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[curlytresses]

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So a friend shared this with me today, and I've never heard this person's other work or this arrangement before. I guess I just kind of wanted to post it here. I'm told it's a mixture between musics from Final Fantasy and Touhou Project.

I don't know what Touhou Project's music sounds like, but it's really surreal for me listening to this. It's stuff I don't recognize and then the melody will drift into the realm of the familiar, stirring up old memories of castles sinking into desert sands, caves with hidden treasures, floating fortresses and angry creatures screaming across the sky.

I haven't played a Final Fantasy game since the last one that was released on the first Playstation and I'm not sure that I want to. How do the newer ones compare with the ones that I love? Which is more important now to the development crew, the heart of the story or the beauty of the visuals? Has one been sacrificed for the other?

I fell in love with those little blobs of pixels on my television screen all those years ago. When I talk to people who have played the newer games, they all seem to agree that they are pretty, but it seems like they always find something disappointing in them. What was there to disappoint back when games were flat, when characters showed emotion through dialog and not the uncanny valleys of their facial expressions? When voices could sound any way we wanted, scenes could be as awkward or funny or moving as our own imaginations let them be, not limited in the least by the flatness of the visuals, but liberated by it?

Part of me feels like the Final Fantasy series has doomed itself in striving to create realistic looking games. I would much rather have a realistic feeling game. Celes didn't have to look beautiful; she was 30 pixels tall and we knew she was pretty because the characters around her showed it. And she could be pretty in any way we wanted her to be. She didn't have to be a generic beauty accessible to everyone - she could be for us.

In many ways for me the older games of the RPG genre are comparable to books, which also require (and allow) our imaginations to fill in the details. I miss that a lot with newer games; there's no room to fill in the gaps. What's there is there and there's not much else. I liked those gaps. I filled them with love and hate and with longing, I filled them with sunlight or with darkness, I filled them with a kind of beauty or ugliness that can only be imagined, can never be portrayed in all the dazzling three-dimensions being pushed onto our stories, telling us what we should be seeing instead of letting us choose.