Final Fantasy villain Sephiroth wasn’t always a bad guy. Like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, all it takes is one bad day at the office to send him off the deep end.
Japanese video-sharing site NicoNico Douga is well known for having its own unique net culture and memes. One of the most interesting of these is the “tekaki” style of video. “Tekaki”, literally meaning “hand-drawn”, refers to a type of video where a popular clip — usually an anime or video game opening — is altered to portray a different game or anime altogether. This is done by tracing the original source frame by frame, making the desired alterations, and then reanimating it.
Most modern-day gamers know or at least know of Final Fantasy 7. The monster hit that single-handedly brought the PlayStation into the foreground and secured its place for years to come. Now, 15 years after its initial release, director Yoshinori Kitase has released some of the few remaining development notes to the Weekly Famitsu.
I’m in California this week for the purpose of checking out a bunch of video games that will be shown at E3 next month. I’m a pre-E3 judge*, you see, bouncing from one showcase with a game publisher to another, signing lots of paperwork in which I swear not to tell people about these games for a few weeks.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 has debuted quite a few bits of DLC since its early-year release. They’ve added Sazh, Lightning, N7 armour, an octopus homage and more, to say nothing of the various alternate costumes.
One of the greatest things about PC gaming is the ability to modify games. Since Doom, fan-made sprites, levels, and even tweaks to gameplay can be found for any number of classic and modern PC titles. Recently, games like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age have received amazingly detailed texture packs for all their characters, improving the graphics incredibly.
It’s hard not to get all wistful and teary-eyed when you watch these videos of Final Fantasy VI‘s various landmarks, faithfully recreated in Minecraft by builder Felix Trapper and set to glorious Nobuo Uematsu-composed music.
