Monday Reviews

Featuring Stranger than Fiction and my first impressions of Final Fantasy XII.

First, Stranger than Fiction, the story of a man who finds his life being narrated by a voice inside his head. I'll admit I was skeptical of Will Ferrell being able to play this role, and that was without realizing how indie the movie really was. Yet he pulled it off in an impressive fashion, and I enjoyed the movie immensely. Obviously, the post-modernist in me loved the blurring of story and reality, and the romantic in me loved the idea that even dull, boring guys such as myself can catch beautiful Harvard Law-attending bakers who will make us delicious cookies. The author in the movie reminded me just enough (in terms of appearance) of one of my professors at Carleton to be unnerving, but she might have been my favorite character in the whole show. My mother complained it was too long (perhaps, but I didn't notice), and my father couldn't take the story at face value. I say that you have to suspend your imagination or accept it as a literary metaphor. But it's not like I have room to talk: I figured out a great way to resolve the great climatic conflict in a pain-free manner (write the happy ending page, then tear it up!). The only other complaint I have is that said climatic ending really was obnoxious in its way, both because I just didn't buy the idea that he "had to die" for the sake of literature, and because the proposed ending would not have constituted great literature at all, but a cliche. Please. But all in all, a stellar movie that hit the same bundle of happy nerves as, say, I <3 Huckabees (if you liked that sort of thing).

Final Fantasy XII. First, my background on this is having played parts of VI, VII, IX, and X. I have never actually finished any of the games: VII I came the closest, getting about half-way into the final dungeon, IX quitting right before I traveled to that dungeon, and VI and X not even coming close. That notwithstanding, I am a big fan of the series and XII does not disappoint. In terms of structure and artistic stylings, it reminds me a lot of IX (which I think is one of the more underrated games in the series). The voice acting is quite good (the Scottish accents can be a bit jarring, though), and the characters are solid (though there is not any one that stands out from the pack). The plot starts a little slow but picks up nicely, and at this point in the game (around 12 hours in--for those of you who have played, I just got the first Esper after beating Gigas) I am thoroughly hooked. As always, Final Fantasy is the type of game that anyone with even the remotest interest in RPG style games can enjoy.

XII's big innovation that has folks talking is the "gambit" system, which allows a significant part of combat to proceed automatically. I'm ambivalently positive towards it. To make that statement clear, I should comment on another major shift from previous games in the series: the lack of random encounter battles. Now, you can see all the monsters on the main map as you wander around, choosing to engage (or not) as you will. That I think is a major innovation, and the gambit system works really well with it. On the one hand, I think that the non-lead characters don't react as quickly given their gambits as I would expect them to. That's a minor quibble, though, and I think overall it's a successful and reasonably intuitive system.