estirose

I have to admit, I chose some rather odd games for Yuletide. A 25 year old video game where people blink out when they die, a series of games where you have to rely on a camera, and a game where you're one of the few survivors of an apocalypse and have to rely on fragile weapons to beat away various kinds of ghosts and hostile animals.

Considering the world is pretty much dead at the end of Final Fantasy II, it's the most hopeful of the three. It's like, half the world's destroyed and one of the four surviving characters hates himself, but everybody's still hopeful! It's amazing. As opposed to the Fatal Frame games, where your default endings are the people you love dying on you. (Except for maybe III, where the canon ending might be 'all the main characters live'. But that's rare.) Or Fragile Dreams, where you bury the only person you've ever known, and rely on the friendship of ghosts and androids to help you find the only other human that you meet by complete accident. And then she apparently dies early.

I just seem to love sad, tragic stories, which is apparent when you figure out that my first prompts for the Fatal Frame and Fragile Dreams fandoms are "hi, take this and write me a story about a character that we never see and don't know more than maybe ten lines about." I am a sucker for fragments about people that aren't central to the story but still have a story of their own to tell.

(This is why I end up writing anthropomorfic and fic about commercials, because there's a story in everything. But that's neither here nor there.)

For Fragile Dreams and Fatal Frame, I also love the limited weapon mechanic (in Fatal Frame, it's limited film; in Fragile Dreams, it's the totally random weapon breakage coupled with limited on-hand space and the fact that you might need all your slots for healing items in a boss fight). And of course, both games are full of ghosts. Even the Tracker acts like one starting with your third fight. (I swear I was fighting Tomoe from Fatal Frame I or Kozue from III with that one!)

If there's one thing that Fragile Dreams shares with Final Fantasy II but not the Fatal Frame games, it's that both games make you fall in love with characters (even Crow) and then *kills them off*. Josef, Minwu, and Ricard in Final Fantasy II; PF, Crow, and Chiyo in Fragile Dreams. All I can say is that at least Sai is a ghost, and Minwu kicks ass even in death.

So, yeah, I like sad games that make me cry about fairly minor characters. I just can't resist them. For all that I should like fun, happy games (and I do love my Bloons TD 4 and 5), it's the sad ones that catch my attention.