No Man's Sky

I bought this game new on clearance which is how I get most of my PS4 titles. No Man’s Sky is a futuristic planetary exploration and survival crafting game. I’m not really big on survival when the word ‘horror’ doesn’t come after it but the exploration sounded novel and intriguing. This game is notorious for having a LOT of problems on launch and let me tell you… breaking news: this game has a lot of problems.

I started the game with no updates which was stupid of me. Without pretext you spawn marooned on a random planet in a random star system with your busted starship. There’s no explanation or suggestion on what to do. You’re just there. Figure it out, dipshit. Not having a real objective or half a clue in the game is equal parts mystique and shitty design. You’re in an enormous galaxy with countless star systems containing like 3-7 randomly generated planets and moons each that you can “discover.” Planets you find you can rename and upload on the internet and then when other people find them I guess it has your name and credits you for discovering it. On any given “undiscovered” planet you can find trading ports, abandoned and occupied facilities and downed spacecraft. There’s about as much air traffic in the sky as there is outside a medium sized airport. If it’s an airless or uninhabitable planet there will be robot sentinels because sentinels are EVERYWHERE, no exceptions. In space you might find a parked fleet of frigates and container ships orbiting and beyond that is the star system’s space station which every system has. You might be the first user to see this particular planet but in the game world you sure as shit didn’t DISCOVER it. It’s like if you flew to Montana and then put a flag in the ground reading ‘Commonwealth of Dickbutt’ because there were less than five people in sight.

Anyway, I’m here with no idea how the game works at all but understanding that I have critical gauges in my HUD that are slowly dropping so I need to survive and probably fixing my ship would be a good idea. I start mining rocks with my laser gun multitool to get ferrite dust which pisses off one of the ever present sentinels which starts shooting me. Annoyed, I kill the sentinel. I go back to mining and two more sentinels show up and start shooting me so I kill them. Then more came. There’s a message at the bottom of the screen sometimes that says something along the lines of “Kill sentinels before they signal for help.” That’s not a thing. That’s total fucking bullshit. Here’s how it works: You kill a sentinel, more sentinels show up. Always. Eventually you get the four legged one and then the near indestructible giant walkers which are essentially just AT-STs from Star Wars. The system is like the 1-5 star alert rating in the GTA or Just Cause games. You are trapped in an endless positive feedback loop of more and greater enemy reinforcements until you die or run away out of sight. Any time a sentinel witnesses you mining or killing an animal they will attack you. It’s never worth defending yourself because you’re just going to exacerbate the problem. It’s much easier to just continue mining and taking easily sustainable potshots from a single sentinel than it is to retaliate and start a war. This was really a shit way to start the game. I haven’t even taken inventory yet. I have no idea how anything works and I’m just instantly thrown into this fight with an infinite barrage of hostile robots. I had the misfortune of spawning with my ship atop a giant plateau formation something like Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. To escape the attack I have to jump off and run and then when it’s finally safe getting back up is a bitch and a half.

After you fix your ship you have three different components on your ship that need to be fueled for complete starship travel. Your takeoff boosters allow you to takeoff without a landing pad. Once you fly up into space you can engage your pulse engines allowing you to cruise the system at a moderate speed. Sometimes it will take you a couple of minutes to get to a far away planet. These engines run on trintium which you can get from mining asteroids which are EVERYWHERE unlike actual space. Eventually you can install an FTL warp drive in your ship which allows you to travel to other star systems but only certain systems, (usually just one) within range so you have to treat the galaxy like an enormous checkerboard which is stupid. I should be able to travel wherever the hell I want however I want.

The planets have a list of attribute variables which I guess are configured randomly to create all these planets. There’s atmosphere or none. There’s the size which actually affects the gravity, (how high you can jump with the jetpack,) which impressed me. There’s number of animal species and which species, extreme heat, cold, toxic or radioactive environments. Those all come with their own storms which quickly drain your suit’s environmental shielding. There’s of course the plants, minerals and earth formations. You reach a point where it becomes boring and you think you’ve seen it all and then you find your first mostly water planet or one with impossible floating islands or one with crazy half mile high hexagonal pillars sticking out of the ground. The game also has an in game debug mode that lets you set up perfect screenshots for whenever you see something really cool.

On planets there are rocks, plants, animals and precious metal deposits all of which you can mine for materials. Everything has a primary substance that it’s composed of that feeds into your inventory as you whittle down the object’s lifebar with your laser. Some items have a secondary substance that you only get a little bit of once you destroy the object. The game plays pretty fast and loose with elements and compounds. A lot of them are real, a lot of them aren’t. It almost doesn’t seem to matter or make sense a lot of times what stuff recharges or makes what. It just does. Some things will accept 2-3 different things as recharging fuel with varying degrees of efficiency. Carbon recharges your laser multitool. Whatever. Sodium charges your personal environmental shield. Oxygen recharges your life support. Frost crystals can make glass? But also platinum can make glass? Refining ferrite makes refined ferrite. Refined refined ferrite becomes magnetized ferrite. Refined magnetized ferrite becomes… just regular ferrite again but a lot less of it since much has been lost during the refinement process. You can craft antimatter? That’s kind of scary. Refining gold makes pyrite… great. So you can literally turn actual gold into fool’s gold which is doubly mystifying since they share no elemental makeup. Refining pyrite makes ferrite which I haven’t mentioned can be found anywhere and is near worthless. So if you want to make gold into playground gravel, this is how you do it.

Wherever you go you can set up bases. These bases can be as simple as just a base computer (which costs 40 chromatic metal to craft) to a building as big and complex as you wish to make it with flags, starship landing pads, exocraft pads, hydroponic systems, various discipline terminals where you can hire other beings to work. These workers will essentially give you quests that get you items or help you learn how to make new products and technology. Eventually I built one of my bases big and complex enough to accomodate all the important components needed to enrich my abilities to the max. I used the modular pieces to build  because it was easier and I hadn’t done much building before. There seems to be no erase or demolish button except for deleting the whole base via the base computer. So as you add on to your base having no Idea what spaces you’ll need next or where the best place to put them is you’re eventually going to build something less than ideal and you’re just going to have to accept that your base looks fucking stupid now or doesn’t work very well. I had one part of my base where a glass geodesic dome was stacked atop two modular square rooms because it conserved space and minimized necessary building materials. The only feasible way to be able to access all those spaces is with a ladder so I have two doors on the first floor to get in, a ladder going up through the center of the ceiling inside to the second floor and then a continuation of the ladder to go up to the third floor dome. The problem is the game has no way for your character to get off of a ladder unless you are at the top or bottom. Since these two ladders are seen as one you are forced to climb past the second floor to get to either the top or the bottom of the ladder. This means the second floor is virtually inaccessible and there’s nothing I can do about it. Because there’s no such thing as modular style stairs in the build menu that I could put on the exterior. I eventually just put a door in the second floor which I could fly through from the outside with the jetpack.

There are things called “journey milestones” where the game keeps track of how far you’ve walked, how many sentinels you’ve destroyed, aliens met etc. and it tells you every time you make the next increment. However I’m dubious of its ability to keep track of days spent on hostile worlds. I spent 80 hours playing this game and I only have a two star rating out of ten. The all animals discovered on planets function is just plain broken. I’ve purposefully scanned all animals on a couple of planets, got a little check mark message and it still shows me at zero.

You can get space freighters which allow you to store stuff and amass a fleet of different space frigates which you can send out on missions similarly to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. You want to make sure the ships you send have appropriate collective stats to the mission or they come back with more damaged components which have to to be repaired and that is super annoying because YOU are the only person in your entire fleet that can fix anything. The missions run in real world time using the console’s clock till completion so when it says 28 hours it means your ships are gone until tomorrow. You have to build a command center in your freighter for every mission you want to take simultaneously. So I built three which means I could have three missions going at once. This is fucking stupid. It’s like if you had to buy one computer for every internet browser tab you want to have open. When ships come back they gain experience, you get paid and you get a payload of items gathered depending on the type and duration of the mission. My Freighter’s inventory is really small so I found myself having to bus a bunch of shit out of my freighter inventory to sell at the store or into secondary storage to have enough room so I could complete a mission and receive the items. You can build storage rooms into your freighter but they’re not part of the regular inventory and have only half the item stacking capacity. I built eight containers but the containers are all individual units which occupy eight separate rooms and only have five slots each so if I’m trying to find a specific item or empty spot I have to walk to one, open it up, exit out and walk to the next one however many times that takes. Why can’t I just upgrade my freighter inventory like I do my exosuit inventory? This system is so cumbersome.

When I get a rare item I hoard it in storage as many as will fit in one slot and then I sell whatever surplus I get. Eventually I just end up with a ton of money that has no purpose other than to continue snowballing into a larger amount of money as I make bigger investments and expand my fleet and rare items and materials that 75% of the time have no reason to exist whatsoever. One of them might be used in some esoteric starship weapon upgrade you don’t care enough about to craft or it might be some item with a vague description that means nothing to you so you don’t even know what you do with it. I’ve had main missions where I’m supposed to craft a critical item and then it gives you the recipe which says to make it out of two other crafted items which you don’t have the recipes for and it doesn’t tell you where you can get them so you’re just up shit creek.

I saved a freighter from a pirate attack that was the size of a freaking star destroyer. The captain offered it to me which I would have loved to take because my freighter is the smallest they come and I’d been having inventory space issues for forever. I didn’t take the ship. After playing this jankey ass game for sixty hours I knew dollars to doughnuts they fucked this up and if I switched freighters I’d lose all modifications to my previous freighter which I guess is realistic but I’d also lose everything in my freighter inventory and containers. I looked it up on the internet and sure enough that’s exactly what would have happened.

There are three main alien races: Klingon, Slippy Toads and Daft Punk. They have three different languages which you can theoretically learn one word at a time via finding devices, shrines, knowledge stones or asking for help from native speakers. Each time you access one of these items you’ll learn one random word from one of the languages which means in dialog boxes the word will show up translated in English. This is a big fucking waste of time because you’ll never learn enough relevant words to slap together a coherent translation because when you learn a word it could be practically any word in the entire dictionary which includes words rarely or never used in the game like ‘phlegmatic’ or ‘corduroy’ or ‘disingenuous.’ Really? I ask you for help with the language and you teach me the word for disingenuous? Don’t you think the word for ‘food’ or ‘help’ or ‘the’ would have been more useful?

One of the worst problems this game has is not knowing where the hell you’re going. You can build portals in this game which makes traveling easier but the more portals you build and the more space stations you discover the harder it is to know where each of these gobbledygook names on the expanding list takes you. You can tell what is a base and what is a space station and where your missions are to a degree even though it will only be as specific as which star system and not which portal in that system is closest. If it’s a different interest like that one planet you found with the uranium or tons of gravitino balls growing everywhere or your base with the big refiner in it then you’d better rename the planets and bases after those things so you can remember or you’re going to be spending a lot of time watching the portal loading screen. (I mean watching it once is more than long enough.) And another thing, the game catalogs the names of these planets you discover and what star systems they’re in but it says nothing else about these planets which really sucks. If you need to mine a lot of a specific thing to make something, you can’t just look at your list of planets, see which one has what you’re looking for and then go there to get it. You just have to go into space and fly around scanning planets until you find one that works for you and in all likelihood the thing you need is only found in trace amounts there and will take forever to mine because if you’re having to go on an interplanetary voyage to get it it’s probably not common.

Now this is great. I booted up this game again over a month later just to take some more screenshots for this post. There has been at least one update since then. In the twenty minutes of play I noticed:

 The inventory screen now gives you an extremely general explanation of what items can be used for, which is a step in the right direction.

I’ve never gone into my freighter and seen this weird bloom effect clipping through the hull. Is that part of the update?

I found a new type of quest and went to the HUD quest marker which was on the nearest planet. Then I found the marker was for this building which is cantilevered in the air off the top of a big hill. Not only that but I had significant trouble finding the door because the door is blocked by the ground so I can’t even get inside unless I use the terrain manipulator. Then once I do get inside there’s all this other terrain clipping through the structure. The game is like “Oh, good! You’re back! I have a surprise for you. Hold on. Wait for it… IT’S SHIT!”

There are so many little things that I could go on and on about like the paradox of specifically using my laser to mine material to recharge my laser or the ubiquitous multitude of near worthless upgrades you can install in everything and various other gizmos and compounds that claim to have a purpose but don’t. What the hell is quicksilver? There’s the fact that there are basically only four missions ad infinitum available at the missions board and HUD markers being wishy washy about if they’ll show up when you do a scan on your surroundings. There’s the pedantic randomness of what materials and how much of them you need to fix which random broken parts on your frigates and the frustrating walk back to your starship and the flight to wherever and back to procure said materials but let’s just wrap it up with the ending. Should you choose to follow the story it’s basically just a bunch of go here and talk to x and go there and activate y and then have a few 2001: A Space Odyssey existential crises. I don’t think I’ve ever played an open world game where the actual story didn’t feel like a giant hassle whenever you finally took a break from your own self directed fun, sighed heavily and went over to that mission marker because it was so close. Here come the spoilers… I guess. That’s kind of a misleading statement because In order to spoil something it implies that the object in question was substantial or worthwhile at some point and believe me when I say that the ending of No Man’s Sky is not. Anyway you find out that this universe is a simulation and what you’re doing is going to reset it. There’s lots of psychobabble to read and then you think maybe you’re about to witness something incredible. The game lets you choose one of four new galaxies to go to and then you go there and then it starts you marooned on a planet with your current ship and all of its components broken. There’s no cutscene. There’s no event. You just begin unceremoniously in the new galaxy the same way you began in the old one. This is bullshit. My ship had a dozen different upgrades installed in it and now they all have to be repaired or trashed. My bases and everything I’ve discovered are all inaccessible because they’re… I don’t know… erased or just in a different plane of existence. I still have my fleet somehow. Now in accordance with my understanding of the story I was prepared to sacrifice everything I had and everything I’d done but I expected to be compensated with a stimulating reveal or resolution but instead I got something that was no different from just going to a new star system and landing on a random planet which I’d already done a hundred times before except this is worse because my ship is trashed and my bases are gone. I understand that the whole idea behind the game is like the meaning of life is an endless journey but I came away from it with a message more of nihilism. I had fun in between all the bullshit but when I got to the end it left me empty. The game Journey I felt had a similar intended message but executed it much better and with zero dialogue. This was such a missed opportunity.

Final Fantasy Tactics: TWotL

This game. Let me tell you about this game and how it has a monopoly on bullshit. 

Final Fantasy Tactics is the second turn based strategy game in the Final Fantasy franchise… I think. I really can’t be expected to keep straight however many hundreds of FF games there are at this point in time. Of all the franchises to have the word “final” in them, it has to be this one.

The plot is a Final Fantasy plot. Really, what more do you need? You know how it goes. The game is in isometric perspective on a square/cube grid where you move your characters around spaces like on a chess board and then tell them to take an action. Depending on what kind of battle you’re in, objectives range from beat this one person to win, beat all of them to win and/or don’t kill this guy or you lose. There are random battles but unless you’re grinding, you’ll mostly be in story related battles.

There are many branching class options for characters to train as, some of them more useful than others. Seriously now, when do white mages become useful? They're just fucking cannon fodder. They'll likely be oneshot killed five turns into a scenario because they're so physically weak. The stuff that they can do is theoretically useful but completely unfeasible in practice because they’re so severely impotent. After a certain amount of time played in the game, their healing abilities aren't worth shit because they don't increase in power at a reasonable rate with the character’s level. If I was playing a conventional FF title, this would be comparable to being stuck using the weak small potions after thirty hours in. As for using buffs and status ailment healing spells, pick one of the following issues that will negate anything you try: it missed, you are immediately targeted and killed before casting, it was blocked, your teammates had to break up and move out of the area of effect before casting, it missed, your teammates are standing on tiles with 1% inclines or other minuscule differences that disrupt the spell's area of effect, it missed or it missed. You cart out your white mage to a battle in order to level them up but then all their spells fail or they spend the whole battle unconscious, so they never gain any experience. Unlike many JRPGs, characters don’t get any experience whatsoever from standing in the background with their thumb up their ass. A character has to successfully cast a spell or hit someone in order to get EXP. I have to send my white mage off on errands to get any. It’s like when you have a shit pokemon. You dump your metapod or abra off at the sitter and say bye. See you when you’re not shit. Only a white mage is never not shit. Mine knows most of his spells but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re all inert when handled by an incompetent waif.

Through your quest, you can meet some people in scenarios and let them join your team. Some can be permanent while others are temporary. Now let’s take a moment to recognize how shitty Rafa is. Rafa and her brother are optional characters that are skyseekers who cast spells but the spells are odd because they have a “random” aspect to them. The first couple of times she appears in a battle, she’s not in your party and you’re supposed to protect her from enemies. This is difficult because she is the stupidest AI in the game and possibly contender for all time, dethroning Natalya from Goldeneye. On top of being reckless, almost to the degree of suicidal, she casts her spells with no regard to the safety of nearby allies. She will include you in the area of effect. She doesn’t care. Back to the “random” spells, they all have a 2 tile radius area of effect, (so a little Swiss Cross or plus sign formation of five tiles.) When you cast it, it does an elemental attack “randomly” between 1-9 times on “random” tiles within that space. It almost never actually does anything. Usually you just get one or two attacks on blank tiles. It’s so shitty so often that it seems to defy statistical reasoning. One time I had three enemies clustered together at close range so I cast it on them. Then I was gobsmacked when the spell hit a total of seven times solely in the two empty tiles, hitting absolutely no one; not even once. That is not fucking random. That is bullshit. If it doesn’t work in that scenario, what scenario does it work in? I actually did a calculation to find out the mathematical odds of missing a 60% shot seven times in a row. There’s, a .016% chance of it happening. It’s statistically insignificant for this scenario...

You know, I saw a perfect baseball game once. I’ve only been to maybe fifteen to twenty MLB games in my life (and a couple of spring training games.) Most of them were to see the Giants. Two or three were to see the A’s. It was complete happenstance that I was there at the Coliseum the day Dallas Braden pitched a perfect game against the Rays. I went with a group of six and not one of them an A’s fan, a mix of Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox people but we just wanted to see cheap close baseball on Mother’s Day and we got way more than we expected. Sadly, there was hardly anyone else in the park to see it. A couple of years later, I traveled down to the Bay Area to see a Giants game in AT&T Park. I was staying in a hotel in the North Bay with my wife, planning to go to the game the next day. That night on TV we watched Matt Cain pitch a perfect game against the Astros in AT&T. Damn! We were one day off. We could have been there. I ended up seeing Barry Zito pitch his signature blowout the next day… Yippee. (I say “signature blowout” even though it wasn’t that bad and he did suspiciously phenomenal that season. If I went back in time before that and told someone that Zito will start the World Series Opener and beat Verlander, they’d think I was nuts.) In well over a century of Major League Baseball, there have only been 23 perfect games and I was lucky enough to see one of them. When I think about how I almost saw two perfect games, it blows my mind. What are the odds of seeing two perfect games in your life? Apparently a lot fucking better than seeing Rafa hit an enemy.

Pretty much all battles in the game feel incredibly scripted because the AI is so robotic and calculating. There is no sort of random factor aside from spells and attacks missing or critical hits and counter attacks. The computer makes the best possible move every single time. Every battle is like Bobby Fischer versus Deep Blue. You make a move. The computer analyzes hundreds of stats and variables, going through flowcharts and algorithms in order to determine the most annoying response. I find this incredibly obnoxious for three reasons. First, the AI comes off as a pedantic tryhard. Second, it’s unrealistic. People, (which is who I’m supposedly fighting a lot of the time,) are not robots. Sometimes they are inefficient or make mistakes. And third, it’s able to do things that not even the player can do. You know what I have to do to make a good move? I have to look at the turn list to see who gets to move in the next five or so turns. I need to know how many turns my action will take. I have to see how far I can move. I have to check my attack range. I have to check what job classes I have equipped. I have to check which skills I’ve actually learned and can use right now. I need to survey the terrain I’m on or am going to. I need to make sure I have a clear line of sight of my target. I need to be aware of whatever threats are in the area such as nearby enemies and their walking and attack ranges. I need to know where and when not to cluster my guys together. I need to be aware of rendering magic spells or other actions that I or an enemy already cast in the area that I’m moving to or away from. I need to figure out which way to face after performing whatever action, to best protect the character. I need to be aware if my character will be in the way of my other characters when they move.

When I tell my dragoon to use jump, I don’t know how many turns it will take for him to come back down and attack. It doesn’t say. I have to just hope that the enemy will still be there when he does. When I move a character toward an enemy to use a ranged attack, I don’t know if the enemy will be in range. The two things it tells you are the walking range of your current location and the attack range of your current location. If you want to know the attack range you’ll have at the tile you’re moving to, then you have to fucking manually count tiles like an asshole to make sure you can reach your enemy from that spot. And even if you do that and don’t make any mistakes, you can still move to the spot and find that the enemy is out of range because of slight elevation differences in the tiles. There’s no undo button for moving, so you basically just wasted a turn. Can I get black magic spells with infinite range? No. Can I get summoners with infinite range and huge areas of effect that conveniently pinpoint only enemies and not allies in that area? No. Can I get archers with infinite range. Can I get an equipment rend attack that does some damage so that when the rend inevitably fails (because I’m the one that performed it,) I didn’t just waste a turn? No. Can the AI have/do/know that? It sure as fuck can. It can have it up and down the line all fucking day. There is most definitely a glass ceiling or a player skill cap. You will never be as good as them.

The first battle that I got stuck on and had to consult a walkthrough for was the second boss fight with Wiegraf. The first fight was fun because I wagered that I might just have enough power to take him if I went right at him with no regard for my well being or other enemies and I beat him with only one, (almost dead,) character left. When the second boss fight ocurs, you are one on one with him with the main character because you apparently told the rest of your party to wait out in the hall and scratch their asses. One on one in a turn based game always feels awkward. Is this supposed to be an actual battle? Because it feels like we’re a couple of prissy dandies mincing around daintily in a slap fight. When a fight only has two people, it becomes painfully reduced to a one-dimensional affair: attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal. It’s so fucking boring and mind numbingly stupid. And it’s only exacerbated further when Wheat Grass literally blocks and counters half of your attacks. It’s also obvious that this is just jerking off before he inevitably transforms, so what’s the point? Beating him like this doesn’t achieve anything. It’s just busywork. This is one of my most hated Final Fantasy institutions. I HATE transforming bosses. Cut the bullshit and just give me the real deal so we can get this show on the road. Don’t fuck around.

This game also has one of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a game. And when I say that, I’m talking about glitches that affect your ability to play the game and not just aesthetics or immersion breaking problems. This one is up there with the unpassable QTE in the PC version of Dead Space 2. If you leave three characters at the sitter- er… send them to do errands, I mean, you typically come back to the same tavern where you took the job after X number of days have passed and collect your rewards and your teammates. However if your teammates happen to be on an errand or uncollected when you progress to the next chapter in the story, the job disappears and the characters become inaccessible. You can not go back to the tavern and recall them or otherwise get them back. THEY ARE FUCKING GONE FOREVER. Not only are they gone, but their spots in your roster remain full and you are not allowed to dismiss them. So your twenty-four slot roster essentially just got downsized to a twenty-one slot roster. That is just… FUCK YOU! How do you make such a horrible, obvious oversight?

I can’t see the enemies or the terrain of the battle scenario before choosing/equipping my team like you can in say Fire Emblem or even Plants Versus Zombies. If it’s my first time attempting the battle, I have no fucking idea what tactic I might want to go with. I’m just throwing darts in the dark.  I also have no clue where in relation to anything else a unit is when I place them on the board. All you get is an arrow which means the enemies will be that way but sometimes that’s not even correct. For a game with “Tactics” in the title, this doesn’t seem to facilitate tactics very fucking well, does it? Guessing is not tactical. And it doesn’t even make sense. How do you not know what the environment looks like that you’re already in? Am I walking around with a fucking blindfold on?  

Random battles happen while traveling and again you can't see anything in the battle before you start. You can't reequip weapons or classes. Just pick and place people. And then deal with whatever the matchup is the best that you can. On top of that, there is no option to flee so you are literally trapped with the given scenario unless you exit the game. That is such bullshit. Realistically, you either need to give the player an out or don't force them to play Russian roulette. You can't expect them to make a bunch of random guesses EVERY SINGLE TIME and then make it work EVERY SINGLE TIME or it’s game over.

I also find it hilarious that so often the enemies you're facing are some nonsensical team of random assholes. Why are a bomb, some geomancers and a flock of birds conspiring together to attack me? At the very least, the animals should be attacking any humans indiscriminately and more likely ANYTHING indiscriminately. But they are literally collaborating to kill just me and my party. And most things, including animals, have the same intelligence as humans so they actually heal and cure each others’ status ailments. A chocobo will go heal some elves that you injured. You'll see a bomb go up to a random summoner and use a weak attack on them to cure them of charm without hurting them too bad. A BOMB does that, a creature named after an inanimate object and which possesses no logical collaborative association with said person. I didn’t even know you could cure charm with an attack until I witnessed this phenomenon. A fucking BOMB taught me this. This crosses the line over into fucking ludicrous. The game goes so, so far out of its way to be a shit to you that it completely abandons logic and reason. You’ve heard of the rule of cool? Where the amount of awesome something is is inversely proportional to the amount of suspension of disbelief it requires from the audience? This is the rule of bullshit where bullshit takes precedence over everything including logic and the laws of nature.

On several occasions you’ll come across some character in trouble and you’ll have to protect them from whoever or it’s game over. A lot of times you’ll start out on the board far away from the character and you’ll need to go join up with them quick before they get the shit beaten out of them. But on multiple occasions I’ve tried to play one of these battles and it was literally impossible to get within range of anyone before the character died. Well that’s real fucking nice. You, without reservation, just made me play a no-win scenario. What was the point of that? If I restarted the same scenario off the same way, It would all happen again in the exact same way. This is because of how the AI works. It always does the best possible move. The only way you can get through this type of problem is to somehow present the enemies with an alternative “better” move which distracts them from the other character. The only thing in your power to try is scramble your party members or formation until you find something that makes them deviate from those calculated actions. Hey guys, look over here! It’s a shitty fucking mage! He’s trying to cast a spell of some sort! You’re not going to to just let him get away with that, are you? It’s so stupid. This game is so flawed and I don’t know if I’ll ever have the constitution to pick it back up again and actually finish it.

There is one thing that I thought was awesome and actually kind of levels the playing field so to speak, (in some scenarios.) I believe it was an ability called “ignore terrain.” Basically it treats any terrain as level ground and takes the same number of moves to cross. Even if it’s something that’s twenty stories high. The downside is that it takes a significant amount of training to learn. I made a couple of my characters learn this when I got stuck on a scenario where archers and long range castors are camped up really high on a cathedral roof. It would take me so long to climb up there that I’d get reamed on the approach and be unable to withstand a fight once at the top. After playing the entire game up to this point in an uphill battle against enemies continuously holed up like little bitches behind their battlements and castles, I finally had something to bring them down to my level. Oh look, I just jumped onto your roof in two turns and started slapping your shit. Not so smug now, are you? If there are two passive abilities that you want every character to have, it’s auto-potion and this.

Ocarina of Time: A Deconstructivist Adventure (Pt 2.)

Here's a comparative of the Oot Hyrule Castle versus the Super Smash Bros. 64 stage. They actually look more or less the same with a few small changes.

Here’s a shot looking straight down through the ground. That ball down there is actually the sun shining up through a black plane while it drifts back to the horizon. I never thought about it until I saw this. I guess I just assumed that he sun appeared/loaded at the horizon and floated across the sky, disappearing at the other horizon where it was gone until it loaded again. But apparently it’s always there, continually rotating around the skybox in the same sense that the real sun appears to work.

There’s typically not much to see in the dungeons because you’re inside rooms with solid walls and a ceiling, so you can’t fly over the tops of the walls and look beyond. But the Forest Temple has some open air cloisters so I tried those areas out.

I found a duplicate elevator of the one on the first chamber of the temple, just floating there behind the walls. No clue about this. Could be beta. Could be a glitch but again, I’ve never seen glitches like this in this game. Stuff doesn’t seem to move around and appear in weird places. It just doesn’t appear at all if anything.  

There’s also this water texture that is only visible as the water surface in this well. Yet there’s a ton of extra extending beyond the wall and into oblivion. I can also stand, walk and climb on invisible surfaces all throughout this area. I even found an area that injures Link when he walks on it. It makes little flames appear on his feet which is what happens when he walks on lava. For being outside the playable realm, there’s sure a lot of constructs here. Was this supposed to be a playable area or was it just a dumping ground for unused code?

One thing I thought was interesting was all of the instances where some object has to be recreated in several different areas as to appear further away or closer. This might constitute creating a flat bitmap image for something that’s really far away. For closer things, they seem to make simplified mockups. When I fly up to investigate, I often find hilariously large size discrepancies between the backdrop mockup version and the actual version.

Here’s the windmill. True size on top. Mockup on bottom (as viewed from the graveyard.)

The Lon Lon Ranch silo. This one’s REALLY bad. Like the Stonehenge prop from This is Spinal Tap bad.

Looks like they got Death Mountain about right though. (That speck in the air just above the peak is Link.)

Here’s a nice pullback shot to show the entirety if Bongo Bongo. Seeing this actually makes him more creepy to me.

The interesting thing about this boss fight is that you don’t enter the main room and immediately get locked in. You enter through a hole in the floor of a smaller chamber high above. So at any point during the fight with the levitation cheat on, you can just fly back up through the hole and leave.

I found a gossip stone tucked behind the roots of the Deku Tree which means it’s not accessible by conventional means at any point, young or old. Could be beta. Whatever it is, it’s sloppy because it’s not hidden that well but neither is it simple to get to. There’s another gossip stone on the tree’s right which I’d think would make this one pointless but I don’t know.

I can’t even begin to describe what I did in order to get in this completely empty shop in frozen Zora’s Domain but let’s just say it was an accident that happened while trying to do something else. I wish I could make a gif of this because it’s bizarre. Link is falling sideways into the background. If I hold down the levitate button, he rises headfirst toward the camera. At some point when he gets close enough, he does a 180 and begins going back into the background. So basically he “falls” and “rises” along this invisible U-shaped track on its side.

The levitation cheat also works in dialogue and cutscenes which makes them more fun. It even works in flashbacks. What the hell? This is interesting because it shows that throughout the whole game, no matter what’s happening on screen, you are always seeing in game models. The Link you see almost get trampled by Zelda fleeing the castle is the very same Link model that you control. Today, (and even back then on the Playstation since it had video capabilities,) your cutscenes are basically like watching a movie that was created in a vacuum. There is no direct in game content in them typically. Everything is recreated and staged with better looking models and graphics. This is probably more of a testament to the limitations of the N64 than anything. Not to say that it detracts or looks bad…

If you fly over the wall in the graveyard as young Link, you can see the pit that leads to Dampe’s tomb (black strip on the left of the map) even though there’s no headstone there and the ground above it looks normal. If you fly in the hole from under the ground, you go to the tomb and you can race Dampe’s ghost for the hookshot like normal… just as young Link. So yeah, you can go in a tomb that 
hasn’t been built yet and race the ghost of a guy that’s not dead.