The Stack

Up to level 12 now. My last session involved a couple of quests of particular interest.

First, there was a “quest” to, in effect, sit and watch a cutscene. This isn’t really a game that can support cutscenes in the truest sense, but it can play out scripted actions and dialogue between NPCs while you watch, kind of like in the Half-Life games — and, as in Half-Life, you’re free to jump around and act silly while it happens. I suppose this wasn’t really the first event of this kind I’ve seen, but it was considerably longer than previous ones, and of more obvious importance: it concerned Lady Sylvanas herself demonstrating to a major orc leader that she has the ability to create more undead to swell the ranks of the Horde, and the orc reacting with horror and disgust, rejecting Sylvanas in no uncertain terms. The Lich King was mentioned, and this is a point where I’m at a disadvantage for having joined at so late a date: I don’t know whether they’re talking about stuff that happened in the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion, or whether it’s all part of the basic WoW backstory. Not that it matters a lot. Either way, it’s part of the gameworld’s history now. The more important thing is that the confrontation itself seems like it’s also an important part of the gameworld’s history. This is a major diplomatic moment, a shift in the world. But it’s also something that happens afresh every time a new undead player character reaches this point in the quest tree. There’s nothing unusual about this in single-player games, but it seems a little strange for a shared world. I’m told that one of the expansions actually introduced mechanisms to keep players who were at different stages of the overall scripted plot in their own separate worlds, but I have no idea if this event is significant enough to merit such treatment.

Second, I finally got a variety quest! Most quests up to this point had been of a few basic types: go talk to this person, kill a certain number of that creature type, gather a certain number of this plant, or kill as many of that creature as necessary to gather a certain number of that item drop. This last is probably the canonical WoW quest, the sort that people bring up when they’re making fun of the game (“Bring me eight blood weasel tonsils!”). There were a few exceptions to this pattern, mind you. At one point, a quest required riding a bat to the Undercity, but that was mainly done as a tutorial in hiring bats, which are basically inter-city transit. This new quest also involved riding a bat, but not in the same way. Instead, I rode it in a repeating loop over a couple of islands so I could bombard them from the sky with vials of plague. In a sense it was just another “kill N of this creature” quest, but it didn’t use the normal combat mechanics at all — it was essentially a special-case minigame, where you have no control over your movement and just have to try to target your throws close enough to as many of the victims as possible. Anyway, it was a welcome break from the familiar grind. I’ve heard about other special-case quests, like the Cataclysm Plants vs Zombies quest, and look forward to seeing more of them. Does that mean I’m getting tired of the core game already?

I’ve been spending a little more time with Pleasance. She’s level 10 now, which means it’s time to choose a major. At level 10, WoW characters gain access to three class-specific areas of specialization with their own upgradeable skill trees (or “talent” trees, as they’re called here). For Warlocks, the three specializations are Affliction (mainly improving your damage-over-time and draining attacks), Demonology (making your summoned pet more effective), and Destruction (expensive but powerful direct-damage spells). After considerable consideration and googling, I’ve decided to invest my first talent point in Affliction. I do this partly because of the zero-downtime promise: drain attacks kill the enemy while healing you, and Warlocks can convert health into mana. (Mind you, I haven’t exactly had much downtime anyway. I assume it becomes more of a problem at higher levels, when you have more hit points to regain.)

The other reason I choose Affliction is a claim I saw that damage-over-time is less than optimally useful for solo play (in which anything that survives your damage-over-time long enough to get the full use out of the spell is going to get a few hits on you in the process), but shines in the context of an adventuring party, where you become the specialist in steadily whittling down boss monsters (while someone else specializes in keeping them from killing you). I figure this might give me a push to start looking for group. So far, I’ve been soloing it.

In fact, I haven’t been interacting with other players much at all. I have some friends that play WoW, but they’re not on the same server as Pleasance. (This is another reason I was experimenting with other characters.) Only two interactions so far stand out, and one wasn’t really an interaction, but more like a parallel action: I was off questing in a remote area that apparently is only much useful for that purpose, and found another undead warlock, with a pet just like mine, pursuing exactly the same quests as me, fighting the same quest-mandated monsters. We didn’t speak at all, but I occasionally paused to watch him fight, standing ready to step in if he looked like he was in trouble. There was a little flutter of fellowship-feeling, at least on my side.

The other was an annoyance. In the orc starting area, someone was trying to recruit strangers to become charter members of his new guild. I don’t know why. He didn’t explain what he was up to. He was certainly up to something: he clearly wasn’t interested in actually having a bunch of newbies in his guild, because he promised that we could quit immediately afterward. He even offered money at one point, but mostly he was trying to recruit through persistent pleading. I declined, because obviously annoying behavior shouldn’t be encouraged, but he kept thrusting his petition on me whenever I stood still. Note that I only ever stood still when I was trying to talk to an NPC about a quest. The guild petition would appear in a special sub-window, replacing whatever contents were there already, to wit, the details of the quest I was trying to begin or complete. I guess it’s possible that the petitioner didn’t realize this was happening, but he should have at least understood that repeatedly asking someone to sign something they’ve already refused to sign isn’t a very effective way to gather signatures.

Still, that’s pretty mild stuff compared to my general experience with online gaming. I haven’t run into any real griefing yet, and no PKing at all. Which probably shows that I need to get out and meet people some more.

I spent a little while creating new characters to see if there was anything I liked better than the undead warlock. The short answer: no, not yet. Perhaps my first (and still longest) experiences with the game have colored my perception of how it should be played? Do most people stick with their first choice? I didn’t bother advancing any of my experiments beyond level 5, so I suppose I haven’t really seen the possibilities at their best. But then, a more dedicated and knowledgeable player than myself informs me that the classes only start really playing substantially differently at around level 30.

The first alternative I tried was a troll rogue. That’s one that I pretty definitely won’t be taking to level 30. Not because of the rogue part — I didn’t really play long enough to see it diverge noticeably from vanilla fighter, and will have to try another rogue sometime to see how the stealth mechanics work — but because of the troll part. The characterization of playable trolls came as surprise to me; somehow, it isn’t one of the parts of WoW that’s managed to seep into the public consciousness. Playable trolls in WoW are jungle-dwellers, or perhaps beach-dwellers to judge by their starting area, which is full of grass huts and tiki idols. And they talk with Jamaican accents. Not only that, their Jamaican accents are transcribed phonetically in their printed dialogue. And that gets right up my nose, because it reminds me too much of one of the things I hated the most about Everquest. My primary character in EQ was an ogre, and thus spent a fair amount of time interacting with other ogres down in Ogreopolis ¹Not its real name; I don’t remember what Ogreopolis was really called. Ogres were supposed to be dim-witted, so signposts and other written materials tended to be misspelled, and a lot of players took this as a cue to misspell things a lot in their spoken text. And it got worse over time. The signposts were at least comprehensible, but the ogre community left them behind and continually upped the bar in their abuses, seemingly competing to see whose dialogue would take the most effort to decipher. I doubt that the troll players in WoW have taken things to that extent, but the memories make me wince every time I see words like “dese tings” pop up in the dialogue window. It’s something I’d like to avoid, and thus, troll NPCs are also things I’d like to avoid. It doesn’t help matters that they also have gangly frames and long ears, which combine with the accent for a Jar Jar Binks flashback.

The more familiar attributes of Orcs, by contrast, give me nothing other than a thrill of recognition. These are the first things in the game that I’ve felt were clearly modeled on the original Warcraft. They have spiky, thatched watchtowers! They have workers who say “Zug-zug”! They have pig farms! They’re also the only things I’ve heard say “For the Horde”, which I don’t remember from Warcraft, but which is such a familiar WoW catchphrase that it’s nice to finally hear it, to solidify the impression that I’m playing the game I’ve heard so much about. This was pleasant enough that I actually made two orc characters, a warrior and a mage. The only real drawback I’ve found to orcs so far is that they have a certain number of troll NPCs hanging around.

The mage worried me a little, because, unlike the warlock, it doesn’t get an automatic pet, and therefore nothing other than friends to draw the enemies away. Apparently mages eventually get spells to freeze enemies in place, but I didn’t get that far, and had to just overpower them with damage, which they seem to be capable of dealing pretty quickly at low levels. The one interesting mechanic I found for the mage was that for the spell Arcane Missiles, which costs no mana to use, but which you can’t cast at will; sometimes in combat you just see a bracket appear on the screen indicating that your Arcane Missiles are ready now. I’m not completely clear on what triggers this, and all that the various WoW websites seem to say is that it’s a “proc”, without explaining what that means.

The warrior class turns out to have a somewhat interesting overarching mechanism: Rage. Rage is like mana, in that it powers various of the Warrior’s special attacks, but unlike mana, it doesn’t just build up over time. By default, it decays; most combats begin with your rage meter empty. You fill it up by fighting. Thus, it’s a mechanic that forces you to not start off with your most powerful moves, kind of like limit breaks. It also provides a motivation to immediately seek out a new enemy once combat is over, so that all the rage you’ve built up doesn’t go to waste. I suppose this isn’t the only game that has a mechanism like this, but it was nice to see it on a melee specialist, which could be pretty bland otherwise.

One thing that was really striking about the experience of creating several characters in a short span of time was how difficult it was to come up with names. (The character creation screen has a button that will generate a random name for you, but where’s the fun in that?) I mean, it was difficult coming up with the name of my warlock, in that it was a decision I agonized over. But with these new guys, it was different: I just found it difficult to come up with a name that wasn’t already taken. I must have just got lucky with “Pleasance”, which was a first attempt. As I kept failing, I tried sillier and sillier things, eventually realizing that all the silly character names I had seen on other players were a product of exactly what I was going through.

I think the most striking thing about World of Warcraft in its early stages is how ordinary it seems. This is a very conventional CRPG. You get quests, you kill monsters, you collect loot to sell or craft. I deliberately chose the most unconventional race — undead — but even that’s more conventional than it sounds, with only minor gameplay differences from any other race. (Apparently undead player characters, as opposed to undead monsters, aren’t even considered to be undead for the purposes of magical effects.) One thing about the quests that surprised me was they’re not always delivered in the conventional way, by NPC conversation: I’ve received one quest opportunity by reading a letter that I found on a slain enemy, and another simply by being present to witness a scripted event encountered while executing a different quest. But under the paint, the quests only come in a few well-worn shapes. I may go into more detail in future posts.

There may be something of the “Shakespeare is so full of clichés” effect here, accusing something of unoriginality because it’s been so widely imitated. But then, WoW isn’t that old. Most of the RPGs I play even today predate it. No, more likely this is a case of the developers focusing on craft rather than originality. There experience is in fact pretty smooth, especially for a new player with a low-level character. The in-game tutorial is a thing of beauty: it refrains from popping up too often, and when it tells me something I’ve already figured out, I usually feel like I’ve been cleverer than expected, not like it’s wasting my time by overexplaining. And there’s amazingly little downtime. After most combats, I pop back up to full health and mana instantly, and when I die, I have the option of resurrecting immediately at the nearest graveyard.

[UPDATE: This paragraph contains misinformation. See the comments.]That last point is something of a freebie for low-level characters, though. Above level 10, you have to either run to your corpse in ghost-form (which is particularly strange if you’re already undead), or wait six minutes to resurrect. Are there other ways in which the game makes things more convenient for newbies? I suppose the passivity of the early monsters counts: in the starting areas, nothing attacks you unless you attack it first. Beyond that, we’ll see. Certainly newbies are the ones to cater to, to draw them in and get them hooked. Once they’re hooked, they’ll put up with more. Ah, but why put in the six-minute wait at all? I don’t know. Maybe to make it more difficult to leap back into those small-village-sized boss fights I’ve heard about. Maybe just to provide a disincentive for dying that doesn’t involve permanent harm. Maybe I’ll figure it out once I’ve experienced it.

Another thing I have yet to experience is any real multiplayer play. Presumably I’ll make an effort to join into groups at some point, because that’s clearly the point of the game, and the main thing separating this from the single-player CRPGs it keeps reminding me of. But I’m kind of surprised how well it’s accommodated solo play so far, especially since I’m playing a primary spellcaster. Yes, warlocks need meat-shields to keep them alive, but they get one built-in. At level 1, you get an imp companion, which attacks stuff for you; at higher levels, you can learn to summon other, bigger sorts of demon. In some ways, this demon seems better than a party: you can re-summon it whenever it dies (provided you survive whatever killed it), and you don’t have to split loot with it.

One thing that seemed strange to me in the early quests: one of the authority-figures in the initial undead village goes out of his way to tell you that you’re free to do as you please and even hints at insurrection against Lady Sylvanas, Queen of the Forsaken. There followed a quest to join in a battle against rebel undead, which seemed like an ideal moment to switch sides, but if it’s possible there, it’s difficult — you pretty much have your hands full being attacked, so figuring out whether you can manipulate the faction system at the same time seems onerous. I don’t even know if it’s possible to gain the favor of enemy factions — I know I managed to do such things in Everquest, but the division between Alliance and Horde seems too fundamental to the game design for that. But for the moment, at least, I’m just accepting every quest I’m offered, heedless of consequence, on the basis that I’m not yet too committed to this character to start over. Soon after the above, I was offered quests to murder some human farmers just in case they decided to join with the enemies of the undead, and to spread plague. I only briefly considered this as a test of loyalty vs morality before agreeing to the deeds.

I don’t play MMOs. That should be clear by now. I’ve played a couple of MMOs in the past, however — and they’re the reasons why I don’t play MMOs. I got into Everquest for a while when it was new and exciting, and played it obsessively until I had discerned its fundamental lesson: that “addictive” does not imply “fun”. Some time later, while unemployed, I got involved with the first telling of A Tale in the Desert, the experimental MMO without combat (but with plenty of conflict), but after a while it came to feel like a job, and I left it behind shortly after landing a job in the real world.

The big problem with MMOs for a personality like mine is that they don’t end (or, in the case of A Tale in the Desert, don’t end soon enough). If the game doesn’t tell me it’s over, I don’t know to stop playing. The fact that all the joy has been sucked out of the activity is not enough to make me stop, as anyone who has read this blog for long enough can attest. So I don’t play them.

But I think I have to make at least a momentary exception for World of Warcraft.

The thing is, I hesitate to even describe WoW as a MMO. No, it’s THE MMO, the definitive one — heck, practically the only one these days. It’s the Harry Potter of the genre, both in the sense of “universally-recognized best-seller” and in the sense of “the one who lived”. There’s a definite pattern to other MMO projects: someone notices that Blizzard is making ungodly money and decides that they want a slice, they spend a bunch of time and money developing something, it attracts maybe one percent of WoW‘s audience for a little while before most of them drift away because of the lack of content. WoW, it seems to me, is a good example of success breeding more success. A large player base probably makes for a better MMO experience, if only because it increases the odds that your friends are already playing. The mere fact that it’s had so many years of continuous development makes for a better experience. The fact that Blizzard isn’t likely to pull the plug on it any time soon has got to make it a better experience than its worried competition.

This is a game with a unique position in our popular culture, a game still played by literally millions of people six years after its release. It’s been parodied in a thousand awful webcomics. It’s left a massive enough print on gaming that even venerable Dungeons & Dragons, father of its genre, has been reasonably accused of imitating it lately. And yet I have not even tried to play it until now, which, for someone who takes games seriously, is kind of like being the proverbial English major who’s never read Hamlet. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d want to give it a whirl eventually, but the “Cataclysm” expansion’s massive revamp of the long-untouched starting areas was the thing that nudged me into doing it now.

How long I’ll be playing it, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give up when my ten-day trial period is over. Even if I decide to start paying for it, though, it’s clear that this game has no place on the Stack: the whole monthly-fee model doesn’t fit the terms of the Oath at all. Nonetheless, I intend to blog about it as if the Oath applied to it. If at any point I can’t think of something to post about my experiences, I’ll take that as a sign that it’s probably time to give it up. Either way, I do intend to keep playing and posting about other games too.

The first character I have created is an undead warlock named Pleasance. I’ve already brought her up to level 9, and will doubtless have more to say about that experience in my next post, but I’m inclined to experiment a little with other characters before going into details.

I said before that we’d take a closer look at what Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble uses in place of combat, so let’s do that now. This is a game made chiefly of mini-games. You have up to four girls in your team, including one leader or “queen”. When you choose to interact with a NPC, you also select one girl to do the interacting, using an action that varies with the girl and the situation. Sometimes a girl’s action will be “accept” or “ignore” or “parley”, and sometimes it will be a game.

In keeping with the old-timey style, the only icons and symbols the game uses are things that could plausibly be found in a vintage board or card game. NPCs are represented on the board by silvery tokens of the sort you might find in an old Monopoly set, and the four character stats are represented by the four suits of a standard deck of playing cards: hearts for popularity, spades for rebelliousness, diamonds for glamor, and clubs for savvy. It takes a while to get used to this mapping, but you get exposed to it a lot as you play.

There are four main mini-games that represent different ways of dealing with NPCs: taunt, expose, fib, and gambit. They all use the “suit” symbols in some way, and each game focuses on a single stat — but not exclusively. One of the nicer things about the design is the way that any stat can help in any game, and that overspecialization in just one stat can lead to failure even in the game you’re specializing in. (Besides, it doesn’t pay to specialize too much because you have no control over which games are available to which girls in any given context.) A fifth game, flirt, is basically only useful for acquiring boyfriends, and has no particular stat focus.

Taunting is the classic Monkey Island-style insult fighting, where you take turns tossing barbs. Popularity, as I mentioned before, functions as hit points here, and is displayed on either side of the play area as a row of heart icons. Other stats seem to determine the strength of attacks, or perhaps just determine which insults a girl can access. Every insult has a comeback that turns it back at the attacker. Success in this game is largely a matter of building up a large repertoire of insults and responses, which can only be done by playing the taunting game a lot and losing. A high popularity can shield you from the effects of your experiments to some extent, but it only goes so far. Losing at this or any other game can cause the girl to sit out for a period of time, and this is the one game that I ever play with the expectation that this will happen and that I will be happy with it.

Exposing secrets is a little word puzzle. You’re given a sequence of club, diamond, and heart symbols, each of which stands in place of a word in a short sequence of sentences. You get to select symbols to turn into words, but your stats impose a limit on how often you can do this — for example, if your popularity is 3, you can flip only three hearts into words. Spades are wild; you can use your rebelliousness to turn over anything. But once you’re out of spades, you have to guess the remaining words from context, picking them from a list of possibilities. I find this game to be by far the easiest, because it’s the least random, and because failing it just makes the next attempt a whole lot easier. For a given character in a given situation, the words don’t change at all, so a lot of the time you can just keep on exposing words with different girls until you know them all. But even that isn’t necessary most of the time, because once you have some context, you can get most of the guesses right. This is also the one game that’s most directly connected to the plot: the sentences you uncover are all about character backstories and the like. For these reasons, I usually go for the “expose” option when it’s available.

Fibbing is done through an escalating bluffing game based loosely on poker. You and your opponent each have five randomly-chosen tokens, which can display any of the suits or be blank, with probabilities that I believe are determined by your stats. You get one free “flip” or draw for each point of glamor. And you and your opponent take turns making claims about what’s on your tokens, with each bid exceeding the last: if you say you have two pair, your opponent has to either claim at least a full house or call your bluff. (Understand that we’re still dealing with just suits, not values; a “pair” would mean two tokens with the same suit.) Being able to put together a good hand is obviously desirable, but not entirely necessary, as long as you can judge exactly how high you can bid without being called. But obviously there’s a luck factor regardless.

The above games are easier to grasp by observation than to describe in words. Gambit, less so. The game sensibly leaves it out until the end of the first chapter, and lets you practice it as much as you want when it does. It’s sort of a more complicated rock-paper-scissors. There are three slots, called Brazen, Smooth, and Devious. You have two numbers — one is your savvy, the other is some other randomly-selected stat — and you have to put them into two of these slots. Your opponent does likewise, often in a way that fits their character. Then all choices are revealed and evaluated, in slot order, and the person with the highest tally wins. If you put anything under Brazen, you score that many points and cancel the effects of your opponent’s Smooth. If you put anything under Smooth, and it hasn’t been canceled by your opponent’s Brazen, you get that many points and cancel the effects of your opponent’s Devious. And if you put anything under Devious (and it hasn’t been canceled by an uncanceled Smooth), you get to steal any points that your opponent got from Brazen. (The number of points you put under Devious has no effect; all that matters is whether you put anything at all there.) The UI goes to some length to make it clear what’s going on after the reveal, putting a big X on canceled stuff and animating the Devious marker sweeping the Brazen from one side to the other, but you still have to already understand how it works in order to make sensible choices. This is the one game that can end in a tie, which generally seems to count like a win at the story level, but you don’t get XP from it. If all the numbers are equal, Brazen-Devious beats Brazen-Smooth, which beats Smooth-Devious, which beats Brazen-Devious. But of course it’s seldom the case that all the numbers are equal, and high stats can still overwhelm low stats. But if you can predict what the opponent is going to pick, you can usually beat them even from a disadvantage (particularly if you can take advantage of Devious). There’s an item you can obtain that’s an enormous help: it lets you know in advance one of the slots your opponent is going to pick.

Flirting is a matter of figuring out correct responses to a randomly-chosen sequence of stimuli by trial and error. The boy might show you a diamond, for example, and expect you to reply with a heart — in this context each suit has a description like “laugh” or “bat eyelashes”, but I don’t remember the details. The correct responses are consistent within each boy, and if you guess wrong, you get to try again. But the number of times you can use a particular move is limited by your stats: a savvy of 3 means you can only use the “clubs” response 3 times, for example. Flirtations vary quite a lot in difficulty. In the more difficult ones, the moves (both his and yours) consist of two or even three picks in a row, which can make it mathematically impossible from the get-go if your girl’s stat total isn’t high enough. But even for the easy ones, having any stat too low is a liability. Boys successfully flirted with become boyfriends, which are more like accessories than characters, providing stat bonuses and a certain amount of protection from failure: when a girl would normally leave for a number of hours, the boyfriend leaves instead. But as far as I can tell, flirting is always completely optional.

My memories of the beta/demo I played years back are now dim, but I know that some of the games were different then. The “fib” mini-game was completely replaced — originally it was some sort of shell game. But also, if my impressions are at all accurate, the role of stats outside of their specialty games has been expanded somewhat. Or, if not expanded, at least clarified.

I spent a bit more time on Faerie Solitaire last night. Sleepy of mind, I wanted something simple to distract me, and isn’t solitaire the canonical distraction? The Solitaire app that still comes with Windows was the thing filling the “casual game” niche before anyone figured out that there was a market there.

But of course that solitaire does’t play the tricks that the for-profit games do to keep you interested and then, eventually, tell you that you’re done so you’ll buy a sequel. More precisely, they tell you that you’re done when you dispose of all the cards, which I suppose is an “eventually” thing, but they don’t have a long-term goal you’re working towards, a campaign mode containing hundreds of hands, with bits of story punctuating chapters. Ending with a single victory seems like the wrong granularity if you want people to play continuously and obsessively. Faerie Solitaire certainly doesn’t. In fact, it employs something of the same gimmick as Half-Life: it never gives you permission to stop. When you finish a match, it doesn’t present you with a menu that has a “quit” option. It gives you a special screen displaying your progress, but the UI has only one button, labeled “Continue”. In order to quit, you have to quit after the next round has started.

The thing is, though, despite the lack of such gimmickry, people did play Windows Solitaire obsessively for millions of man-hours. Was it just the lack of alternatives, or is there still something we can learn from it?

Now here’s one that I probably wouldn’t have tried, let alone bought, if it hadn’t been part of a bundle. Faerie Solitaire is apparently a fantasy-themed variant (and near-homophone) of the golf-themed Fairway Solitaire, a game I know almost nothing about. But now that it’s flounced its way onto the Stack, scattering glitter all over the place, I might as well give it a whirl.

It’s basically a get-rid-of-all-the-cards game, and feels quite a lot like that thing with the Mah Jongg tiles that there seemed to be a hundred different indie casual implementations of a few years ago. You have a bunch of cards on the table in stacks, and you have a “foundation” card. You can remove cards from the top of the stacks and place them on the foundation, but only if their value is one greater or one less than the current foundation card. If you can’t make a move like that, you draw a new foundation card from the deck. Play ends when you clear the board or run out of deck. Either way, you keep going to the next level, trying to build up a total score that exceeds some threshold. The exact rules of scoring are left obscure, but apparently it helps to go for long runs without resorting to the deck. It’s a game with a large random factor, where you’re often left just going through the motions with no need of thought, but every once in a while you have to make a real decision.

The whole reason that this game can have levels, and therefore a campaign mode, is that the layout of the stacks can vary. Stacks can branch or merge or take on pyramidal shapes where one card controls access to many. (This is particularly reminiscent of that Mah Jongg tile game.) The designers also try to introduce a little variety with special layout features like ice cards, which can’t be removed until you melt them by reaching a fire card elsewhere on the board. But when you come down to it, that’s just a little window dressing on an ordinary stack that’s been divided between two places on the screen. It does have the practical effect that it can split the stack in ways not otherwise geometrically possible, because there can be arbitrarily many ice cards on the board, all melted by the same fire card. There’s a similar gimmick with flower and thorn cards that go the other way: in order to release the thorns, you need to hit all the flowers. Either way, though, it’s mostly just an illusion of variety.

For that matter, the whole “faerie” aspect is a veneer. It’s a pretty thick veneer, though. There’s a whole thing where clearing the last card in a stack sometimes reveals an egg, which you can hatch into a magical critter that you keep in a menagerie in fairlyland, and which can grow up into a larger critter with some color text if you let it earn enough experience (which it gets by watching you play cards) and then give it a specified number of some Catan-like resources that you also occasionally find under stacks. As far as I can tell, none of this has any impact on the game. It’s a sub-game that you’re expected to pursue for its own sake.

Also, playing cards earns you money that you can spend on upgrades, like additional free undos, or the ability to peek at the next card in the deck. Increasingly sophisticated ways to cheat, in other words. Except of course that since they’re codified in the rules, and the player has to earn them, they don’t really feel like cheating. It’s the benefits of cheating without the gnawing sense that you’re missing out on the intended experience.

To be short about it, what we have here is a rather thin game buttered over with the leveling, purchases, upgrades, unlockable extra modes, pseudostory, and graphical bling that are used by casual games in general, but that I associate most strongly with PopCap. The fairypets, although they just sit there without so much as a spot animation, are sort of a lo-fi version of the Zen Garden and Virtual Tank from Plants vs Zombies and Insaniquarium respectively.

Of all the Final Fantasies I’ve played — and I’ve played exactly half of the main-line titles by now — FF6 is the one that took me the longest to beat. Not because it’s a longer or tougher game than the others, but because I kept stopping. I guess this is a pretty good indicator that I didn’t find it as compelling as FF5 or FF7. The story and setting are interesting enough, but most of the time, my attention was on the mere mechanics, which just didn’t keep me interested the way FF5‘s freewheeling Jobs system did. I can blame my urge to optimize for part of that: the dual use of Espers, teaching spells continuously and raising stats when you level, meant that I spent a lot of time shuffling them around from person to person.

Ah, but I leave out the Espers’ third use, that of summonable. That’s because I was hardly ever using them that way toward the end, as my characters came to dwarf them in power. Maybe half of them knew the Ultima spell (the ultimate area-effect direct-damage spell), and most of them knew Cure 3 (enough healing power to usually restore the whole party to full health) and Life 2 (resurrect and restore to full health). These are all big mana-drains, but they also knew Osmose (absorb mana from an enemy) — something that I never used much for most of the game, but which proved useful in the three-stage boss fight against Kefka.

There’s a certain amount of philosophizing before and after the fight, with Kefka taking a garden-variety nihilistic stance, countered by Terra’s nurturing the-journey-not-the-destinationism. With his makeup and hyena’s laugh, Kefka always seemed a bit like the Joker, but when he goes into ultimate-battle mode, he adopts a more mock-angelic form that’s a clear anticipation of Sephiroth in FF7. I suppose that to people who played the games in order, it came off as Sephiroth being a variation on Kefka’s theme, but from my point of view, Kefka looks like a transitional form, a step on the way to the more familiar.

At any rate, as I had been told, the end boss fight turns out to be pretty easy once you’ve come that far and survived the other encounters in Kefka’s junkyard tower. The main obstacle to completing the dungeon is simply its length. I may be just remembering badly, but I don’t recall the final dungeon in FF7 taking anywhere near so long to traverse. And, once you’re through with it, you get the cutscenes. Just like in FF5 (or, at least, the Playstation remake of FF5 that I played), this game just doesn’t want to end. It wants to keep showing you stuff for as long as you’re willing to look at it.

Notably, there’s a series of in-engine vignettes showing the crew rushing to escape the tower before it collapses: each character (or set of related characters) gets their own little mini-sketch highlighting their role in the story — yes, even Gogo and the yeti, who aren’t really part of the story, and who shouldn’t even need to escape the tower, because I left them cooling their heels on the airship. Each of these vignettes is preceded by a credits-like listing, showing their name twice, in small letters in the form it’s usually given and then its full form in larger letters: “Edgar as EDGAR RONI FIGARO”, for example, or “Gogo as GOGO”. It took me a while to realize that the first form was probably the player-assigned name, and that it only looked weird because I hadn’t renamed anyone. Once again, I find myself wondering if I’m strange for doing that, if most people reassign them. Certainly whoever designed that sequence assumed that they do.

Once out of the tower, the real credits for the game are punctuated by scenes of the world, freed from Kefka’s random destruction, being restored: the grass comes in green again, a child is born, a seedling sprouts where some children planted it, some villagers manage to finish repairing a building without it getting wrecked again. These are all things that were set up as you roamed about talking to NPCs earlier in the game, and it feels very good to have things tied together like that, to make it clear that your actions have made a difference — but also that your actions aren’t solely responsible for the recovery. This is a matter of people all over the world working to heal it, not a burst of magical Disney energy restoring everything. In fact, that’s kind of important to the themes here. In the end, defeating Kefka involved destroying magic.

Now, lots of fantasy stories, from The Lord of the Rings to Spellbreaker, culminate in the end of the magical age and a transition into something more like the real world. I suppose it’s a metaphor for growing up. But usually it’s portrayed as a loss. Here in FF6, magic is unquestionably a bad thing, and the world is better off without it. There are mentions of the Mage Wars that almost ended the world a thousand years ago, and the Empire’s attempts to resurrect it result in a cataclysm of similar proportions. The only thing that makes the heroes hesitate to get rid of it all is half-Esper Terra, whose fate once the Espers are gone is uncertain. She survives, but only by giving up her magical half — just like the world itself. It suddenly strikes me that this is the reason for her name.

At any rate, that’s one more Final Fantasy off the Stack. Two more were released while I was playing it. The game is very completist-friendly, providing the winner with big lists of all the spells, lores, blitzes, rages, and dances the various characters did and didn’t get. The only place where I was at all complete was Cyan’s sword techniques, and that only because completing a certain quest unlocks all the ones you haven’t got yet in a single lump. I did manage to find and kill all eight of the Great Dragons, and received for my trouble an Esper that I hardly used. Contrary to expectation, it wasn’t Bahamut, either; I never did find Bahamut, although the lists tell me he was around somewhere. The one place where I failed completism most completely was the Arena, where you can wager items on noninteractive duels (one of your guys vs a monster of some sort) in order to win better items. I had used the Arena minimally, due to a misunderstanding on my part. I had found that most of the time I wound up in combat with a freaky-looking facecloud called Chupon who seemed completely undefeatable, because he would always use his Sneeze attack to simply expel my guy from the ring. “I should hold off on arena fights until I know how to block a sneeze!” I thought. “I don’t want to wager a valuable item and have Chupon just take it away from me.” Well, it turns out that the opponent you get is determined by the item you wager, and Chupon is the player’s punishment for wagering too low. So I missed out on some stuff there, but obviously nothing I needed to win the game.

Since I’ve already played FF7 and FF8, the next game in the series I play will be FF9. We’re getting pretty close to the end of Final Fantasy on the Stack, provided I don’t buy any more or take another two years to play each of the remaining games. But I’ll probably want to finish Chrono Trigger and Recettear before starting any new JRPGs.

2010 was a special year for The Stack: it was the year of the Chronological Rundown, an experiment I’m not in a hurry to repeat. How did it go? Here’s a summary:

Special notes on dinosaur content: Deus Ex has bird-like monsters that I believe to be feathered dinosaurs but which were not identified in the parts I got to over the course of the year. Bioscopia had no actual dinosaur specimens, but there was a man-sized theropod statue holding a sign at one point. Surprisingly, there’s another dinosaur holding a sign in a cutscene in WarioWare — is this a widespread phenomenon I wasn’t aware of? Overall, though, I think the winner for dinosaur content is Evolution, which not only had the greatest variety of dinosaurs, it’s the only game that had dinosaurs for their own sake, rather than as obstacles for the player or as signposts.

Most of the year was spent slowly drifting behind schedule, but shorter games toward the end allowed me to pull ahead and even spare a month for the IF Comp. Does this mean games have gotten shorter over time? Not necessarily: it should be borne in mind that the games that are on the Stack are ones that I haven’t finished yet. A twenty-year-old game that can be completed in a day is very unlikely to still be on the Stack. And yes, such things definitely exist: the first games in the Ultima and Final Fantasy franchises both qualify.

As for the project of reducing the Stack, this has been the worst year yet, and it’s all because of Steam and their special deals on multi-game bundles. I’ve been considering altering the terms of the Oath to handle this better, but I honestly don’t want to — the games I buy this way are for the most part short, interesting indie works that I might never get around to trying otherwise. But this still mainly a manifestation of the weakness of will that brought the Stack to its current size in the first place. Buying games, or books, or building up a huge Netflix queue, is an act of denial, a refusal to admit how short our time is in this world and how much of that time is wasted on mundanities. The Oath forces me to acknowledge my limitations, and to make the most of time by being selective — or it would, if it weren’t broken.

And yet, there’s something I’m contemplating doing with my gaming time that will likely leave me with even more games unfinished. More info later, possibly.