Redefining Retro: The CoNcast Episode 25
So, here's episode twenty-five of the CoN podcast for you. This time around, our panel is reviewing the subjectivity of "retro" gaming, particularly as it relates to Final Fantasy. The idea of what makes a Final Fantasy game "retro" is something that can change based on your own experience or lack thereof with the series, and to address that, we talk not only about what makes particular games in the series retro to our minds, but also what we as gamers can do to communicate effectively about the series to those who have a different perspective.
Do you agree with our thoughts on what makes a Final Fantasy a retro game, or which games fall into that bucket? What other games give you the feel of a classic, retro FF? Draw your own conclusions by listening to the newest CoNcast now!
Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes, This Episode
Posted in: CoNcasts
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Rangers51 |
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| Member Since: 1997-07-31 | |
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Comments
| ElPanachino | Comment 1: 2014-08-20 15:34 |
| To me, "retro" means SNES generation and before because of the leap in graphics and sound that occurred after that. In my mind FF7 and on aren't retro, though I can see why someone who starts with the PS2 generation (FFX and up) would consider the PSX generation to be retro. | |
| Glenn Magus Harvey | Comment 2: 2014-09-08 21:51 |
| Re getting interested in what friends are playing -- this happens so frequently, and is a very significant method of discovery for me. Games I've discovered and become interested in from seeing others playing them include Metroid, Super Mario World (before my parents got me an SNES), Super Mario Kart, Contra 3, Secret of Mana, the Sonic games, Gex, Vectorman, Star Fox 64, Worms Armageddon, Age of Empires, Gunstar Heroes, Chrono Trigger, Gauntlet Legends, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, Age of Empires II, the rest of the Metroid series, Ico, Super Smash Bros., Zelda Twilight Princess, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Zelda Ocarina of Time, and Minecraft. And many more that I'm forgetting. I haven't necessarily gone onto buying all of these, but they have definitely influenced my tastes over the years. Anyway, I should probably dedicate the bulk of this response to the central topic of this CoNCast: "retro" games, nostalgia, and what they mean to me. To me, what people call "retro" never really became retro, I guess. Basically, I never really "moved past" the 16-bit or maybe 32-bit era, so to me personally, 2D perspectives and sprite graphics really are still "current". It's sort of a long story. Some of you may have read this before, but I'll lay it all out here. I started off with NES, GB, and SNES games. Basically everything was a 2D platformer of some sort (Mario games, Metroid, Mega Man games), excepting some of the things on this 105-in-1 GB multi-cart that my mom (or maybe a relative?) picked up at some point. Even so, I mainly played those that were platformers (Tail 'Gator, Ninja Turtles, Super Mario Land, Castelian, etc.) -- and cursed those that didn't let me jump (Mickey Mouse in Crazy Castle, Pitman/Catrap, The Tasmania Story). Also played some DOS games, but the ones that made the biggest impression were mostly platformers too (Cosmo, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Secret Agent Man), with the exception of a certain Tank Wars (which is actually more like, stationary artillery battling, also 2D, and really hilarious to put the AI on "Mr. Stupid"). I was then introduced to some Sierra games -- specifically, the Dr. Brain series, EcoQuest, and Turbo Science, with a side serving of Hoyle and King's Quest VI (which made no sense to me at that age). So that's how I got to know point-and-click adventures. However, on the PC, I never did move onto DOOM, or Wolfenstein, or other PC classics like Diablo or Starcraft. I did discover Age of Empires around 2000-ish, though I never got to play it myself until about 2006, when a friend let me play AoE II and Starcraft. But I never played a PC FPS until 2012. I did start playing Metroid Prime in 2007, and I had played a few minutes of Halo before that, but not until Team Fortress 2 became free-to-play in 2011 did I actually start playing any FPSes on PC. Meanwhile, I never got a new console after an SNES, until much later. Well I owned a Sega Genesis for about a day, and was disappointed that a cartridge I brought from Hong Kong didn't work on my US Genesis. But, maybe because I knew that games cost a lot of money, or maybe because my parents never seemed too keen on my playing games (always discouraging me from playing for too long or getting too into them, despite letting me play them in the first place), I never asked for an N64. I played Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Diddy Kong Racing in stores for a little bit (and thought Thwomp's Fortress was the first level, haha), and while they seemed cool, I just never did ask to buy it. Then the PS1 came out, and with it, a slew of games that I wouldn't ever dare even mention in front of my parents. And for whatever reason, I never felt socially pressured to get them either -- if anything, the "darker and edgier" (and gorier) aesthetic seemed to be the antithesis of what I did enjoy in my games (or maybe it was just the newfangled graphics?). I did kinda want Mega Man Legends and Mega Man 8 for PS1, but the fact that I didn't have a PS1 presented a barrier so I just lived without them. (If anything, Star Fox 64 has gotten me closest to getting an N64.) Now as the gaming world drifted further and further from me due to my lack of the newest systems (or lack of willingness to ask my parents for games), I might have stopped gaming as a hobby altogether. Pokémon did come along and suddenly give me a new thing to play on my Game Boy. But probably the biggest thing that retained my interest in gaming and the game industry -- and it's ironic since it is of questionable legality -- is emulation. Around 2000, I discovered emulation. Someone put an SNES emulator on a school computer. Suddenly, I could play games on my computer! All those SNES games that I hadn't ever gotten the chance to play! or that I rented and played only once! And all those games I hadn't even heard of before! Suddenly, thanks to emulation and the internet, a huge wealth of games for the NES and SNES were effectively at my fingertips. And here's the kicker: I didn't need to get the newest games and systems to content myself. For the next several years, most of my gaming was emulation. I left home for university, and I didn't dare take my game systems with me...which was just fine since I had a computer anyway. From NES and SNES emulation, I expanded to Genesis, SMS, GB, and GBA emulation. All the while, I was playing games that were increasingly dated (as "real world" time moved on), but to me, they were fresh new experiences. I also rediscovered gems that I had once owned, or rented, or seen friends play, or played at friends' houses. Many of these are some of the best games ever, including Chrono Trigger, multiple Final Fantasy games, the NES Mega Man games that I never played or never finished, the SNES/GB/GBA Metroid games, the entire Castlevania series, Felix the Cat (NES), Tail 'Gator (GB), Volley Fire (GB),... (Also thanks to the magic of emulation, games were less tedious to play because I had a turbo button. And savestates.) (Another side-product of the world of emulation was that I also got to re-experience the amazing soundtracks to these games -- even out-of-game, thanks to ripped sound files and specialized players/plug-ins. The magic could now come with me everywhere!) Note that almost all -- of these games are 2D sprite-based games. Some of them had 3D-like elements, such as Super Mario RPG, or Yoshi's Island, and some actually were 3D, such as Star Fox 2 (I still haven't played Star Fox 1, I'll be honest). But the vast, vast majority were that aesthetic that people consider "retro" these days. Around 2004, I also discovered indie games. I don't have a good record of all the little freeware things I've played, but it became notable starting with Cave Story, then La-Mulana, both of which I consider top-notch games. Thanks in part to the smaller development budgets of indie games, they also tended to be sprite-based 2D games. Which I guess you could say further reinforced my tastes. Meanwhile, I never had the hardware to run anything really spectacular and newfangled. Not that I really needed it -- I was quite content in being able to play my 2D games, so why would I need to buy an expensive gaming rig or a new system? I guess you could blame my never getting a PS2 for my never really experiencing an entire generation of games that came out in the meantime...but in my defence, I felt money was tight so I never saw a good reason to do this anyway. Fast-forward a few more years, and it's now the rise of indie gaming in the commercial scene. I never saw myself as a part of the PC gaming scene (which I felt, rightly or wrongly, was dominated by people who played games like Counter-Strike, which I was not interested in), and this "Steam" thing was just one more place where a bunch of people with those sorts of tastes hung out and I had little interest in joining them. Then one day someone gifted me Recettear. From there, I discovered the commercial indie game market. Not everything was that great, mind you, but at least it revived my interest in the game industry as a whole. It showed that at least someone still cared to carry on those traditions of older styles of games that weren't basically 3D-animated movies or FPSes with super-duper high-res graphics. Basically, games I "understood". (Yeah, I know, Recettear is 3D, not 2D, but the action RPG part is not too different from, say, Zelda LttP. And the aesthetic style isn't about looking super-realistic, but about looking right and getting the point across. And in any case, it revived my interest in buying games.) (Curiously, it seemed like Japanese indie PC games were more likely to offer the kind of experiences I'd wanted -- and this isn't because I especially liked Japan, but is likely because western PC games were more likely to be strategy or FPS games, rather than platformers and JRPGs. I felt those latter genres to be more "familiar" to me, thanks to having played them extensively over years of console gaming in the 90s and emulation in the 00s.) Fast-forward to today. Nowadays I'm most interested in playing (and supporting) games that continue those traditions of quality 2D and 2.5D games. (I don't mind 3D graphics, though it probably doesn't help that I have a lower-end computer and I also feel a little discomfort from playing FPS games.) I'm very interested in the indie gaming scene, and especially (though not limited to) the Japanese indie ("doujin") scene, which really seems to cater to my tastes (though it also produces a lot of bizarre weirdness, plus a heap of smut that I'd really prefer didn't exist). As well as some companies that seem to want to keep this tradition of...I guess you could call it "immersive 3rd-person" gaming. Ironically, one of those companies is Nintendo, yet I haven't bought anything from them in a long time now, though I've been tempted to do so, so many times. One of these days...one of these days... But I have been patronizing Falcom like mad, buying multiple gift instances of the Ys games on Steam (and spamming y'all with notices about their sales, haha). TL;DR: Unlike the rest of the gaming world, I never really "moved on" from platformers, Zelda-likes, and JRPGs, and never really got very much into PC-centric genres like the FPS or RTS (even though I have played them a little). So I don't really feel my tastes are "retro", as much as they're the sort of games I like to play, I used to like to play, and I will continue to like to play for the foreseeable future. While I do nostalgically look back at specific games, I don't feel that the style or aesthetic itself is bygone. It doesn't feel old. It feels current, natural, and familiar. That's not to say that all sprite-based games are better, either. There's a ton of crappy sprite-based and/or 2D/2.5D games out there. There were, for the NES; there were, for the SNES; and there are, for PC today. By no means have I been equally satisfied with all the indie games I've played -- been quite dissatisfied by some of them, in fact. (Though I usually try not to make the mistake of buying them in the first place...) (But hey, it's better than being almost completely uninterested in the world of gaming and the game industry, right?) And so I sometimes feel a little offended by the use of the term "retro". Because it carries an implication that something is indeed from a bygone era. No! To me, at least, the era -- this style -- is still current, alive, and thriving. Another style may have been created in the meantime, but that style has by no means supplanted this style, nor is that style strictly better either. Implications looking down on games because they're 2D or feature sprite graphics -- including comments that a game ought to cost less because they use those aesthetics -- are ones I disagree with pretty strongly. (And hearing stories about graphical fidelity breaking game development budgets kinda vindicates my opinion.) It's kinda funny that one of you (R51, I think) remarked that FFXII is "a decade old" -- because it still feels like "a new thing" to me. While the datedness of PS1-era 3D polygon graphics is starting to show, even to me, but pretty much everything from the PS2 onward still feels like modern graphics -- and from my perspective, I really don't feel there's been much change since then. Maybe we can make a character look more or less realistic, hair blowing in the wind, or something, but that just seems almost negligible. As for how to get people interested in this "retro" aesthetic, perhaps it might just be good to let them sit down with a good 2D sprite-based game for an evening or so. It seems to me that people are still able to enjoy something once they move beyond the visual presentation, as long as the gameplay is enjoyable and/or the narrative is strong. But it takes some time, because visual presentation is very much a first-impressions thing. A good thing might be the rise in "retro" aesthetic in indie games. The budget gamer of today might actually become more comfortable with these styles, and thus grow to be more open to playing these classic older games. I generally agree with y'all's takes on which FF games to recommend to different people, based on their tastes in other areas such as the type of narrative or gameplay they're interested in. Incidentally, partly as a consequence of being "out of touch" with the mainstream game industry for so long, "hype" is sort of a rare thing for me. It probably doesn't help that I don't follow gaming news blogs and sites, and I only get my news from places like CoN and from various specific people (such as people I know on Steam). Similarly, the concept of a "day 1 purchase" is practically unknown to me (though I did do it for the first time recently, for Trails in the Sky FC). If anything, it's a wonder if I ever buy a game within a year or two of its release. Then again, I mostly play single-player games, so it's not like it matters much anyway... Re Final Fantasy IV in 3D: I actually don't mind it being in 3D. What I'm afraid of is that the game will feel very slow, thanks to lots of animated cutscenes and other animations (e.g. battle swirls) that would take a lot more time than 2D FFIV. | |
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©1997–2025 Josh Alvies (Rangers51)
All fanfiction and fanart (including original artwork in forum avatars) is property of the original authors. Some graphics property of Square Enix.
©1997–2025 Josh Alvies (Rangers51)
All fanfiction and fanart (including original artwork in forum avatars) is property of the original authors. Some graphics property of Square Enix.