Riddles In The Dark @twistedriddles - Tumblr Blog

Final Fantasy VI Replay Retrospective Review

I was avoiding this one, because I knew it would be controversial. Final Fantasy VI is a good game. But it isn't my favorite, and I'm not sure in the end, it will even be in the top 3. There's a lot to recommend this game. It came out the year before Chrono Trigger, and it has a very similar feel in terms of characters and story presentation.

That's all very good. Each character in their personality here feels unique and interesting, and there are a LOT of them. The first half of the game, things really gel. It's an interesting story, it has a good narrative trajectory, but in the second half of the game, things feel a bit more disjointed, and the fact that there are so many characters actually works against it as you proceed to interact with them all.

Mechanically, I feel like this game falls a bit flat, because it is very easy to have ever character master every esper, which makes characters feel very samey on the combat level, with only their unique abilities and some stat differences (due to the espers they had equipped when leveling) to differentiate them.

That said, Kefka is a great villain, and the opera scene is fun and iconic. The final battle is one of the most fun in the series, and it really benefits from the huge cast of characters, but overall, the game doesn't feel as compelling as Final Fantasy IV does, so I put IV above VI in my rankings.

It may help matters (or hurt them depending on your opinion) that I didn't play FFVI to completion until I was an adult. I rented it when it came out (for those of you too young to remember, there used to be stores that you would go to and pay to rent a video game for a few days), and I played probably 8 hours of it before I returned it. And then I didn't touch it for 7-8 years after that. So I don't have the feelings of nostalgia that others have for this game. That said, onto the lists.

The Good

The Characters: It's truly impressive with a cast as large as this that they really develop nearly every character, even some of the villains.

The Final Boss: I'm not exaggerating when I say this fight is one of the best in the series. It's so much fun to be making your way up a tower of a boss while relying on your huge party to handle it when someone falls. We will see a similar mechanic in Final Fantasy VIII, but we aren't there yet, and there, I think it works against you, whereas here, it feels really good and epic.

Espers: In general, I think these are cool. From a plot level, finding various espers is rewarding, and from a mechanical level, for most of the game it's cool to be unlocking new abilities. It's not until you really sit down and decide to master them that it works against the game mechanically.

The Story: At least for the first half of the game, as things are being revealed, and you are learning more about each character, the story is really interesting and engaging. It's also super memorable. Unlike some of the earlier games, I remember this plot very well.

The Music: I don't think I mentioned this in my FFIV review (that music is also very good), but the music here is one of the first times in the series that it becomes so good that I just want to listen to it on its own.

The Bad

The Open World Part: In the second half of the game, the world opens up, and you have to find each character and recruit them again. This feels really disjointed after a really well constructed first half.

Everyone is the Same: Once you master all the espers, which is not that much of a chore, every character has all of the same abilities available to them. The only real differences are their stats, their unique abilities, and their equipment. VERY late in the game, you can do some very interesting builds with equipment, but until then, it feels like I just have a party of the same character over and over.

Rankings

FF IV

FF VI

FF V

FF III

FF II

#final fantasy #review #final fantasy vi #ff6 #final fantasy retrospective

tallahasseemp3

please read this story of a man accidentally discovering his wife is the world's best Tetris player

lichfucker

[image description: an excerpt of text that says:

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

/end id]

justahumblememefarmer

TL;DR on the article

The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.

The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.

They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.

She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.

rederiswrites

History will remember you today, Minnesota. Well done.

leebrontide

IN NEGATIVE TWENTY DEGREES!!!!!

Please spread this around. Don't let ANYONE lie and say my community is anything but ASTONISHINGLY UNITED in rejection of ICE's behavior. This crosses generations, race lines, party lines, class lines. THAT is how bad ICE is. THAT is how bad we want them gone.

THAT is how loudly we are DEMANDING they leave!

Do you understand what a crowd like this means in a small city like Minneapolis??? In weather that hurts to breathe???

Can you imagine what that takes?

ralfmaximus

Bigger turnout than his inauguration!

Final Fantasy V Replay Retrospective Review

This game is so much better than I remembered it being. If you know what I like in video games, you know one of those things is having creative power to build characters the way I want and make them powerhouses in interesting ways. This game has that all over. It's the first time in the series that you can really do that. You have a class, and an addiitonal ability (this can be something like barehanded, or red magic, or whatever).

In addition to that, the plot for this game is absolutely wild. It involves werewolf aliens, 3 different worlds, twists and turns, and a really charming cast of characters. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game, and it left me wondering why I was so luke warm on it the first time around.

The Good

The Job System: This is really the hallmark of this game. There are so many incredibly cool combinations you can make, especially once you unlock Mime and can put a 3rd ability in in place of item. Now you can do REALLY crazy combinations. You also get bonuses to stats from different jobs, allowing you to really power up your characters.

The Story: The story of this game really could have been sacrificed and it would have still been a great game because of the mechanics. But it wasn't. The story is engaging, and you care about the characters. It's also just totally out there.

The Bad

Limited Characters: You only have a small amount of playable characters. You have just your party, and there is one additional character at a certain point in the game, but this is a departure from both FFIV before it and FFVI after it, which both have larger casts of characters to play with.

All The Vehicles: It's cool that we get different ways to travel, but having to like fly airship one to airship 2 to the hovercraft to my drake or whatever is a bit annoying after a while.

Rankings

FFIV

FFV

FFIII

FFII

#final fantasy #review #final fantasy V #FF5 #final fantasy retrospective

Final Fantasy IV: Retrospective Replay Review

So I was doing these on my side blog, but side blogs are a PITA, so I'm just going to do this here.

FFIV is really the first really good game in the series. It has an engaging story, interesting characters, and some great plot moments. It also has an enormous cast of characters. The largest one by far until FFVI. That cast is rotating, rather than all available at once, but that really adds to the plot trajectory. You really begin to care about these characters, and they have real, memorable personalities.

The Good

The Characters: absolutely the best so far, not that there's a lot of competition at this point.

The Plot: This is a memorable and interested plot. It has emotional moments that are impactful.

The Mechanics: They may be simple, but they make each character distinct with distinct abilities. They each feel different to play, and it's legitimately fun when you can play around with a new character.

The Bad

Party Setup: Because characters rotate, but you don't have a bench, you get characters taken away from you that you might have liked, and you are eventually stuck with the party the game decides for you, not the one you would pick for yourself.

Sacrifices: They get a little old. So many people sacrifice themselves for the party, that it becomes kind of predictable and cliche.

Pink Puffs: These fuckers. If you want to best armor in the game, you need to get a pink puff tail, and the chance of one dropping is tiny. So it takes an absolute eternity. Fortunately, the rate is significantly higher in the Pixel Remaster.

Current Rankings

FFIV

FF3

FF1

FF2

#final fantasy #final fantasy iv #review #jrpg #project ff retrospective

criticalgeekery

Final Fantasy 1-3: A Retrospective

So, I'm going to lump these together. They are short games, they don't have a TON of meat to them, and I want to get them out of the way. I played the Pixel Remasters of all of the first 6 games, so keep that in mind.

Final Fantasy 1

This game is by no means bad it's just not exceptional in any way. This is maybe the 3rd time I've played it. It's short, and it sets up a lot of the Final Fantasy mainstays, of course. You create a party and choose their jobs/classes/whatever you want to call them. I believe my starting party was Fighter/Black Mage/White Mage/Thief? But don't hold me to that. There is a very basic "stop the big bad evil guy" plot. The magic system is simple, but works. It's incredibly short. I think I beat it in like 2 days.

The Good

The Combat: It's the standard jrpg formula, but you have to give them some credit for being pioneers in a lot of this. Each job has abilities that they can do that no one else can, and it's fun enough.

Magic: Because you buy new spells for each magic level, there is a good feeling of progression there.

In the end, this is basically D&D: And that's not bad. You go in with a party of 4 classes, you advance those classes, upgrade them at a certain point, beat the BBEG and save the world.

It's Short: It may not be the best RPG out there, but it's not going to take a lot of your time, and if you want to know where the series started, there are worse ways to spend a few hours.

The Bad

There's nothing really remarkable: This isn't BAD per se, it's just that playing this in retrospective means that you are left saying "why am I not playing a game that does this better?" This certainly wasn't the case when it was released. Then, it was really novel, but now, in 2026, looking at it as an option to play now, there are just better things to spend your time doing.

Final Fantasy 2

This is not a good game. I think a lot of people would grade this the worst of the bunch, it is certainly one of the weirdest. It's not a terrible game. It's not as bad as I feared going into this (at the time, I had never played this game to completion), but i was Square experimenting with a new formula (which they would eventually change and adopt for the SaGa system). As you use your stats, they level up. There's no exp, there's no levels, you just hit things, and your strength goes up. You get hit, your HP goes up, you block things, your evasion goes up. The story is... frankly forgettable, as in I don't remember anything about it at all, and it's only been a year. But this game wasn't exactly a struggle to get through, and like the first game, it's short.

The Good

It's Short: Even more so than the first game, this is an advantage. The story is not super engaging, the system is not super fun to play with, so the fact that you don't have to do so for very long means it ends before the novelty wears off too much.

It IS something new: This was only their second outing in this series, and they tried something completely different for it. They are far from the only ones to do this in the 80s (looking at you, Zelda), and it is worth giving credit for the kind of gutsy development decisions that we just don't see from AAA publishers anymore. The system isn't even THAT bad. It's intuitive enough, it's just not the most fun to play with, and it's SO different from the first game that it's kind of jarring.

The Bad

The Story: Honest to god, I do not remember one single plot element to this game. I can't remember the bad guy, I can barely remember the good guys. FF1's story isn't exactly the most memorable either, but this one really feels like it wasn't top of mind when making the game.

It's possible for the system to create some feelbads: As is the case with ALL "use it and get better at it" systems, if you decide to change course later, you are kind of stuck, and it's POSSIBLE, although not likely without trying, that you can get yourself in a really bad spot. For example, if you manage to get some REALLY good equipment early on and build up your evasion, you'll never build up your HP, so when something DOES hit you, it's going to hurt. That makes for a very steep correction that you need to go work on.

Final Fantasy 3

Probably the best of the lot. It's their first attempt at REALLY playing with the job system, unlocking new jobs as you go, playing around with various party compositions, and being able to change things up. It's a pretty fun time. They don't REALLY nail this concept for a few more games, but it takes what they did in FF1 and adds complexity, rather than just change for the sake of change. I actually had fun with this one, and I think it's the first time I get to REALLY say that in the series.

The Good

The Job System: We're getting somewhere now. We're seeing a preview of what will be a pretty standard series staple going forward (even if not always as obvious as it is here). Customization is something that I, personally, really enjoy out of my RPGs, and while FF2 sort of tried and failed at creating a customizable character experience, FF3 seems to be heading in the right direction but putting on SOME rails, but allowing you to choose the train.

Character Advancement: I mean this tags onto the job system, but I want to say that this is the first time where I felt like my characters were notably different and more powerful as I leveled them up, and I actually bothered to get them to max level before beating the game (I often do this. But I didn't bother in FF1, and that wasn't possible in FF2).

The Bad

It's still pretty stripped down: There's not as much meat here as in later games. This is to be expected, but again, looking at this as an option for a game to play right NOW, there are better choices out there.

It's Short: This time, this feels like a bad thing. The game was pretty fun, the job system has some meat to it, it would have been nice to gave a longer game to play around with that in.

The Story: It's still not super memorable. The JOB system is memorable, but the story not so much.

criticalgeekery

Final Fantasy Replay Retrospective

So, for a couple years now, I have been making slow progress through replaying all the numbered Final Fantasy games as sort of a retrospective, thinking about it as a series, seeing how my opinion of these games has changed over time. I had no idea what I was going to do with this effort. I had considered streaming it (there would have been times when that would have been entertaining), but that's a lot of work, and may amount to nothing, and would have hampered when I could play. So, instead, I have opted to go and dig out my tumblr in order to post my thoughts on each game. As a warning, even some of these are a bit hazy, because I played them a year or so ago. Anyway, it's not like I have a bunch of followers, but this might be entertaining to some folks who find it.

findingfeather

Author Ursula Vernon has a friend currently staying with her.

Ursula and Kevin reply:

This is still one of the best Internet Sitcoms around at the moment. You’re welcome.

findingfeather

Addition:

normal-horoscopes

Fun fact: the symbol on the friend’s hand is John Dee’s Monas Heiroglyphica, a deeply magical symbol which represents several foundational ideas for early European Renaissance magic.

dykeofmisfortune

bill and ted learn the word “gender presentation” and get stressed out because they think they need to give a presentation on their genders

noiselessbuck

Assigned at birth!? Ohhh nooo My dude do you think they take late submissions?

thirtytwoelvismovies

It’s only taken 30+ years, but I’ve finally beaten all three Castlevania games for the NES.

wilwheaton

As someone who can appreciate the difficulty of this accomplishment, WOW. Holy shit. WOW!

twistedriddles

This is a huge accomplishment. But maybe a bigger accomplishment is you still have the slip covers.

onetwistedmiracle

The Fellowship of the Ring, remixed as Girl Scout Cookies.

yodaprod

Playing Ms. PacMan while waiting at the Lav-O-matic

Source: Flickr/Jonathan Goode

thirtytwoelvismovies

People forget that a big chunk of the ‘80s and ‘90s arcade experience was that arcades were there while you were doing other things.

wilwheaton

Arcade games were literally EVERYWHERE. There was a row of them, maybe twelve in total, along the front wall of the Ralph’s supermarket, for fuck’s sake.

#I spent a good portion of my childhood playing Ms Pac-Man in diners.

bixbiboom

[ID: A tweet from Matthew Mercer @.matthewmercer which reads: “It has begin. We genuinely hope you enjoy, as we (and SO many other wonderful people) have poured our hearts into this for years to bring it to you. The first 3 episode have officially dropped, and it only gets better from here. ;) #TheLegendOfVoxMachina”. There’s a link to the Amazon listing beneath, showing the banner image for the show. /end ID]

[ID: A tweet from Matt in reply to his own previous tweet which reads: “GODDAMN IT, Autocorrect!! Bah, I am leaving it. Perfection is a false goal. Embrace the messy. Everything is silly, and what is life. <3” /end ID]

[ID: A cut-together screencap of a series of replies from the cast to Matt’s typoed tweet, each in reply to the one previous in a chain. They each read as follows. Taliesin Jaffe (@.executivegoth): “#ItHasBegin”. Sam Riegel (@.samriegel): “It has. It has begin.” Liam O’Brien (@.VoiceOfOBrien): “On brand.” Taliesin Jaffe (@.executivegoth): “Once more it again begins, yes.” Marisha Ray (@.Marisha_Ray): “It have begins.” Travis Willingham (@.WillingBlam): “Begins it has.” Laura Bailey (@.LauraBaileyVO): “I has bacons.” Ashley Johnson (@.TheVulcanSalute): “you’re mom.” And Matthew Mercer (@.matthewmercer): “………………… yup.” /end ID]

And finally we have...

[ID: A tweet from Matthew Mercer @.matthewmercer in reply to everyone above which reads: “...I hate you all so much.” /end ID]

Happy #TheLegendOfVoxMachina Day, everyone!

aiiaiiiyo

Howard Hesseman as Dr Johnny Fever. WKRP in Cincinnati 1978-1982. RIP to the Doctor Check this blog!

goodatyugioh

surely this is a good idea that doesn't have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

dragoninthedesert

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits...but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

goodatyugioh

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

fandomsandfeminism

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went ".......wtf?????" when I read it. So thank you.