#fin-fin

[strawberryamanita]

Oh, I never said but I listened to "Come And See Him" reeeeeally closely (I was one of the ones who started asking what the lyrics are), and I can say with confidence that the line is:

FinFin come and see him,

Love and we'll believe him

...so I answered my own question gkdvakdbajanfbsmnd

[riastarthe]

Fin Fin: deluxe edition

Teo Encyclopedia, part II • continued from part I

the rest of the encyclopedia! This is a guide to which of Teo's flora and fauna show up at Fin Fin's various hangout spots. Fin Fin interacts with many of the creatures of this world, and eats plenty of its food. Different animals show up at different times of year or for different events, and many move around and do their thing independently of fin fin's presence/absence-- this is also your place to explore, after all-- giving the world a more full and randomised feeling. when you're in the Lemo Valley and press the space bar to a rhythm, animals will come out and join in a song.

here's our friend playing with the Piki Seal

like most virtual pets (myself included) feeding fin fin is key to befriending him. you're given a pack of those round berries, called Lemo fruits. there are red (basically the default,) green, orange, yellow, and pink lemo fruits. by feeding fin fin four of the same colour within 10 minutes, he'll change colour to match. if you manage to feed him another four in another 10 minutes, the colour will become deeper and richer. after doing this a third time, he'll stay that same colour until the next full moon or new moon by the Teo calendar, which happens every two weeks-- oh, and they do have 2 moons.

the lemo fruits in your package start going bad after about a month. if you feed fin fin an old lemo fruit, he turns blue and gets absolutely twisted

the US deluxe edition of the game only ever had 5 possible locations (3 or 4 in the demo or standard versions) while the Japanese/Chinese/Taiwanese releases had 6. that sixth area is Fin Fin's nest, the home of him, his wife, and their lumpy little baby. which means everyone else missed out on not only seeing the incubation of the egg and the baby growing up, but also, another of Fin Fin's "enemies"…

this spooky thing is a predator called ギラーミン Girāmin/Gillarmine (on EMGE's fan site it's written Gminfly-- unsure if that's strictly a German translation.) i've never found too much footage of it personally, but it has a low, muffled voice.

[tinsinart]

@dawnblade's funny little man. do they go to planets? do they go to the magic planet?

Ozzie said you got hurt. I hope your mystery biscuit heals soon.

[riastarthe]

TEO -もうひとつの地球 -

From the original Japanese soundtrack | Composed by Chuji Akagi • Vocals by Yoko Ueno, Mishio Ogawa • Art direction and design by Ira Okudaira, Koichi Chigi • Produced by Makoto Tezuka / NEON TETRA • POLYSTAR CO. LTD

TEO -The Other Earth-

Fin Fin's Clock

Fin Fin Songbook: Spring Morning (medley) ~ Summer Song (medley) ~ Autumn Dusk (medley)

Wonderful (/Mysterious) TEO - sung by Mishio Ogawa

more Fin Fin/Teo/Fujitsu

[riastarthe]

i was so surprised people were finding my humble blog until i did some looking around, and it seems like some big time twitch gamer has been playing Fin Fin of all things. what is in the air right now? fin fin zeitgeist? i wonder...

fortunately, fin fin is now preserved on the internet archive and playable with a Virtual Machine if it's not compatible with your system. but wow, this sudden revival makes me want to build an actual archival site for all my stuff instead of only a tumblr blog, where neither permanence nor provenance is guaranteed. and i sure do love to make a website ^_^

my personal Fin Fin story is: in 3rd grade my friend Lindsay showed me a black and white photocopy of a very short newspaper article while we were sitting in a huge pine tree at recess. i know exactly where we were and what time of year it was, because although the image wasn't in colour and mostly illegible, i was quickly obsessed with it. i made a copy of that copy and brought it home.

honestly it feels like i didn't go to elementary school at all and everything i learned, i learned at my friend Fin Fin's house lol

i loved being in the water. i loved anything in the water. i drew those things all kids (?) seem to draw-- like piles and piles of elaborate cross-sections of the ocean to show all the plants and animals living in it. this translated to toys and eventually games as well. this Littlest Petshop seahorse was completely mesmerising to me... it's not like you could do much with it, but it seemed magical. each side of the tank is meant to have hot or cold water, changing the seahorse's colour. (you pick it up with the magnet wand)

and were any of you also on fire for any type of rotating/autonomous aquarium toy? they still make those now, but it was something that seemed to populate a fair number of bedrooms or kitchen counters.

so Fin Fin slotted in nicely.

i already had some training on the computer— i was really bad at typing so my mom dragged an old desktop (with the built-in monitor!) and seemingly had me type directly into the terminal lol. i was also really bad at math, and was instructed to play the 1994 Math Blaster with the hope that it being a computer game (precious to me) would like, click my brain into place or something.

it seems weird to say “my parents used computers for work” but it was sort of notable in that we also had a computer at home for my sibling and i to play on— my parents used that one for socializing and by that i mean playing 7th Guest and Myst— the latter of which i loved to sneakily watch and would later play, too. i had a huuuuge poster of the Sunners from Riven's Jungle Island because i was obsessed… i'm sure you can see why. i love any Caribbean place and any aquatic guy.

i first played the demo version of Fin Fin. it let us preview other Fujitsu properties, like Virtual Safari, a colonial project developed by Anglia Multimedia (a subsidiary of Anglia TV, now ITV Anglia) which no longer exists. it was all about taking photos of the wildlife with the footage coming from Anglia's Survival series, but it was pretty unsettling.... and it felt literally dark, too, colours and lighting-wise, but maybe that was more the mood than the visuals. i can't find someone else playing it at a decent quality, so maybe that means i have to do it again........

somewhere in this time i also played Creatures (1996), but my most prominent memories are of Creatures II (1998.) just like fin fin, these games have a lasting and self-sustaining fandom. i've utilised fan-made (and in some cases, fan-turned-staff-turned-fan) injections and gene/egg modifications over the years whenever i boot it up again... the series is on GOG if you want to play it too!

anything that looks like this? absolutely marvellous to me. i can FEEL my brain turning on.

Creatures is more about the evolution/your hand in their evolution and arriving at a certain level of "advancement" plus what you find along the way. plus, the norns are infuriating. i love them, but my god they are truly helpless lol so be prepared! meanwhile, fin fin is more about emotional development, especially that of the kid playing it. it's an emotional experience, rather than the player taking on a teaching role.

there's a lot of articles-- maybe even including the one i first read-- that are written through an excruciatingly contemptuous adult tone, as though fin fin was ever designed with adults explicitly in mind. which isn't to say that adults were never invited to enjoy it-- they were, and they do! i certainly do, lol! (i also cannot begin to imagine how i'd feel about it if it hadn't been so formative.) fin fin isn't trying to mirror real life exactly. fin fin lives inside a computer-- so what would that look like? what would that act like? it is, genuinely, like trying to envision an alien planet.

what is it about these virtual pets that even the pixels of a Tamagotchi were/are so deeply empathised with? i think it's that they weren't trying to create the real world, but a world that would exist in a computer, something sumptuous, a visual delight, essentially boundless but with a unique and memorable feel to it. it's in stark contrast to the cloying and frantic literalism of games since the 2000s. i mean we all feel it now-- "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less and I'm not kidding."

these early graphics stick out so much in our minds as something WE had a hand in creating, in our minds. but projection wasn't the only mechanism creating this experience, it was also the necessary reflection as mistakes are made and corrected, and the world is explored, and cause and effect are witnessed. fin fin was a first step and first contact with something that recognised our presence. there was more room for our imagination to fill in any blanks or create connections between ourselves/experiences and the virtual world.

i touched on this/other childhood games some in my Klonoa post.

yes, the Myst series' pre-rended backgrounds are gorgeous to me, while dated now-- and even these aren't hyper-literal. you look at them now and of course our imaginations were filling in where the answers fell away into the expanse, and even moreso as we move away from their point in game history. they certainly weren't made with the same intent as something like a virtual pet. they're a story, not a little guy. a virtual world, or a simulated life, while limitless, is small and precious, too. nurturing isn't the same as teaching, having any kind of authority inside the space, the space which seemingly continues after you leave it-- it's a sense of mutual care.

The project's executive producer is the Japanese film director Makoto Tezuka and his aim, he says, was to create a character and environment that would "survive for 1,000 years". - via the times, 1997

i played through the Fin Fin storybook (To Teo and Back with Jack) with my sibling, with friends, with cousins... but i found it lacked a lot of the charm, in part because i didn't find myself needing an in-game analogue. maybe it would've worked better for kids even younger than me?

there was a little card that game with the game that you could fill out to "receive promotional updates and prizes" which i did do, but for the life of me i don't remember what if anything i might've received. and i was very lucky to have two of the now-rare deluxe version Fin Fin plushies... i only have two because my dog chewed the eyes off of one of them and i was aghast. so that's what i mean by lucky, because this happened right as the window was closing on Fin Fin. these things just can't be found anymore. i've really gotta rescue them from my parents' house.

it's really sweet that fin fin is given new life ever so often. i hope everyone enjoys their new friend 💙

[musicalpickups]

More violin pick-up lines please? :D

I'll post them when I get more!

And fin-fin to answer your question as to how many I have stocked up, I've got 7 posts saved in my drafts at the moment. And a few things in my inbox that I haven't made into posts yet.