Random Battle

What is Blue Magic?

Blue Magic, also referred to as Enemy Skill or Lores, is a skillset consisting of abilities used by monsters. Most of the time, a character who can use it is known as a Blue Mage.

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It was first introduced in Final Fantasy V and has since reappeared in most games from the series since then. The most common way of obtaining those skills or spells is to have the blue mage get attacked by the spell and survive it. There have been other variants, but they all require the player to fight the enemy with the wanted skill. (more…)

Back its in old days, Square, now known as Square Enix, was trying very hard to market its games and achieve the optimal appeal for all of its games. So much that it “tricked” players for many years into buying games by changing the original titles. While it is common for international companies to localize the titles of their games for marketing purposes, Square went the extra edge and made games look as if they were part of a different series than they really were.

Final Fantasy II and III

These are the most known examples of this strategy. The Final Fantasy II and III games as we know them in North America are actually the 4th and 6th installments in the series. Square had no plans to release the games between the first game and FFIV so they whacked the number so that consumers wouldn’t be confused. Fortunately, they rectified the numbering with Final Fantasy VII, but that left people wondering where Final Fantasy IV through VI had gone until fans learned that FFII (us) meant FFIV (jp) and FFIII (us) meant FFVI (jp). (more…)

Brands are powerful, especially in the entertainment industry. Releasing a game for a popular series guarantees its financial success. That’s why developers keep churning out sequels and spin-offs from popular games. The Sonic series has seen more than its share of bad games, yet the fans don’t hesitate to shell out the money whenever a new game is released. The same can be said for many other popular series, but two companies in particular went the extra mile to ensure the success of some games: Nintendo and Square. (more…)

Whenever you purchase a game, you pay for a number of things, the most costly being the development costs, the cost of paying all the developers, designers, testers, animators, etc. to create the game that you’re about to enjoy. You also pay for the marketing department who spent money to give you an incentive to buy by showing you ads on the television, on the websites you love or in magazines you read. However, these are about the only costs that really are about creating a game and making you buy it.

Whenever you buy a game in store or online, the costs of delivery vary a lot, but most of the time the price is the same. Sometimes it’s the physical retailer who puts pressure on the publisher because he’s afraid of losing sales. Sometimes, it’s just the publisher wanting to make a bigger margin, expecting people won’t notice. Here’s my analysis of how the price differs for these two methods of selling.

Physical retailer

There are some obvious costs like the packaging which includes the box, the disc or cartridge and the printed manual. Then you pay for the people working at the store, for the shelf space (bigger titles pay to be at eye-level and have more copies in front). You also have to consider the transportation of the game and the storage. These are all unique to a physical store. However, buying a physical disc does have some advantages: you can lend it to people, you can resell it and you have a sense of ownership (if that matters to you). The reselling part is actually a big factor here, even if you just sell it at 20% of the cost, that’s a pretty decent rebate over an online version that you can’t get rid of.

Online retailer

Online stores are not without expenses though. The publisher has to pay for disc storage (which is arguably pretty cheap), bandwidth (also kinda cheap) and the people managing the online store (not as cheap). The advantages of buying online is that you can redownload the game at any time on any computer or video game system (I hope) and the game will never wear down or get destroyed by a pet or little brother.

The costs appear to be tremendously smaller when buying online, why is that not reflected in the price of games? Fortunately, there is hope: Steam and indie games are demonstrating regularly how good games at reasonable prices can be an excellent business model.

When remaking Final Fantasy 3 for the DS, Nintendo not only improved the graphics (although that is debatable, I prefer 2D sprites to 3D pyramids), they also reworked the job system and implemented new quests. Some of those quests are unlockable via the Mognet system.

The Mognet is simply a mailing system run by moogles. When it was first introduced to the series, in Final Fantasy 9, the player could only receive letters from various NPCs. In Final Fantasy 3, however, the player can now also send mail to other players via WiFi. While the entire Mognet feature was optional for the game, a particular quest required the user to actively use it to complete the quest. The quest in question is the ultimate achievement in the game, it’s the Onion Knight quest which gives you access to the most powerful job class and equipment. (more…)