S.E.E.S.

Stephen's Extracurricular Enrichment Sessions

MP3

  • For Those With Eyes To See

    My house sits next to a nineteenth century Methodist church. Despite a worn (some might say dilapidated) exterior, it’s been outfitted with solar panels, which are—predictably—organized in cross patterns. And every morning, when I’m either beginning my weekday commute or embarking on a weekend run, all I can see is FFTA attack grids… Continue reading

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  • A Veritable Red Bow

    Does equipping the Char Bow boost your agility by 3x? You know, if Char and Fraw got together, CharBow could be their power couple portmanteau. All right. That’s all I’ve got. As a mecha podcaster, I was legally obligated to make these jokes. Apologies. Continue reading

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  • Deez…

    Even though your clan name isn’t random, it does remind me of the OG Xbox, each unit of which had its own unique name (e.g. “Shadow,” “Walla Walla,” “Blitzkrieg”). You’d only know this if you’d linked your console to another console (probably at a LAN party and probably to play Halo, but hey, maybe some Continue reading

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  • Kupo? Kupo? Kuuuuuuupo!?

    I love moogles. I mean, who doesn’t? They’re cute, they’re cuddly, they operate an efficient postal system—what’s not to love? It pains me to say that Tactics Advance includes a quiet but visceral audio cue when you fell a moogle on the battlefield (see below). It’s like when you play your first Monster Hunter and Continue reading

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  • Ode to a Wii U Pt. 3

    For the final part of this series I want to highlight Nintendo’s transition to HD—who am I kidding? We gotta talk about dual screen gaming. It’s so simple, so intuitive, so quietly revolutionary that it’s a damn shame hardware developers (really just Nintendo) left it behind. The DS, 3DS and Wii U allowed players to Continue reading

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  • Ode to a Wii U Pt. 2

    There was a time when hardware manufacturers expected—even wanted—players to hang out their console’s UI, rather than jump immediately into a game. With the advent of internal storage, companies Sega and Microsoft worked to develop a distinct aesthetic for their products, which manifested in the system architecture. During the next two console generations, Nintendo perfected Continue reading

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  • What’s in a Name?

    FFTA monsters names (which are not randomized) come in one of two flavors: See below: Continue reading

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  • Ivalice Alliance

    Riding the meteoric success of the PlayStation Final Fantasy entries, Square Soft (that felt nice to type) announced the one-two-three punch of Final Fantasy X, XI and XII in 2000. I remember reading about it in an issue of EGM. Not long after Square released the first teaser image of XII: Obviously, the illustration doesn’t Continue reading

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  • Let it Snow

    Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (2003) became oddly relevant in June 2020, when fans compared the game’s introductory tutorial, presented in the guise of a snowball fight, to the opening of The Last of Us Part II. The contrarian in me usually resists takes like this; the tendency for online commenters to fit square pegs into Continue reading

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  • It Couldn’t Happen to Me…

    It was May 2020. I was taking one of my daily walks around the neighborhood, lost in the existential fog of those early Pandemic days. I was listening to an episode of Retronauts on Etrian Odyssey, Atlus’s series of dual-screen (mostly) dungeon crawlers. Jeremy Parrish, longtime evangelist of the series, was opening up about how Continue reading

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