

Heck, I’ve seen it happen (more than once) in a support forum context where someone is a regular and always treated respectfully and helped whenever they ask, but one day the support person is a tad more relaxed (read: less corporate, more open and personal) in their communication and the customer is offended out of left field. Which then becomes stressful for the support person and naturally causes them to clam up in future communications.

Yes, big companies definitely take it too far in their frustratingly sterile I’ll-restate-everything-you-said-and-repeat-your-name-over-and-over direction, but “human-like, friendly banter, playful” is incredibly risky and not worth the stress.

It’s one thing when it’s one-way, magazine -> audience, and the current edition is off of newsstands in a month or two. Once you throw in forums and social media then the public gets to shape the narrative.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/ro5e6r/t...

Instead we get 9000 identical sites regurgitating the same identical garbage; I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction going up an incline that a steam engine simply cannot do (and that detailed page is lost to me, I can't find it).

It's just how subreddits devolve to meme-reposting unless actively and strongly countered; forums were a bit better at that but you had to have active moderation.

FF8 was universally lauded by the major sites as the best JRPG since sliced bread. In reality it had an unlikeable lead character, an absolutely bizarre plot with time flashbacks that were totally nonsensical, the main party was composed of thoroughly unlikable teenagers, the plot twists about their shared mother was just dropped out of nowhere, the game mechanics required you to "junction" to a summon spirit to get things out of your backpack, leveling up was actually a bad thing, and ... just so much more. Cards. Draw grinding. Gunblades.

This VERY LONG review perfectly tears it apart, but, uh, warning it has epiteths like "fag" and others that date it to the teenage slang of the late 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFTkY0IFL1g

I think he may have rereleased this at some point and cleaned it up of the unfortunate language.

If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.

Wow. I literally gaped.

A hard fact to digest is that if you have a website like this, content might not come as often as an audience expects.

Which nowadays doesn't work, as people are content crackheads, quality isn't that important anymore.

This article is just perfectly written, and the image at the end... nobody will read this and regret it later, but it is a story that doesn't happen every single day.

FFVII was great but it is an interesting contrast to games like FFVI / Chrono Trigger. The SNES games came out at the end of their console's lives and made the absolute most of what the hardware had to offer. FFVII was early-ish in the PSX life cycle and pushed JRPGs forward. There were some earlier 3d-ish JRPGs, sure, (wild arms was 1996) but FFVII would go on to define how those games would work for years. It became the prototype, but it also feels like a prototype in a lot of ways. It has a lot of jank. Some of those mini games just aren't fun anymore. The good news is all the stuff they learned about narrative in the previous generations was intact and carried the game where it might have other wise faltered.

Anyways, I still loooove FFVII a ton too. But it's good for different reasons than the later SNES games. Also FFVIII was a lot of fun too, and a much more solid 'game' than FFVII even if some systems were pretty breakable / exploitable.

https://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-goi...