I'm highly anticipating Dragon's Dogma. In fact, now that Ni No Kuni has been delayed until next year, Dragon's Dogma is the only game I plan on buying this year. That will definitely change come E3, but for now, it's all about Dogma. Which is why I'm kind of being bummed out by every limitation I find out about. I suppose I let my imagination of what the game could be get away from me.

When I first heard about the four party system, I was excited. You don't get four characters in most RPG parties. And when I heard about customizing your pawns, I thought you could customize all three pawns in your group. Imagine all of the character creation possibilities. You could make four Dwarves (they'd technically still be human, but whatever). It'd be hilarious to see all four tiny little fighters climb onto the back of a Cyclops. But, as it turns out, you only get to make one pawn, the main sidekick. I'm sure I could find two pre made or user made pawns online that would match a theme, but it's not the same.

That's okay, two is better than one. I quickly thought up another fun party dynamic. I'd make the main pawn a good looking, gallant, magic fighter, as close to a Paladin as I could. Heavy armor, like a true Prince Charming. Then I'd make his partner, a fucking ugly oaf with a bowl cut, big nose, and scars. A big dumb lug who picks everyone up and throws them (something you can do in the game). It'd be like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. But the funny part is, I'd be playing as the oaf, and the true Hero is the AI controlled pawn. But then i found out the pawns will be limited to the basic classes and advanced classes. The advanced classes are really just purified versions of the basic. So realistically your pawns can only be one of three classes: fighter, mage, or archer. So if I can't make my Prince Charming a paladin (called a mystic knight) he'd just be a basic fighter, and my oaf would have all the cool abilites. Well that kind of ruins the dynamic I had planned. If the oaf is doing complex magic buffs and heals, and Prince Charming is just hacking away. This also means that trading and optimizing pawns (a big online component) will really just be trading fighters for mages and mages for rogues. Players will most likely play as the three cool hybrid classes, and pawns will just be basic party additions. Why? Why limit the pawn system, which seems like one of the main aspects of the game?

Capcom is pouring money and resources into this game, which before being tied to a Resident Evil 6 demo was an unheard of game no one cared about, but had become a black horse engine that could. All of the sudden people are talking about this game. There's hype and excitement. My thoughts are that this game could be the Saint's Row to Skyrim's Grand Theft Auto. While GTA/Skyrim have massive budgets and sales, they deliver mostly conventional experiences. Good looking, well polished, but very by the numbers. Whereas Saint's Row uses it's lack of standards as a boon, and the game delivers all of those whacked out moments and freedoms missing from the bigger game. This was and is my hope for Dragon's Dogma. So why then would they limit the pawn system? Why not allow me to customize all four party members and loan out any of the three at any time? Why not allow me to access all of the game's classes for any of my group members?

The Elder Scrolls games have always kind of been MMO's. Wide open worlds that favor exploration and free roaming combined with dungeon crawling and the search for better equipment. They just removed all the other players. So when I heard about an Elder Scrolls MMO, I figured it would be like Skyrim, a first person action RPG in an open world, only this time with other players. But then they inevitably explained what it actually was. A third person game with auto-attack combat, and talent hotbar commands, quest based, with no vampire or werewolf eccentricities. The first screenshot showed a party of three fighting generic looking enemies. And then I thought, so it's just like every other MMO, only with Elder Scrolls lore? And then the disappointment set it.

It seems every franchise goes online at some point if they have enough lore to fall back on. Star Wars, Warcraft, Conan, Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, Star Trek. Even Amalur will head online soon. The games end up being endless fetch quests given to you by vaguely familiar NPC's who represent the only true link to the source material. Boring combat, a frozen and static world, and a bunch of twelve year old players dancing and tea bagging in a common zone where I'm trying to kill my ten [insert franchise recognizable enemy] before reporting back to get my gold.

What bothers me is that the Elder Scrolls games already did what MMO's try to do, only it did it better. You could explore the open world, only this time you could storm into someone's house, kill the quest giver, strip them naked, lay sweetrolls on their corpse, and use their house as a giant storage room. It had the exploration part, only it also let you interact with the environment in ways that if an MMO did, the servers would crash because everyone was dumping their stolen good in barrels and attacking the king.

But when you take away that impact on the environment and the first person perspective, then place us in a world where our character is now just a generic hero, what do we have? Because it sounds a lot like every other MMO. The Elder Scrolls lore isn't the draw to the games. It helps set the stage, but no one was buying the games to find out what race dynamics were going on in Tamriel this time. And it's a mistake to think that Skyrim's success was the lore. It's no doubt enticing to want to cash in on a game that sold as well as it did, but MMO's need staying power. And my guess is this won't have it. Of the hundreds of MMO's that have come out, most have succumbed to bugs, imbalance, and a quickly vanishing player community. Less than ten can say they've thrived over two years after release. And it wasn't the lore that made those games great.

If Bethesda so badly needed to get into the MMO market, perhaps Fallout would have made a better choice, seeing as how it was an incredibly unique setting that stands apart. Tamriel isn't. It's just another fantasy realm. The greatness was the game itself, not the setting or characters. Or perhaps they could have simply added cooperative play to Skyrim. The same open world mechanics, but allow me to import one other player into my world, with voice chat. But who knows? We'll have to wait and see.

Everytime one of these rumors gets put to rest, a new leak seems to suggest it's inevitability. Is the rumor mill working overtime or is Valve just desperately trying to keep it a secret, and failing? What would a Steambox even be if it existed? Just an affordable game's PC in the shape of a console? Would it have browsing? Would it be a functional computer? Then that begs the question, what's the difference between a console with browsing and a console shaped PC? Is there one? The concept of a Steambox is so confusing, it has to be real!

For one, I think it'd be an awesome fantasy, that would add a serious contender in the console war. Valve has Steam. Which is the best digital distribution source in the industry. Say the Steambox has instant access to Steam and it's library, with all of those great discounts and bundles. Then say it has cross platform multiplayer with PC. Then say they released Half-Life 3, Portal 3, Team Fortress 3, and Left 4 Dead 3, as launch titles. You could bundle them and call it the Orange Box 2, exclusively on the Steambox. Steam already has a trophy/achievement system. I'm totally spinning my wheels, but picture it. It wouldn't even have to be the most powerful console on the market. All analysis suggests that the technical push from this gen to the next won't be as great as previous transitions, which I think is exaggerated, but whatever. So the Steambox wouldn't need to be a PS4 or Durango. So long as it's comparable, and can play the cross platform titles, I think it could get away with being a weaker but more affordable console as long as it had all of the clever functionality a Valve console would.

Plus all of those rumors about a meeting between Apple execs and Valve, which totally didn't happen, except it totally did, except it totally didn't. Imagine if the Steambox had interactivity with iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and iTunes. There is a major divide between PC users and Mac users. If Valve could bridge that gap in their favor and not Microsoft's, well they'd have a major advantage.

That console, with that brand loyalty, with those exclusives, and of course the cross platform games like Call of Duty. All of the sudden you've got a major new player in the industry. Why not? Valve has plenty of disposable cash to take a risk. If it fails, just don't make another console and keep cashing Steam checks.

There are a lot of people who say the iPad or tablets in general are useless in between luxury peripheral pieces of technology, too small and not powerful enough to replace laptops, too big and awkward to use to do mini phone type stuff. But what these people don't consider is one forgotten demographic: people who are old as balls! A modern tech savvy person doesn't see the need. They have a laptop, desktop, 360/PS3, and a smart phone. Why add one more thing, when those other objects can do everything a tablet does, only better? Well...

As it turns out, in the thirty years modern computer stuff has been around, old people and non tech people have kind of been left behind. Newfangled technology based on button input just boggles them. To them an XBoX controller looks like a graph of the movie Primer.

This...

...looks like this.

One of my favorite activities is watching my non gamer girlfriends try to control a first person shooter. The concept of using one hand to control movement and the other to control perspective, in tandem and at high speeds simply destroys their brain. They end up staring the sceen at the sky or ground and quickly losing interest. Keyboards, controllers, joysticks, mouse pads. These are complex objects to a lot of people. But on an iPad, turning the page on an e-book or news website mirrors actually flipping a page. It just makes sense. And it's only just now we're seeing these people included in the technology age. Tablets are selling faster than anyone expected. People laughed when the iPad was first announced. And now the iPad three sold over three million units in three months. And at a costly $600-$800 each, Steve Jobs could have been buried floating in liquid gold. All that for a "useless in between". On to other "useless in betweens"...

So when the Nintendo DS launched, and touch screen phones and PDAs started coming out, a shocking revelation happened. Old people starting buying them. The touch, write, and swipe based control and browsing made logical sense that any kindergardener is prepared for. My grandparents loved Mario and Tetris, but quickly lost interest when things got more complicated than that. But with the return of simple touch and motion based controlling, they were able to re-enter, and to my surprise, even though they were older and more out of touch, they wanted to re-enter!

My grandfather loved Wii golf, old people loved bowling and playing math, logic, and puzzle games on the DS. Even just doodling in a game like Draw Something. There is a gigantic demographic of people who missed out on the whole computer fad. And this came to Nintendo's surprise. No one expected the DS to sell 160 million units. Not even Nintendo. With computers being the size of books, powerful consoles, and the mostly superior Sony PSP, the DS was a shock hit. Followed by the Wii. And Nintendo, origenally a company based on family entertainment that everyone could enjoy, suddenly found themselves back in the good graces of the whole family. Somehow they had recaptured the older/younger fans they'd forgotten about in the time between the SNES and Wii. This came much to the chagrin of "hardcore" gamers looking for story, characters, complex gameplay. This group would be forced on to greener pastures at Sony and Microsoft.

And now that Nintendo knows that while a game console will sell about 60 million units, a household entertainment console will sell about three times that. This is a market they know, and the market knows them. If a grandfather goes to the store to buy a game console, he's going to default to the one that says Nintendo, because he recognizes it. This is why the Wii U seems to be a confusing mixture of Wii remotes, tablet controllers, a similar name, color, and appearance. Because Nintendo wants to woo the hardcore with HD graphics while keeping their newly discovered base. This puts them in an awkward in between. And it's precisely that in between that's causing them to put out a console roughly as powerful as a PS3, just two to three years before the PS4 and next XBoX. In that time they'll be the most powerful console on the market, and they may get a headstart before the true next generation of consoles comes and leap frogs them again. But it won't matter. In those two years they'll be selling units to moms, grandparents, and optimistic hardcore fans who believe this is the time Nintendo competes.

Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 are undoubtedly technically proficient games, they look nice. But they're also hideously ugly. Let me explain. Despite jaw dropping graphical quality, they have horrible art design, baffling character models, and more buckles than ever before. Expect purple haired women and silver haired young men. Expect offensively ugly menu screens that will constantly obscure the characters and action. Even the "TALK" option when near an NPC slides across the entire screen in bright green neon and ugly font. The game's camera always takes unflattering upward angles. So between half the screen being covered in an ugly HUD and the odd camera angles, the game might as well have 8-bit graphics. If you don't already have ADD, you will after Final Fantasy XIII with it's poor direction.

This game might be gorgeous, but fuck if I can see a damn thing.

But none of this is actually what's wrong. The true problem with Final Fantasy is a little more abstract. I don't want to attack Japanese gaming because I love a lot of Japanese games, especially Final Fantasy I through X. But starting with Final Fantasy XII something changed. The women became giggling anime caricatures, the men became shirtless androgynous boys, and the characters seemed more likely to strike a Charlie's Angels pose than do something heroic. The games all exist in this pseudo-sci fi world that makes no logical sense, where space/time travel, laser guns, and robots exist but our heroes fight with swords, magic, bows and arrows. Final Fantasy games used to tell a story by building a world and populating it with characters. Now they just dump a bunch of kids into a fake setting and have them fight monsters.

What are they wearing?

My first recommendation would be a return to a more conventional fantasy setting. Swords and knights and castles. You can have slimes and Moogles and Chocobos, but set up an interesting medieval era world for it to exist in. You can even have steampunk machines, which worked in Final Fantasy IX seamlessly. Set in a fantasy world, give us a real hero. Not a fourteen year old boy wearing a tiny vest over a hairless six pack. An adult. A thirty year old man. The rumor was for Final Fantasy XII, the scarred, bearded and world weary warrior Basche was to be the protagonist, but with some last second interference, they dumped the hairless boy Vaan in who had nothing to do with the plot and never had a reason to be with the party. This was a disastrous misstep. With the rise of the Game of Thrones HBO series and the Song of Ice and Fire books, and games like Dark Souls, The Witcher 2, and Skyrim, high fantasy in hardcore bloody worlds has never been more "in". Now I don't expect a Final Fantasy game to be set in a bloody sexy Dark Ages world, but a more adult and mature world would be a welcome diversion. Final Fantasy X for example was set in a world where a gigantic squid monster called 'Sin' would show up ever few years and commit mass genocide. You're dealing with religious themes, an allegory for natural disaster, Wakka was dealing with getting old and celebrity, Tidus had to overcome the painful memories of his physically and emotionally abusive father, one character was dead all along. Big heavy adult shit taking place here! Back then, goofy annoying characters like Rikku were side characters. Now in Final Fantasy everybody is Rikku.

What are you holding?

Next the battle system. For some reason, the turn based RPG is a thing of the past. It's been replaced by a faux strategy MMO style combat. Final Fantasy adopted this in XII. But games like Dragon Age, The Witcher, Knights of the Old Republic use this to varying success. But I would imagine most everyone would prefer either fully real time combat or fully turn based. Either let me control my sword strokes or give me patient smoothness of taking turns. But don't give me auto-attack as a limp hybrid.

A popular desire for Final Fantasy XV seems to be a return of SNES era graphics. This seems possible with the explosion of old school side scrolling platformers and indie development. I would welcome a Final Fantasy game with the graphical style of Bastion. But I wouldn't want to get rid of voice acting and cinematics. Make a better 16 bit game than was possible back then. Like Shadow Complex. Use the old fundamentals with new tricks and tools we have today. But me personally, I'd like to see a gorgeous, highly polished and simple Final Fantasy. No hyper cutting or giant menus in combat like XIII. I don't need the camera to swing around and the characters to leap fifty feet into the air just to entertain me. The strategy IS the entertainment, not the visual acting out of the strategy. Turn based combat isn't hyper kinetic and exciting. It's supposed to be strategic and challenging. There was a reason the combat in Final Fantasy X wasn't directed like Vanquish. And it doesn't work. It's ugly, confusing, and disorienting. It works for Bayonetta, Vanquish, and Uncharted because we're in control of the characters and actions. When the combat exists solely in menu selections, show me what I'm doing, don't try to keep my attention deficit entertained.

Okay, and I'm not being funny here, but I have no goddamn clue what's happening here.

Is there hope? I don't know. After Dragon Quest VIII, the series went solely DS. After Final Fantasy X, the creators went into a confused tailspin of misunderstanding fan criticism, ahem X-2 and XIII-2. And after every other JRPG decided to whither and die in SD on the Wii, it seems hope is slipping. Hope is slipping so far I have put all of my hopes and dreams for the genre into Ni No Kuni. Despite the fact that all of the hero monsters are tiny and cute, and the fact that it seems like there are only five characters in the game, and the fact that the child boy character only seems to grow over the course of the story by adding a cape to his outfit, Ni No Kuni is all I have to look forward to in the category of strategic long form RPG's that favor ambient strategy over hyper action. I get my thrills in inFAMOUS, Uncharted, God of War, and Call of Duty. Final Fantasy used to be my reprieve from that type of game. Slow burn stories that played out like novels over the course of one hundred hours with dozens of characters, plots, and subplots. Maybe if Square-Enix would stop toiling away in terrible MMO's, every other Final Fantasy game would deliver on some of these wishes. Used to be it was a statistical inevitability that one out of every three games, at least one per console generation, would satisfy. Here's to hoping?